Sacred Tokyo & Japanese History

If you have watched The Elusive Samurai (Nige Jōzu no Wakagimi), you know him as the antagonist: Ogasawara Sadamune, military governor of Shinano, a supernaturally gifted archer, and a distinctly strange man. If you have ever stood along the sand track at Tsurugaoka Hachimangū in Kamakura on the sixteenth of September and watched a rider in Kamakura-period hunting dress hit three targets at full gallop, you have seen something else entirely. These two things are the same thing. The riding…

I went to the Shingen-ko Festival in Kōfu because of a BBC documentary. The programme was about the fact that the retainer families of the Takeda — a clan destroyed in 1582 — still exist, still know who they are, and still gather. That struck me as worth seeing in person. So in 2026 I went. What I saw there sent me back to rewrite everything I thought I understood about a single sentence. The line A man in Takeda…

A car-free day trip from Tokyo — written for readers who arrived here through The Elusive Samurai. — If you have read The Elusive Samurai, you know how the story begins. Kamakura falls in 1333. A boy of the Hōjō house escapes and runs for Shinano, where a shrine priest called Suwa Yorishige takes him in. Two years later, Shinano rises. Most people who want to walk that story go to Suwa. That is the right instinct, and I have…

If you have been watching The Elusive Samurai, you have met Suwa Yorishige. He is the strange, laughing man who takes in a hunted eight-year-old boy and announces that this child will one day rule Japan. The manga makes him a prophet. That is fiction. But the real Yorishige was something stranger than a prophet, and the truth is not a softer version of the story — it is a harder one. He was a god. Not metaphorically. Institutionally. What…

Near the end of Scarlet Heart, the Fourteenth Prince performs a sword dance and then recites a poem — a Song-dynasty lyric about the reckless honour of a young man’s life, remembered from the far side of losing it. A great many viewers have cried at that scene. Underneath it is a simple question. How does a man with that much lose? A hundred thousand troops. His father’s confidence. A faction behind him. Ceremonial honours no other prince in the…

— “They Built a Garden with the Navy’s Money”: Re-examining the Summer Palace and the First Sino-Japanese War Every guide tells you the same thing When I visited the Summer Palace in Beijing, our Japanese-speaking guide told us that this garden was the reason China lost the war against Japan. Walking on, I passed an English-language tour group. Their guide was saying the same thing. The story is told with remarkable consistency: Empress Dowager Cixi diverted the navy’s budget to…

  This is a companion to [The Heirloom Seal of the Realm: the empty stone that ruled China for a thousand years]. That article looked at the center — the jade in which the Son of Heaven held the whole Mandate. This one looks at the far rim. What a little island at the outermost ring of that world crossed a deadly sea to fetch was not “the Mandate” at all, but something much smaller: mere *recognition*. And the gap…

A Bodhisattva from the Northern Qi Dynasty Visiting the Tokyo National Museum — Oriental Gallery, Room 1 I recently visited the Oriental Gallery at the Tokyo National Museum — and it was wonderful! The moment I stepped into Room 1 on the first floor, a single statue caught my eye: a Standing Bodhisattva, created in Shanxi Province, China, in 552 CE during the Northern Qi dynasty. That predates even the beginning of Japan’s Asuka period. It is a piece from…

HOW TO READ BUDDHIST STATUES IN JAPAN  |  Part 1 What Are All These Buddhist Statues Doing? A Beginner’s Guide for Travelers to Japan You may have seen it already — perhaps in a photo before your trip, or on a postcard at the airport: the Great Buddha of Kamakura, sitting serenely in the open air, one hand raised with the palm facing outward. It is one of the most iconic images in Japan. But what is that hand gesture…