Mount Iimori: The Making of the Byakkotai Story

In 1900, another thirty-one graves were established on Mount Iimori. They commemorated Byakkotai members who had died elsewhere in the war of 1868. The addition placed a wider group beside the nineteen whose graves had been arranged on the hillside a decade earlier. Even at its most famous burial ground, the Byakkotai's history was larger than the story of one group dying together.^[1]

The hill stands northeast of Aizuwakamatsu, above the town that grew around Tsuruga Castle. Its name is closely associated with teenage soldiers who died by suicide during Aizu's defeat. The graves, however, were followed by new approaches, a larger plaza, lanterns, and monuments. People who had not known the dead acquired places from which to address them—and occasions on which to explain what their deaths should mean.

That second history is built into Mount Iimori. A burial ground could receive bereaved families, school pupils, and overseas donors without requiring them to bring the same account of the past. How did a particular loss become a lesson that could travel, and what happened when later generations changed the lesson?

Mount Iimori already brought people onto its slopes before the war. The Sazaedō, a timber pilgrimage hall dating from 1796, gave worshippers a compact encounter with the Thirty-three Kannon pilgrimage of western Japan. Images of Kannon, the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion, once marked that devotional circuit inside the building. Interlaced ascending and descending ramps let people complete it without retracing the same path.^[2]

The building organized movement around religious images rather than around a view of a battlefield. A person could undertake an abbreviated pilgrimage here without reaching every distant temple represented within it. The hall's unusual circulation belonged to that purpose long before it became a building encountered alongside the Byakkotai memorials. Its images were removed during the early Meiji campaign against Buddhism, while the structure remained.^[2]

Water brought another connection to the hill. The Tonoguchi irrigation channel carried water from Lake Inawashiro toward the Aizu basin, passing through a tunnel beneath the ridge. The tunnel's association with the Byakkotai rests on its use during their retreat, not on construction as a military escape passage.^[3]

These two features give the site a life before its commemorative one. A pilgrimage hall and a water channel had different users and purposes, neither originating in the events that would make the hill nationally familiar. The retreat brought soldiers into an existing landscape. Later memorial work then organized that landscape around their deaths.

This sequence keeps the hill connected to the town below. It was not an empty stage waiting for the Byakkotai. Water infrastructure linked it to cultivated ground, while the hall offered a local form of a far-reaching religious practice. The war intersected with those uses; it did not explain their beginnings.

The Byakkotai—the White Tiger Corps—belonged to Aizu's military reorganization in 1868. The domain divided forces by age and retainer status. The Byakkotai formed the youngest category, conventionally described as sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds under the age-counting system then used, and contained several companies. The episode on Mount Iimori concerned part of the Shichū Second Company, not the whole formation.^[4]

Aizu was fighting in the Boshin War, the conflict accompanying the replacement of the Tokugawa shogunate by the new imperial government. Its lord, Matsudaira Katamori, had served the shogunate in Kyoto. Fighting eventually reached his home territory, where Tsuruga Castle became the center of a siege. Young retainers were therefore sent into a campaign already extending beyond the institutions and households in which they had grown up.^[5]

After fighting east of the town at Tonoguchihara, members of the company retreated toward the castle and reached Mount Iimori through the irrigation tunnel. What followed is usually told through a decisive visual mistake: the boys saw smoke over the town, believed the castle had fallen, and killed themselves. Aizuwakamatsu's tourism account still presents that explanation. The castle, however, continued to resist.^[1][6]

Local historian Ishida Akio offers a different reconstruction, drawing on accounts that include the later narrative associated with the survivor Iinuma Sadakichi, subsequently known as Sadao. In Ishida's version, the group debated attempting to rejoin the castle or fighting outside it; the reported argument also concerned capture and obligations to lord and ancestors. That is different from a decision explained solely by mistaken smoke. Neither the present view nor a later narrated speech gives direct access to every youth's last thoughts.^[7]

The number nineteen presents a related problem. Ishida counts sixteen deaths on the hill, one survivor, and three comrades who died elsewhere before being included in the commemorated nineteen. His accounting differs from the common compressed description of nineteen suicides at Iimori. The group represented by the graves should therefore not be silently treated as an uncontested count of deaths at one moment.^[4]

What can be followed without resolving every detail is the movement from military deployment to retreat, death, survival, and later narration. Iinuma survived the episode and became a source for its telling. The row of gravestones acquired a collective identity afterward. That identity is part of the history to explain, rather than a ready-made substitute for the events.

