About This Guide

This guide covers every post town (shukuba) of the Edo Five Roads — the Tōkaidō, Nakasendō, Kōshū Kaidō, Ōshū Kaidō and Nikkō Kaidō — 214 stations in all, each with its own page: where it stood, what stands there today, how far it lies from Nihonbashi, and the full text of its encyclopedia article where one exists.

How the guide is built

The station lists, distances and present-day locations come from the station tables of the Japanese Wikipedia road articles (CC BY-SA 4.0); distances in ri were converted at 1 ri = 3.927 km and are shown as approximations. Article texts are adapted from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 4.0 — each page credits its source article. Where a station has only a Japanese article, the full text was translated into English for this guide; where no separate article exists, the page carries a short summary prepared from the road records, and says so.

Photographs and woodblock prints are hosted here directly. Every image was checked on Wikimedia Commons for a free licence (public domain or Creative Commons) before use, and is credited individually on its page. The Tōkaidō and Nakasendō prints are by Utagawa Hiroshige and Keisai Eisen, public domain.

Honest limits

Some post towns have vanished almost completely, and their pages are short. Distances follow the historical station tables and may differ slightly from modern road distances. Place names and municipal boundaries are those recorded in the sources at the time of writing. If you plan to walk a section of an old road, confirm local conditions with official local sources before you go.