Why It Sucks to Be an Island Exile in Edo Japan

A clerk in Edo reads out your sentence, and it is one word. Ento. Exile to a distant island. It has no term. It ends when a pardon arrives, and a pardon may never arrive. Your fields, your house and everything inside it are confiscated the moment it is read out. Then you wait in the jail at Kodenmacho for the exile ship, which sails only twice a year, and you learn which island you are going to only on the night before it leaves. For a man bound for Hachijojima, the farthest out, simply arriving could take the better part of a year, most of it spent waiting on Miyakejima for the next ship. When you are finally put ashore, about 180 miles out into the Pacific, you are told your daily life is your own affair. There are no walls and no guards, and no rations worth the name, on an island where one famine in the seventeen sixties cut the population roughly in half. Leaving without permission was punished by death. Fewer than four in ten exiles ever set foot on the mainland again. And yet the island's own folk song, still sung today, calls Hachijo an island of kindness. Exiles kept village records and taught reading, and one of them, in fifty-three years on the island, wrote it all down in about seventy volumes. Episode 11 of EDO LIVES. The real lives behind old Japan. CHAPTERS 00:00 The Sentence 01:29 A Sentence With No Number 03:43 Months in a Cell, and an Island Named the Night Before 06:17 The Crossing 08:18 "Your Daily Life Is Your Own Affair" 10:43 The Island That Could Not Feed Itself 12:58 There Is No Way Off 14:52 What You Were Worth to the Island 17:24 Waiting for the Pardon Ship 19:19 After the Ships Stopped SOURCES Kotobank, the entry on ento (island exile), from the Heibonsha World Encyclopedia, Nipponica and the Britannica Japan encyclopedia https://kotobank.jp/word/%E9%81%A0%E5... Yamamoto Seiji, Island exile as a punishment in the shogunate's Kanto domains, Hosei Shigaku no. 14 (1961) https://hosei.ecats-library.jp/da/rep... Tokyo Metropolitan Archives, 2019 research report on the exile records of Hachijojima https://www.soumu.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/d... Okuyama Ikuko, The process and character of population outflow from Hachijojima, Journal of Geography vol. 95 no. 1 (1986) https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/... Hachijo Town, the history of Hachijojima https://www.town.hachijo.tokyo.jp/kan... Okayama Prefecture Tokyo Office, on Ukita Hideie and his fifty years on Hachijojima https://www.pref.okayama.jp/page/deta... Kotobank, the entry on Kondo Tomizo, author of the Hachijo Jikki https://kotobank.jp/word/%E8%BF%91%E8... Tokyo Metropolitan Government, on the folk songs of Hachijojima, an Intangible Folk Cultural Property of Tokyo https://www.chiikishigen.metro.tokyo.... ABOUT THIS CHANNEL EDO LIVES follows one person through one job, in the Japan of the shoguns. Researched from Japanese language sources and primary records. New episodes every week. This video uses AI narration and AI generated illustration. The research, the script and the editorial choices are human. #japanesehistory #edoperiod #hachijojima