Tachikawa Silk History Walk: Japan’s No.1 Mulberry Village, Sunagawa

Tachikawa’s north once grew more mulberry saplings than anywhere in Japan. A walk through Sunagawa’s silkworms, looms, cat-charm shrine and lost fields.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

Deep inside the website of Tachikawa (立川), a city in western Tokyo, there is a row of ten handouts made by the city’s Museum of History and Folklore. They cover the usual suspects of local history: archaeological sites, the Jomon period, carved stone grave markers, the medieval Tachikawa warrior clan, the Edo period, the arrival of the railway, the airfield. The ninth handout is titled “Sunagawa’s Mulberry Saplings.”

I opened it and read it twice. “In the Taisho era, Sunagawa Village was at one time the number-one producer of mulberry saplings in the whole country, and was especially famous as a centre of sapling production.”

Number one in Japan. When I hear “Tachikawa” and “number one” in the same sentence, my mind goes to the size of Showa Kinen Park, or the crowds at the station. Mulberry saplings were not on my list. To be honest, I am not confident I could pick out a mulberry tree. I tried to recall the shape of its leaf and realised I could not tell it apart from a persimmon. That is the level of traveller now setting out to walk a village that once led the nation in mulberries.

How did a village on a plateau that could barely grow rice become Japan’s top producer of mulberry saplings? And where did all those mulberry fields go? To find out, I followed the records of Sunagawa (砂川), the northern half of Tachikawa.

A note for readers new to Japan: silk comes from the cocoon of the silkworm, and the silkworm eats one thing only, the leaves of the mulberry tree. For most of the modern era, raw silk was one of Japan’s most important exports. Wherever there were silkworms, there had to be mulberries. Hold on to that, because this whole story hangs on it.

Tachikawa’s silk history begins on a plateau that could not grow rice

When people in Tachikawa think of silkworms, they think first of Sunagawa. Occupying the northern half of the city, Sunagawa was a “new field” village (shinden, 新田) carved out at the start of the Edo period along the Itsukaichi Kaido road and the Tamagawa Aqueduct, the canal that carried drinking water to Edo. I have told the story of its founding elsewhere in this series, so here I will talk only about the soil.

The land of Sunagawa is covered by the Kanto Loam, a thick layer of volcanic ash that settled over the plain. Tachikawa City’s notes on its cultural properties say this soil was not suited to rice paddies. In the early Meiji era someone even drew up a plan, complete with a map, to create paddy fields, but in the end very few were actually made. A village that cannot grow rice has to make its living from something else.

One of the answers was mulberry. The museum’s handout says that by the Kyoho era (1716–1736), Sunagawa was already known as a mulberry-growing area, and that sapling production had begun early. The Kyoho era was the reign of the eighth shogun, Tokugawa Yoshimune, famous in Japanese history for his sweeping government reforms. While the shogun was busy reorganising Edo, the mulberries were quietly getting on with growing in Sunagawa.

On silkworm-raising itself, the museum’s handout “Sericulture and Weaving” says this. Silkworm-raising in Tachikawa took off in the middle of the Edo period, and until the beginning of the Showa era (the late 1920s) it was the centre of farming life. From spring to autumn, when the worms were being raised, farm households organised their lives around them. Even the houses were remodelled into what was called sanshitsu-zukuri, “silkworm-room construction.”

People rebuilt their homes to suit an insect.

Tachikawa’s city-history newsletter, Tachikawa Monogatari (“Tachikawa Stories”), comes at the same fact from another angle. An article introducing the team writing the modern section of the new city history says that silkworm-raising and weaving, which had flourished since the end of the Edo period, developed with Sunagawa Village at their centre. Another issue lists the main industries of the Tachikawa area through the Meiji era as “silkworms, weaving, sweetfish fishing and so on.” Before the railway arrived and before the airfield was built, Tachikawa lived on mulberry leaves, the clatter of looms, and ayu, the sweetfish of the river.

