The Lord Who Chose Simplicity

The Oak Gate

The road from Edo, the bustling heart of a nation at peace, was a long one. For Tokugawa Mitsukuni, grandson of the first shogun, Ieyasu, every mile was a deliberate shedding of skin. He was sixty-two years old, a man who had held immense power, a daimyo of the great Mito Domain, and a figure of consequence in the intricate politics of the shogunate. Yet, the procession that carried him toward the hills of Hitachi Ota in the spring of 1691 was not one of palanquins draped in silk, but of a man moving toward a quieter definition of wealth. He was headed for a villa he had constructed the year before, a place called Seizan-so, the “Western Hill Palace.” The name was grand, a deliberate irony borrowed from a Chinese poet-recluse. The reality was anything but. As he approached, the final gate was not a towering edifice of stone and lacquered cypress, but two simple pillars made from the rough, unfinished timber of kunugi—oak trees. This was the Kunugi-mon, the Oak Gate, a statement carved from the forest itself. It spoke not of what he could build, but of what he had chosen not to. Beyond it lay a one-story structure with a gentle slope to its heavy thatched roof. This was not a castle, nor a palace. It was a cottage, a scholar’s hermitage. Inside, the walls were rough, deliberately unadorned. This was a place built for a singular purpose, a purpose that had consumed Mitsukuni for decades and would occupy him until his death: the quiet, monumental task of writing the history of Japan.