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Yamamoto Komatsu (1849-1943)
Jan. 5th, 2024 06:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomiYamamoto Komatsu was born in 1849 in Edo, just as her father Shinzo was turning 42; it was an unlucky age according to the Shinto beliefs, and children born in their fathers’ unlucky years were, according to superstition, to be fostered out and named (and then potentially returned to their birth families) if they were to grow up healthy. Shinzo couldn’t bear to part with his daughter, however; nor did he want to risk seeing her die in infancy thanks to his own failure to observe this custom. So he compromised, and she grew up nameless, called Aka-chan “Baby” by everyone until her teens.
When she was seventeen, in order to support the family through her father’s illness, the “Baby” took her three-stringed shamisen, the only skill she had, and went down to Uraga on the Kanagawa coast, a naval shipbuilding town and gateway to the outside world. She and her friend O-Ume first found work as cleaning ladies at a shipping agency, but it didn’t go well and their employer resolved to send them back to Edo. Their goodbye party was held at an inn called the Yoshikawaya, where the Baby’s performance of tokiwazu, singing stories with her shamisen as accompaniment, drew the attention of the innkeeper and got her offered a job. At this point she abandoned “Baby” and took the name Etsu.
In 1875, the navy held a torpedo test offshore of Uraga, attended by assorted Royal Highnesses, who spent a night at the Yoshikawaya. Etsu assisted in entertaining them, including some thumb wrestling. Her size and strength were particularly admired by Prince Komatsu, who asked if she would take his name as her own. Shy of bearing the name in kanji, she chose its phonetic representation instead.
Some twenty years after her arrival in Uraga, guests at the inn invited her to come to the major naval base of Yokosuka, further along the coast, and open an inn on her own conditions. Already in her mid-thirties, Komatsu resolved to take the offer in order to do the most she could for herself and her family as a single woman. In 1885, she opened the Komatsu restaurant in Yokosuka, which promptly became the haunt of numerous naval officers, including Togo Heihachiro, Yamamoto Gonbei, and Yamamoto Isoroku. They called her restaurant the “Pine” (a translation of matsu) and treated her like a mother.
Komatsu lived into her nineties, dying in 1943 after having left her restaurant in the hands of a great-niece, Goto Naoe (who herself remained in charge well into the 1990s). The restaurant itself survived until a fire in 2016.
Sources
Ishii
http://hayabusa-ipo.sakura.ne.jp/coffeebreak/002.pdf (Japanese, photos of the restaurant interior)
https://hamarepo.com/story.php?story_id=5396 (Japanese, some pictures from outside and of the area, also of Komatsu herself, sadly only in old age)
When she was seventeen, in order to support the family through her father’s illness, the “Baby” took her three-stringed shamisen, the only skill she had, and went down to Uraga on the Kanagawa coast, a naval shipbuilding town and gateway to the outside world. She and her friend O-Ume first found work as cleaning ladies at a shipping agency, but it didn’t go well and their employer resolved to send them back to Edo. Their goodbye party was held at an inn called the Yoshikawaya, where the Baby’s performance of tokiwazu, singing stories with her shamisen as accompaniment, drew the attention of the innkeeper and got her offered a job. At this point she abandoned “Baby” and took the name Etsu.
In 1875, the navy held a torpedo test offshore of Uraga, attended by assorted Royal Highnesses, who spent a night at the Yoshikawaya. Etsu assisted in entertaining them, including some thumb wrestling. Her size and strength were particularly admired by Prince Komatsu, who asked if she would take his name as her own. Shy of bearing the name in kanji, she chose its phonetic representation instead.
Some twenty years after her arrival in Uraga, guests at the inn invited her to come to the major naval base of Yokosuka, further along the coast, and open an inn on her own conditions. Already in her mid-thirties, Komatsu resolved to take the offer in order to do the most she could for herself and her family as a single woman. In 1885, she opened the Komatsu restaurant in Yokosuka, which promptly became the haunt of numerous naval officers, including Togo Heihachiro, Yamamoto Gonbei, and Yamamoto Isoroku. They called her restaurant the “Pine” (a translation of matsu) and treated her like a mother.
Komatsu lived into her nineties, dying in 1943 after having left her restaurant in the hands of a great-niece, Goto Naoe (who herself remained in charge well into the 1990s). The restaurant itself survived until a fire in 2016.
Sources
Ishii
http://hayabusa-ipo.sakura.ne.jp/coffeebreak/002.pdf (Japanese, photos of the restaurant interior)
https://hamarepo.com/story.php?story_id=5396 (Japanese, some pictures from outside and of the area, also of Komatsu herself, sadly only in old age)
