Renaissance in Japan: A Cultural Survey of the Seventeenth Century by Kirkwood Kenneth P

Author:Kirkwood,Kenneth P.
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781462912094
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
Published: 2012-08-21T04:00:00+00:00

Portrait of Ibara Saikaku

By Haga Issho. The original is now in the possession of

Mr. Kubo Mitsugu, at Uwajima.

In modern times it has been nicknamed the Venice of Japan, because of its network of waterways along which pass continually all sorts of small freight-carrying craft. "Osaka," noted the late Rudyard Kipling in one of his letters dated 1889, "is built into and over and among one thousand eight hundred and ninety-four canals, rivers, dams, and water-cuts." How many water-courses existed two hundred years earlier cannot be stated, for the topography of Osaka has changed vastly down the intervening course of time.

Beyond doubt the central feature of old feudal Osaka was its redoubtable castle, overlooking the Okawa river that winds through the city at a tangent to the castle base. On its lofty plateau and from its towers, it commanded a view of the entire city and country round about for a distance of thirty miles. Between thirty thousand and sixty thousand labourers toiled day and night for three years to raise these amazing walls. Louis Froez a Portuguese Jesuit, writing in 1586, related that "The walls are of great amplitude and height—all of stone. In order that the multitude of workers should not cause confusion, it was ordained that each master should have his determined place, where he should work, a great number of people being employed during the night in emptying the water which continually kept rising in the fosses. What is the cause of such marvel in this matter is to see whence such a number of stones of all kinds of sizes have been taken; there being a great lack of them there. For this reason [Hideyoshi] commanded the neighbouring lords for twenty or thirty leagues around to send boats loaded with them. In this way the city of Sakai alone had been charged to dispatch two hundred vessels every day. So that from our house we sometimes saw as many as one thousand entering under full sail and in good order together... Besides the towers and the bulwarks around the fortresses, which are visible from afar by reason of their height, and the splendour of the tiles which are all gilded, he is rearing many other remarkable edifices there."1 Over a century later Kaempfer added his detailed description of this colossal structure as the principal and dominating feature of the city; and still two centuries later, though the castle was dismantled and had ceased to serve as anything except a mediaeval relic, another traveller, Rudyard Kipling, stood amazed before it and wrote: "Such a fort! Fifty feet was the height of the wall, and never a pinch of mortar in the whole. Nor was the face perpendicular, but curved like the ram of a man-of-war. They know the curve in China, and I have seen French artists introduce it into books describing a devil-besieged city of Tartary... The stone was granite, and the men of old time had used it like mud. The dressed blocks that made

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