Research to Road: How a Single Paragraph Gets Written (Part Two).
"月日は百代の過客にして、行かふ年も又旅人也。"
“Days and months are travelers of eternity…the voyage itself is home.”
- Matsuo Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North,1689
We’d arrived in Tokyo in the spring of 2023 with a box full of masks and hand cleanser for our first 8-week research trip and couldn’t wait to get on the road.
Our primary aim was to swarm every history museum in Tokyo that we could find. We found lots of art, swords and suits of armor, but frustratingly little on the Nakasendō itself, at least in the detail we were looking for. After a week of fruitlessly scouring otherwise excellent museums throughout the city to understand the history and give the road its much-needed context, we needed to get out and start walking.
Today, municipalities and sometimes prefectures manage much of the Nakasendō. There’s no central authority regulating preservation, maintaining historical legacy, or even validating the “official” route, which has naturally changed somewhat over the course of 400 years of economic expansion, natural disasters, war, and urban sprawl. As such, the preservation of post towns depends heavily on the towns themselves, their budget priorities, and the tireless efforts of retired volunteers.
Some towns, like Warabi, Kashiwabara, and others, have made the preservation of road heritage a priority. Others, faced with declining populations in rural areas or driven by infrastructure or urban expansion, have mostly ignored it. A handful have enthusiastically cashed in on the tourist trade with movie-set townscapes, rental kimonos and Instagram-ready views.
All of them, in their own way, gave us clues for deeper dives, themes to explore, and valuable context to give our research more weight. Many had small museums that were far more valuable to us than those we found in Tokyo. Filled with artifacts and records left behind by travelers centuries ago, we found them run by octogenarian custodians or retired, passionate high school teachers whose ancestors lived and worked in the post stations. Although often surprised to find two Westerners popping in asking detailed questions about obscure historical events, without exception, they were eager to make tea, offer a snack, and tell their stories.
There’s a museum in Oiwake-juku, just outside of Karuizawa, that captures this grass-roots preservation spirit. Kishimoto Yutaka, a retired journalist from Matsumoto who now lives in Oiwake, runs the Nakasendō 69 Tsugi Museum on a stretch of the original road leading into the western entrance to Oiwake-juku. He is an avid preservationist of the Nakasendō and, by many accounts, its leading historian. A thoughtful, meticulously kind, and reserved man, his eyes take on new light when he talks about the road. His two-story museum is a tour of the entire journey in artifacts, artwork, maps, straw sandals, and Edo period walking hats. He has stories to tell behind every item, from scraps of pumice from the Mt. Asama eruption in 1783 to 18th-century Omi merchant cloaks from Shiga Prefecture. Following him through the exhibits, arranged by post station, takes some stamina. Flitting from shelf to shelf, playing a traditional flute, cheerfully strapping you into a pair of walking sandals or showing how travelers used a walking lantern, his excitement is contagious.
Once you’ve been through the building, though, the tour isn’t over. Just outside is a carefully maintained garden that you quickly realize is a tiny-scale replica of the entire road itself. A winding path leads past all the major attractions of the road, from a miniature Nihonbashi Bridge and a pond representing Shimosuwa Lake, and every major mountain from Edo to Kyoto. His influence on the Nakasendō is such that when he was building the garden, the town of Oiwake moved a line of electrical poles to the other side of the street so that he could replant the iconic red pine trees that had originally lined this entrance to Oiwake during the Edo period.
Our process in documenting the road was not, on the surface, complicated. We had our notes, walking routes, and research ready. When we arrived in a post town, our first task was to walk the length of it and its adjoining section of the road. We targeted points of interest from our notes, assigned GPS points, translated any signboards if there were any, photographed them, and moved on. Often, one point of interest, a temple, inn, or monument, led to one we didn’t know about. More than once, a bemused local would ask us what we were doing and give us suggestions on other sites or more background to research. Seeing the target in place led to a better understanding of the relatable context that our historical research helped flesh out. Others, like the 13th-century Daikōji Temple in Shinmachi, Gunma Prefecture, which still has bullet holes in their gate from the Sengoku-era Battle of Kanagawa, allowed us to physically encounter traces of the deadliest military engagement in the history of the Kantō Plain. Seeing these landscapes from both a Japanese and a Western historical and cultural perspective allowed us to explore stories about the road’s experience that we hadn’t seen in our research or any other guides to the Nakasendō. It was very exciting…until, well, sometimes it wasn’t.
History has, naturally, changed the experience of walking the Nakasendō. In some places, dense suburbs have replaced bucolic rice fields, featureless modern buildings have taken the place of Edo period villages, and freeways or Shinkansen tracks have paved over country roads. Aerial bombing devastated a handful of towns during the war or by natural disasters, leaving little trace of anything built before the modern era. These featureless stretches are in the minority of road segments, but they exist. Initially, we felt disheartened and searched in vain for an interesting story or a scenic viewpoint, only to find that, to be honest, none existed. But then, we realized that this too was part of the road’s story.
Edo period travelers were very familiar with this reality of travel. Tachibana Nankei, a physician who walked the road in 1790, wrote: “Today again, there is nothing in particular worth recording. I merely hurry on to the inn (今日も特に記すべき事なし。宿へ急ぐのみ。).” Instead of fighting it, we embraced the concept. In some of these stretches, we suggest detours to more interesting paths; some, we advise putting on headphones and just get through it like our physician friend 200 years ago. And for others, we simply suggested hopping on a train where possible and bypassing the stretch altogether. We still walked and documented it just the same, but let our audience decide what they’d prefer to do.
And there’s still more to explore. People walk the road today for many reasons. Some want the challenge of walking it end to end. Some want to explore history, discover Japanese culture, or experience its natural beauty, while others simply want to post selfies in rental kimonos on Instagram. The travelers who walked the Nakasendō over 400 years ago were not so different (except for maybe the Instagram part…but they did often write poetry describing their impressions of a famous place, proudly showing their family back home where they had been. A sort of 17th-century version of the selfie...). They walked it to discover their newly unified country, seek a better life, experience the freedom of traveling the road, or attain spiritual enlightenment through pilgrimage.
We came away from our extensive field research with the clear understanding that writing a contextual, practical guide to a historic road requires more than archival research or simply walking it. The effort demands a hybrid of careful research and experience, patience, and thoughtful observation, along with the understanding that it is far more than a ribbon of asphalt with a handful of old buildings scattered along it. It is a link to our shared humanity and a way into understanding a country’s history and culture, and grasping the depth and commonality of our collective experience.
