歴史 History

Yesterday, during our lunch break, the genial Sakuramoto-san 桜本 took me and my Korean friends for a walk outside the jikkenchi. He is a 山城ファン — a “castle enthusiast,” and likes nothing best than to explore the sites where castles used to stand in days of yore, when the likes of Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi or Tokugawa Ieyasu still walked these roads. As these castles where mostly made of wood, there isn’t much to see; but the memory remains.

The Kasugayama jikkenchi owes its name to the eponymous shrine located right down the hill, and which has been there for more than a thousand years — ever since the local inhabitants begged a few kami (gods) from Ibaraki Prefecture (in the east of the country), who happened to be travelling in the region, to stay here and bestow their protection on this land. The very old stones and faded carvings of the deity Jizō that stand by the side of the road, sometimes bearing Buddhist engravings in Sanskrit (!), attest to the passage of time.

This region is also famous for being the heartland of the ninja culture of old. The village nearby still comprises many beautiful old houses surrounded by staunch stone walls, in which the warriors were trained. Sakuramoto-san points out the cute pop-culture ninja mascot and its shurikens that graces all the manhole covers around here, and laughs: “These guys would be considered terrorists nowadays.”