Why Writing About the Nakasendō Is Harder Than It Looks
Writing a historical walking guide to Edo-period Japan looks deceptively straightforward: map an old road, summarize some high-level history, point out what survives, rinse and repeat. In practice, it is a methodological minefield. Inconsistent sources, separating historical fact from fiction and managing scope to make the journey relevant to the modern reader were just some of the unexpected challenges we faced on this project. Taking academic liberties with theoretical history is one thing, but this historical and cultural context had to be grounded in a physical landscape and interpreted for a Western audience. It had to connect with a walker standing in front of a monument and making that context relevant, interesting and enlightening. We soon understood that the challenge of the project was that history must be reconciled with place.
Sources
By the late seventeenth century, Japan had one of the highest literacy rates in the world, extending well beyond the elite classes. Edo Japan left behind an enormous documentary record: travel diaries, temple and village accounts, guidebooks, maps, prints, and poetry, with new material still emerging from local archives and private collections. This abundance, however, creates more problems than it solves.
First, most surviving material is not directly useful for understanding life on the Nakasendō. Administrative records—land registers, donor lists, household accounts—are invaluable for economic history but reveal little about how travelers actually experienced the road.
Second, reliability varies widely. Many travel diaries focus narrowly on famous sites already celebrated in classical literature, repeating established narratives rather than observing conditions on the route itself. Others exaggerate, omit detail, or freely copy earlier texts. Even some celebrated artists are believed to have depicted places they never visited, relying on secondhand accounts to meet demand. Place names shift, descriptions conflict, and sometimes locations appear to be embellished—or invented altogether.
Finally, and most critically, historical sources are often detached from the modern landscape. Texts describe villages that no longer exist, landmarks that have disappeared, or routes that cannot be reconstructed from documents alone. Reconciling historical accounts with present-day geography requires being on the ground: walking the road, examining surviving inscriptions, and experiencing the physical terrain that shaped travel and settlement.
For this project, documentary research alone was insufficient. Sources had to be tested against place, not merely against one another. Only by combining archival work with field research could the historical context be securely anchored to the Nakasendō as it survives today.
Making the History Relevant to the Modern Walker
From the early Edo period, the 1630s, to the mid-19th century, Japan, with few exceptions, was cut off from the world. For over 200 years, Japanese culture evolved in a vacuum and even after opening to foreign trade, largely continued that way well into the early 20th century. One of the biggest challenges we faced was making a human connection in a cultural context that was often indecipherable to a modern, Western audience. Japanese people living during the Edo period had much in common with us today. They took to the road to seek a better life. They were entrepreneurial; they interpreted their world through art and poetry; and they were proud of their culture and their newly unified country. Our challenge was to craft their stories to connect to a modern experience. We handpicked stories and history, intertwining them with physical space, to create themes that would resonate with the modern traveler. Our goal is to create an understanding of how Japan got to where it is today beyond the tropes of samurai, kimono and the tea ceremony.
Untangling Myth and Reality
While Edo Japan was a highly literate society, myth, superstition and long-repeated stories that are simply taken as fact largely influenced its local history. Any historical event, a battlefield, burial location or even determining whether a historical figure actually existed takes extensive cross-checking, particularly from periods prior to Edo. This is further complicated because many people had more than one name, multiple temples across the country may have the same names, and long-extinct administrative regions or villages have no modern location references. Tomoe Gōzen, a celebrated onna musha, or female warrior from the late Heian period (12th century), has at least seven burial locations on and off the Nakasendō. Little attempt has been made to distinguish an actual gravesite from a monument. In Tomoe Gozen’s case, we looked at all of her supposed burial sites, accounts of her life and decided that it simply would not be possible to select a specific location. We explain this and leave it to our audience to ponder.
