History of Fushimi: Ancient, Heian and Medieval Times — Before Fushimi Castle: The Fukakusa Settlements, the Shigetsu Villa, and the Lives of the Fushimi-no-miya Family and Local Villagers

About the Appeal of Fushimi-Momoyama

Toyotomi Hideyoshi began building a castle in Fushimi in 1592. Even before then, Fushimi and its surroundings were home to farming settlements, people who made earthenware, aristocratic villas and an imperial palace. The land at the foot of the hills and near the rivers was used for living, for production, and for travel between Kyoto and Nara.

Today’s Fushimi Ward includes areas with different origins, such as Fukakusa, Momoyama, Toba and Daigo. The Fushimi-no-miya was a house of the imperial family, and the “Fushimi-no-miya palace” refers to that family’s residence. This article focuses on Shigetsu in the Momoyama Hills and the life of the Fushimi-no-miya family, and traces their connections with Fukakusa to the north and Toba to the west. Today’s shopping streets in front of the stations and the sake brewery district did not continue unchanged from ancient times. [52, 53, 57, 58]

Fukakusa holds traces of farming and pottery making far older than the castle

In Fukakusa, north of central Fushimi-Momoyama, wooden farming tools such as hoes and spades have been excavated together with earthenware at the Fukakusa Yayoi Site, located southwest of Mt. Inari. Kyoto City’s general history notes that wet-rice cultivation was practiced early in this area. The excavated tools were made of hard oak wood, making them evidence of both the work of tilling the land and the techniques used to work wood. [58]

Clay also supported production in this area. Kyoto City notes that the entry for the 17th year of Emperor Yuryaku in the Nihon Shoki contains an account of earthenware makers being sent to the imperial court from “Fushimi (俯見) in Yamashiro Province.” This is a record of a place name and potters appearing in written documents. Both what it tells us and the nature of the evidence differ from the farming tools found at the archaeological site. [58]

In later periods as well, there were clay pits from Fukakusa to the Momoyama Hills, and that clay was used for Fukakusa roof tiles and Fushimi dolls. Fushimi’s history includes not only sake brewing but also manufacturing that used local materials. However, it cannot be confirmed that the ancient potters and later craftspeople formed a single, unbroken lineage. [58]

Lowland rice paddies, and hills used for clay and wood

Excavations at the Fukakusa sites have yielded not only farming tools but also everyday objects and charred rice. Rather than filling in rice farming with imagination alone, daily life can be confirmed from both the tools used to till the land and the crops that were grown and stored. The history of the settlement discovered on the west side of Mt. Inari and the history of the roof tiles and clay dolls made much later from the hill’s clay both involve “clay,” but they differ in period and in the kind of work. [DXH013]

In the Heian period, imperial tombs and temples were built in Fukakusa. After Emperor Ninmyo was buried at the Fukakusa Mausoleum in 850, Kajo-ji, his family temple for memorial rites, was established, followed by temples such as Jogan-ji and Gokuraku-ji founded by the Fujiwara clan. Just as Fujiwara no Yoshifusa built Jogan-ji to pray for the protection of his grandson Prince Korehito, later Emperor Seiwa, memorial rites for the imperial family and the prayers of the regent’s family shaped the placement of temples in the area. Fushimi’s connection with the imperial family did not begin solely with the villa at Shigetsu. [DXH023]

On the Shigetsu hill, the Fushimi Villa was built overlooking the Uji River

Shigetsu lies at the southern end of the Momoyama Hills, overlooking the Uji River. In the late 11th century, Tachibana no Toshitsuna, a Heian-period aristocrat, built the Fushimi Villa (Fushimi Sanso) here. Kyoto City’s explanation dates its construction to the Enkyu era, 1069–1074. Toshitsuna was a son of Fujiwara no Yorimichi, who founded Byodo-in in Uji, and he was also known as Fushimi Choja (the Rich Man of Fushimi). [52]

This site was south of the capital, between Kyoto and Nara, and close to the rivers and Ogura Pond. The villa on the hill and the stretches of water and fields spreading over the low land were different uses of the same area. Shigetsu is known because a castle was later built there, but before the castle was built it was also a place where aristocrats kept residences. [52, 63]

After Toshitsuna’s death, the villa passed to the imperial family, and in the time of Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa, Fushimi-dono was built. It is also called the Funatsu Palace (Funatsu Gosho) and the Fushimi Detached Palace (Fushimi Rikyu). While the owners and names of the buildings changed, Fushimi was handed down as land connected with the imperial family. [53]

