The Nakasendō: Two Edo Post Towns, One Afternoon's Walk Apart
Most travelers who want to see "old Japan" go to Kyoto, take a photo of a preserved street, and leave with the uncomfortable feeling that they have visited a set. There is a better option, and it takes an afternoon: walk the surviving stretch of the Nakasendō, the highway that connected Edo and Kyoto through the mountains, between two post towns that never allowed the twentieth century to arrive properly.
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The Highway Through the Mountains The Tōkaidō, the coastal road, is the famous one — the highway Hiroshige made into woodblock prints. The Nakasendō was its inland rival, longer and harder but free of the river crossings that could strand travelers for days. It ran sixty-nine post towns between Edo and Kyoto, where officials, merchants and pilgrims changed horses, ate, and slept under strictly regulated rules.
Why These Two Towns Survived When the railway arrived in the Meiji era it took a different line through the Kiso valley, and Magome and Tsumago were left economically stranded — which is exactly why they still exist. In the 1970s Tsumago's residents adopted a preservation charter with a memorable rule: the buildings must not be sold, rented out, or destroyed. Power lines were buried, vending machines hidden, and the street was left as a street rather than staged as a museum.
The Walk Itself The path between them is about eight kilometres over the Magome Pass, with a climb of roughly three hundred metres from the Magome side. Some of it is original stone paving through cedar forest, some of it is quiet paved lane past rice fields and waterwheels. It takes two and a half to three hours at an unhurried pace, and it is genuinely walkable in ordinary shoes.
The Bear Bells and the Tea House Along the route you'll pass brass bells mounted on posts, intended to be rung to warn bears of your presence — a detail that tells you how rural this is despite being a few hours from Nagoya. Roughly halfway there's a free rest house where volunteers often serve tea to walkers, a habit that has outlived the highway it belongs to.
What a Post Town Was For The Nakasendō was one of the five highways of the Edo period, running inland between Edo and Kyoto through the mountains — the alternative to the coastal Tōkaidō. Along it, at regular intervals, sat post towns: settlements licensed to provide lodging, horses, porters and official message relay to travellers on a road where nearly everyone walked.
The traffic was not casual. Under the sankin-kōtai system, feudal lords were required to alternate between their domains and the capital, moving with large retinues, and the highways and their post towns existed to service that. What you are walking through is the infrastructure of a political control mechanism.
Places Named in This Story
- 1Walk from Magome to Tsumago rather than the reverse. Magome sits higher, so you climb less, and Tsumago is the better place to arrive.
- 2Ring the bear bells along the trail. They are there for a reason rather than as decoration.
- 3Use the luggage forwarding that runs between the two tourist offices in season. You walk with a day bag and your luggage meets you.
- 4Stay a night in Tsumago. The day visitors go by late afternoon and a lantern-lit empty post street is the whole reason to be here.
- 5Wear proper shoes. It is not a hard walk but it is a mountain pass on stone and forest path, not a promenade.
This is the most accessible surviving stretch of Edo Japan's road network, and the same instinct — walking a route people actually used — leads to the Kumano pilgrimage trails in the south. Our Nagano prefecture page covers the rest of the Kiso valley, and the luggage forwarding piece explains the service that makes point-to-point walking practical anywhere in Japan.
Sources
Hinato
Hinato lives in Miyazaki, Japan and is the sole operator of Fudoki Japan, an independent English-language guide to the country's lesser-known places across all 47 prefectures. Drafting is AI-assisted; every page is reviewed by a person before it goes live, and that person is answerable for it.
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