The guide read out an address
September 21, 2019, at the Kabukiza — Tokyo’s main kabuki theatre, in Ginza. The evening program of the Shūzan-sai, and I was watching Matsuura no Taiko — “Lord Matsuura and the Drum of Chūshingura” — for the third time, with Nakamura Karoku as Lord Matsuura.
Partway through the play, the Earphone-Guide — the theatre’s rental audio commentary — explained where Lord Matsuura’s residence had actually stood. Around Asakusabashi, it said.
Wait. That’s my neighborhood. No — next door to it. I had seen this play twice before, and only at that moment did it click.
I already knew that Hōraien had been the Matsuura family’s estate. What I had not known was that this Matsuura was the same house as the lord on stage in front of me. The guide read out an address, and the two things fused into one.
I watched the rest of the play in a state of excitement. As soon as I got home I checked on a website that overlays old maps of Edo onto the present city. What I found, I will not write here. It is too close to home. I have since moved, so I no longer live at that spot.
But I already knew the place. Not from the theatre. I had known it first on the map of a game.
A Portal called Hōraien-ato
There is a game called Ingress — Niantic’s location-based game, the one they made before Pokémon GO. Portals stand on a map of the real world — the things Pokémon GO players know as PokéStops — and nothing happens unless you physically go there. Walking is the game’s controller.
In Asakusabashi stands a Portal named “Hōraien-ato” — the Site of Hōraien. Its description says this is the site of a garden of the Matsuura lords of the Hirado domain.
In other words, I knew this was the site of the Matsuura garden before I ever saw the play. The only thing missing was the single line connecting it to the Matsuura of Matsuura no Taiko. The address filled that line in.
What kind of garden Hōraien was, and how the play’s premise — a residence next door to Kira’s — collides with the historical record, is all in the Ryōgoku article. This page tells the story one step before that: why I knew the land before I knew the play.
Counting the order
Let me line up the dates.
- July 14, 2014 — I started Ingress. The day the iOS version launched. Android players had a head start, and iPhone players like me had been kept waiting. A badge in the game preserves this date
- January 13, 2015 — I bought my first book on kabuki: a beginner’s introduction written for businesspeople (Makoto Naruke’s Bijinesuman e no Kabuki Annai, in the NHK paperback series)
- Early 2015 — I came across the Hōraien-ato Portal. I had business that took me to the Asakusabashi area often, and had swept up the Portals around it as a matter of course. This was the period I played Ingress hardest
- From April 2015, one year — I lived in Malaysia. I sometimes found myself introducing Japanese history and culture, kabuki included. Having never seen it myself
- May 14, 2016 — I saw kabuki at the Kabukiza for the first time
Do the subtraction: Ingress precedes the book by 183 days — almost exactly half a year. The theatre is a further 22 months away.
One more thing is on the record. By the time I opened my first book on kabuki, I had already walked to more than ten historic sites, photographed them, and registered them on the map myself. The game has a badge that counts historic sites you found, submitted, and got approved; the date on my tenth is preserved — December 19, 2014. One month before I bought the book.
The wish to see kabuki someday was much older than any of this. Standing on the side that introduces Japanese culture, in Malaysia, simply made it plain that I still hadn’t. That is all.
Even so: the land came before the book, and the book before the theatre.
The work of raising a Portal
Ingress had a feature that let you nominate Portals yourself, and there were criteria for what qualified: places of historical or educational value, distinctive architecture, public art, hidden gems specific to the place. Parks, libraries, shrines and temples passed easily. The range overlaps almost exactly with what this site now calls a “spot.”
The procedure was fixed, too.
- Go there and photograph the actual thing yourself
- Attach the coordinates
- Write the description in your own words
And it was first come, first served. Nominations were reviewed in order, so if someone else’s qualifying submission got in first, theirs became the Portal. The Android head start meant I was behind from day one. So I walked — picked candidates, went, shot, took the position, wrote the description, submitted. Every day.
Some were rejected. Rejections came with reasons, and if you fixed the problem you could resubmit. I kept at it until they passed. I managed the submissions and rejections with labels in Gmail.
I would leave at sunrise with my kit and chase Portal candidates until dark. Back home, I filed the day’s submissions and worked up the next list — checking municipal records and library references, scouting on Street View before setting out.
Put that next to what I do now, and it is the same activity.
On my recent reporting walk in Ryōgoku I got up at 6:30 — I normally sleep until 8 — and was out the door by 7. I don’t leave that early for work.
Between August and December 2014 — five months — I filed about 600 nominations. That averages four a day, but I had a day job, so in practice they piled up on days off. 233 of them passed. Six hundred filed, 233 approved — a hit rate of just under 40 percent.
The badge for this — the Seer — went gold at 200. It cannot be earned without this kind of single-minded behavior. Among players it was famously the mark of the obsessed.
The Seer count was frozen at the end of 2014, so my submissions stop there. I stopped because they stopped counting. That is the whole story. The reviews themselves ground on for years; the last rejection notice reached me on April 20, 2021 — more than six years after I had filed it.
And some of the Portals I raised are still on the map today, as PokéStops in Pokémon GO. Strangers stop in front of monuments I nominated.
