[Confucius said,] “Fish are made for water; men are made for the Road.1 Those who are made for the water immerse themselves totally in ponds and are nourished by them. Those who are made for the Road live carefree and tranquil. Thus it is said, ‘Fish do not think about the water, and men do not worry about the Road or how to walk it.’”
—Analects, Chapter 6
A HIKE ON THE KISO ROAD will take the traveler much farther back than the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when a number of the still-extant inns along the way were established. The road was first mentioned in an early historical chronical, the Zoku nihongi, in an entry for December in the year 702, which states, “For the first time, the Kiso Mountains in in the province of Mino have been opened.” A following entry in the same chronical for the year 713 implies both that the road had been completed and the reasons why it should be traveled: “The paths in the Kiso area of the provinces of Mino and Shinano [later called Nagano] are steep, and the round trip is difficult. Therefore, one takes the Kiso Road.”
The road, however, is much older still. Traveled extensively and settled here and there by the hunting and fishing Jomon people who inhabited Japan from about 11,000 B.C.E., it was before that, no doubt, a trail for the bear, deer, wild pigs, and other animals that still inhabit the region today. The population of the area decreased during the ensuing agricultural Yayoi period (200 B.C.E.–250 C.E.) and the following court-centered periods, but by the tenth and eleventh centuries, villages and hamlets had grown up along the river bank, and certain areas had come under control of a samurai gentry living in mansions that supported Buddhist temples and some commerce in lumber. Eventually, daimyo and local warlords staked their claims as hereditary owners of the lands, barriers were put up along the road to control mercantile activities, robbers, and, to some extent, military incursions, and traffic increased. Finally, the eleven towns along the Kiso—from north to south: Niekawa, Narai, Yabuhara, Miya no koshi, Kiso Fukushima, Agematsu, Suhara, Nojiri, Midono, Tsumago, and Magome—were firmly established by the middle of the 1500s, adding a certain amount of security to the traveler who chose to take the route along the deep valleys and dark forests through which this road winds.
IN OCTOBER OF THE YEAR 1600, the Eastern forces under the command of Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated the Western forces loyal to the Toyotomi clan in one of the most important battles in the history of Japan. The result of this victory—mostly won on the misty, rainy plain of Sekigahara—was the pacification of the country after nearly two hundred years of a steadily declining Ashikaga shog-unate and debilitating civil wars. Ieyasu would soon be named shogun, and Japan, more or less, would be under his control, more or less, because the provinces and fiefs of the country were still ruled by the daimyo, or hereditary warlords, whose loyalty could never be taken for granted.
The movement of troops being thus a major concern, Ieyasu soon developed an infrastructure of five major roads, the gokaido 
, which monitored and controlled military and official communications between the capital of Edo (now Tokyo) and Kyoto, and also the outlying provinces. These roads were to be maintained by the local daimyo whose fiefs they passed through, but provincial barriers were banned and replaced here and there by those designated by shogunal decree. Post stations were designated—248 for the entire gokaido system—every five or six miles, depending on the topography and conditions of the road.
In 1635, Ieyasu’s grandson, the shogun Iemitsu, instituted the sankin kotai system to further tighten the central government’s control over the provincial daimyo. This system required all the daimyo of Japan to reside in Edo every other year for a year to several months and, further, required their wives and families to live permanently in the capital as virtual hostages.
This, along with the great improvements in the economy, had a profound influence on the gokaido in general, and on the Tokaido and Nakasendo—the two most used of the five roads—in particular. The samurai making up the daimyo’s retinue often numbered in the thousands, and inns, shops, teahouses, and other accommodations in the post towns increased accordingly. Concomitantly, with the increased safety and improvements in the conditions of the roads, the newly more affluent common people could travel confidently as well.
In the end, by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, what had been intended as a system of tighter control ended in an unprecedented freedom of movement for a great portion of the population. A road culture had been created that would influence literature, the visual arts, cuisine, and the cross-fertilization of ideas—many of which we think of as classically Japanese even today.
THE TOKAIDO AND THE NAKASENDO—both running between Kyoto and Edo—were the most popularly traveled of the gokaido. The Tokaido—flat, mostly level, and by far sustaining the most traffic—paralleled the eastern seaboard and involved the crossing of twelve rivers and a few larger bodies of water, such as Ise Bay and Lake Hamanako, as well. Regardless of the necessity of ferry crossings, which sometimes involved rough waves and long waits, the weather was relatively warm and pleasant, and thus the Tokaido was a preferred route.
