Hikone Castle and Umoregi-no-ya: A Place in the Family

For fifteen years, from 1831 to 1846, Ii Naosuke lived beside Hikone Castle without being its lord or designated heir. His residence stood outside the middle moat. He belonged to the family ruling the domain, received support from it, and had rooms in which to study and receive people. None of those things gave him the position held by the head of the house.^[1]

The residence is called Umoregi-no-ya, the dwelling of “buried wood.” The name can suggest an isolated retreat, far from public life. Its actual setting is more revealing. The castle was close; succession was not. The separation between the two was an arrangement within a ruling family, made tangible in where its members lived.

Naosuke eventually became lord of Hikone and, later, a senior officer of the Tokugawa shogunate, Japan's military government. That outcome makes it tempting to treat everything here as preparation for an appointed future. The castle and the house preserve a less predictable story: what did membership of a ruling family provide to someone who had no assured place in its government?

Hikone's castle was already two centuries old when Naosuke entered Umoregi-no-ya. Construction began in 1604 and continued over roughly twenty years. Its surviving three-storey keep dates to about 1606–1607. Below it, the stone enclosures, gates, and water defenses formed a much larger establishment. The plan inside the middle moat remains especially legible, although modern changes have removed much of the former outer enclosure.^[2]

The keep supplies a clear image of the ruling house. It does not identify where all its members lived or where officials conducted daily business. A hereditary seat needed those arrangements to continue as individual occupants changed. Someone could inherit responsibility for the castle without building its tower; someone else could be born into the same family without inheriting that responsibility.

At the foot of the hill stood the Omote Palace, the principal residence and administrative establishment. Work on it began in 1616, and the city's archaeological account places its completion by about 1622. Its public-facing buildings accommodated government, while the inner portion contained the lord's domestic rooms and their supporting facilities. The distinction was internal to a palace that joined residence and office.^[3]

The city's interpretation locates deliberation by senior retainers in the Sasa-no-ma complex, in consultation with the lord in the neighboring Omote-goza-no-ma. These were spaces for people holding particular responsibilities, rather than a gathering of everybody related to the ruling family.^[3] Inheriting the headship meant taking a place in that working relationship. It conferred something more specific than the right to occupy a large residence.

The palace also contained cultural spaces. Its Noh stage, built in 1800, stood between surrounding buildings. Noh is a theatrical tradition combining chant, music, and stylized movement; at Hikone it had a purpose-built place within the ruling establishment.^[3] Artistic practice was therefore no intrusion from a private world wholly outside government. Yet the existence of a stage did not make a performer the head of the domain. The same distinction would apply to the younger son's studies.

Another residence stood north of the castle hill, between the inner and middle moats. Historically called the Tsuki Palace, its surviving buildings are now known as Rakuraku-en; together with the neighboring Genkyū-en garden, they formed a lower palace landscape. The estate originated in the late seventeenth century and was subsequently enlarged. It provided accommodation for retired heads of the Ii house.^[4]

Retirement here did not mean departure from the family establishment. In 1812, Ii Naonaka transferred headship to his son Naoaki. The following year he moved into the Tsuki Palace and enlarged it substantially. The surviving Goshoin, a formal reception building, dates to that 1813 work. Naosuke was born in the lower palace in 1815, the fourteenth son of Naonaka.^[5]

Those dates give the setting a meaning that a generic label such as “the lord's garden” would miss. Naosuke was born into the household of a retired head, while another member of the family occupied the governing position. The estate held more than one generation and more than one kind of standing at once.

A retired lord could still require formal rooms. The Goshoin's arranged reception spaces belong to that continuing social life. Their presence does not turn the building into the domain's principal government office. The Omote Palace and the lower palace served different positions within the same house, and those differences cannot be read from grandeur alone.

Naonaka's death in 1831 changed the younger son's accommodation. Naosuke moved from this palace setting to the residence later remembered as Umoregi-no-ya. Museum research records his support there as a stipend reckoned at three hundred bales of rice.^[1] The figure should not be converted casually into either destitution or a modern salary. It identifies a supported dependent, not an independent territorial ruler.

