博多：食の質と夜店のゆくえHakata: The Quality of Food and the Night Stalls

I am in Hakata, Fukuoka today. For many people, Hakata evokes the image of going out to the riverside night stalls lit with lanterns in the darkness to enjoy late-night meals. However, the greatest problem with eating out in Japan is that one cannot ensure the quality of food, and restaurants are entirely inflexible. For this reason, although I continue my research journeys across different regions, I almost never eat out. Instead, I buy high-quality ingredients as soon as I find them and cook for myself in the hotel. If I cannot obtain good ingredients, I sometimes end the day eating only nuts. To overeat and consume food that does not suit my body, thereby harming my health, is, for me, the greatest risk factor that makes research difficult. It also significantly dulls my clarity of mind, intuition, and even my pace of travel, so I avoid it very strictly.

Generally, Japan is thought of as a treasure house of food, but despite boasting the highest number of restaurants in the world, the reality of much of its dining industry is far from healthy. Walking through Hakata, where ramen shops are everywhere, I absolutely never enter them. For these reasons I have adopted this style of travel, but in a sense it can be said to resemble that of a modern ascetic. Just as practitioners of shugendo once ranged from mountain to mountain in training, I move from city to city, disciplining myself in the midst of the whirlpool of desires emanating from the people of the towns.

And Hakata is known as the leading city in western Japan west of Osaka and Hiroshima, and as the largest city in Kyushu. Above all, interpreting the history of Kyushu, including northern Kyushu, is extremely difficult, because diverse clans mixed and overlapped in complex ways, making it anything but simple. Yet it is also true that currents arising from Kyushu have repeatedly transformed Japanese history. A representative example is the Jinmu Tosei (神武東征), the eastern expedition told in myth. Born in Hyuga in Miyazaki Prefecture, Kamu-Yamato Iwarebiko (later Emperor Jinmu) is said to have heard that there was an ideal land to the east, launched his expedition to Yamato, and eventually ascended the throne at Kashihara Palace in Nara. This is regarded as the beginning of the history of the emperors.

On the other hand, Kyushu was also the stage for difficult histories, symbolized by the ancient wako pirates and the Mongol invasions (蒙古襲来). In the late Edo period, many patriots rose up with the dream of transforming Japan, beginning with the powerful samurai of Satsuma under Takamori Saigo, who, through the mediation of Ryoma Sakamoto, allied with the Choshu domain to topple the shogunate. Their actions had a deep influence on Japan’s future. However, these historical currents that arose from Kyushu and drastically changed Japanese history are not often spoken of today. The reason is that the Meiji government came to be controlled not by men of Satsuma, but by officials from Choshu. In particular, after the people of Satsuma were defeated by Choshu in the Seinan War (西南戦争) of 1877, the Kyushu factions lost their position in the new government. From then on, central officials, grounded in bureaucratism, reversed the positions they had held during the Bakumatsu, focusing on consolidating and maintaining their own power, and the new government soon became hollow. It was again the people of Kyushu, still revering Takamori Saigo, who raised the banner of opposition. The foremost among them was Mitsuru Toyama, whose grave I visited earlier today.

Toyama, born in Fukuoka, was one of the Kyushu men who deeply revered Saigo. During the Seinan War, however, he had been imprisoned on another charge and was unable to take part, and since Saigo died in that war, Toyama later spoke of this as his greatest regret. Thereafter, as a new Kyushu standard-bearer to succeed the late Saigo, Toyama raised his name in modern Japan, emerged through the political society Gen’yosha (玄洋社), and exerted immense influence over prewar Japan. Thus he came to be known as the “person of character second only to Saigo,” and his name spread throughout the country. By the prewar period, he was regarded as a fixer and a major figure of the right wing. Later, together with Ryohei Uchida, also from Kyushu, in the early 1930s, as the military began to run unchecked, they backed Tsuyoshi Inukai as prime minister in pursuit of their dream of reforming Japan. But when Inukai was assassinated in the May 15 Incident (五・一五事件), Toyama’s power in politics also declined, and the army rose to fill the void.

The “Greater Asianism” (大アジア主義) espoused by Toyama and his circle sought to liberate Asian countries from Western colonial rule, and in fact they independently involved themselves in multiple liberation movements. However, as Toyama’s influence waned and the army gained strength, the original essence of Greater Asianism—as a movement for liberation from Western occupation—was altered by a government dominated by the military, and state-led Asianism was reduced to a mere imitation of Western imperialism, simply transferring suzerainty from Western powers to Japan. After the Second World War, Toyama’s name gradually faded from memory, but even now there are still many who revere him.

Will the historical spirit that has long flowed through Kyushu once again be awakened here and exert influence across Japan? Or has that current already run dry? Hakata has long been a unique historical city formed through the blending of immigrants, naturalized peoples, and arrivals from abroad, and many different people still live here today. Walking its streets, I quietly wonder when the force of history that runs through this place will surface again.