Walking in front of today’s Tachikawa Station, it is hard to hold that sentence in your head. Somewhere under the department stores and the elevated monorail there was once a mulberry village.

A god brought in from far-off Hitachi

How seriously Sunagawa took its silkworms is shown by one particular god.

Inside the grounds of Azusami Tenjin Shrine (阿豆佐味天神社) stands Kokage Shrine (蚕影神社, “Silkworm Shadow Shrine”). According to Tachikawa City, this god of sericulture was invited here in 1860, at the very end of the shogun’s era, from Tsukuba District in old Hitachi Province, today’s Tsukuba City in Ibaraki Prefecture. The city writes that silkworm-raising in Sunagawa was so important, and so central to the village economy, that the villagers went all the way to distant Hitachi to bring back a guardian god for it.

A small aside. The museum’s handout gives the year as “Man’en 1 (1860),” while the city’s cultural-property page says “Ansei 7 (1860).” Both are right. Japan counts years by era names, and in the third month of that year the era was changed from Ansei to Man’en. Seeing one year given two names in two documents, I briefly wondered whether the god had moved house twice.

I have written about the shrine as it stands today, and how it came to be called the Neko-gaeshi Jinja, the “Cat-Return Shrine,” in the episode on the Tamagawa Aqueduct and Sunagawa. Just one point bears repeating. According to the city, once silkworms have spun their cocoons, rats come to eat them, so this shrine used to hand out paper charms with a picture of a cat on them to keep rats away. The job description of a silkworm god in a silk village, it turns out, included arranging cats.

At the parent Kokage Shrine in Ibaraki, there is a legend about Princess Konjiki, the “Golden Princess.” A princess from Tenjiku (the old Japanese name for India) has her life threatened four times by her stepmother, drifts ashore on the coast of Hitachi in a boat made from a mulberry tree, and turns into a silkworm. In the legend, her four ordeals become the four “sleeps” in which a silkworm rests.

The plot, as summarised on Japanese Wikipedia, is full of incident. The first time, the princess is abandoned on a mountain where lions live, but the lion does not attack her and carries her back to the palace. The second time she is sent to a mountain of eagles and hawks, the third to a barren island, and the fourth time she is buried in the palace garden. When she survives even that, her worried father, the king, puts her in a boat carved from a mulberry tree and sets her adrift. On the coast of Hitachi she is rescued by a fisherman and his wife, and she appears to them in a dream with a message: after the lion’s rest, the hawk’s rest, the boat’s rest and the garden’s rest, she learned in the boat how to make a cocoon.

So each of a silkworm’s sleeps carries the name of a lion or a hawk. Whether the farmers of Sunagawa ever looked down at a motionless worm on the rearing tray and said, “Ah, it’s having its lion’s rest,” the records do not say. But once you know the story, an insect’s nap suddenly looks like the interval in an adventure epic.

The number four is not just legend. The museum’s handout also says that a silkworm repeats a cycle of eating mulberry leaves and sleeping four times. The sleeps that Sunagawa’s farmers watched every year were also the number of a far-off princess’s trials. Myth and farm work shake hands over the same number.

“Every day is a war”: a year with the silkworms of Sunagawa

So what actually happened in a farmhouse during silkworm season? The museum’s handout lists the work in order.

Hakitate. The newly hatched worms are moved onto sheets of rearing paper with a bird’s feather. A freshly hatched silkworm is tiny; you sweep it along with the tip of the feather.

Kuwakure, also called kyuso: feeding the mulberry. Silkworms have to be given fresh mulberry leaves. The handout’s photos show a person picking leaves next to silkworms eating them.

Jozoku: mounting. Grown silkworms are moved into frames, where they spin silk thread and build their cocoons.

Itohiki: reeling. Cocoons are boiled in a pot, the thread is drawn out, and a hand-cranked reel called a zaguri winds it onto a frame. The wound thread is then transferred to a second frame.

