(Leaf 63) – Senryu (or, witty tom-foolery)
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The Hakone Sekisho (箱根関所)
was the first ‘barrier’ station on the Tōkaidō (東海道), the main road which
connected Edo (present day, Tokyo) with Kyoto, during the time when Japan was
ruled by the Tokugawa Shogunate. It was a way-station, set up to inspect and
regulate the passage of arms and women-folk from the Samurai class – a means
for the Shogun to maintain political control of the country and its people by
controlling the regional, feudal lords who were expected to be loyal to him.
There were fifty-three such stations along the Tōkaidō.
When I first came to the Hakone Sekisho in 2004, it was the site of an
archaeological excavation. Returning in 2009, it had been transformed (on
the basis of those findings) into a full-scale reconstruction of what the
original barrier would have looked like to travellers passing through during
the Edo Period, between 1619-1868. The following poem was written in response
as my jokey interpretation of what the old Edo-era master poet, Matsuo Bashō,
might have thought were he to pass through the barrier today, much like an
ordinary airline passenger with “nothing to declare” except a penchant for poetry, passing through a Customs checkpoint
at a modern airport.
At the Sekisho
– no sword,
only my pen!
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