Takashima Divines His Own Fate in Prison

In the 6th year of Ansei (1859) Takashima was imprisoned for a crime he describes as committed "led on by the recklessness of my adolescence". In the cell he found the second volume of the Book of Changes, left behind by a previous prisoner, and studied it for three years until he felt he had grasped its principles.

In the first year of Bunkyū (1861) he made a set of paper ropes as a substitute for yarrow stalks and divined his own fate.

He obtained Chun (屯) changing to Setsu (節), with the second line moving: "Negative II is perplexed and receding; she mounts a horse, but is unable to advance."

From the commentary phrase "that she marries ten years hence" he reasoned that his difficulty would take ten years to resolve. From the water of Kan lying ahead of him in the diagram, he read that he would have to "wade water".

By his own account: two years later he was banished to Tsukuda-jima — an island, and so the "wading of water". He was released in the first year of Keiō (1865).

In the 3rd year of Meiji (1870) — exactly ten years from the prison divination — he began the four enterprises he is known for: mail steamers, railways, gas-lighting, and a school.

Chun is the hexagram of a beginning that cannot yet move: the sprout under the stone, the horse mounted but held. Its second line is not a promise of rescue but a description of a period that has to be lived through rather than forced.

For a modern reader stuck in a situation with no visible exit, the useful part is the reframing of the timescale — treating a hard passage as something with a shape and a duration, rather than as a permanent condition. That is a way of thinking, not a forecast.