Battle of Sekigahara

[Joseph Svinth]

To commemorate the 400th anniversary of the battle, Japan Airlines and Japan Travel Bureau have prepared a special seven-day tour for overseas visitors from Oct. 5 through Oct. 12, 2000.

More than 1,000 reenactors are expected, to include a demonstration firing of antique guns. (160,000 were on the ground in 1600, but what the heck.)

The tour starts with two days in Tokyo, a visit to Nagahama (near Lake Biwa), then to Kyoto. The package includes roundtrip on JAL, double-occupancy, breakfast daily and two lunches, transportation, and gratuities; the price is at $2,350 from SF, LA, Vegas, and Honolulu; $2,400 from Dallas and Chicago; and $2,450 from New York.

For information contact Pacifico Creative Service Inc at 888-727-8785 outside NY State and 212-850-7450 inside NY State, or Japan Airlines at 800-525-3663.

Source: Rafu Shimpo

[pboylan]

Sekigahara!?! Why on earth would I pay all that to visit the town where I drive my mother-in-law to see her chiropractor?

Peter "Ok, so I'm a little cynical" Boylan

[John Lindsey]

How much of the battlefield is left? I seem to recall that there are a lot of houses and roads on it now.

[pboylan]

Battlefield? What battlefield? That there is arable land, so they've been farming it since they hauled the last body off of it. And building houses and laying down asphalt. From what I've seen of the town, there's not much of a really historical nature left, but then battlefields tended to be whatever flat, open space that wasn't flooded for rice that they could find.

Peter Boylan, who'ld kill to get back to Japan these days.

[John Lindsey]

Thats kinda in sharp contrast to the Civil War battlefields in the USA that are considered hallowed ground. Matter of fact, there are many contrasts between our War of Northern Aggression and the Civil War period of Sekigahara.

I dunno, but I don’t see the forces at Sekigahara fighting for what we in the West would consider worthy goals such as the preservation of the Union (North) or for State rights (South). Sure, it brought about the unification of Japan, but was it that much better (no war) under Edo Japan than before? Just some things to think about on this 400th anv.

[Earl Hartman]

John:

Just out of curiosity, how far (if at all) do you have your tongue stuck into your cheek when you refer to "the War of Northern Aggression"?

Earl

[John Lindsey]

Far..or as we say in Texas: faaw

[Gil Gillespie]

Well, John, I had 3 great-grandfathers in the Confederate Army, and one blew the bugle to dismiss Lee's troops at Appomatox, so they've always told me. My Japanese wife was alarmed at the passion the "War of Northern Aggression" still arouses here in Florida, as throughout the South. As a child I remember hefting one of their heavy Navy Colts!

As to Sekigahara it has always IMHO characterized the highest and lowest of the samurai values we cherish: Mitsunari's loyalty in face of insurmountable odds plus his stoic nee almost humorous & ironic acceptance of his execution, and Kobayakawa's treachery in throwing his full army against its allies in the heat of the battle, turning the tide. Both are remembered to this day in Japan for the traits they embody.

You're right, John, this is viewed very differently from our Civil War. The everyday Japanese does not place the value on "hallowed battlefields" that we do. Sekigahara is a preserved oft-visited site, but nothing nearing Gettysburg or even Little Bighorn (where Custer died for our sins with only about 250) as compared to the tens of thousands who were slaughtered at Sekigahara.

I remember zooming through Sekigahara on the shinkansen, my face pressed to the window like a puppy, trying to make some sense of the pine trees, plains, and mountains whooshing by. The Cheyenne Indians have a belief that "everything that happens in a place is aways a part of that place." Being into history I've always felt that. Many times I've tingled with "the presence."

Years ago, driving unconsciously through Dallas I suddenly felt the hair stand up on my neck and arms. Looking around I realized I was driving past the grassy knoll and the schoolbook depository! I have a feeling that the hackles will raise on many who avail themselves of Joe Svinth's Sekigahara tour.

Only cuz ah've filt it!

[Earl Hartman]

One thing about Sekigahara is that it was the battle that led directly to the unification of Japan under one government, as opposed to being a battle in a war that was fought, on one side, to destroy a union that already existed, and on the other, to preserve that union, as was our Civil War. Prior to Sekigahara, Japan had cultural unity, but not political unity. Before and after the War of Southern Rebellion (as we Yankees call it) the US had political union, but, it could be argued, a cetain lack of cultural union. While I don't mean to ruffle any feathers, the fact that there are people who apparently genuinely feel to this day that the war to preserve the union was unjust is quite incomprehensible to me. (A bloody tragedy, yes, but then, all wars are.)

