Today I departed from Oita City, passed through Hita City and Ukiha City, reached the Ariake Sea, and then arrived in Saga. One of the purposes for choosing this route was to focus on the Chikugo River. The Chikugo River originates from Mount Aso and flows east to west across four prefectures in northern Kyushu—Kumamoto, Oita, Fukuoka, and Saga—before emptying into the Ariake Sea. I traveled along the Chikugo River down to the Ariake Sea, and the first place I visited was Hita City, a basin at the entrance of the mountains, which can be called a strategic point of this river.
Although Hita City hardly draws attention today, historically it held extremely important significance, particularly during the Edo period, when it became a directly governed land of the shogunate, known as “tenryō.” The reason was that Hita City was a transportation hub from which roads and rivers radiated across Kyushu—northward to Fukuoka, eastward to Oita, southward to Miyazaki and Kagoshima, and westward to Saga and Nagasaki. It was known from ancient times as the Hita Kaido, a route where people, goods, and information frequently passed. Especially during the Edo period, because Kyushu was the region farthest from Edo, the Tokugawa capital, it was difficult to monitor, and thus Hita was made a shogunate-administered territory to serve as a base for surveillance and to prevent uprisings.
However, it was not the Tokugawa who first recognized the importance of Hita. Remarkably, traces show that from the Yayoi to the Kofun periods, this area was already regarded as significant and underwent development. Why then did this region, which today hardly stands out, attract people from ancient times? One reason lies in its position as a junction with maritime transport. In fact, the Mikuma River (the local name of the Chikugo River in this region), which flows right by Hita, is the main stream of the Chikugo River, and if one travels about 75 kilometers downstream from there, one reaches the Ariake Sea. Many kofun (ancient burial mounds) and settlement remains have been found around Hita, suggesting that it was deeply connected with the activities of ancient maritime clans.