Interpreting practice draft in 2019 通訳練習の原稿

(1st panel)
The Sunpu castle town was founded in the Shizuoka plain which was a fan delta formed by the Abe river and the Warashina river. Because those rivers periodically caused floods in the surrounding area by its rapid current, Shogun Ieyasu tried to save the villages around the Sunpu castle from flood damages and set off flood prevention work. He summoned the Satsuma clan as workers for that construction project (Satsuma was an old province in Kagoshima, Kyushu which is an island located in the southwest of Japan). They built banks along the Abe river to change the flow direction into the present-day pattern so that floods didn’t affect the central part of Sunpu castle town. Those banks along the Abe river were called Satsuma Dote in Japanese (“dote” means bank) after the origin of the workers.
*These blue lines show the locations of the old Abe river streams. Some streams would diverge from the main toward the center of the city. The red lines represent Satsuma banks. As you can see, the banks prevent the river flow from coming to the center.

(2nd panel)
After the flood control work was completed, Ieyasu embarked on basic infrastructure construction in Sunpu area through which towns around the Sunpu castle were designed and built. That later led to the establishment of the Sunpu castle town and the beginning of Japan’s castle town history.
Castle towns were originally intended for defense to ensure the safety of mainkeep of a castle. The mainkeep was surrounded by multiple layered moats and walls. Neighbors surrounding a castle were extensions of these defensive structures, which is why the main street on this town map was designed to run zigzag through the town so that it could distract enemies in case they tried to attack the castle. Before the Edo period, castles were the centers of military and government administrations, but after conflicts among worriers in the war period were settled, castles rather became economic centers.
(3rd panel)
This is a map of the Sunpu castle town around 1800. Streets were neatly constructed in a grid so as to make the town structure highly organized and convenient for the residents. One of the reasons why the residential area was plotted this neatly would be that the government assigned each plot for the group of residents of the same social class. In the Edo period, Tokugawa government devised a social classification called Shi No Ko Sho, which classified the people into four social classes: "Shi" was samurai or worrier", “No" was farmer, "Ko" was artisan, "Sho" was merchant. So, the residents lived in an area of the town designated for their social class. Afterward, the Sunpu castle town plan became the model for the construction of other castle towns all across the country. They say that in order to design Edo city they referred to the structure of the Sunpu castle town.
(miniature replica)
This is the miniature replica of the Sunpu castle town. The structure of the town was characterized by irrigation canals as well as highly organized plotting of the residential area. Water was carried from the Abe river and Kujiragaike, a large pond in the suburban area, and was channeled to every part of the town. Water from the canals was not only used for agriculture but also used for many other purposes such as cleaning or fire prevention. Rich water resources must have contributed to the prosperity of the town while making the livelihood of the residents much easier and more comfortable in many aspects. Each district of the town was called after the major occupation of the residents who lived there. For instance, Gofukucho, which means in Japanese “town of cloths or kimono”, was where fabric dealers lived. Ryogaecho, which means “town of exchange” in Japanese, was where money was exchanged and so on. And most of those districts’ names at that time have been conserved even up to the present day. It’s safe to say that the principal structure of the central area of Shizuoka city of today was based on the Sunpu castle town at that time.