Lake Biwa
Maruko-bune
Boat Museum

Historically, Lake Biwa has not only been a source of water for the region encompassing Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe, but it was also a key hub for the transporting of goods. After being unloaded at Tsuruga, fish from the Sea of Japan and other goods shipped along the coast from northern Japan were transported south to the port of Shiotsu on Lake Biwa, where they were reloaded onto boats and brought south to Otsu and Katada and unloaded for transport over land to Kyoto and Osaka.
Typically, these consisted of herring and other seafood, seaweed, and saddle rigging for horses. Return journeys carried cotton, sweets, soy sauce, sake casks, kimono, fabrics, and tobacco.
Among the 48 major ports (there were more than 100 in total), Otsu and Shiotsu had the largest number of boats and wholesalers by far, and north-south freight operations were therefore the most common of all the various transport activity on Lake Biwa.
Legend holds that lake business was controlled by the “Katada mob” through rough practices almost akin to piracy. It is said that the self-styled “Sugaura Navy,” based in Nishiasai, frequently clashed with the Katada mob.
Having gained control of transport operations on the Seto Inland Sea, Taira-no Kiyomori, the legendary military leader of the 1100s, ordered his son Shigemori to embark on a gargantuan undertaking: to carve a canal from Lake Biwa’s Shiotsu Port to Tsuruga on the Sea of Japan coast. The fact that Kiyomori and other military figures throughout Japanese history prioritized controlling Lake Biwa transport ahead of, for instance, major land routes, illustrates its importance to political and military power in those times.

Oda Nobunaga, the daimyo known as the “great unifier of Japan,” took control of Lake Biwa’s transport operations around 1569, and guaranteed the continued operation of cargo vessels. His successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, kept a grip on those cargo operation rights and later established the “hundred boats of Otsu” organization in ports in Otsu, Sakamoto, Katada, and Konohama, thus cementing Lake Biwa’s importance as a major hub on national transport routes.
Things began to change when Kawamura Zuiken, a prominent trader of the 1600s, established the eastbound and westbound coastal shipping routes at the behest of the Tokugawa shogunate. At the time, shipwrecks were common along the country’s Pacific and Sea of Japan coasts in absence of set routes, so establishing these was seen as vital for enabling mass transportation.
The rise of coastal cargo routes, plied by higaki (“bamboo fence”) boats, so named because of the distinctive woven bamboo railings along the gunwales, and taru (“cask”) boats, named for their main cargo, marked the beginning of Lake Biwa’s decline as a major hub of trade routes linking Kyoto and Osaka with the northern Hokuriku region. Kawamura made plans for a canal between Tsuruga and Lake Biwa in 1697, but old age and the demands of other projects meant these plans went unimplemented. Moreover, the increased independence of Kitamae (“northbound”) boats plying the route from Osaka to the Hokuriku region via the Seto Inland Sea, which had previously been controlled by the Omi merchants, accelerated the sidelining of Lake Biwa, which required cargo to be unloaded and reloaded for overland transportation.
The final blow for Lake Biwa was the opening of the Hokuriku Railway in 1882, and Maruko-bune boats had disappeared from the lake completely by around 1965 (with a lone exception, which operated in Kohoku-cho Onoue until a few years ago). And so, Lake Biwa’s vital role in the nation’s cargo transport network—a position it held for more than a thousand years—came to an end.