On the other hand, the Nakasendo, and especially the Kiso Road section, ran through deep mountain valleys and along treacherous cliffs and was often cold even during the early and late summers. Nonetheless, it was the favored route of the imperial family, the nobility and their princesses, and the family of the shogun. The most famous journey along the Nakasendo is, perhaps, that of the princess Kazunomiya, who traveled to Edo in 1862 to marry the fourteenth Tokugawa shogun, Iemochi. Her retinue consisted of some twenty-five thousand men, which backed up some of the more difficult passes for weeks. The mountains and rivers, the forests and mists the young princess would have seen as she peeked from behind the blinds of her palanquin comprised much of the same scenery we see today. But being the daughter of an emperor, and surrounded by thousands of noblemen, noblewomen, and samurai, she would have missed most of what the common folk took interest in and what we encounter as we walk along with our tiny bear bells and walking sticks.
THE ROAD
Although the gokaido were controlled by the Tokugawa shogun-ate and its representatives, maintenance was delegated to the local daimyo. Thus the condition of the provincial segments reflected upon the prestige of those daimyo and was duly noted by dignitaries both foreign and domestic. In this way, the roads tended to be kept neat and passable, whether consisting of dirt, gravel, or stone pavement. The shogunate also ordered that a line of trees—pines and cypresses—be planted along the highways, ostensibly to protect travelers from the sun during the summer and the cold winds in the winter. This may have had a military objective as well, however, as the trees would have been cut down across the roads to impede invading armies on their way to Edo. Again, local maintenance was required.
To mark progress along the roads, ichirizuka, or one-ri (about two and a half miles) markers, were placed in clear locations, often next to a pine, cherry, or zelkova tree. The Nakasendo had about 130 of these markers between Edo and Kyoto, and a number of these can still be seen on the Kiso Road section today.
Although the road now ascends and descends in elevation, there are many level stretches that make for comparatively easy walking. The toge, or “passes,” however, while not particularly high in elevation, are steep and often narrow, and would cause backups in progress for days or even weeks as some retinues were composed of hundreds or thousands of samurai, pack horses, and carriers. Thus, there were often specified resting places, relay stations and teahouses along the way where travelers could stop to catch their breath but could not stay overnight.
Bridges were built only with permission from the shogunate government. They sometimes spanned a river but more often were the frightening kakehashi, or suspension bridges made of wooden planks held together with thick vines that followed a cliff overhanging the rushing current beneath. Bridges were sometimes washed away by floods, and both revenue and building materials were difficult to come by. Today, with the advent of the national highways and the new “car culture,” the original bridges are all but gone. The site of one of the most famous, however, the kakehashi near the northern entrance of the post town of Agematsu, is clearly marked, and the traveler can imagine the trepidation with which these bridges were approached.
Everyone, it seems, was on the gokaido during the Edo period (1600–1868). As official roads, of course, first in priority were the daimyo, who either rode on horseback or were carried in palanquins, and their innumerable attendants (on foot except for the higher-ranked samurai) on their way between their home provinces and the capital. Spearmen bearing blades covered with fur took the lead of these retinues, which included cooks and even wooden tubs for the daimyo’s baths. As noted, there were also members of the imperial court traveling as emissaries of the emperor or accompanying a princess betrothed to a shogun. There were the further dignitaries of the Korean ambassadors and the representatives of the Dutch settlement in Kyushu.
Then there were the common people: merchants of every stripe, from representatives of the large commercial houses (their merchandise went mostly by sea) to traveling peddlers carrying their goods on poles over their shoulders; pilgrims on their way to Ise Shrine, the Thirty-Three Temples on the island of Shikoku, or the Zenkoji, a famous Buddhist temple in the city of Nagano; blind masseurs, or zattou, who specialized in massage, moxa, and acupuncture; goze, the blind female street singers who, traveling in groups of two or three, played the samisen and sang songs from classical tales, like the Heike monogatari; and country doctors, or inaka isha, who identified themselves by pulling their hair back into ponytails, wore black jackets, carried sun umbrellas, and hoisted their doctor’s bag wrapped in large cloth kerchiefs on their backs. There were also subscription monks soliciting contributions for their construction or repair of temples, and komusou, monks who wore large straw hats that covered most of their faces and begged for alms while playing a bamboo flute. These latter monks were supposedly members of the Fuke sect of Buddhism but were suspected to be spies for the government and were often given wide berth. The fact that they carried short swords was not lost on either locals or other travelers.