But then again, I'm a Yankee.

Earl

PS John: Is it true that the everyday words for "petroleum" and "leather punching tools" in Texas are the same?

[Joseph Svinth]

Many Americans also believe that the Emancipation Proclamation was a good thing, too.

"...Find the Cost of Freedom...
buried in the Ground.
Mother Earth will swallow you,
lay your body down...
Stephen Stills

Originally posted by Joseph Svinth
Many Americans also believe that the Emancipation Proclamation was a good thing, too.

Yes, Agreeed. But but it was late to the party.

This comment, you must understand, comes from someone who had family that fought on both sides of the Civil War before North Carolina officially entered the fray -- and whose family history in the Great North State goes back to when it was just "Carolina", as one of my anscestors was one of 13 men to sign the original writ of government to King Charles.

BTW - re: shivers - I found myself to be in the same "hair raised on the back of my neck" state when I woke up in the middle of a road trip to Sunbury, PA to find our group parked in the middle of the fields of Gettysburg. I'll never forget it.

North Carolina - "First at Bethel - farthest at Gettysburg - last at Appomattox"



Anyone care to take a stab at the origins of Memorial Day and Veterans' Day?

Quick - everyone run out to the video store and rent the Burns series...

[Edited by Tetsutaka on 07-14-2000 at 09:43 PM]

[Joseph Svinth]

Safety in use message -- a very long posting.

If we are to be this technical, then Sekigahara did not unify Japan. For example, Lord Ieyasu was not proclaimed shogun until 1603, and it was not until June 1615 that his forces stormed Osaka Castle, thus defeating Hideyoshi's son Hideyori. Thus the battle of Osaka Castle is the true ending point of the war. Equally importantly, it was not until Meiji times that Shogunate or Imperial forces physically occupied Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Ryukyus. Instead, those had previously been occupied (or, in some cases, claimed) by barons who had enormous regional autonomy. True, nobody wanted a war and everybody agreed that the Tokugawas were too powerful to fight, but that didn't make them the undisputed masters of all of modern Japan.

So, while one who wished to be totally accurate would say that following Sekigahara Lord Ieyasu became the most powerful warlord on Honshu, generations of Meiji and Showa historians have simplified that so that now most people believe that following Sekigahara Japan was unified under the administration of the Tokugawa Shoguns.

American history is not much different. For those of you who don't know your American history well, the Emancipation Proclamation is dated January 1, 1863, and had no immediate effect on anything. Why? First, because it excluded the emancipation of slaves in the Loyalist portions of Maryland and Louisiana, which were the only slave-owning areas Lincoln controlled at the time, and second, due to the power of "whitecappers," from 1877 until 1967 the South continued to average a few hundred lynchings per year. (Nobody ever bothered to count the gang rapes.)Therefore there is a trend in histories designed to be sold in the South to say that it was states' rights rather than slavery that led to the war in 1862.

Which is only partially accurate, for as late as January 1865, the Confederate vice-president Alexander H. Stephens rejected a complete amnesty for the South if it would rejoin the Union but abolish slavery. The states' right issue started around 1820, and revolved around the question of whether slavery would be allowed in the trans-Mississippi West. This was an enormously volatile issue in the Senate particularly, where there are two Senators per state. The House was also concerned because representation is based on residents. Thus blacks were counted as a percentage of a white for residential purposes, but of course not allowed to vote.

Things got ugly during the 1850s when California and Oregon decided that they didn't want to be slave states, but free. Slavery was beginning to be outnumbered in Congress, and the rich folks who buy congressmen and senators didn't like this. So, fearing that Lincoln's elected but not yet seated administration would pay more attention to Harriet Beecher Stowe and the abolitionists than British, French, and Southern cotton money, South Carolina seceded from the Union on December 20, 1860.

President James Buchanan said nothing one way or the other, so shortly before Lincoln's inauguration in March 1861, Confederate President Jeff Davis called for 100,000 volunteers and by mid-April he had a force twice the size of the US Army. Bolstered by this knowledge, South Carolina forces then fired the first shots of the war at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. On April 15, 1861, President Lincoln also called for volunteers. Two days later, Virginia seceded, saying that Lincoln's call for volunteers was a call for a war against the seceded states. Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina followed suit, and Kentucky declared neutrality.

