From the historian's notes

Edo, 1657

Japan · East Asia · late February 1657 — days before the fire of 2-3 March · winter

What it was high

one of the world's great cities already — hundreds of thousands of people, swollen by the alternate-attendance system that parks daimyo households herecastle town from Tokugawa Ieyasu's arrival in 1590; shogunal capital since 1603

That year

• the Meireki fire: beginning 2 March (18th day of the 1st month), wind-driven fires burn the better part of the city over two days — most daimyo mansions, hundreds of temples, the castle's great keep 2-3 March 1657 highthe deadliest urban fire of the early modern world; deaths conventionally given as up to 100,000, with serious estimates ranging from ~30,000 upward
• the preceding months were drought-dry, and the seasonal northwest winds are strong — the tinder condition is present and perceptible in the days before winter 1656-57 mediumcitywide
• the castle keep (tenshu) burns in this fire and is never rebuilt — Edo's skyline loses its crown permanently 3 March 1657 and forever after highsymbolic and real
• the furisode ('long-sleeve kimono') origin legend — a cursed garment burned at Honmyō-ji temple igniting the city — attaches to this fire told ever after lowlegend

Who held it high

Tokugawa shogunate; the emperor reigns unseen in KyotoShogun Tokugawa Ietsuna, a young fourth shogun governed in practice by his regents-counselorsthe country has been sealed (the sakoku edicts, complete by the 1640s) — no foreigners but the Dutch and Chinese pen at distant Nagasaki, Christianity banned on pain of death, travel controlled at highway barriers. The city itself has never burned at full scale — it is about to

Its name high

Edo (江戸, 'bay door')Written in Japanese (kanji with kana)

The date, there high

Meireki 3 — the disaster she is here to precede is named after this eraJapanese era name plus year, lunisolar calendarTemple bells and the official time-bells beat six day-hours and six night-hours that stretch and shrink with the seasons; dawn and dusk are 'the sixth bell'. Appointments are made by bell and neighborhood, not by minute. The unequal hour is her working clock here.

Money medium

tri-metal system: gold koban, silver by weight (chōgin), copper mon for daily lifethe copper mon (Kan'ei tsūhō); rice stipends are the samurai economy's real unita bowl of noodles: the famous '16 mon' soba price belongs to the next century — for 1657 say 'a few coppers' and no more

Weather medium

late February: clear cold days, hard dry air, strong northwest winds off the mountains — laundry dries in an hour and thatch dries to kindlingthe drought and wind regime before the Meireki fire is the documented extreme of this exact window

Things

ObjectsKan'ei tsūhō copper coins (minted since 1636); charcoal braziers (hibachi) — the city's little fires, everywhere, all winter; paper screens, tatami, cedar-shingle and thatch roofs — the fuel load in plain sight; water barrels and ladders at street corners; wooden citizen-register tags and travel papersFoodsoba and udon from stalls (cut-noodle soba is current by mid-1600s); miso soup, grilled river fish, pickles; tofu sellers' calls at dawn; sake warmed against the cold; NO nigiri sushi — that is a 19th-century inventionClothindigo-dyed cotton on townsfolk; silk for samurai households within sumptuary rules; padded winter kimono; straw raincoats and sandalsGetting aboutfeet, palanquins (kago), packhorses; canal barges and lighters on the bay; NO rickshaws — invented 1869In the aircharcoal smoke over the whole city — the winter signature and the warning she can literally smell; dried fish and soy; cold dust on the wind; wood shavings from endless construction

What she'd hear

Edo-period Japanese, socially graded to a degree she must not fumble; women's speech has its own registers. Modern Japanese would not pass — hers must be learned to period. A Kyoto tinge or provincial softness in her speech is explainable; foreignness is not.

Where she could stand

• Nihonbashi bridge — the wooden bridge that is kilometer-zero of the realm's five highways; fish market at its foot
• Edo castle with its keep still standing — the five-storied tenshu above white walls — in its last days of existence
• a daimyo compound gate — the barracks-walled mansions of the attendance system, gate crests and spear racks
• the original Yoshiwara quarter — the licensed quarter still at its first site near the city's heart — it moves to Asakusa only after the fire
• a time-bell tower (toki no kane) — the bell at Kokuchō that beats the city's hours

Researched for this card · confidence high