Mount Iimori–Byakkotai Sites · Place Guide

Today

Highlights

Additional nearby attractions

Takizawa Honjin
Tonoguchihara Battlefield
Tsurugajō Castle
Byakkotai Memorial Hall
Iinuma Sadakichi Memorial Sites

Overview

Map: GSI Japan Mount Iimori is both a battlefield memory site and a landscape made by later generations. In 1868, members of the Byakkotai's Shichū Second Squad reached the hill after fighting east of Aizu-Wakamatsu. The deaths that followed became one of the best-known stories of the Boshin War. Yet the present precinct also records how that story was selected, enlarged, internationalized, and ritualized from the Meiji period onward. A surviving eighteenth-century pilgrimage hall adds an independent layer that predates the war.