National vs. Local Access
We scheduled our first field research trip to Japan as soon as the lifting of travel restrictions was announced. Our first aim was a week-long tour of Tokyo history museums, the Diet Library and other archival repositories. We were soon disappointed. Don’t get the wrong impression. Tokyo has world-class museums and historical research libraries. We viewed beautiful exhibits of Edo period art, textiles, institutional history, and even a museum with a full-size replica of an Edo neighborhood on the banks of the Sumida River. Specific treatment of Edo period travel culture and even more specifically, the Nakasendō, one of the country’s two most important highways for over 200 years, was much harder to come by. Once we got on the road itself, we soon realized that this was where the history was. Local museums are scattered all along the road, and these became our carefully curated treasures. Some manned by municipalities, some by passionate amateur historians, some just a house owned by descendants of the Edo period village headmen open only on festival days, all are priceless gems to a researcher. Our biggest find — the Nakasendō 69-tsugi Museum in Oiwake, Nagano Prefecture — was like winning the lottery. Run by Kishimoto Yutaka, a retired journalist, the privately owned museum has artifacts from every station on the Nakasendō, complete with a garden in front that is a micro-scale reproduction of the entire road. An accurate history of the road cannot be written from a desk in a library. It has to be walked, experienced and informed at the most local level, not just for accuracy, but to truly understand its depth and importance.
Constantly Shifting Landscapes
Japan’s explosive development over the last 160 years, plus the damage of the war years, has transformed the physical landscape of the country. Modern superhighways, industrial cities and urban sprawl practically erased the Tokaidō Road, the most popular and well-traveled highway during the Edo period up and down its eastern coastal route. While the Nakasendō is remote enough to escape much of the fate of the Tokaidō, the landscape is not what it was, of course, and navigating the route leads to compromises. There is no official definition of the route itself. Much of it is mapped at the local level, with some towns investing more than others in preserving its historical legacy. We learned early on that Google Maps, while convenient, is not a definitive authority on the route. In fact, in certain sections, it can lead to unsafe highways or other environments not suitable for walking. In our field research, we’ve taken great care to walk each route, identify possible detours or diversions for both safety and to enhance the experience while following the original route as closely as possible. This involves exploring many dead-ends, alternative detours, etc. And sometimes mysteries remain unsolved. Why is a 400-year-old road marker sitting in a farmer’s field 150 yards from the “official” route? We have no idea. Locals have no idea. A road this old is going to have its mysteries…
The Edo Period’s Complicated History
The Edo period, despite its continuing presence in Japanese modern popular culture, was not highly valued in the Meiji period. The new government took over the country in 1868 with a sweeping mandate for change and an urgent need to bring Japan into the modern world to avoid dominance or even possible colonization by Western powers. Edo culture was seen as vulgar, backward, shameful and not a suitable model for a new country eager to stand as equals to the West. References to Edo were covered up and eliminated, including the changing of the city’s name to Tokyo. Daimyo mansions were torn down, their expansive gardens turned into government ministry headquarters. Road markers, castles, barrier checkpoints, all vestiges of the previous 250 years disappeared from the landscape. The period’s unpopularity would continue until the mid-20th century.
This collective shunning of one of the most influential periods in Japanese history slowly reversed itself during Japan’s explosive economic development starting in the early 1960s. Younger generations attracted to a simpler life, clear roles in society, and a society bound by tradition values and honor generated an interest in the Edo period, reintroducing it to modern popular culture. Movies, TV shows, comics and literature celebrated historical figures, famous battles and even resistance to westernized culture.
These phases of Edo’s popularity complicate interpreting its history, the way locals view it on the ground and attempts to discover its physical legacy.
Writing a historical walking guide to the Nakasendō requires more than assembling sources or tracing an old route on a modern map. It demands constant negotiation between document and landscape, myth and evidence, national narrative and local memory. Each decision—what to include, what to question, what to leave unresolved—carries interpretive weight.
The difficulty of this work is not incidental. By holding sources to place and place to history, the project aims to offer modern walkers a deeper understanding of how travel shaped early modern Japan—and how those systems continue to influence the country’s landscape and culture today.
