![]() ![]() It was the same timeless view seen by one of Japan’s many travel-loving poets, Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828), who had also hiked this route, known as the Nakasendo Road, and was inspired to compose a haiku: Flowing right in Looking out through the shutters later that night, I saw the clouds part briefly to reveal a cascade of brilliant stars. Their elderly parents were the inn’s cooks, and soon we all gathered for a traditional country dinner of lake fish and wild mushrooms over soba (buckwheat noodles). And the antique aura was hardly broken when the owners, a young couple with a toddler and a puppy, emerged with a pot of green tea. The only sign of the 21st century was the vending machine by the front doorway, its soft electric glow silhouetting cans of iced coffee, luridly colored fruit sodas and origami kits. My 1810 guidebook offered travelers advice on settling in to lodging: After checking in, the author suggests, locate the bathroom, secure your bedroom door, then identify the exits in case of fire. At the top of creaking stairs were three simple guest rooms, each with springy woven mats underfoot, sliding paper-screen doors and futons. There was no answer when I called in the door, so, taking off my shoes, I followed a corridor of lacquered wood to an open hearth, where a blackened iron kettle hung. At the same time here in rural Japan-feudal, hermetic, entirely unique-an era of peace and prosperity was underway in a society as intricate as a mechanical clock, and this remote mountain hostelry was welcoming a daily parade of traveling samurai, scholars, poets and sightseers.Įarly morning on an old stretch of the Kiso Road, part of the 340-mile Nakasendo highway, which connected Edo and Kyoto and has been in use since the 700s. It had first opened its doors in 1789, the year Europe was plunging into the French Revolution, harbinger of decades of chaos in the West. I identified my lodgings, the Maruya Inn, from a lacquered sign. The carved wooden balconies of antique houses leaned protectively above, each one garlanded with chrysanthemums, persimmons and mandarin trees, and adorned with glowing lanterns. Not a soul could be seen in the only laneway. Modern Japan seemed even more distant when I emerged from the woods into the hamlet of Otsumago. This article is a selection from the July/August issue of Smithsonian magazine BuyĪ feudal procession sets out from the Nihonbashi in Edo in this 1833-34 woodblock print from the series “Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido Road” by Utagawa Hiroshige. Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 Beautiful women walking alone were particularly dangerous, it was thought, as they could be white foxes who would lure the unwary into disaster. A Japanese guidebook I was carrying, written in 1810, included dire warnings about supernatural threats: Solitary wayfarers met on remote trails might really be ghosts, or magical animals in human form. Now I had to worry about encounters with carnivorous beasts? It seemed wildly unlikely, but, then again, travelers have for centuries stayed on their toes in this fairytale landscape. And yet, every hundred yards or so, a brass bell was hung with an alarming sign: “Ring Hard Against Bears.” Only a few hours earlier, I had been in Tokyo among futuristic skyscrapers bathed in pulsing neon. Curtains of gentle rain, the tail-end of a typhoon in the South China Sea, were drifting across worn cobblestones that had been laid four centuries ago, swelling the river rushing below and waterfalls that burbled in dense bamboo groves. The forest trail I was hiking into the Kiso Mountains of Japan had the dreamlike beauty of an anime fantasy.
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