The transition was therefore more precise than a fall from luxury into obscurity. A father's retired household had ended; his son still belonged to the family but required another place within its arrangements. The castle landscape made room for him without giving him a public office. His daily setting changed because a family position had changed.

Succession within Hikone was not the only imaginable route. In 1834, Naosuke traveled from Hikone to Edo, today's Tokyo, with his younger brother Naoyasu. Both were candidates for adoption into the Naitō house, which ruled Nobeoka in southern Japan. Naoyasu was selected, and the shogunate formally approved his adoption later that year.^[6]

This particular transaction shows how different family problems could meet. The Ii house had sons who did not hold its headship; another ruling house was seeking an adopted member. Birth into one lineage could qualify someone for consideration elsewhere without determining who would be chosen. Selection and political recognition were separate steps.

For Naosuke, the journey did not produce the proposed new place. It did produce a surviving statement about the name of his dwelling. The document now cataloged as Umoregi-no-ya no kotoba was written during his Edo stay, in 1834–1835. He explained that he had given his residence there the same name as his house at Hikone. As the museum paraphrases it, the name expressed an intention to keep apart from distracting worldly business and pursue his own path, rather than simple weariness with the world.^[6]

The name traveled even when the prospect of adoption failed. That is a useful clue to how Naosuke presented his position: “buried wood” could be a chosen description of a life, not merely an address imposed on him. It is his stated interpretation, preserved in a document, rather than permission for a later writer to reconstruct every feeling behind it.

His prospective move into another family gives Umoregi-no-ya a wider setting. The smaller residence was one possible place for an Ii son; adoption might have supplied another. Remaining in Hikone was the outcome of this particular attempt, not evidence that the family's younger members had only one route through life.

Umoregi-no-ya's rooms give practical content to that life apart. The house has formal guest rooms, separate everyday living rooms, service spaces, and a tea room called Juroken. The front reception suite consists of two eight-mat rooms; the entrance has adjoining accommodation for attendants. This is a household capable of receiving and serving people, rather than a single scholar's cell.^[7]

Its distinctions of space are significant without making it a miniature government palace. A guest could be received without entering every domestic room. Food and other household work required places of their own. The means of living as a member of a warrior family continued here, though the residence did not carry the administrative functions of the Omote Palace.

That comparison is more useful than deciding whether the house was “humble.” Humility is relative to an expected standard. The lower palace, the working residence of a domain ruler, and Umoregi-no-ya supplied different kinds of accommodation. The last was constrained in relation to the family's palaces while still offering resources that made sustained study and sociability possible.

The correspondence adds people to those rooms. Hikone Castle Museum's study of Naosuke's letters describes exchanges with relatives, retainers, and other close associates during the Umoregi years. Subjects included the arts and ordinary happenings. The surviving correspondence changes in emphasis after he became heir in 1846, when domain business acquired a larger place.^[8]

“Retirement” is consequently a misleading word for his position here. He had not relinquished an office he once held. Nor had he ceased to participate in relationships beyond his walls. The house allowed a supported life whose activities did not depend on an immediate governing appointment. Letters kept that life connected to other households and to people whose knowledge or companionship mattered within it.

The building presented today has also undergone substantial repair, including work following snow damage in 1984. Its preserved arrangement should not be mistaken for untouched nineteenth-century surfaces.^[7] The historical relationship remains the important one: a residence outside the middle moat, sustained by the family within the wider castle establishment.

One surviving manuscript makes the study more concrete than a list of accomplishments. Naosuke copied and annotated the Tales of Ise, a classical collection of episodes and poems. His notes drew comparisons with other works, including the Tale of Genji, the Nihon shoki chronicle, and the Lotus Sutra. The museum dates the handwriting to his years before becoming heir.^[9]

These references describe a method. A phrase in one work could be considered beside an episode, usage, or passage in another. Copying became a way of gathering questions and comparisons on the same page. The manuscript records an activity with a visible product; it does not require the future minister's career to make it historically interesting.

