In the footsteps of the daimyo: walking the Nakasendo

In the footsteps of the daimyo: walking the Nakasendo

Stephen Barber

There were once 69 post-stations on the arduous, alternative mountain route that Japan’s feudal lords and their retinues took from Kyoto to the shogun’s castle in Edo, present-day Tokyo. So it seemed fitting that after a stay at our favourite Kyoto ryokan (Shiraume), we should return to Tokyo by walking in the footsteps of those so-called daimyo. It was November 2022 and our first post-Covid visit to Japan.

These post-stations offered lodgings, replacement horses and sustenance to their redoubtable visitors. Today most have been absorbed into larger towns, or shrunk into remote hamlets. Still, a handful — among them Magome, Tsumago, Narai, Kiso-Hirasawa—still retain their historic character, long familiar as the backdrop to samurai TV dramas.

The so-called Nakasendo, or central mountain road, was one of five official routes taken by the daimyo, regional barons who pledged fealty to the shogun, and were required to alternate residence between their local domain and Edo. When not present in Edo, the Tokugawa shoguns’ stronghold, they had to leave their wife and heir behind as hostage, a system only abolished in 1862 in the dying years of the shogunate. Most celebrated of these highways was the Tokaido, the main Kyoto-Edo road, which passes through coastal plains and along the Pacific Coast. With its spectacular views of Mount Fuji, it is famously represented in the woodblock print series of Hiroshige and Hokusai, but today the Nakasendo offers a far superior walking experience.

In three and a half days we walked north-east from Magome to Niekawa, just short of 40 kilometres, excluding a couple of short local train journeys to achieve our schedule. The walking is mostly gentle, varying between ancient stone-laid pathways, forest trails and grassy farm tracks to narrow, empty country lanes and side roads on the margins of commuter towns.

To get to Magome-juku (‘juku’ means post-town), you take a local train to Nakatsugawa and then a short bus ride. Present-day Magome comprises a single street of mostly tourist shops, rising steeply uphill. Largely burnt down in a 1900 fire, it has been restored to the point of parody. Still, it has a certain charm, notably in the huge wooden Masugata overshot waterwheel and the mini-waterwheels by the side of the road. At the end of the town the paved road continues into a hinoki forest, punctuated by Japanese maples, foliage blood-red in the autumn sunlight. Here too are cryptomeria (Japanese cedar), oak and rhododendron. 

It’s 8.3 kilometres to Tsumago; along the way are dozens of empty dwellings — roadside inns and private houses — recently abandoned, it seems, as their roofs are intact and their paths barely overgrown. The inns or lodging houses (minshuku) are only partly victims of the collapse of tourism (including domestic visitors) during Covid. Rural depopulation is also a factor. We see few fellow walkers, as it’s only two weeks since Japan lifted its international travel restrictions.

Our arrival just before dusk into Tsumago-juku, the jewel of the post-towns on the Nakasend, is entrancing. Its approach road starts by turns sharply at right angles (‘Masugata-style’) to deter invaders; parallel rows of Edo Period merchant houses follow the gentle curve of the main street.  The houses here have the distinctive dashibari-zukuri design, characterised by built-out second floors and overhanging roofs, sometimes held down by small, regular boulders. The second floors also typically have senbon-goshi (one thousand lattice) windows. 

Together these features give Tsumago a unique character, exquisitely embodied in the Matsunoya ryokan, where we were fortunate to stay. It has the feel of an ancient Kyoto temple. Dating back to 1804, the lugubrious tick-tock of a Meiji Era wall-clock adds to the gloom of its wood-framed interior of ochre plastered walls and sliding paper screens. Proceed further and there are exterior wooden passageways giving onto inner gardens with carp-filled ponds and bonsai. Everything creaks as we walk to our tatami-room; a kaiseki dinner is served as we warm our legs under a heated table blanket (kotatsu). 

Next day there’s a 22-kilometre walk to Nojiri, where we’ll catch a train to Kiso-Fukushima. But first, a snoop around the back streets of Tsumago; here we find an early-20C post office, an impressive old kosatsuba public notice-board, large and small wooden waterwheels running off an old roadside waterway, and crumbling domestic warehouses (kura) with their tiny barred windows, once guarding a family’s treasured possessions. 

