From Takebashi on the Tozai Line, where Palaceside Building stands, it is four stops to Monzen-Nakacho. I found a gap in work and went on to Tomioka Hachiman-gu = photo right =, loved as “Fukagawa’s Hachiman-sama.”
Tomioka Hachiman-gu was founded in 1627 (Kanei 4) by oracle on land then called Eitai-jima. They reclaimed the sandbars around, opened shrine land and parishioners’ homes, and are said to have gained 65,000 tsubo of shrine property. Known as “Fukagawa’s Hachiman,” it is still “Edo’s greatest Hachiman,” gathering unchanged faith.
Beside the great torii stands a bronze of late-Edo surveyor Ino Tadataka = main photo =. Relatively new, built in Heisei 13; beside it a third-order triangulation point (a datum for longitude, latitude, and height in surveying) is also set = photo below =. Ino was born January 11, 1745 (Enkyo 2) and lived to seventy-three. He was born in Kozeki village, Yamabe, Kazusa (now Kozeki, Kujukuri, Sanbu, Chiba). At eighteen he married into the Ino house in Sawara, Katori, Shimosa (now Sawara, Katori), which ran sake and soy brewing and moneylending. He retired at fifty, then from 1800 (Kansei 12) to 1816 (Bunka 13) spent seventeen years surveying the country and finished the Dai Nihon Enkai Yochi Zenzu, first making Japan’s true shape clear. He was also the first in Japan to observe the meridian transit of Venus.
The scale of that trail aside, accomplishing it after retirement is nothing I can copy, but it is a perfect model for a second life after leaving work. Past fifty Ino lived in Fukagawa Kuroecho (now Monzen-Nakacho 1-chome) to study astronomy and surveying, and before every survey journey he worshipped at Tomioka Hachiman-gu. The bronze stands against Ino’s map of Japan cut in black granite, right foot stepping out: fifty-five-year-old Ino with a staff-tip compass, marking the first strong step toward survey.
The 2001 Toei film “Ino Tadataka — Dream of the Meridian,” starring Kato Go, his wife Oei played by Kaku Chikako, was a good picture of this man. It encourages a second life; sadly it does not seem to be on DVD.