The Five Roads of Edo Japan

How the shogunate's five great highways — and the 214 post towns that served them — moved a country on foot.

In 1601, a year after his victory at Sekigahara, Tokugawa Ieyasu ordered the creation of a national road network centred on Edo, the city we now call Tokyo. At its heart stood the Gokaidō, the Five Roads: the Tōkaidō along the Pacific coast to Kyoto, the Nakasendō through the mountains of the interior, the Kōshū Kaidō toward Kōfu and Suwa, the Ōshū Kaidō north to Shirakawa, and the Nikkō Kaidō to the shrines of Nikkō. All five were measured from a single point — the bridge of Nihonbashi in Edo.

Along each road, at intervals of a few hours' walk, stood a shukuba — a post town. There were 214 of them on the five roads together, and every one had the same official machinery. The toiyaba arranged horses and porters for official traffic. The honjin inn lodged daimyo and high officials; its deputy, the waki-honjin, took the overflow and, on quieter days, wealthy commoners. Ordinary travellers used the hatago inns, fed at teahouses, and navigated by the ichirizuka milestone mounds planted every ri — about 3.9 km — along the way.

The system's heaviest users were the daimyo themselves. Under sankin-kōtai, the alternate-attendance system, provincial lords had to travel to Edo in procession on a fixed schedule, and their retinues — sometimes hundreds strong — filled the post towns in season. A lord's procession was advertising as much as obligation: the roads became a stage on which wealth and rank were displayed, and the post towns grew fat on the traffic.

The roads today

The railways and motorways took the traffic away, and most post towns became ordinary suburbs or farming villages. But the map of the old roads is still legible. Modern National Route 1 follows the Tōkaidō; Route 20 follows the Kōshū Kaidō; Route 4 follows the Ōshū and Nikkō roads. A handful of post towns — Magome, Tsumago and Narai on the Nakasendō, Ōuchi-juku in Fukushima — preserve whole streets of Edo-period buildings. The rest survive as a name on a map, a milestone mound, a shrine gate, a row of old pine trees. This guide gives every one of the 214 stations its own page, famous or forgotten alike.