Other than the huge daimyo retinues, however, the most numerous travelers on the gokaido—and particularly on the Nakasendo and the Tokaido—were the yuusan ryokyaku, people traveling for pleasure. These people could be townsmen, farmers, groups of women who had left home for a while with or without the permission of their families, shop boys who simply decided to take a break from work, and even children who begged for alms along the way. Most of these claimed they were on pilgrimages, and many were, but the fact was that “pilgrimages” had become a sort of recreation—an excuse to get out of humdrum daily life and to see places other than home. Not much was required in equipment, after all: a good pair of straw sandals, a paper umbrella or an oiled paper coat against the rain, and perhaps a straw mat to lie on in an emergency. These and almost everything else could be supplied in the numerous shops and teahouses along the way—and still can be.
POST TOWNS
The road within the post towns was fixed at a width of fifteen to thirty feet, while the length of the post towns ranged from a little over four hundred feet to nearly eight thousand feet. When Kaibara Ekiken passed through the Kiso Road in the early seventeenth century, he reported that the size of the towns varied from 28 households in tiny Magome to 130 in Kiso Fukushima. Throughout the following two centuries, the towns would prosper or decline depending on economic, political, or environmental factors.
Despite the differences in size, however, the structure of the towns was basically the same. The Nakasendo/Kiso Road was the main or only street in town and was usually lined on both sides by shops, inns, and food stalls. The road itself, however, often meandered this way and that in what was called a dako 
, or “snake crawl,” sometimes taking sharp L-shaped turns. This pattern—along with the square-shaped masugata, gates often constructed with stone walls at the entrances and exits of the towns—was designed to confuse and slow down an invading army or a hostile force passing through on its way to Edo.
As the post towns were originally designated as way stations for daimyo on their way to and from Edo and to facilitate shogunate and merchant communication, each one provided a honjin, an officially appointed inn for dignitaries, and a forwarding agent to take care of supplies, called a toiya. The honjin, some of which survive today, was accoutered with gates, ceremonial entrances, and the very best of rooms where the most exalted personages could either rest or stay overnight. Often, a shrine or Buddhist temple was situated at the rear of a honjin in case a quick evacuation was necessary in times of war. A waki-honjin, or lateral honjin, was nearby in the case of an overflow of dignitaries. Naturally, the honjin was reserved for those of the highest status.
The common people also needed places to stay, and as travel became more and more popular during the Edo period, inns—called hatagoya—sprang up in increasing numbers. Such inns were basically divided into two categories. The meshimori hatago provided, along with lodging, prostitutes under the guise of serving girls. Inns were initially limited to two such “waitresses,” but this number was found to be difficult to enforce. Hatagoya that did not provide these services were called hirahatago and catered more to women travelers, married men, and samurai who, no doubt, were under the watchful eyes of their daimyo. Many inns employed tome onna, women who coaxed, and sometimes forcefully pulled, travelers into their establishments.
On the Kiso Road, some of the inns established during these times are still extant and in business. Today, the inns are divided into two types: the ryokan, usually more expensive and where meals are often served in private rooms, and the minshuku, less formal and where the guests dine in a common room.
The toiya, often the busiest place in the post town, was a relay station, providing horses for daimyo, their samurai, and the nobility. It also functioned to make arrangements for sending baggage on to the next station, and its services were also available to merchants and travelers who could afford horses and palanquins. The men who managed the toiya wore a three-quarter-length jacket and a sort of suit pants, and had the special right of carrying a sword. It was their responsibility to make sure there was always a sufficient number of horses and men to transport the myriad travel equipment deemed essential by the daimyo, a job that sometimes necessitated bringing in corvée laborers from nearby farming communities.
Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, some of them much larger than one might expect for the relatively small populations, provided (and still provide) for the religious needs of the towns-people. The Zen sect dominates most of the temples in the Kiso, and, while we associate Zen with religious austerities and long periods of meditation, the priests’ main functions were to carry out funeral ceremonies for the deceased, take care of the mortuary tablets of the ancestors, deliver Buddhist and Confucian homilies to locals, and keep an eye out for their general welfare. The central government approved of and helped to support these temples and expected the priests to stay in line with its policies, especially those of acquiescence to the Tokugawa shogunate.
