The Tsukino family, like the majority of Japan's middle class families, can only be traced back to shortly after the Meiji Restoration (1868). In that year, the younger son of a peasant family living outside Edo (Tokyo) began calling himself Tsukino Shinta (1851?-1907). According to family tradition, he chose the family name as a reference to the great secret of his family: that they were the impoverished and diminished descendants of the Akizuki noble family, whose primary heraldic device had been the crescent moon prior to their destruction in the sixteenth century. [1]
Regardless of that, or of any other hypothesis as to the name's inspiration, Tsukino Shinta was a young man born into an age to which he was uniquely suited. Bright, imaginative and able, he became an assistant to one of the first professional photographers to operate in Tokyo, and earned a successful if unremarkable living in his employ, eventually owning his own studio.
Ironically, no photographs of Shinta have survived to the present day, nor do we have any definitive information about his life prior to 1879, when he began to keep a journal. He was apparently married to a woman named Ameiko (?-1877?) but it is not clear whether or not they had any children before her death, caused by an allergic reaction to a bee sting roughly two years before Shinta's first journal entry.
He began writing to pass the time while taking the train from Tokyo to Kyoto for a vacation, and his first few entries are quite mundane. But that vacation was anything but ordinary. Shinta was fated to witness both the terrible tragedy of the Great Fire of Kyoto, and to an event which was even more important to him on a personal level.
Shinta does not write concerning his reasons for being out on the streets on the night of the fire. Possibly he had been recruited for a bucket brigade. What he does write about is this: shortly after midnight, he was watching one of the buildings burn, when suddenly a woman appeared some distance away. The verb he uses has connotations of an abrupt nature, implying that the woman appeared as if from nowhere. Shinta himself came to doubt that, later suggesting that she had just walked into his line of sight without him realizing it until that moment.
In any event, she stood watching the flames, rather closer to the building than Shinta himself, as though entranced. Suddenly, the building began to collapse, and a piece of flaming debris came loose and fell towards the woman. Shinta, moving faster than he himself thought possible, pulled her out of the way. Their eyes met for the first time.
The woman who called herself Doji Hitomi (?-1914) had blue eyes and long white hair, both of which seemed utterly out of place on the face of a young Japanese woman, which was what she otherwise appeared to be. She began to yell at Shinta, speaking in a dialect unfamiliar to him, asking him who he thought he was to lay hands on a member of the /buke/ in such a fashion, and then suddenly trailing off as she noticed her surroundings. She then asked, in a confused tone, "Where in the world am I?"
By morning, Shinta had come to a pair of conclusions concerning this bizarre woman. The first that he reached was that she was utterly insane. She claimed to be a member of the aristocracy -- indeed, a relative of the Emperor -- but then compounded her outrageous statement by insisting that her homeland was not Nihon, but rather a land named Rokugan [2]. She claimed not to recognize any place names suggested by Shinta, and he had never heard of any of the places or people she named. She was utterly unfamiliar with modern technology, perplexed by the idea of a clock. The only explanation was that she was quite mad.
The other conclusion was that Shinta was desperately in love with her. The fact that she was mad detracted not at all from his certainty that his life would be empty without her. Love itself was mad, he reasoned. He persuaded Hitomi to return to Tokyo with him, and even to take a room above the studio where he worked. She agreed, apparently hoping to contact a magician able to return her to her own world.
The next two years of Shinta's journal are filled with his courtship of Hitomi. It was a long and involved process. Shinta was inexperienced with romance, as his first marriage was apparently arranged, and his clumsy efforts alternately bewildered and horrified the object of his affections. For her part, Hitomi was fickle, easily irritated or reduced to tears, prone to fits of jealousy if Shinta's interests ever seemed to turn elsewhere, and strongly opposed to the idea of being in love with a "commoner". Somehow, they came together, and were married on June 30, 1881. [3]
Their first child, a daughter whom they named Wakana, was born the next year, on April 17. A son, Genma, would be born on August 11, 1884. A third child, another son named Ryou, was born October 21, 1886 but died at the age of three months. None of them had their mother's eyes or hair, but the survivors carried the genes for them as recessive traits, passing them down through the generations until they combined with similar recessives to produce blue-eyed Tsukino Usagi, the great-great-granddaughter of Tsukino Genma.
[1] While Usagi's paternal grandfather, Tsukino Miki, apparently told the legend of Princess Yukihime to Kurosawa Akira -- who filmed it as The Hidden Fortress (1958) -- Kenji is fairly certain that his father thought it was just a tall tale.
[2] Confusing the issue of Hitomi's origins even further, an American game company has published Legend of the Five Rings, a collectible card game inspired by Asian myth and legend set in a fantasy empire named Rokugan. There does not seem to be any way that the game's creators could have known about Hitomi's fantasies, but the game's background is very similar to the land described in her memoirs. Notably, members of the Crane clan's Doji family often have white hair and blue or grey eyes, a mark of their descent from the kami Doji. The entire affair can only be described as an unexplained mystery.
[3] It has been speculated (mostly by Richard McNichol, who assisted me in translating the various journals) that Shinta eventually resorted to inventing the story of his family's noble origins in order to trick Hitomi into viewing him as a social equal. There are references in Shinta's journals to lies which had brought the couple together, but which he feared would tear them asunder if the truth ever came to light. However, Richard's speculations in this matter don't answer all the unanswered questions, and raise several new ones as well.