Toshitsuna chose terrain with views extending beyond the garden

Toshitsuna’s Fushimi Villa shows how a garden maker valued the surrounding mountains and waters. The historical tale Imakagami, completed in the late 12th century, contains a story in which, when Retired Emperor Shirakawa asked about fine places, Toshitsuna named his own villa at Fushimi and answered, in effect, that Toba-dono was splendid because the retired emperor had built it up, but that it was lacking in terrain and views. What is being compared here is not just the luxury of the buildings but the terrain the site originally had and its distant views. [R2E014]

The Goshui Wakashu also contains a poem Toshitsuna composed when ladies-in-waiting of the Shijo household came to Fushimi for an outing and were about to return before nightfall. Ladies-in-waiting (nyobo) were women who served in aristocratic households and similar settings. The villa was not merely a residence for keeping the view to oneself; it was a place for inviting guests, exchanging poems and maintaining ties with the capital. There is a theory that Toshitsuna was the author of the garden treatise Sakuteiki, but the fact that anecdotes and poems about the villa have survived does not by itself establish that he was its author. [R2E014]

The Toba Detached Palace and Fushimi-dono stood in different places

Around the same time, the Toba Detached Palace (Toba Rikyu) was built in the area west of present-day Takeda Station. It was a large palace complex developed by Retired Emperor Shirakawa, who, after leaving the throne, continued to govern as a retired emperor under the system known as insei (cloister government); it was then passed on to the time of Retired Emperor Toba. Palaces such as the South Palace and North Palace were built along with temples, and land routes and waterways were also developed for aristocrats’ travel. [52]

The Toba Detached Palace was not the same building as the Fushimi Villa or Fushimi-dono at Shigetsu. The former was on the low land west of the Momoyama Hills, while the latter were on the hill side overlooking the Uji River. Both areas are within today’s Fushimi Ward, but visiting them requires separate trips. A trip focused on Jonangu Shrine or Anrakuju-in and a walk from Otesuji to the sake brewery district can be planned with different starting stations and routes. [52, 48]

Daigo and Hino to the east, meanwhile, are areas that developed around Daigo-ji and Hokai-ji. They also come up when researching “Fushimi in the Heian period,” but they were not among the facilities clustered around the Momoyama hill. Today’s ward boundaries do not match the regional groupings of that time. [52, 53, 57]

You can compare on a map JR Momoyama Station, the gateway to Shigetsu, Jonangu Shrine, associated with the site of the Toba Detached Palace, and Daigo-ji to the east. Today’s stations, temples and shrines are landmarks for visiting the settings of this history. This does not mean that the buildings of the Fushimi Villa or the palaces can be seen as they were.

The Fushimi-no-miya family made the palace at Shigetsu its residence

In the Nanboku-cho period, Fushimi-dono was a palace associated with Retired Emperors Kogon and Komyo of the Northern Court, among others. Retired Emperor Kogon passed the palace to Prince Yoshihito, a member of the imperial family, and his residence there led to the history of the Fushimi-no-miya family. Near the palace, Fujiwara no Neishi, mother of the two retired emperors, founded Daikomyo-ji. [53]

Ishii, Yama, Funatsu and Miki: village work before the castle town

A key source for 15th-century Fushimi is the Kanmon Nikki, written by Prince Fushimi-no-miya Sadafusa, a member of the imperial family. The diary mentions villages such as Ishii, Yama, Funatsu and Miki. Ishii village, where Gokonomiya Shrine stands; Yama village, home to the kimori who managed the forests; and Funatsu village, facing Ogura Pond, each had different land conditions and work. Before the place became a castle town, it already had villages, each with its own name. [DXH007]

Prince Sadafusa’s records mention fish caught from boats, bracken and matsutake mushrooms, plum-blossom viewing and autumn leaves, and mandarin oranges from late autumn to early winter. The mandarins were given as gifts to high-ranking people in the capital, and the prince himself sometimes went beyond Funatsu village to Misu to pick horsetail shoots. Fishing at the waterside, gathering in the hills, and harvesting and gifting fruit were different seasonal activities in the same area. The way the land was used was very different from the commercial and industrial town that today’s sake brewery district easily brings to mind. [DXH007]

The prince’s palace is thought to have been near the southeast of present-day JR Momoyama Station. Nearby Shigetsu was known as a high spot with fine scenery, and Ashikaga Yoshinori, shogun of the Muromachi shogunate, also visited it on his way back from Nara. More than 150 years before Hideyoshi built his castle, it was already a place between the capital and Nara where shoguns and shogunate envoys stopped by. [DXH007]