The post towns offered the authorities an institution, if not to regulate, at least to oversee the high volume of traffic on the road. Passing by these towns was strictly prohibited, and those travelers on horseback or riding palanquins were required to hire new transportation at each location. In this way, each town was guaranteed a certain amount of business regardless of its size or population, and every traveler was at least assured of a look at another aspect of the road.
A WORD SHOULD BE SAID about modern coffee houses in Japan, and especially on the old Kiso Road. The first coffee house opened in Japan was in Tokyo, in 1888. This venue, the Kahiichakan, apparently included such amenities as baths, billiard tables, and writing desks, but—perhaps due to mismanagement—eventually went out of business. Coffee, however, was in Japan to stay, and the coffee house soon replaced the old teahouse as a place to either meet friends or just decompress alone. Japanese coffee, regardless of its origin (Jamaica or Kenya, for example), is usually rich and tasty, and great care is taken in its brewing. For the modern customer who arrives before ten o’clock in the morning, a “morning set”—a hard-boiled egg, a thick-cut piece of toasted white bread with butter and jam, and perhaps a dollop of fresh potato salad or coleslaw—is usually available. The shops are generally comfortable and friendly, and the customer is never encouraged to move on in any way. They are designed for your pleasure, sometimes specializing in classical music, sometimes in jazz, and so forth. There is almost always something to read nearby, be it a newspaper or magazine, and there are coffee shops that specialize in manga, where these graphic novels literally line the walls.
Coffee shops are an institution in Japan, to be found in the smallest towns and villages, and in this way it is perhaps not surprising that they now appear in even the most traditional post towns on the Kiso Road. As with other preserved buildings that make up the towns, the coffee shops are often located in a former Edo- or early-Meiji-period shop of some sort and retain all the traditional atmosphere of the earlier business. The proprietors of these shops are always friendly and helpful, and, in some cases, their families may have lived in the village, and even in the location of the shop, for hundreds of years. Thus, they are always good sources of information or just congenial talk and not to be thought of as interlopers.
From the twelfth century and perhaps earlier, local and provincial lords established bansho—barriers, or checkpoints—at various places along the roads to control troop movements, regulate commerce (especially the illegal export of lumber), discourage brigandage, and generally to keep an eye on the movements of the provincial population. With the establishment of Tokugawa hegemony in 1600, these bansho were ordered to be removed along the gokaido and were replaced here and there by sekisho—larger barriers and checkpoints controlled by the Tokugawa and operated by their hereditary representatives. Some of these sekisho were indeed imposing edifices. Built in deep valleys or where cliffs ran parallel to a rushing river, they included stout wooden gates at the entrance and exits manned by armed soldiers. Weapons stocked in the sekisho included firearms, bows and arrows, heavy wooden staves, and barbed spears to catch those unfortunates who tried to push their way through. Miscreants, the insane, and criminals were shackled or tied up, their fates to be decided later by the magistrate.
The main purpose of the sekisho, however, was to ensure the security of the Tokugawa government in Edo. Thus, its most important functions were to stop any movement of firearms into the capital and to watch for the passage of women—the daimyo’s wives and daughters—on their way back to the provinces. Any attempt to remove these women from Edo, where they were more or less hostages, could be seen as a warning sign of a rebellion by their husbands or fathers. For this reason, the passage of women through the sekisho was discouraged in general, and even young effeminate-looking boys were physically checked—often at very close range—though they be accompanied by farmers or merchants.
To pass through the sekisho, permits or passports (tegata) were required, which, for the common people, were issued at any number of places, from clergy at temples and shrines, post station officials, or, in some cases, innkeepers. As the number of travelers increased during the middle and late Edo period, tegata were more and more easily acquired, and the sekisho guards would sometimes allow passage through the gates even without one. This was especially true when large groups of people arrived, supposedly on a “pilgrimage,” and the checking of every document would impede more important work.
This leniency is illustrated in the case of the Edo-period haiku poet Koshigaya Gozan, who was stopped at a barrier while traveling the Kiso Road.