Just copying the list out makes me tired. And the other party is a living creature that will not wait. Read up on the silkworm and things get heavier still. Japanese Wikipedia explains that the silkworm does not exist in the wild; it is almost the only domesticated insect that cannot survive without human hands. Put one on a mulberry tree outdoors and it will not go looking for leaves itself; it starves or falls off. On top of that, Japanese counts silkworms with the counter used for large animals, as in “one head, two head,” as if they were cattle. Its scientific name is Bombyx mori. According to Wikipedia, the genus name comes from the Greek for “silk-producing insect,” and the species name from the Latin for mulberry: “the insect that eats mulberry and makes silk.” From its very name, this is an insect that cannot get started without a mulberry tree.

In other words, from spring to autumn the farmers of Sunagawa were looking after thousands of lodgers who were counted like cattle and could not even feed themselves. No wonder they rebuilt their houses for them.

How did the young people on those farms describe the busy season? Issue 7 of Tachikawa Monogatari has an article on the magazine published by Sunagawa’s postwar youth association. Its autumn 1954 issue reported on a “Women’s Gathering” held by the association. A lecture titled “Making Good Use of Leisure Time” was given on the topic of improving housework, but it happened to fall in the peak silkworm season, when “every day is a war,” and since most of the young women had no leisure at all, a little over 40 people came.

A meeting about how to use your free time, which people could not attend because they had no free time. I know I should not laugh, and I laughed a little. But the record also tells us something important. Even in the postwar Showa years, silkworm season in Sunagawa was still going on, and still heavy enough to be called a war.

Lodging the lion dancers, and cocoon-ball decorations

Silkworm season overlapped with festival season. Issue 13 of Tachikawa Monogatari, in an article on the shishi-mai (lion dances) of Sunagawa’s shrines, records the houses that put up the lion-dance troupe. The host house provided meals, its garden and its best rooms, and even ran baths for the children who performed the lion dance and the staff-wielding bo-tsukai dance. And some families, it says, would stop their silkworm work to take on the role, because hosting was considered an honour.

Silkworms will not wait, I wrote a moment ago. Yet the villagers made the silkworms wait so they could welcome the lions. There were days when honour weighed just a little more than cocoons.

Silkworms were there at the start of the year too. According to the museum’s handout, every farmhouse once observed silkworm-related seasonal customs such as mayudama decorations, cocoon-shaped balls hung up at Koshogatsu, the “little New Year” in mid-January. Pray for a good cocoon harvest at New Year, live with silkworms from spring to autumn, and make them wait a little on festival day. The Sunagawa year ran on a silkworm calendar.

Tachikawa’s mulberries and silkworms in numbers

• 4 — The number of times a silkworm sleeps. In the legend, also the number of the princess’s ordeals.
• 1860 — The year Kokage Shrine was brought to Sunagawa from Hitachi. Two era names, one year.
• 85 — Per cent. The share of Sunagawa’s farm households weaving cloth in 1889.
• 500 — The number of those households. By the arithmetic, the whole village was clacking.
• 1 — Sunagawa’s national ranking for mulberry-sapling production in the Taisho era. The museum mentions it in passing.
• 40 — Roughly how many people made it to the 1954 “Women’s Gathering” in peak silkworm season. Those who could not come probably outnumbered them.

So how were those record-breaking saplings grown, and where did they go?

Tachikawa’s mulberry fields: Japan’s top sapling nursery

Before getting to the saplings, it is worth confirming why mulberry leaves mattered so much.

The museum’s “Sunagawa’s Mulberry Saplings” handout says that silkworm-raising techniques developed rapidly from the middle of the Edo period, and that by the Meiji era raw silk ranked among Japan’s top exports. Silk farmers racked their brains to get even a few more cocoons, and one way was to seek out better mulberry leaves. Leaf quality made a great difference to how the worms grew: good leaves meant the worms ate eagerly, and more cocoons could be harvested.

For sericulture, the handout explains, mulberry with large, thick leaves is considered best. The worms take to it, and feeding is easier too, because bigger leaves mean fewer leaves to pick. For a farmer, good mulberry paid twice.

