Iiga Village

The village map has been converted to an Adobe Acrobat (.PDF) document. Download the map here.

Iiga Village is where most of the action in Bushido takes place. The village is a small but prosperous town of about 700 people with three main sources of income: rice, silk, and stopovers from travellers on their way through to Edo (which is about a week's travel from Iiga).

The vast majority of the town consists of commoners -- farmers, silk-harvesters, ironworkers, the staff of the inn on the outskirts of town, artesans, and so on. The town's magistrate is a youngish samurai, Yoshiro Metsukuno, although thanks to the Shogun's new regulations regarding daimyo, he is required to spend half the year in Edo. In his absence, his wife, Oyuki, manages his affairs and keeps the peace.

Silk is a key part of the town's income. Because of this, a regular staff of bodyguards -- some disenfranchised samurai, some just bold young men looking for good work -- is maintained by the township to protect this "wealth." Not just the silk itself, but the people who make it and even the silkworms themselves have been targeted by criminals in the past. Many people passing through town wind up spending at least a little money on the material -- it's quality stuff and some are known to make pilgrimages to the town exclusively for Iiga silk.

The other big part of the town's welfare comes from travelers -- priests on pilgrimages to the various shrines, ronin, soldiers, officers of the bakufu, and so on. For this reason, the town does its best to present itself as an attractive place to stop over for the night. However, the presence of the inn and the silk-making are relatively new (i.e., within the last fifty years or so). As a result, there is a certain amount of tension, not always explicit, in the town between those who work in silk or at the inn and those who do the "real" work (threshing rice, night-soil, etc.) There is a local expression that reflects this: "There are two Iiga, one high and one low." It depends on who you ask as to which is considered which, of course.

There are several local ordinances established by previous generations of magistrates. Tobacco, for instance, is expressly forbidden to villagers, since it is generally regarded as being unhealthy, expensive, wasteful (both in terms of time and money), and a fire hazard. Unfortunately, there tends to be a lot of illegitimate traffic in tobacco between villagers and transients (not to mention stiffer drugs like opium, but those are extremely rare). A villager caught with tobacco is generally fined a month's worth of rice. (On the other hand, most of the native villagers tend to look down on tobacco as being a "big city" thing, and can't afford it in the first place.)

Iiga also happens to be situated in a fairly temperate and mild part of the countryside, so it's not uncommon for some older merchants or samurai to move there and retire. And since it's situated along the road to Edo, there are often traveling entertainers who stop the night to perform puppet shows, one-man plays or other amusements.

Below: A small segment of Iiga Village

The lands surrounding Iiga are mostly mountainous and deep-growth forests. The river just south of the village runs east-to-west, and eventually runs south and into the ocean. Well-traveled paths do exist (to be added to the map at some point).