By Isla Quinn
“Sold, hired out, or destroyed.” Three verbs, and a town agreed in 1971 that none of them should happen to any place in Tsumago. That charter, according to Wikipedia, followed three years of restoration work by local residents. It is the single most useful fact about why the street looks the way it does.
Where it sits
Tsumago-juku is in Nagiso, in the Kiso District of Nagano Prefecture, at the south end of the district where Routes 19 and 256 meet, according to Wikipedia. The suffix juku means a post town, a stop on a road where travellers rested and changed horses. That gloss is general knowledge and not taken from the article, so it is our reading.
On the road between two capitals
The Nakasendō, Wikipedia says, was one of five centrally administered routes designated by the Tokugawa shogunate for its communications network. It ran about 534 kilometres between Edo, today’s Tokyo, and Kyoto, with 69 staging posts, through the old provinces of Musashi, Kōzuke, Shinano, Mino and Ōmi. Tsumago was the 42nd of the 69. Before it joined the Nakasendō, the Tsumago article says, it was the tenth of eleven stations on the Kisoji, a minor trade route through the Kiso Valley. The Nakasendō article adds that the Kisoji’s eleven post towns became part of the larger road, from Niekawa-juku to Magome-juku.
Dates in order
- Edo period: Tsumago serves as the 42nd post town on the Nakasendō, according to Wikipedia.
- Late 1830s: Hiroshige walks the route, according to Wikipedia’s Nakasendō article. He contributed 46 designs to a series of 69 views, and Keisai Eisen completed the series.
- 1968: local residents begin restoring historical sites and structures, according to Wikipedia.
- 1971: about 20 houses restored, and a charter agreed that no place in Tsumago should be sold, hired out or destroyed, according to Wikipedia.
- 1976: the town is designated a Nationally Designated Architectural Preservation Site, according to Wikipedia. The article uses that term, and so do we.
- 1995: the honjin, the main inn, is rebuilt, according to Wikipedia.
- 2001: the waki-honjin Okuya is named an Important Cultural Property, according to Wikipedia.
The two inns
The honjin was the main inn. Wikipedia says the original was destroyed and the building seen now was rebuilt in 1995. The waki-honjin, the secondary inn, called Okuya, is the original building, and it was named an Important Cultural Property in 2001. So one of the two principal buildings is an old structure and the other a rebuilding of a lost one, and the article is plain about which is which. We think that is worth saying as plainly.
The walk to Magome
A preserved section of the original highway runs between Tsumago and Magome-juku, the next post town, which has also been restored, according to Wikipedia. A bus service connects the two ends of the route. We give no timetable and no walking times, since we have no source for them.
A writer’s valley
The Nakasendō article notes that Shimazaki Tōson’s novel Before the Dawn chronicled the effects of the Meiji Restoration on the Kiso Valley. It does not describe the decline of the road itself, and we do not supply one.
What kind of sources these are
Both of our sources are Wikipedia articles, which anyone can edit. We did not find a town, prefectural or national heritage page we could read, and we have left out opening hours, entry costs, accommodation and travel advice for that reason. We have also left out population and visitor figures.
What we left out
We left out the list of railway lines that the Nakasendō article says follow the old route, because the list was missing from the text we read. We left out any claim about how the town looked before 1968, since neither source describes it.
Roam first. Shop later.