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Kamo No Mabuchi

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Kamo No Mabuchi FIVE Entering the Past: Kamo no Mabuchi (1697-1769) The city of Hamamatsu has for centuries benefited from its location on the Tokaido highway near the midpoint between Kyoto and Edo. During the Tokugawa period, the castle town derived eco­ nomic advantage from the constant passage to and fro of that steady stream of official travelers (daimyo and their retinue), as well as less official wayfarers (merchants, sojourners, religious pilgrims, and so on) which daily passed through the city. It will be recalled that this is the same route on which the European observer and physician Engelbert Kaempfer found "scarce credible" the number of daily travelers and proclaimed the route to be "on some days more crowded than the public streets in any of the most populous towns of Eu­ rope." 1 Even today, when the city is best known for its production of motorcycles and pianos and the local delicacy of unagi (eel), the city is a train stop on the Shinkansen Kodama route--the contem­ porary counterpart of the Tokaido in the Tokugawa period--and remains very much betwixt Japan's ancient and modern capitals. Hamamatsu's best-known native son is Kamo no Mabuchi, born in the village of Iba, known today as the Higashi Iba district of Hamamatsu, in the lOth year of the Genroku era, 1697. 2 He was 1 Quoted in Sansom, III, 136. 2 Hamamatsu is better known as the birrhplace of Kamo no Mabuchi than for the fact that 100 Kamo no Mabuchi the son of Okabe Masanobu (1654-1732), who in turn was de­ scended from the Kamo family who had served as hereditary war­ dens of the Kamo Shrine in Kyoto. The Okabe family was itself divided into three main lines: one styled the Naka Okabe (Central Okabe, considered the main branch) worked either as shrine admin­ istrators or agriculturalists; a second styled the Nishi Okabe (West­ ern Okabe) tended toward vocations either as Shinto priests or as lower-ranking samurai; and a third known as Higashi Okabe (East­ ern Okabe) were primarily agriculturalists. Mabuchi's father was born into the Nishi Okabe line but was later adopted by the Hi­ gashi Okabe, and thus it is believed that he made his living prin­ cipally by working the soil, though the family's intimate connec­ tions with Shinto made them far from rural rustics. 3 Mabuchi's given name at birth was S6shi, which means "three­ four" and is believed to refer to the date of his birth on the 4th day of the 3rd month. 4 Whether or not this demonstrates a sense of humor on the part of his father, as some have suggested, the evi­ dence is strong that both his parents were found of learning and took special interest in Waka verse. In his diary, the Okabe nikki, Mabuchi remembered his mother as a woman who "had always re­ vered the gods and buddhas, ... and had compassion for the lonely and wretched. If she heard of a beggar coming to ask for food, she would take her own things and go to feed him." 5 His father is said to have been a robust and spirited man-"uncommonly obese" in Mabuchi's words-who died in his seventy-eighth year after a life of hard work and financial difficulty. 6 Mabuchi was his parents' only surviving son, and by all accounts the relationship between parents and son was close and affectionate. Japanese studies of Mabuchi's life invariably suggest that his parents were instrumental in instill- Tokugawa Hidetada, the second Tokugawa shogun (r. 1616-1623) was born in the local castle. 3 Inoue Minoru, Kamo no Mabuchi no gakumon, pp. 8-10. 4 Terada Yasumasa, Kamo no Mabttchi-shOgai to gyoseki, p. 5. 5 Quoted in Saigusa Yasutaka, Kamo no Mabuchi, p. 20. 6 Mabuchi described his father in a letter found in Yamamoto Yutaka, comp., KKMZ:SH, II, 1314. .
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