Our first stop is Nagiso after 3.7 kilometres. This is one of the most evocative sections of the whole walk; again, empty dwellings, but also rice paddies abandoned or left to grow wild. Sometimes we walk for an hour without seeing a soul, wondering whether anyone is living under the low-pitched roofs of the old farmhouses along the way. Entering Nagiso, the side-street running towards the station looks prosperous enough, but all the way along there are gap-toothed streets where cheaply-built houses have been razed, again suggestive of depopulation. 

From Nagiso to Kiso-Fukushima it’s a further 18 kilometres of paths, much of it through the Kiso Forest, sometimes steep and rocky, passing along gurgling forest streams, or high above gushing torrents. There is frequent evidence of landslides. The sweeping tracery of keyaki trees (zelkova, of the Elm family) scatters the amber rays of the afternoon sun.

The forests of the Kiso valley were renowned for the quality of their timber, so for centuries during the feudal period, logging of five key species was strictly regulated: hinoki, sawara and asunaro (cypresses), koyamaki (umbrella pine) and nezuko (Thuja). These were the woods used for the regular rebuilding of the Ise Shrine, for daimyos’ mansions in Edo, temples in Kyoto and the like. After the shogunate fell in 1868, along with its feudal laws, the forest was plundered and only protected and replanted in recent decades.

The last few kilometres into Nojiri follow a steeply-descending forest road into town. Oddly, there’s no traffic and the surface is covered in twigs and fallen leaves. Eventually we find out why. A huge landslip has destroyed a bridge; monstrous excavators and giant boulders block our way … luckily a hard-hatted construction worker leads us gingerly through the obstacle course, for otherwise a long uphill detour was in prospect.

After a short train hop from Nojiri we stay in Kiso-Fukushima, once one of the four official checkpoints on the Nakasendo. More developed than Tsumago, in parts it nevertheless betrays its post-town origins. Next morning, another 15-minute train journey to Yabuhara, from where we face a 6.2 kilometre hike over the Tori-Toge pass, down into Narai.

At first, a rising track takes us through monotonous plantations of Japanese larch, but higher up there are remnants of old-growth forest: cherry, pine (akamatsu), oak and other mostly deciduous trees. Just below the pass with its red torii and small shrine are a dozen or so massive Japanese horse chestnut trees, memorable enough for the poet Basho to record in his haiku:

Chestnuts from Kiso

As souvenirs for those

In the floating world

At the entrance to Narai-juku the street veers sharply left, then straight, then an abrupt dog-leg turn before resuming its principal direction, again to thwart attackers. The post-town is if anything more perfectly preserved than Tsumago —essentially a single street lined with a hundred or more Edo-era shops and houses, featuring overhanging roofs at first and second-floor level, lattice-work and paper screens on the ground and upper-storey façade, many with traditional merchants’ hanging signs. 

Next morning we have but one objective: to find the 1000-year-old chestnut tree just outside Niekawa. It proves harder than expected. To get there, we walk 2.5 kilometres from Narai to Kiso-Hirasawa, renowned as a Nakasendo checkpoint but also for its lacquerware. The town is full of lacquerware shops behind which extend huge, narrow, whitewashed Edo-era warehouses (kura), stocking their precious goods. 

Then a five-minute train journey from here to Niekawa. Once there, no one seems to have heard of the ancient chestnut. Then one resident, who seems to know, sends us off in the wrong direction. Its location turns out to require a slightly hairy walk along the main road back towards Kiso-Hirasawa, then a track right from the road. There, on a steep wooded incline, steps lead up to a small shrine close to the veteran tree, its hoary, muscular burls swelling outwards from a deeply crevassed 8.5m-round trunk that soon separates into a tangle of giant limbs that twist up into a thin but healthy crown. It’s by no means Japan’s oldest horse chestnut (there’s a 1,300-year-old specimen in Ishikawa), but it’s proof that Japan’s variety (Aesculus turbinata) is a lot longer lived than its European cousin (A. hippocastanum). 

There are other well-preserved post-towns on the Nakasendo, including the exclusive mountain resort of Karuizawa, but our route perhaps comes closest to evoking one section of the daimyos’ passage from Kyoto to Tokyo as it was under the shoguns. 

Stephen Barber

November 2022

By Stephen Barber ()