The work also depended on connections. Museum research into Naosuke's study of Japanese classical learning follows his exchanges with the scholar Nagano Yoshikoto. A text was sent to Hikone in 1845; surviving annotations and later correspondence show questions being carried forward after Naosuke left Umoregi-no-ya. The paper trail crosses the boundary between his years as a younger son and his later position as heir.^[10]

That continuity changes the usual account of waiting. An interval without a promised appointment need not be empty time. Here it contained work that could be continued, revised, and discussed. At the same time, the ability to undertake it rested on circumstances the word “solitude” can conceal: accommodation, maintenance, access to texts, and people with whom to exchange questions.

There was no examination at the end of this course of study that awarded the government of Hikone. The record of an annotated classic and the record of a succession answer different questions. One shows what Naosuke was doing; the other identifies when the ruling family's arrangements changed. Keeping both in view avoids treating cultural work either as idle ornament or as proof that inheritance followed merit.

Umoregi-no-ya mattered because it gave this work a sustained domestic setting. The manuscripts matter because they prevent that setting from remaining an attractive but empty shell. Together they reveal a life taking form before its later office was known.

Tea supplied another activity with a development of its own. Naosuke studied the Sekishū tradition, named for the seventeenth-century tea practitioner Katagiri Sekishū, while also investigating other approaches. In a work written in 1845, the Nyūmonki, he declared the establishment of his own branch within that tradition. The declaration preceded his appointment as heir.^[11]

The Umoregi period thus contains an initiative separate from the later succession: he was setting out a body of practice to articulate and transmit. It was possible to take a defined position within an artistic tradition while remaining outside the headship of his family.

The house's Juroken tea room belonged to this domestic setting. Its entrances linked it to neighboring rooms rather than requiring the small crawl-through doorway familiar from some tea houses.^[7] The arrangement placed tea within the movement of an existing residence. Tea could be brought into the household's day without requiring a detached pavilion. The room combined a particular practice with the constraints and opportunities of the house around it.

His mature writing offers a clearer statement of what he asked of a tea encounter. In the Chanoyu ichie-shū, thought to have reached completion around 1857, he urged host and guests to give themselves fully to the occasion as something that would not recur in precisely the same way. He also described the host's solitary reflection after the guests had departed.^[12]

That text is later than Umoregi. It belongs to the continuation of the practice, not to a single afternoon recoverable in this tea room. Its emphasis places obligations on the person doing the receiving as well as on those received. The encounter required preparation and attention; it could not be supplied simply by the host's family name.

Nor did mutual attentiveness erase differences of standing. The next surviving record brings the tea practice back into Hikone's palaces, where its participants remained connected through the institutions of the domain.

In 1846, the death of the designated heir, Naomoto, opened a place for Naosuke. He became heir and moved to Edo. In 1850, after Naoaki's death, he succeeded as lord of Hikone.^[1][8] The decisive sequence involved vacancies and a recognized change of family position. The years at Umoregi were not a fixed apprenticeship whose allotted term had expired.

A later notebook shows what continuity could look like within that change. The Hikone mizuya-chō, Naosuke's own record of tea gatherings, contains sixteen occasions from 1851 to 1857. Many guests were retainers or priests from temples connected with the house. Venues included the Omote Palace's Tenkōshitsu and Futaian tea rooms and the Genkyū-en garden.^[13]

The geography is now different. The supported younger son had practiced in his separate residence; the lord could host within the palace and garden establishment. The activity continued, but its setting and the host's relationship to many of those present had changed. A retainer receiving tea from his lord did not thereby cease to be a retainer.

The notebook thus joins places that a tour of buildings might leave disconnected. Umoregi-no-ya, the Omote Palace, and Genkyū-en belong to different stages and settings of a documented practice. They need not be forced into an inevitable upward journey. The later gatherings can be understood without imagining that every earlier manuscript, lesson, or cup of tea was directed toward them.

Today, these places survive in different material forms. The Omote Palace site became the castle museum, opened in 1987, with reconstructed palace spaces; Rakuraku-en retains repaired historic buildings, and Umoregi-no-ya has its own history of conservation.^[14] Their relationship is more durable than a claim that every room has remained unchanged.

Read together, they show how a ruling house housed people who had ruled, people who were ruling, and people who might never rule. Naosuke's residence was neither outside that family system nor equivalent to its governing seat. It supplied a place to live and work without guaranteeing succession. What he made there had a history before the castle became his responsibility.