Walking the Nakasendō

The Nakasendō Road is a 534-kilometer inland highway that once linked Edo and Kyoto through sixty-nine post towns during Japan’s Tokugawa period and early Meiji era. But to describe it merely as a road is to miss its real significance. The Nakasendō cuts across Japan’s most densely settled plains, passes through agricultural heartlands, climbs into alpine mountain corridors, and descends into the historically layered basin of Lake Biwa. Along the way, it passes through post towns that reveal a striking diversity of landscapes, natural beauty, and regional cultures that few travelers to the country experience.

The Nakasendō Project addresses the absence of a historically rigorous English-language guide to this route. Rather than treating the road as a scenic walk, the project approaches it as a living environment, one that empowered a unique travel culture that still exists today, enforced authority, enabled trade, and connected distant regions long before modern infrastructure and Japan’s evolution to a modern state.

Drawing on original traveler diaries, Edo-period travel literature, art, political history, and local archival sources, the project reconstructs how people actually moved along the Nakasendō and why the road mattered to the formation of early modern Japan. Walking the route with this historical context offers insights into Japan’s past, and its present, that conventional tourism cannot provide.

By grounding the modern journey in historical research, the project allows today’s walkers to follow the Nakasendō on foot while understanding how Edo-period legacies continue to shape and inform Japan’s landscape, communities, and cultural identity.