by Richard Humphries
Tokyo Journal 2002
Today, travel in Japan hardly resembles the measured and determined pace of the past. Time is not counted in days or weeks but in hours, minutes, and seconds. For writers and travelers seeking more than the sensations of physical delight within a comfortable cocoon, inspiration survives, though often framed within the narrative of a ‘useful weekend excursion.’ And speed doesn’t mean more is better. Sometimes when you gaze out a Shinkansen window, the landscape recedes in a backward fashion like the disjointed, mildly disturbing images produced during a video rewind.
It wasn’t always like this in Japan. Before the Meiji revolution and the attendant opening to the West brought the belching iron horse and later its vehicular descendants, travel was a matter of walking, and of walking great distances. The eyes saw all, the ears heard all, and the feet, which often let you know about it, felt all.
There were five great trunk roads linking Japan’s political centers as well as its ceremonial ones. The best known was the Tokaido, connecting Imperial Kyoto with the seat of shogunal power at Edo. Much of that route is now lost to either the rail line that bears the same name, or to various elements of urban agglomeration and expressway construction that have smothered most of the remnants. A true glimpse, if that is what one wants, can really only be sensed in the stylized ukiyoe of Hiroshige.
But the master artist also lent his skills to another of the major roads, and there are places where that thoroughfare survives as something more than just a colorful print.
The Nakasendo, or Central Mountain Way, also connected Kyoto with Edo, but meandered in a much more inland fashion. This meant a longer route but then again one safer from the risks of coastal flooding or of naval depredation. It had 69 post stations from end to end. There, travelers could pause, rest and be entertained,
Today’s visitors typically arrive by train and bus or by car. More often than not they confine their stays to Magome and Tsumago, two of the eleven post towns located along a stretch of the route known as the Kiso Highway. This route mostly follows the river of the same name. And though this type of visit is limiting it is one well worth making.
Magome was the hometown of one of Japan’s greatest writers, Shimazaki Toson (1872-1943). His semi-biographical masterpiece, Yoakemae (Before the Dawn), captured the spirit of the post road system, and especially the burdens it placed upon local communities, And, as he set his work amidst the upheavals of the early Meiji years, he was able to make it something of a parable of change. Some communities prospered, but many, especially in the Kiso Valley, were left behind in poor and somnolent obscurity. Toson also dealt with the psychological complexities of the outside world impinging on Japanese parochialism, a subject of heated debate even today.
Both Tsumago and Magome are largely restorations and in fact the latter was completely rebuilt in the 1890s, by which time its heyday as a post station had passed. Nonetheless, some of the world described by Toson is still there. Honjins and waki-honjins, inns for high or lesser officials respectively, still stand, sometimes as museums. Kosatsubas, large wooden signboards, signify the entrances to the communities and, in an aesthetically pleasing move, electrical wires have been put underground and garish vending machines moved away from the roadside.
Many visitors walk the few kilometers between Magome and Tsumago but few venture further, something time constraints, an elevated lifestyle, and yes, a lack of need to, restrict. But why not keep walking? What better way to experience something of what it was like in the past to trudge 100s of kilometers on official business, in search of work, or on some other errand?
North from Tsumago I walked through replanted forest until reaching Midono, the next former post town. Here there was a choice—walk along the original route for 16 kilometers or take a diversion. The former I had done two years before; it occupied a busy stretch of Route 19. The latter, identified on signboards as a scenic ‘historical route,’ suggested better possibilities.
And so there were. For nine kilometers the accretions of modernized urban life peeled away. The trail seemed an arcadia of small farming hamlets, with scenes reminiscent of Southeast Asia. Women in conical hats and wearing colorful cloth labored in the fields along with men. Cars were few and discordant noises almost non-existent. The route alternated between woodland paths and paved sections hardly wide enough to deserve the appellation of roadways.
This alternative path climbed upwards towards the Nenouetoge pass before descending downwards back to the Nakasendo proper. In this upland area there were still stands of what was once the Kiso valley’s most valuable product, the hinoki tree and its cousins, varieties of Japanese cypress.
