The Tōkaidō

1 · POSITION

The Tōkaidō is the coastal road from Nihonbashi in Edo to the Sanjō bridge in Kyoto, about 495 kilometres, and the fifty-three post stations Tokugawa Ieyasu set along it from 1601. A traveller on foot took thirteen to seventeen days. The register enters it for what each station held: lodging graded by rank, from the daimyō’s honjin to the inn for anyone who could pay. [1, 2, 3]

2 · A SEGMENTED INDUSTRY

The post stations, shukuba, kept several kinds of house. The honjin was built for samurai and court nobles and was not run as a business; the waki-honjin served the same guests and took ordinary travellers when it had rooms; the hatago lodged ordinary travellers and fed them; the kichin-yado lodged them without food. The register calls it a segmented accommodation industry four centuries before the phrase. [2, 4]

3 · HORSES, PORTERS, PROCESSIONS

Each station had to supply the official traffic — by one account thirty-six horses for official messengers, by another a hundred porters and a hundred horses a day. The traffic was heaviest under alternate attendance, when the daimyō travelled to Edo with retinues of retainers and porters. The shogunate banned bridges and ferries on the Ōi River for defence, so travellers were carried across. [1, 3]

4 · THE ROAD IN PRINT

The road became the subject of Hiroshige’s Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō in the 1830s. The last of the fifty-three, Shōno, was added in 1624, and official documents count fifty-seven, with four post towns between Kyoto and Osaka. At Futagawa an honjin survives that operated from 1807 to 1870. [1, 2]

5 · ⚑ CANDOUR

⚑ The horses each station had to keep are given as 36 by one source and as 100 porters and 100 horses a day by another; both are printed. The road is counted as 53 stations or 57 by different reckonings. The length is taken from the station table, not from a measured survey. [1–4]