Karuizawa on Culture Day (3)

2023-12-27

It has been some time since the last article, but this is a continuation of the Cultural Day story.
The last stop of the tour, the Karuizawa Oiwakejuku Museum of Local History, was visited.
There I found…

(I couldn’t take a photo of the building that day, so this photo was taken in December.)

Oiwakejuku has long been a strategic point of traffic, then the post town developed greatly in the Edo period when the Nakasendo Road was extensively repaired and Sankin-kōtai was started.
The exhibition room displays materials related to Oiwakejuku.

I am not very good at Edo period history, so I was looking at the exhibits without having a point of view. The exhibits progressed its period and entered the Meiji era. I can understand this period better than the Edo period…(maybe).

I saw two boards “Gobo-no-keiji" (means “Five Public Notices").
(Photography is not allowed inside the museum, so a schematic diagram is provided. The parts of the text that I am not confident about reading have been replaced by hiragana, relying on the explanatory text in the exhibition).

(Translation.)

“Christianity is still forbidden as before.
Belief in evil religions is strictly forbidden.
4 March 1868.
Grand Council of State
Observe the above notice.
Nagano Prefectural Government"

“As a human being, you must observe the five moral principles.
Show mercy to the disadvantaged, such as widows, orphans and the sick.
Never commit murder, arson or robbery.
4 March 1868.
Grand Council of State
Observe the above notice.
Nagano Prefectural Government"

“Gobo-no-keiji" has five boards and these are two of them.

Hmm?
I was more interested in the date and the last name than in the content. It was issued by the Nagano Prefectural Government.
Nagano Prefecture must not have existed yet in 1868. Why is it issued under the name of Nagano Prefectural Government?

After returning home, I searched and found that there are quite a few “Gobo-no-keiji" issued in the name of “Nagano Prefecture".

One example
* The board in Iizuna town (Hachijuni Cultural Foundation website, written in Japanese).

The contents are the same as those I saw at the Oiwakejuku Muesum. According to this site, it was “re-issued by Nagano Prefecture" after 1871.

I also found a news report broadcast in April this year about the discovery of “Gobo-no-keiji" in Nagano City.
* SBC Shinetsu Broadcasting 17 April 2023. (written in Japanese)

The image is of interest to me, so I quote the images from the website.

Please note the boards in the middle above and to the left. Only where it seems to say 'Nagano Prefecture’ does it appear to be a different color, don’t you think?

***

After searching for examples from other prefectures, I found one from Tsuruga Prefecture (now Fukui Prefecture).
* Archives Guide for Schools, Fukui Prefectural Archives. (pdf file, written in Japanese)

This shows that the last line has been deleted and replaced with 'Tsuruga Prefecture’.

I see, so some of the boards posted in the past have been scraped off and rewritten and posted in the name of the prefecture.
Perhaps the board in Nagano City broadcasted on SBC News is the same.

I guessed that there must have been an instruction from the government to post the same content again after the prefecture was established.

When I saw the notation “Nagano Prefectural Government, 1968", I felt as if I had made a “discovery", but when I looked into it, it seems that there are examples like this here and there.
Come to think of it, it is written on a board, not on paper, so it would be easy to correct it by scraping it off, wouldn’t it?
Of course, not all the boards would have been scraped and rewritten. If the previous board had been disposed of, it would have had to be rewritten anew.

It was an exciting and interesting cultural day for me.
This concludes my article on this year’s Culture Day.

Lastly, here is a photo of the street bulletin board in Oiwakejuku.
I wonder if the “Gobo-no-keiji" also was posted here.