Nakasendo
Walking an Ancient Mountain Road
The Nakasendo is an Edo-period mountain road that connected Kyoto and Edo through the Kiso Valley of central Japan. In June 2025 I walked its best-preserved section over five days, with a camera. This is the record of that walk.
Magome is a place clearly made for people before people made places for cars. The single narrow road ascends steeply up the mountainside, lined with the kinds of buildings that became the staples of the post-towns: inns, shops, restaurants, all built to serve the needs of travelers four hundred years ago, and still at it. The morning moved slowly — coffee at Hirubiri twice, then Cafe Kappe — before the trail finally left the village behind.
The following morning I left early, heading north through Nagiso and into another section of steep ascent — mile after mile of rice farm broken up by stretches of thick forest wherever the land was too steep to cultivate. It was the hottest section of the walk, with long exposed stretches along the road and no shade, until a bench and a miraculously cold vending machine appeared in time to prevent the day becoming a medical event.
Perhaps because the terrain here was the most unforgiving, this section of the trail felt the least like the well-worn path it is. As I curved up around the mountain, tree roots and rocks emerged from the soil, and the trail narrowed before opening up to a view of Narai from above, looking straight down the main street and the railway line built alongside it.
What is strange about them is not the absence of modernity — you notice that and then adjust — but the presence of people living completely ordinary lives inside a protected historical environment. A woman hangs washing between dark timber uprights. A man parks his kei truck and walks back to his house along the Edo-period road. The anachronism runs in both directions.
Matsumoto Castle was built in the sixteenth century and has never been destroyed. It stands in its moat at the centre of a city that has grown indifferently around it, its black tenshu rising against whatever sky the season provides. The morning before the train, there is time for one circuit of the moat, beneath the branches at the water's edge. There will be a next time — slower, further south.