The burial precinct took shape through repeated construction. Work began in 1883. In 1890, an approach was prepared and the hillside cut back to enlarge the ground for the nineteen graves. The thirty-one additional graves followed in 1900. A further expansion in 1926 created the plaza before the main group.^[1]

Cutting into a slope did something that erecting a single marker could not. It made room for a group to be encountered together and for people to gather in front of it. The setting could accommodate collective observance as well as an individual visit. Later ceremonies would take place in space deliberately obtained from the hill, rather than on an unchanged patch of ground left by the retreating soldiers.

The other thirty-one complicated that collective identity. They belonged to the Byakkotai but had died in different places. Bringing their graves into the same precinct widened the site's constituency without making their experiences identical to those associated with the nineteen. The hill became a place to remember dispersed losses through a common military name.

Commemoration also acquired its own dates. Four stone lanterns were added for the fiftieth-anniversary observance in 1917. An inscription records the history of the 1926 expansion. These objects identify later undertakings, not equipment used by the soldiers in 1868.^[1]

The expansion inscription is particularly revealing. It makes the construction of the memorial itself something worth remembering. The dead remained the reason for the precinct, but the work of arranging their public presence had begun to leave a record alongside them. A person looking only for traces of the battle would miss the steps through which the hill became suitable for recurring assemblies.

Nor does the orderly arrangement settle the historical disagreements. The graves provide names and a shared commemorative setting. They do not supply a transcript of the decision on the hillside. Their coherence belongs to the work of remembrance, in which people whose deaths occurred under different circumstances could be brought together without every circumstance being resolved.

A school ceremony supplied a different means of carrying the memory forward. The Aizu Chōrei Gikai, the foundation caring for the burial precinct, traces its sword-dance offering to 1884, when pupils of the private Nisshinkan school performed during the seventeenth memorial observance. The practice subsequently passed through the old Aizu Middle School to Fukushima Prefectural Aizu High School.^[8]

This was a postwar educational setting, not the original domain school continuing its wartime business. The pupils stood in a relationship to the dead created by commemoration. They had to learn and perform an offering; their participation renewed the ceremony without making them witnesses to the events it recalled.

The foundation describes the practice through both consolation of the dead and encouragement of the living. Those purposes can occupy the same ceremony while asking different things of it. Consolation directs attention toward people who are absent. Encouragement directs a message toward those still present. The offering was thus capable of joining mourning to instruction without the two becoming the same act.^[8]

A recurring school performance also gave the place a form of continuity different from stonework. The students changed; the responsibility to prepare the offering could be passed on. A grave did not have to acquire a new inscription each time a new group learned how to participate.

This is one way a memorial becomes durable. Its upkeep concerns not only the condition of paths and monuments but also the continued availability of people who know what to do there. The documented succession of schools provides an institutional route for that knowledge. It does not tell us that every performer or spectator understood the Byakkotai in exactly the same way.

Printed teaching materials could carry the story to people who never climbed Mount Iimori. Historian Lee Se-yun identifies a Byakkotai verse in the state-compiled Japanese-language reader for higher primary schools used from 1904. A contemporary teaching guide discussed an image of the deaths on Iimori as supplementary material. The episode could be presented through words and a recommended picture, without a visit to the graves.^[9]

The verse made the deaths an example of loyalty. Its function was not to compare the different later accounts or reconstruct every company's movements. A classroom text needed an episode that pupils could read and recognize. In that form, the hill became a setting within an instructional narrative, while the particulars of Aizu's political conflict could recede.

The difference from the burial precinct is substantial. A grave identifies a person; a short lesson can make several people collectively illustrate a quality. Both can use the same name, Byakkotai, while preserving different kinds of information. A visitor may encounter the additional thirty-one at the hill. A reader meeting only the final episode has no equivalent reason to ask about them.

