Tomb of Takeda Kounsai and Others

The Tomb of Takeda Kōunsai and His Companions

On the western edge of Tsuruga, near the black pine groves that screen the shore of Wakasa Bay, a low square mound of earth holds the remains of 353 men beheaded in the early months of 1865. They were members of the Mito Tengu-tō, a band of loyalists from what is now Ibaraki Prefecture who set out to carry a political plea to Kyoto and were halted here, hundreds of kilometers from home, by deep winter snow and by an army commanded by the one figure they had hoped would speak on their behalf.

The site is registered as a National Historic Site under the name Takeda Kōunsai-tō no Haka. Fifteen gravestones stand on the mound, facing west toward a shrine built to honor the dead. It is a plain place, ringed by a stone fence, and the plainness is part of why it has survived as a record of one of the bleakest episodes of Japan's final feudal years.

The Mito Tengu-tō and Their March West

By the 1860s the Mito domain was split against itself. One faction held to a cautious, established line; the other, the reform party known as the Tengu-tō, pressed hard for sonnō-jōi, the doctrine of "revere the emperor, expel the barbarians." The two sides moved from argument to bloodshed, and in 1864 the conflict spilled beyond the domain's borders.

That autumn, members of the Tengu-tō raised Takeda Kōunsai, a senior domain official, as their commander and began a long westward march. Their aim was to reach Kyoto and present their cause to the imperial court through Hitotsubashi Yoshinobu, the future shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu, who then served as Protector of the Imperial Palace and had himself argued for closing the port of Yokohama. The marchers wanted an ally at the center of power.

For roughly forty days they pushed along the Nakasendō highway, slipping past the forces of domains ordered to stop them. In December they crossed the Kinome Pass into the Tsuruga area and reached the post town of Shinbo, where heavy snow pinned them down. Around them gathered a suppression army of some four thousand troops drawn from the Kaga, Aizu, and Kuwana domains. At its head was Yoshinobu, the very man they had marched to petition. On learning this, the party gave up the fight and surrendered to the Kaga domain in late December.

The Kaga troops, who seem to have respected the loyalists' motives, held them in three neighboring Tsuruga temples and treated them with some care. That changed at the end of January 1865, when the prisoners were handed to shogunate officials. More than eight hundred men were forced into a row of warehouses on the waterfront that had been used to store dried herring and herring fertilizer. Windows were boarded, a single bucket served as a latrine in each shed, the men were shackled, and the food was poor. In the cold of a snow-country winter, sickness spread and a number died before any sentence was passed.

The investigation that followed was brief and largely a formality. The shogunate ordered 353 men beheaded, with the rest banished, exiled, returned to Mito, or held as minors. The first to die, on the fourth day of the second month of 1865, were Takeda Kōunsai and twenty-four of the party's leaders. The executions continued in five separate rounds at the grounds of Raikō-ji temple in the Matsubara district. Word of the defeat reached Mito, where the rival faction put many of the loyalists' relatives to death as well, Kōunsai's own family among them. Before his execution Kōunsai composed a death poem about plum blossoms scattering yet leaving their scent behind, a verse that later tied this place to the plum trees of his home domain.

Why the Site Is Protected

The 353 bodies were buried at the execution ground itself, in five pits dug in the field beside Raikō-ji. For a time the burial showed as five rounded earthen mounds, and locals called the spot the Five Mounds. In 1868 the mounds were built up into a single square tomb and topped with fifteen gravestones; a major reworking in 1914 turned the stones to face west and set them in two rows, the form a visitor sees today.

In December 1934 the burial ground, covering roughly 854 square meters, was designated a National Historic Site. The listing falls under the criterion for tombs and monuments. What earns the protection is not artistic merit but documentary weight: this is the actual ground where the Tengu-tō episode reached its end, preserved in place rather than reconstructed elsewhere. For a chapter of late-Edo history more often read in textbooks than seen, the tomb is rare physical evidence.

What to Look For

The fifteen stones repay slow reading. Thirteen of them carry the names of the 353 executed men. One stone, set a little larger at the center, bears Takeda Kōunsai and twenty-four of the leadership. Two stones in the back row stand apart from the rest: one records the names of twenty-one men who fell in fighting during the march, and the last lists thirty-one who died of illness in the herring warehouses before the sentences were carried out. Reading across the rows, a visitor can trace how the group met its end in three different ways.

The stones once faced east, back toward Mito, arranged in a horseshoe. The 1914 reorientation turned them west, toward Matsubara Shrine across the road, so that the markers and the shrine now answer each other across a quiet lane. A low stone fence rings the raised mound. There is little ornament and no grand gateway, which suits a memorial to men who died as condemned prisoners and were only later honored.

Around the Tomb

Directly across the road stands Matsubara Shrine, founded to enshrine the Mito dead as 411 spirits, headed by Takeda Iga-no-kami, Kōunsai's official title. Its annual festival falls on October 10. The plum trees planted in the precincts were sent from the Kairakuen garden in Mito, a gesture that echoes Kōunsai's plum-blossom death poem; Tsuruga and Mito are now sister cities, and the trees are a living thread between them.

Near the tomb you can also see one of the herring warehouses where the party was held. Threatened with demolition during postwar harbor works, it was saved by local residents in 1954 and moved to the shrine grounds as the Mito Loyalists Memorial Hall. The building became a Tsuruga municipal cultural property in 2020, and after a relocation and improvement project a guidance facility opened beside the tomb in October 2024. The warehouse is normally viewed from the outside only.

The wider Matsubara area is worth time in its own right. The Kehi-no-Matsubara pine grove, counted among Japan's three great pine groves, spreads along the nearby shoreline, and Tsuruga's old port town holds further sites including the grand shrine of Kehi Jingū. To reach the tomb, take a community bus from JR Tsuruga Station on the Matsubara or Jōgū line and get off at Matsubara Kōen-guchi, a walk of about three minutes; the Gurutto Tsuruga loop bus stops at Matsubara Jinja. By car it is roughly thirteen minutes from the Tsuruga interchange on the Hokuriku Expressway.