Dewa Province

Dewa (出羽国; -no kuni) is an old province of Japan, which today composes Yamagata prefecture and Akita prefecture, except for the city of Kazuno and the town of Kosaka.

Historical record

In the first year of the Wadō era (708), the land of Dewa-no kuni was administratively separated from Echigo; and the ambit of the province was gradually extended to the north as the Japanese pushed back the indigenous people of northern Honshū.

In Wadō 5 (712), Dewa-no kuni was administratively realigned in relation to Mutsu province (陸奥国); and Empress Gemmei's Daijō-kan continued to organize other cadastral changes in the provincial map of the Nara period, as in Wadō 6 when Mimasaka province (美作国) was divided from Bizen province (備前国); Hyūga province (日向国) was sundered from Osumi province (大隈国); and Tamba province (丹波国) was severed from Tango province (丹後国).^[1]

In the Sengoku period the southern region around Yamagata was held by the Mogami clan and the northern part by the Akita clan, both of which fought for Tokugawa Ieyasu at the Battle of Sekigahara.

In the Meiji Period, Dewa-no kuni was again administratively reconfigured, this time into Uzen and Ugo before being substantively recast along with all the other old provinces into the modern prefectural pattern of Japan.

References

Notes

Further reading

• Titsingh, Isaac, ed. (1834). [Siyun-sai Rin-siyo, 1652], Nipon o daï itsi ran; ou, Annales des empereurs du Japon, tr. par M. Isaac Titsingh avec l'aide de plusieurs interprètes attachés au comptoir hollandais de Nangasaki; ouvrage re., complété et cor. sur l'original japonais-chinois, accompagné de notes et précédé d'un Aperçu d'histoire mythologique du Japon, par M. J. Klaproth. Paris: Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland.--Two copies of this rare book have now been made available online: (1) from the library of the University of Michigan, digitized January 30, 2007; and (2) from the library of Stanford University, digitized June 23, 2006. Click here to read the original text in French.

Coordinates: 39°00′59″N 140°19′02″E / 39.01639, 140.31722bpy:দেৱাnew:देवा

Donate to Wikimedia