Jiang Feng, chief writer of "Japanese Overseas Chinese Daily".
I remember that on October 14, 2023, I took the opportunity of a business trip back to China to squeeze out time to revisit the tomb of Emperor Kangxi, the second emperor of the Qing Dynasty after entering the customs in the Eastern Tombs of the Qing Dynasty. I don't know why, but I suddenly remembered the relevant records of Emperor Kangxi having 55 children. Thinking about it now, maybe it's because I'm getting older, I only have one son, I'm still working in Singapore, and I often feel lonely in my heart. When I silently said the number "55", my fellow friends teased me: "You know, you are not the emperor!" Recently, I looked through the Japanese scholar Kiyoyuki Higuchi's "The Secret History of Japan" (Shodensha, July 1988, first edition) and found that there was an account of the 54 children of the 11th Tokugawa Iesai, the 11th shogun of the Edo shogunate. Look, there is only one child less than the Kangxi Emperor of China.
In Japan's Edo period, the emperor was the "ear of the deaf man", and the shogun was the "emperor" who was "real and nameless". The Tokugawa family has been in power for half a century, which is certainly inferior to the 61-year reign of the Kangxi Emperor. General Tokugawa Ieki had one person in the main room and 24 people in the side room. Emperor Kangxi successively had 3 queens and 82 concubines. In this comparison, the "productivity" of General Tokugawa Ieqi is higher than that of Emperor Kangxi. To add an extra mile, General Tokugawa Ieki was 61 years old when he died, and Emperor Kangxi was 69 years old when he died. Look, if the "productivity" is too strong, it will die early.
Why did Tokugawa Ieki have such a strong "productivity"? It is said that shortly after Tokugawa Ieyasu established the Edo shogunate, he forcibly adopted Ryoka (located in present-day Minamibo Soujo, Chiba Prefecture, Japan) in Anbo Province as a ranch directly under the shogunate. When Tokugawa Yoshimune, the eighth shogun of the Edo shogunate, came to power, he not only actively expanded the area of pastures, but also imported three "white oxen" from India in 1728. It is still a good story in the history of friendly exchanges between Japan and India. At that time, the three "white cows" were eating grass and milking milk. The milk is heated, then mixed with sugar, and then slowly boiled over a simmer to make "white cow cheese".
The result? According to Okazaki Moriko, who used to be the director of the Beijing branch of the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, in the book "Yuwang Tokugawa Ieki" (Bungei Chunqiu Co., Ltd., first edition in May 2020), there are two results: one result is that General Tokugawa Ieki has become a direct oral of "white cow cheese", and after eating it every day, he is full of energy, and he can't wait to run around Edo Castle three times, so that he can have more children; Another result was that by 1792, the "white cattle" of this ridge pasture had produced about seventy heads. When I think about the history of the shoguns of the Edo shogunate in Japan who rushed to "produce" like this with the white bull, I can't help but laugh. Wonderful!
It is worth affirming that after General Tokugawa Ieki tasted the benefits of "White Cow Cheese", he did not take it for himself, but asked his physician Momoi Genin to write a book called "White Cow Cheese Examination", adding his own cases of "successful experiments", and then let "White Cow Cheese" also enter the homes of ordinary people.
Today, Japan is in the era of "declining birthrate", and people are more willing to talk about the "birth history" of Shogun Tokugawa Ieki. It should still be beneficial to have more children. At the age of 15, the 21st daughter of Shogun Tokugawa Ieki, Ronghime, married Maeda Saitai, the 13th lord of the Kaga domain. At that time, the "Beijing Office" of the Kaga Domain specially built a magnificent "Ronghime Palace", and the gate of this "Palace", the "Gomoriten Gate", is the "Akamon" of the National University of Tokyo, the most famous in Japan today, and it is a real landmark. Many Chinese students studying here mistakenly think that the "Akamon" was the gate of the "Beijing Office" of the Kaga Domain, but they do not know that it is actually the gate of the "Ronghime Palace".
On February 16, 2016, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun emphasized in a report that the birthplace of Japanese dairy farmers is not Hokkaido, but Chiba Prefecture. Today, Chiba Prefecture produces about 220,000 tons of milk per year, making it the fifth largest dairy farmer prefecture in Japan. (Written on February 17, 2024 in Chiba "Fengrakusai").