At the outset, I was on foot and was about to pass through the barrier at Fukushima in the province of Mino. The guard asked what my profession was, and I responded that I was a teacher of haiku. “If that’s the case,” he said, “prove it with a verse and I’ll let you through.” Just then, a cuckoo cried [and I recited],
At the barrier, in no way
would they let me through;
[then,] a cuckoo!
Easing travel even further were the byroads that skirted some of the sekisho, which could be located by asking the locals or sometimes consulting a guidebook. In some cases there were holes in the sekisho walls that a person or even a group of people might squeeze through at night—the gates were open from six in the morning to six at night—and so go on their way.
All in all, the fifty-three barriers along the gokaido were established to provide some stability to the country—first, political, then commercial and social. Although travel by the common people was not encouraged by either the central or local governments, the general leniency shown to them at the sekisho did nothing to stem the tide. Finally, with the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and the eventual dissolution of the domainal clans, many of the barriers were torn down as remnants of an older age, while those that remained standing or were rebuilt as historically important became wonders for an ever-increasing number of travelers.
YESTERDAY AND TODAY
Travelers have journeyed along the Kiso Road for nearly a thousand years—for inspiration, aesthetic pleasure, or the sheer joy of walking through mountains and rivers of outstanding beauty. In the twelfth century, the poet-priest Saigyo walked through on his way to the then capital of Kamakura, writing classical poetry and performing religious austerities. In the seventeenth century, the Buddhist priest Takuan and the haiku poet Basho traveled into the Kiso, taking notes and composing verse after verse. Later there were the poets Buson, Yayoi Yuya, Shiki, and Santoka, Kaibara Ekiken (the physician, philosopher, and writer), and the famous wood-block print artists Hiroshige and Eisen. The writer Ikku Jippensha had his comic characters Kita and Yaji go down the road in his Zoku hizakurige, and Yoshikawa Eiji famously depicted the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi not only walking the Kiso Road, but meditating under a waterfall that modern hikers still delight in visiting today. These are only a few of the well-known travelers who have passed through wide-eyed at the scenery, sat down and counted their blisters, visited the famous Zen temples, drank cool water from the mountain streams, and spent happy nights at the local inns. Japanese hikers and tourists walk the same road today: some just to get out of their urban areas and appreciate the deep mountains, the autumn foliage, and cherry blossoms in the spring; others to experience the living traditional Japan that was the daily fare of their not-so-distant ancestors.
To say “the same road,” however, is not quite accurate. Over the millennia, the path has been covered or swept away by earthquakes, typhoons, flooding rivers, or the works of man. Even as recently as a few years ago, a short length of the road was covered by a landslide, and hikers have had to take a detour. On some maps, sections of the road will be designated as “the old Kiso Road,” but, when considered in terms of centuries, one may well ask, “Old compared to what?” The traveler will find that the scenery has not much changed, however: the mists still hang in the folds of the mountains, the clear water of the Kiso River still rushes over monstrous boulders, the passes are no easier to climb than they were for the samurai accompanying their mounted lords, the old pick-me-up gohei—grilled mochi covered with sweet miso sauce—can still be found in local food stalls, and travelers can still bed down in an inn that may have been established shortly after Columbus discovered America. This is the Japan that many tourists hope to see when they deboard their international flights just outside of Tokyo or Osaka but never leave the enticing, interesting but distractingly modern urban areas. What Walter Weston, the British missionary turned mountain climber, wrote in 1917, remains true today.
There is a popular impression, widely prevalent to-day, that a traveler bound for Japan in search of the primitive and the picturesque, which are there to be found combined to a degree unknown in any other country so easy of access, unless he hurries quickly hither, is likely to find his opportunities vanished and his quest proved a fool’s errand. And yet, happily, there are still to be found, by those who know where to seek them, not forty-eight hours distant from the very heart of the empire itself, remote and lonely valleys whose old-world ways, quaint superstitions, and primitive institutions almost compel the belief that one has, in less than two days’ journey from Tokyo, executed, as it were, a leap backward from the twentieth century to the tenth.
—The Playground of the Far East
IT SHOULD BE ADDED that most of the post towns described in this book can be reached by the local Chuo-sen railroad line, taken either from Tokyo or Nagoya. For those towns that the railroad has not reached, minibuses and taxis are available. I would agree with Thoreau, however, that he travels best who goes afoot. Blisters and rain-soaked boots aside.