This site’s rules come from there
I used to think this site’s rules were things I worked out when I built it. I was wrong. Set them side by side and they are the nomination requirements of twelve years ago.
| Portal nomination requirement | This site’s rule |
|---|---|
| Places of historical or educational value; public art | Real places where the plays are set |
| Photograph the actual thing, on site | Only photographs I took there myself |
| Attach the coordinates | Every spot carries latitude and longitude |
| Write the description yourself | Every synopsis and commentary in my own words |
| You cannot nominate without going | Nothing is published unless I have visited |
| Read the rejection reason, fix it, resubmit | Park it as “unverified,” write only when the evidence is in |
| Research candidates in municipal records and libraries | Chase the books a signboard cites back to the originals |
| Scout on Street View before setting out | Overlay the Edo maps on the present map before a walk |
| Manage submissions with Gmail labels | Build the theatre-going ledger from purchase-confirmation emails |
The bottom row surprised even me. This site’s record of 78 kabuki performances is not written from memory; it is a ledger built by checking ticket-purchase confirmation emails one by one. That checking is also how I caught — and corrected — two performances a typhoon had cancelled, which I had been counting as seen.
But I did not build the ledger while consciously remembering the Portal files. When I set out to make the theatre record, I went to my Gmail thinking the evidence would be there — and found the labels already in place. My self of twelve years ago had made them. Only on seeing them did I remember.
The pilgrimage I didn’t know I was on
For some years after starting Ingress, I went out for no reason except the game. I walked all over Tokyo, rode buses for it, travelled across Japan for it, occasionally abroad for it.
In Sugito, the Saitama town where I lived then, I nominated everything I could find. The town sits where Sugito-juku, a post station on the old Nikkō highway, used to be — monuments and old things everywhere.
My year in Malaysia was the same, on foot. I found teammates in the game on my first day in the country, and we ended up on an expedition to Thailand together. A friend from the same game came from Japan, and we roamed Malaysia. In the very year I stood introducing Japanese culture to others, I was circling the sites of another country’s land, kabuki still unseen.
At the time I never asked myself what I was circling. I was not conscious of visiting historic sites; I was playing a game. Though I suspect I had always liked this kind of thing.
Some of it has nothing to do with the game. In Tokyo, when a road bends for no reason, I suspect a buried river. When I find a stone marker carrying the name of a bridge, I suspect a culvert. Walk to the little shrine nearby and the plaque explains it. When I first moved to my current neighborhood, I actually did this. It was the Torigoe River.
Which came first — did the game make me this way, or was I always like this? I can no longer tell. But the circling itself — the pilgrimage — was real.
So the pilgrimage came first. I had stood on the land before I knew the play.
One thing I want to make clear. The Hōraien-ato Portal is not one of mine. Someone, somewhere, walked to the spot, photographed the monument, wrote the description, and submitted it. I merely received it. Five years later, their description did its work in a theatre seat.
And one more thing, in passing. That description calls the place the site of a secondary villa of the Matsuura family. Surely it was the principal residence, I thought — and looked into it. Both are correct. When the land was granted in 1632 it was a villa; after the principal residence burned in 1641, this became the principal residence the following year. The description a player wrote turned out to be more accurate than I expected.
And so, now, I write
I had wanted to make this site for a long time. Wanted, and nothing more. I am slow to get up, and for years I didn’t.
While I wasn’t getting up, the world quietly finished the preparations. Old maps of Edo can be read at home. The National Diet Library is on my screen. What I write, I can publish myself. And the research now has an AI for a partner — the historical verification on this site is a division of labor between us. What I saw in the theatre and what I felt on the ground, only I write.
The age when you can do what you love, as much as you love, arrived before I got up. The land was there first, and now the tools were too. The only latecomer was me.
Sources (9)
This page is a translation of the Japanese original; the sources below are the same.
- Dates, theatres and casts of performances: my theatre-going ledger (private), built from ticket purchase-confirmation emails, the records of the National Theatre ticket centre, Ticket JCB and Ticket Pia, and my own 2016 social-media posts. The third Matsuura no Taiko was September 21, 2019, Kabukiza, Shūzan-sai evening program (Matsuura: Nakamura Karoku V) — cast confirmed against the Kabuki performance database, kabukidb 752
- Book purchase date: my book catalogue (built from Amazon purchase history). Makoto Naruke, Bijinesuman e no Kabuki Annai (NHK Shuppan Shinsho)
- Start date, nomination counts and badges in the location game: in-game records (confirmed by screenshot on August 14, 2026)
- Ingress iOS launch on July 14, 2014: Weekly ASCII, July 14, 2014 (Japanese)
- The freezing of the Seer badge (December 31, 2014) and its 2025 revival: Ingress Wiki, “Seer” / Niantic, Operation Portal Recon & Seer Returning to Ingress. Note that the suspension of Portal submissions themselves — September 2015 to September 2017 — is a separate matter (Fev Games, “Nominations”)
- Nomination counts and rejection dates: my own Gmail (
label:portal-submittedand others; nominations of August–December 2014, latest rejection notice April 20, 2021) - Portal nomination criteria (historical or educational value / distinctive architecture or art / hidden gems): Fev Games, “Nominations”. ⚠️ This is the public wording from after nominations reopened in 2017; I have not been able to confirm the exact wording I nominated under in 2014. The practices of the time (first come, first served; rejections with reasons; resubmission) are from the notification emails I received
- Hōraien’s history (granted as a villa in 1632; the principal residence from the year after the 1641 fire) and the Matsuura residence question: the Ryōgoku article, with primary sources in its source list
- The Earphone-Guide’s wording is not reproduced; only the fact that it explained the location of the Matsuura residence
Translation notes: the game terms in this page (Portal, PokéStop, Seer, nomination) are restored to Ingress’s original English rather than translated from the Japanese; explanation depth is deliberately redistributed from the Japanese original — lighter on Ingress, fuller on kabuki — per this site’s translation policy (research/eigo-yakugo.md).