Lee interprets the years around the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 as a period when representations increasingly settled around bushidō, the warrior ethic, and national spirit. His evidence concerns the production and circulation of those representations. It does not establish that every child accepted the intended lesson.^[9]

Historian Tanaka Satoru identifies a related feature of the story's portability: the young soldiers could be commemorated apart from a full judgment on the political struggle in which Aizu had participated. Sympathy for them did not require a retelling of every dispute involving their lord.^[10] This helped make room for meanings broader than the experience of one defeated domain.

The educational use continued in later settings. Tanaka points to a July 1943 issue of the magazine Nihon Kyōiku, which presented Aizu's domain schooling and Byakkotai memory as material for contemporary educational practice.^[11] The historical pupils had become subjects through which later adults addressed pupils of their own. The teaching purpose belonged to those adults' time, not to an instruction left by the dead.

In 1928, a monument donated from Rome added a different language and a different political setting to the precinct. A granite column traveled by sea from Naples to Kobe, then onward through arrangements involving Japan's Foreign Ministry and the businessman Ōkura Kishichirō. Local organizations helped bring it onto Mount Iimori. The gift required transport and local work before it could become a statement beside the graves.^[12]

Its inscription connected the Byakkotai with Roman authority and the Fascist Party emblem that decorated the monument. In the dedication, ancient Rome supplied prestige for a contemporary act of admiration. These were claims made by the donors through the object, not meanings inherent in the deaths of 1868.

The column was repeatedly said to have come from Pompeii. Aizuwakamatsu's municipal archive notes that the assertion lacks secure evidence and that the place of excavation is unknown.^[12] The unresolved provenance does not prevent the dedication from being read: the donor's use of antiquity is documented even where the precise ancient source of the stone is not.

The Roman gift changed the relationships visible at the hill. A monument could honor the Byakkotai while also displaying the identity and symbols of those presenting it. The location supplied a connection to the dead; the inscription supplied a message the dead had never written. The resulting object records an encounter between an Aizu memorial and an interwar political vocabulary.

Another overseas gift had a different status. A library reference investigation identifies the German monument with Hasso von Etzdorf, a secretary at the German embassy, who donated it personally in 1935 after visiting Iimori.^[13] An official's private gift is not automatically a declaration by his government. Grouping both objects simply as monuments sent by foreign states conceals a difference in how they arrived.

The two gifts nevertheless demonstrate how far the Byakkotai story had traveled. Someone could approach the graves from outside the history of Aizu's households and military obligations and find a subject for commemoration. In doing so, a donor added another account of what deserved attention. The graves did not disappear beneath that account, but they acquired neighbors whose own identities and purposes had to be read as well.

The Roman monument changed after another war. In 1945, occupation authorities ordered the removal of its axe emblem and the cutting away of its inscription. The text was restored in 1987; the emblem was not restored with it. The object that remained consequently carried both the interwar dedication and a postwar history of alteration.^[14]

These changes affected more than the condition of a stone surface. Removing the emblem and words separated the column from an explicit political message. Restoring the inscription later made that message readable again. The presence of the words could now document a past dedication without requiring a reader to adopt it. The history of the alteration is needed to understand why the surviving object is neither the unchanged 1928 monument nor a wholly new memorial.

The precinct also continued to make room for losses beyond its central group. Alongside the nineteen and the other thirty-one, its custodian also identifies a commemorated group of sixty-two adolescent warriors who died in the conflict. These are commemorative categories, not numbers to add into a single casualty total.^[8] Their coexistence points beyond the best-known episode toward a wider population drawn into the war.

In 2019, the burial precinct was entered in Japan's register of monuments. The Agency for Cultural Affairs' explanation names two connected subjects: the deaths during the Boshin War and the history of commemorating them. The later construction campaigns are part of the reason the place is protected.^[15]

That formulation leaves room for the site's different histories. The tunnel belongs to a retreat through an older working landscape. The grave groups record choices about whom to commemorate together. The school offering supplies a practice that successive pupils can learn. The foreign monuments preserve messages brought from elsewhere, including a message later removed and partly restored.

Mount Iimori does not require those histories to end in one instruction to the living. Remembering a death, explaining how it happened, and offering it as an example are different undertakings. The hill preserves evidence of all three. Keeping them distinguishable allows the young people to remain subjects of history, rather than only figures in the lessons others made from their loss.