井の中の蛙

Professor Matthew Stavros of the University of Sydney (seen in the third photo below) wrote in response to my post on the discovery of roof tiles from Honnôji at an excavation site in Kyoto. Matthew, who is a specialist in medieval Kyoto and has participated in archaeological digs in the city, reports that archaeologists have been excavating this site, which they were almost certain was Honnôji, for some time, but lacked definitive proof. The significance of this recent find is that the roof tiles are marked with a symbol that was only used at Honnôji.

Matthew kindly provided some images from the excavation which illustrate something of the excavation process and results (after the break).

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Those of you who are, like me, interested in that brief era in the late 16th and early 17th centuries known as the Momoyama period (or the Azuchi-Momoyama period for sticklers) will be interested to know that archaeologists in Kyoto have discovered the first solid proof of the location of Honnôji Temple. Honnôji was of course the site of Akechi Mitsuhide’s treasonous assault on the warlord Oda Nobunaga on Tenshô 10/6/2 (or June 21st, 1582 to most of us). Mitsuhide took advantage of the relative lack of guards, henchmen, and major vassals in the vicinity to launch a major attack which resulted in the incineration of the temple and the death of Nobunaga, known to many today as the first of the three “Great Unifiers” of the late sixteenth century. According to the Asahi Shimbun, archaeologists working over the past month have discovered roof tiles and stone walls from the temple, some marked with distinctive designs used only by Honnôji.

I wish I was in Kyoto now so I could visit the site! This is one of the most famous events in Japanese history, so the discovery of material remnants of the conflict (often referred to in Japanese as the “Honnôji incident”) is significant.