In Sunagawa, varieties called “Shirashodo” and “Maruba Jumonji” are said to have existed already in the Edo period. Maruba jumonji means “round leaf, cross-shaped.” Hear only the names and they sound less like mulberry varieties than family crests or schools of swordsmanship.

The turning point came between the end of the Edo period and the Meiji era. Once sapling production by grafting was established, the handout says, the work became simpler and mass production became possible. Grafting was also well suited to breeding, and new varieties appeared almost every year.

The Tama area, the broad stretch of western Tokyo to which Tachikawa belongs, was once a major centre of sapling production. Within it, Sunagawa Village in the Taisho era was at one time the nation’s number-one producer, and especially famous for its saplings, the handout says.

Here half of the opening mystery is solved. Sunagawa was a village that raised silkworms, and at the same time a village that raised mulberry saplings to sell to other villages for their silkworms. On a plateau that could not grow rice, it fed its own worms on mulberry leaves and shipped mulberry saplings to farmers across the country. What it was selling was the silkworm’s dining table itself.

Saplings for the Imperial Household Ministry

The handout includes four photographs. Simply lining up their captions shows you a century of Sunagawa mulberry.

The first: “Shipping mulberry saplings (Takamatsu-cho, Taisho era).” Takamatsu-cho is the district spreading north-east of today’s Tachikawa Station. From an area now full of office buildings and apartment blocks, mulberry saplings were shipped out in the Taisho era.

The second: “Commemorating the delivery of mulberry saplings to the Imperial Household Ministry (1922).” Saplings from Sunagawa were supplied to the ministry that handled the affairs of the Imperial family, and the villagers even had a commemorative photo taken. It was the village saplings’ big day. What the ministry used them for, the handout does not say, and I will not fill the gap with guesses. But 1922 was also the year an army airfield opened in Tachikawa. That year, aeroplanes came to Tachikawa’s sky, and Tachikawa’s saplings went to the Imperial Household Ministry.

The third: “Shipping mulberry saplings by truck (Kamisunacho, 1961).” The handcarts had become trucks, but the saplings were still leaving the village. 1961 was three years before the Tokyo Olympics.

The fourth: “Mulberry fields spreading across Sunagawa (Kamisunacho, 1979).” In 1979, the year Japan’s arcades were full of Space Invaders, there were still wide mulberry fields in Kamisunacho, Tachikawa.

The mulberry village is not ancient history. For Tachikawa residents now in their forties and fifties, the rows of low bushes beside the roads they cycled down as children may well have been mulberry. Though that is a strange thing to hear from someone who cannot tell mulberry from persimmon.

Mulberry rooms dug underground

Sunagawa’s mulberry story has one more unexpected location: under the ground.

Tachikawa is currently compiling a new city history. Reading the progress reports in Tachikawa Monogatari, I found that the folklore and topography team, with help from families who once raised silkworms, had measured surviving silkworm rooms and interviewed the owners. Another issue says the team surveyed a kuwamuro, a “mulberry room,” in Wakaba-cho. In brackets, a short explanation followed: “a hand-dug underground tunnel.”

Underground rooms, named for the mulberry, had been dug by hand. Exactly what was stored in them and how will have to wait for the published report. The newsletter asks anyone with records of surviving silkworm rooms or mulberry rooms to contact the city-history office.

Readers of this series may remember another underground room in Tachikawa: the udo cellars where Tokyo udo, a pale spring vegetable, is grown in the dark. Tachikawa City explains that udo growing began in the decade after 1945, as silkworm-raising declined. The Kanto Loam is no good for paddies, but it holds its shape when you dig into it. The same soil held mulberry rooms, and later udo rooms. The ground under Sunagawa has been a kind of rental property, changing tenants with the times.

But the mulberry fed more than silkworms. Beyond the cocoon lay thread, and beyond the thread, cloth. Follow that thread and, surprisingly, you arrive at a title held by only one craft in all of Tokyo.