Haga

Haga lay in Shimotsuke, where the Haga family ruled Ōuchi estate along the Gogyo and Kokai rivers. During the Muromachi period their seat was Mōka Castle. They remained important retainers of the Utsunomiya house in the Sengoku wars, but lost their lands with their lords at the end of the sixteenth century. Mōka subsequently passed through several ruling families and became an outlying possession of Odawara domain.

Cotton weaving gave this agricultural district a wider commercial reputation. Mōka cotton production began around the middle of the seventeenth century and was known across Japan by the early eighteenth. Government also changed: Mōka came under magistrates in 1783, and in 1797 a new administrative residence was built on the former castle grounds. Its magistrate sought to restore the district's impoverished villages, linking the old warrior centre to a new programme of rural recovery.