Edo Fires Part 3: Edo Fire Brigades

To fight against fires in Edo, the Shogunate started by reworking the structural planning of the city, such as broader avenues, relocation of highly flammable storage facilities etc., and then had daimyō (domain lords which also included the Tokugawa clan) form their own brigades to protect their Edo estates. (If you need to refresh your mind, I briefly explained the sankin kōtai system in the October 18, 2022 article). The jōbikeshi were in charge of protecting the samurai estates under Tokugawa control and defending Edo castle, but the most famous group was the kaga-tobi, which worked for the wealthy Maeda clan and was rumoured to only be constituted of men taller than 190cm.

As the capital densified over the years (1 million by the 18^th century) and fires became deadlier, commoners were also in need of fire brigades. It was truly a dangerous job, so the best suited were carpenters who knew how buildings were built and how to hack them down (I’ll go into more details about this in a future article).

Edo machibikeshi (町火消し town fire brigades) were organised into 48 groups (組 gumi) each responsible for a different section of Edo and represented by a different hiragana (except for hi, he, re, n which were replaced by kanji for phonetic reasons). In addition, there were also 16 groups organised in Honjo and Fukagawa (east bank of the Sumida) – for a total of 64 fire brigades!

These brigades were led by tôdori, then tool-carrying matoi-mochi (standard bearer) and hashigo-mochi (ladder-bearer), then the regular members known as wakashu and ninsoku.

x