Estate officials who dealt with land sales, extraordinary levies and disputes between villages

Officials who carried out the practical management of an estate (shoen) on behalf of its lord were called shokan. One person involved in managing the Fushimi estate was Ogawa Zenkei. In the 1416 entries of the Kanmon Nikki, Zenkei appears as mandokoro, a post responsible for managing the estate, and he conveyed the orders of the estate’s lord, the Fushimi-no-miya family, to the villages. Concrete examples of his work include a notice prohibiting the unauthorized sale of land within the estate and an order calling for people not to use force in a dispute with a neighboring district. Buying and selling farmland and responding to disputes were not settled solely by the decisions of village residents; they took place within a system of control that ran from the princely family through the estate officials. [R2E007]

In 1422, when the princely family tried to impose tansen, the residents together refused to agree. Tansen was an extraordinary tax assessed according to the area of rice fields. However, because Zenkei agreed on his own authority, the residents brought a complaint against him. Even though estate officials lived in the villages, they did not always represent the views of the village as a whole, and their interests could diverge over annual taxes and additional burdens. [R2E007]

Zenkei also attended renga (linked-verse) gatherings at the palace and served the Yamana clan, a daimyo family. Miki Zenri, meanwhile, was involved in land management as gesu, responsible for on-site management of the Fushimi estate, and as a retainer (hikan) of the Hatakeyama clan he could also be called on to provide troops. “People who served the palace,” “people who managed the villages” and “people who followed a daimyo’s military obligations” overlapped among the influential figures of the same area. [R2E007]

Warrior power was also involved in a dispute over brushwood in the hills

In the 1433 disturbance involving Sumiyama, Ogawa Yuzen, Zenkei’s son, and the gesu Miki Zenri were at the center of the response. Yuzen also held the post of mandokoro. Sumiyama is a village in the mountainous area on what is now the Uji City side, and it belonged to the domain of Daigo-ji. A dispute over the area where brushwood could be cut in the hills escalated into a clash involving killing and wounding, requiring negotiations with the shogunate and powerful daimyo. Prince Sadafusa tried to appeal to Hatakeyama Mitsuie through Zenri, who served the Hatakeyama clan. The livelihood of cutting trees and gathering fuel was also an issue that affected the boundaries between lords and military connections. [R2E007][R2E020]

While the Ogawa and Miki families were in conflict over landholdings and posts, they also formed quasi-parent-child relationships, for example by serving as kakan, the person who placed the cap on a son at his genpuku ceremony. Genpuku was a coming-of-age rite in which a young man received an adult name and clothing, and a bond not based on blood ties formed between the child and the eboshi-oya (cap sponsor) who oversaw it. Not only marriage and family succession but also rites like these served to shape human relationships within the estate. [R2E007]

Village officials, too, dressed in costume at the palace and joined in a ceremony of taking holy orders

People who handled the practical management of the estate also took part in banquets and ceremonies at the palace. At a banquet on the 7th day of the 3rd month of the lunar calendar in 1416, Ogawa Yuzen, together with the palace samurai Oka Zenkoku, performed furyu dressed as Katsurame and as saotome, women planting rice. Katsurame were women associated with the Katsura area, and saotome were women who planted rice seedlings. People who carried out the practical management of the estate played different roles at banquets. [R2E007]

When Prince Sadafusa took Buddhist vows in 1425, Yuzen also took vows on the same day, together with Oka Zenkoku. The bond between lord and retainer appeared not only when orders were given but also at banquets, in performing arts and in religious ceremonies. Going a step beyond a general statement that villagers visited the palace, we can see who held which post and who took part in which events. [R2E007]

Villagers offered performing arts at the Fushimi-no-miya palace

Villagers from the surrounding area also gathered at the palace for events. The Kanmon Gyoki, the diary of Prince Fushimi-no-miya Sadafusa introduced by Kyoto City, records that villagers gathered at Fushimi-dono and, with elaborate decorative constructions and costumes, offered a dance called matsubyoshi. At Gokonomiya Shrine and elsewhere, sarugaku (a performing art that led to Noh), renga (in which several people link verses together) and ochaji (tea gatherings) were also held. Through performing arts and events, there were connections among the palace, the shrine and the surrounding villagers. [53][88]

