春の汐干狩 Spring Clam Digging
“Spring clam-digging, gently, gently…”
This is an old verse.
In the old calendar, around the time of the fourth-month blossoms, generally speaking, when the tide recedes, since Edo, as a customary pastime for the middle classes of Tokyo, loading hopes onto their outing, gazing at the scenery of the sea, catching fish, shellfish, and clams was one of the pleasures for women and children.
On this day, without distinction between high and low, all joined in the enjoyment and among the entertainments on the beach, there were also those who played pranks on women.
Around the beginning of Meiji, when two sisters went clam-digging and did not return, their parents became worried, submitted a request to the police to investigate, and asked around among anyone who might know something, but some days later, the two corpses washed ashore on a lonely coast.
When the police investigated, there were traces suggesting that one had violated the other and then strangled her, and afterward, the person arrested as the culprit was the captain of a ship called Myōjinmaru, which was anchored off Shinagawa.
In an illustrated four-page news sheet of the time, a single-sheet print, though even if called a “newspaper” it was really no more than a current-events magazine and not an actual newspaper it was depicted by the brush of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.
