“Oda pounded and Hashiba kneaded", but there’s no Tokugawa to eat the mochi
In Kanramachi in Gunma there is a garden called the Rakusan’en 楽山園, designated as a national Place of Scenic Beauty in 2000. This garden was believed to have been built by Nobunaga’s second son, Nobukatsu, after being awarded the Obata domain (where Kanramachi now is) by the Tokugawa shogunate.
In the grounds near where the mansion/residence formerly stood, there is a statue of two people pounding mochi. It looks like an arbitrary statue at a glance, but at closer look, it turns out to be a depiction of the famous satire poem often referred to as the “Tenka mochi poem” (天下餅の歌 Tenka Mochi no Uta):
織田がつき 羽柴がこねし 天下餅 すわりしままに 食うは徳川
“Oda pounded and Hashiba kneaded the Nation mochi, and in the end the one who sat and ate is Tokugawa”
The mochi mortar has 天下 (the nation) engraved into it, and the statue kneading the mochi has a monkey-like face to represent Hideyoshi. Nobunaga looks rather generic, but once you recognise the other two elements, the statue with the large mochi pounding mallet can’t possibly be anyone else.
The curious part here is that there’s no depiction of Ieyasu eating the mochi. I’ve searched around for explanation, but there doesn’t seem to be any provided, either by the city’s official materials or by visitors. The guests seem to be confused, and a lot of them don’t even seem to realise what this was in the first place. One blog says “I think these are vassals/employees?” and another says “I don’t understand what these mochi-making statues are all about”.
Perhaps it’s because that last part of the poem about Ieyasu eating is a slight against him (it was basically saying that he contributed nothing to the unification). Even if the statue is modern and not built in the Tokugawa era, people still tend to avoid making any of the historical figures look bad in official sites and displays like this.
Why choose this satire poem to build a statue out of to begin with, then, is beyond me. There was a statue of Nobukatsu inside one of the buildings, but this mochi statue doesn’t feel like it made much sense. I felt that it would’ve been more reasonable to create statues of the other lords of the domain (the Oda family was eventually replaced by another clan as the rulers here), or even just Nobunaga alone.