The hinoki was very much a shogunal monopoly and woe be it to any local villagers who thought otherwise simply because their families had lived there for generations. A common saying in the region went, “In the old days, when a tree fell in the Kiso, a head went with it.” After the post system broke down, villagers, in need of new income sources, felled most of the trees nearer the valley floor, replacing some with cedar many years later.
Further north, and just south of another post station, Agematsu, was an area of striking scenery, though Edo era travelers, burdened with heavy loads or on official business, and in a hurry to reach the next post town, likely didn’t pause there. The sight is called Nezame-no-toko (waking-up spot) and is a gorge where the Kiso River is constricted by a series of massive rock formations.
After Agematsu came Kiso-Fukushima. The latter is what is has been, the administrative center of the Kiso valley. And making it a stop for express trains has ensured some level of local prosperity. Other one-time post towns have only local stops while some have been completely bypassed by rail.
Kiso-Fukushima was also a place that many travelers preferred not to stop too long at if they could. It had samurai and an overbearing regional officialdom but more importantly it had one of the most important sekisho, or barrier stations, in all of Tokugawa Japan. These were internal customs and immigration posts, the eyes and ears of a totalitarian state.
Feudal lords, or daimyos, often traveled the Nakasendo under the compulsory system of sankin kotai, or ‘alternate residence’ to and from Edo. Shogunal officials wanted their potentially turbulent vassals to come to the capital for regular periods where they could be kept under watchful eyes. Of Japan’s daimyos, 39 were given ‘permission’ to use the Nakasendo.
Their women remained in Edo as effective hostages. Barrier guards were ever on the alert both for firearms being smuggled towards Edo, and for daimyo women, disguised as men, trying to escape the other way. The one at Kiso-Fukushima has been reconstructed as a local museum. It is good at displaying the barrier setting though understandably less so in conveying the sense of unease or fear these checkpoints once produced.
From Kiso-Fukushima, the route passed through two more old post towns, Mienokoshi and Yabuhara. Neither is today particularly remarkable though Yabuhara retains some renown for its craftsmen, makers of exquisite wooden combs.
Several hours of rain, hardly a burden for travelers of old, had wearied me to the point where the climb from Yabuhara up the Toriitoge pass, short though it was, wasn’t welcome. The summit does offer splendid views, weather permitting, of sacred Mt. Ontake in the distance, but more interesting for me were the unfurnished but free rest houses on either side of the pass, places where exhausted hikers could rest or spend the night.
The route over the pass contained a few stretches of the roadway in its original form, covered with ishidatani, or paving stones. Walking on them, I thought it time perhaps to reflect upon the many human (and pack animal) feet that had trodden upon those stones. Samurai, daimyos, officials, villagers required to haul loads, spies, wandering poets like Basho, and all manner of saint and sinner passed by, sometimes singly and sometimes in their thousands.
One of largest groups to travel the Nakasendo did so twice. In 1861 as the Bakufu was entering its terminal phase, Iemochi, the penultimate shogun, arranged for a marriage with the Imperial Princess Kazunomiya. He hoped to restore something of his crumbling authority with the added luster to be gained from an imperial connection.
The shogun sent an entourage of 15,000 to get his intended and of those, 10,000 returned with the Princess. For many living along the Nakasendo, Kazunomiya’s journey resembled a plague of locusts in its commandeering of resources and added work burdens. Nevertheless, despite the massive effort, the marriage did not preserve the doomed shogunate. Iemochi died a few years later and by 1867 the Bakufu was no more. And the Nakasendo, as a walking route, would gradually follow the shoguns into oblivion.
The Toriitoge pass descended into Narai, in my view the most interesting of the former post towns. As with Magome and Tsumago further south there were museums and the inevitable souvenir and specialty shops. But there was something more.
Narai had a greater feeling of authenticity. Where the others had done much to restore a past that had mostly withered away, Narai seemed to have preserved some elements of a past that have never been truly lost. And this despite the fact that organized restoration work has proceeded since 1980. To be sure, it gets the tourists but it also has the feel of a working village. If for some reason the Nikons and Canons stopped coming you sense that the villagers would simply get back to their farms and forests and carry on, just like their ancestors. (RH)