Tobacco Pipes and Go Stones
Even at the busy Ninomaru Goten, there was time for relaxation and recreation. Archaeologists found 22 pipe bowls and stems at the site, along with stones used to play the board game Go.
Tobacco was first introduced to Japan in the late sixteenth century. In 1601, a Franciscan missionary named Jerónimo de Jesús de Castro (d. 1601) presented tobacco seeds to Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616), founder of the Tokugawa shogunate. Ieyasu was evidently not impressed: the shogunate later banned tobacco as a vice. Nonetheless, smoking remained popular, and the prohibition was eventually lifted. Matsumoto subsequently became a major tobacco cultivation center that exported to large cities including Edo (Tokyo) and Nagoya.
Go is a strategy board game that originated in China and is believed to have reached Japan sometime during the seventh century. Players take turns placing black or white stones on a 19-by-19 grid to surround and capture territory and the opposing player’s stones. The Go stones found at the Ninomaru Goten site were made from black slate and white clamshell.