An explanation by the Agency for Cultural Affairs notes that the entry for the 7th day of the 1st month of Oei 23 (1416) records villagers of the Fushimi estate preparing a matsubayashi and coming to the prince’s residence. In the facsimile edition below, the characters “郷中松拍子” (matsubyoshi of the villages) can also be seen in that day’s entry. The event in which villagers visited the palace is recorded from the side of the imperial family member who wrote the diary. [67, 68]

In contrast to the matsubyoshi recorded in the medieval diary, at today’s Shinkosai festival of Gokonomiya Shrine, flower parasols from each neighborhood proceed along Otesuji toward the shrine, and portable shrines (mikoshi) travel around the parishioners’ districts. The form of the festival differs by era, but people from the neighborhoods still carry it on today, and the shrine and the streets serve as the setting for the festival. [49, 53]

The ports of Toba and Yodo are older than Hideyoshi’s Fushimi Port

Before the castle was built, water transport did not all converge on the area around present-day Kyobashi. In the Heian period, imperial family members and aristocrats setting out on pilgrimages to Kumano traveled down the Yodo River from the port of Toba near Jonangu Shrine. In the Kamakura and Muromachi periods, the port of Yodo served as a base for bringing goods into Kyoto. The retired emperors’ palace at Toba, the port of Yodo and Fushimi-dono at Shigetsu all made use of waterways, but they operated in different locations. [DXH009]

After his eldest son ascended the throne as Emperor Go-Hanazono, Prince Sadafusa moved to the capital and spent his later years there. Between the time when members of the imperial family lived at the Fushimi palace and the time when Hideyoshi later carried out large-scale land development, there was a process in which both the residents and the uses of the land changed. Building Fushimi Castle was not a move into uninhabited land; it was a project that reorganized an area of villages, forests, waterside land and a palace around the castle and daimyo residences. [DXH007, DXH009]

Hideyoshi’s castle building greatly changed existing land use

Medieval Fushimi was also caught up in warfare. During the Onin War, Inari Shrine and other places burned, and nearby temples, shrines and settlements suffered damage. Later, at the end of the 16th century, when Hideyoshi built a residence at Shigetsu and expanded it into a castle, Fushimi became a castle town with many daimyo residences and townspeople’s quarters. [53, 1]

Our article on Fushimi Castle and its castle town explains this change in stages: the expansion from a residence into a castle, the relocation after the earthquake, and Ieyasu’s rebuilding. Our guide to the area’s highlights covers the locations of today’s hills, the old town in front of the stations, and the port and Chushojima to the south.

References

• The Heian Period: Aristocratic Culture and Fushimi
• The Medieval Period: An Age of Upheaval / Fushimi and Its Ties to the Northern Court
• 90 Years of Fushimi Ward: A History of Diversity
• The Origins of Ancient Fushimi
• Leaflet Kyoto No. 261: Reconstructing Fushimi Shigetsu Castle
• Kyoto City: Fushimi Ward Residents’ Tour of Historic Sites and Famous Places
• Gokonomiya Shrine: Shinkosai Festival
• Kyoto City: The Castle Town Founded by Hideyoshi
• Miyako Meisho Zue (Ukai Collection, National Institute of Japanese Literature; 1786 printed edition)
• Kanmon Nikki, Kenkon [1] (published by the Imperial Household Ministry’s Library Bureau; 1931–1935 edition)
• Fushimi Ningyo Kamamoto (Fushimi doll kiln workshop) (March 15, 1923; Fukakusa Archives 038-001)

• Agency for Cultural Affairs: Hakata Matsubayashi (the 1416 record of the Fushimi estate in the detailed explanation)

• Japan Arts Council: The Origins of Nohgaku

• DXH013 Kyoto City: Fushimi, the Port Town Linking Kyoto and Osaka
• DXH023 Kyoto City: The Heian Period: Aristocratic Culture and Fushimi
• DXH007 Kyoto City: Part 2, The Age of the Kanmon Nikki
• DXH008 Ueda Shinpei: The Samurai of Fushimi: A Short Study of Personal Names in the Kanmon Nikki (Shoryobu Kiyo 70)
• DXH009 Kyoto City: Part 4, Fushimi and Water Transport (From Kumano Pilgrimages to the Canal)
• R2E014: Kimura Saburo (1985), Famous Places and Landscape Gardening: On Their Historical Relationship
• R2E007: Ueda Shinpei (2019), The Samurai of Fushimi: A Short Study of Personal Names in the Kanmon Nikki
• R2E020: Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI) Research Results Report 18520514: Villages in Mountain Areas / Disputes over Mountains and Fields