So, ignoring for the moment the question of both slavery and states' rights, there is a good case for terming the war the War of Southern rather than Northern Aggression. After all, the first army raised was Confederate, and the first shots fired were Confederate.

There is much that both sides did wrong, and some that each side did right, in that war. But the Confederacy remains the only English-speaking nation to ever lose a total war, and as a result the myth of the Lost Cause exerts as much power in the Old South as the Stab in the Back exerted in Weimar Germany.

As for my own familial bises, my maternal great-grandfather was an officer in a Pennsylvania unit throughout most of the late unpleasantness. He reached the rank of major, if I remember correctly. He was Pennsylvania Dutch, and all his relatives had been in Pennsylvania since before 1740. From a farming family, he hated slave owners and industrialists about equally, and what caused him to join up was his Quaker-influenced opposition to human bondage.

My paternal great-grandmother was Indian and my father is a registered member of her tribe. While it isn't good to ask about attitudes toward the Civil War-era US government on that side of the family, the tribe does hope to someday get back the 3,300 acres of its 1856 reservation that the Army has occupied since 1917.

On my wife's side, Abraham Petty was among the soldiers who captured Joe Johnston near Greensboro, NC, in 1865. Sergeant Petty also fought at Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge, and the Cumberland Gap. Sergeant Petty had a white father and a black mother, so in those days was legally Negro. Another relative, Joseph Fuggett, was born a slave in Tennessee, but got his freedom by tending a Yankee colonel's horses. And a third of her relatives, Artimus Bakeman, died as a member of the 185th New York in hospital at City Point, Virginia. Bakeman was Dutch, African American, and Onandaga, so was again legally Negro.

But lest you think that these ancestors have prejudiced me unduly, I hasten to assure you that is not the case. Instead it was some maternal relatives in Indiana. These people only buy pillowcases having presewn eyeholes, and the last time I saw them they were quite insistent that the N-words were out to get us white folk and that the wrong side won in the Civil War, a viewpoint that convinced me much more than genealogy that Mr. Lincoln had the right idea when he decided that the idea of one nation under God was worth fighting for.

[Edited by Joseph Svinth on 07-15-2000 at 11:24 AM]

"Daylight again...
following me to bed
I dream about a hundred years ago
How my fathers bled

I think I see a valley,
covered in bones in blue,
all the brave soldiers
who can not get older
are callin' after you.

Hear the past a callin'
from Armegeddon's side
When everyone's talkin' and no one is listenin'
How can we decide?

Composed in Williamsburg, Virginia not far from Yorktown where this country, with a bit of aide' Francaise, won it's independence from British "tyranny" and founded a nation based on "liberty and equality" yet some 70 years later was still shedding blood over the questions of individual liberty and government by federal versus local and state representation.

I reside in Richmond, Va. It's impossible to go anywhere in or around this town without being reminded of the "Great Conflagration" They literally tore down one of the few remaining defensive works surrounding Richmond and moved it several hundred yards so they could put up a strip mall and parking lot. The city of Fredricksburg is slowly but surely sprawling out to cover the hallowed ground of Chancellorsville (I guess I could quote Joni Mitchell as well as Stephen Stills).

Near here is Cold Harbor, where Union forces twice (1862 and 1864) threw themselves at the "King of Spades" (Lee) and his entrenched forces. It has been called the "first battle of modern trench warfare" Imagine fighting amongst the skulls and bones of men who fell two years before on the same ground. "Hear the past a'callin!" For almost an hour, men were cut down at a rate of over one per second. You can do the math. I've seen a good sized tree stump whose trunk was severed by Minie balls. Imagine what cannister shot would do to ranks of men!

Monument Avenue, a tree lined boulevard here which Northern immigrants call "Losers Lane," bears several equestrian statues of Lee, Stuart, and "Stonewall" Jackson. It has recently come under "attack" as a tribute to the ignoble institution of slavery and not deserving of city or state funding for maintenance.

Peace,

[Earl Hartman]

Joe:

A slight historical quibble/question:

My father, who is of German ancestry and whose father was from Pennsylvania, insists that the term "Pennsylvania Dutch" is wrong, and that the proper term is "Pennsylvania Deutsch", referring to the Germans who settled Psnnyslvania, not the Dutch. Comments?

Also, I'm well aware that Sekigahara did not unify Japan; this is why I said it led to the unifaction of Japan rather than saying it unified Japan.

Earl