10 TRAVEL + INDULGENCE THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN, SEPTEMBER 8-9, 2018theaustralian.com.au/travel

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domains. This had no real purpose other thanto drain the lords’ resources while givingthem a strong disincentive to rebel.

It also necessitated good roads to and fromEdo and the creation of numerous post townsto supply them and their retinues. This is whywe find ourselves in Ena, about to walk asurviving rural section of the Nakasendocalled the Kiso Road, through the scenic KisoValley in central Honshu.

This five-day tour is a short one for WalkJapan, which leads tours all over the countryfrom Hokkaido to Okinawa, including anonsen trail, winter snow-shoeing, a templepilgrimage, and an 11-day Nakasendo walkthat goes all the way from Kyoto throughHikone, Sekigahara (site of the conclusivebattle won by Tokugawa in 1600) and several

TAKE THE SLOW ROADSLiving heritage on a guided walk in JapanPENNY DURHAM

It seems impossible that last night wewere stumbling through the neonfrenzy of Tokyo’s Kabuki-cho. Now weare in Ena, a tiny town a few hours fromthe capital via Nagoya, where we havemet our Walk Japan group. The

wooden-walled ryokan we are sleeping intonight has been here since 1624, and thethree women looking after us are the 14th,15th and 16th-generation innkeepers.

Ena was one of the 69 post towns of theNakasendo, an ancient road connectingKyoto with Edo, modern Tokyo. One of thefive highways, or gokaido, that took on hugeimportance during the Tokugawa shogunate,the Nakasendo is now a road into Japan’spast. It’s 150 years since the Meiji Restorationbrought to an end the fascinating Tokugawaera and 260 years of peace and unity, para-doxically under a military dictator and a rest-less warrior class, that followed 150 years ofcontinuous civil war. This hard-won peace didnot keep itself, of course.

As shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu — the thirdand savviest of Japan’s Three Unifiers, afterOda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi —kept his daimyo or lords under controlthrough the ingenious sankin kotai system.The lords spent alternating years in Edo, leav-ing their wives and children as hostages in thecapital when they returned to their own

historic post towns to finish at Nihonbashi inTokyo, the bridge to which all roads led.

Our group of 11 walkers — a family of fourfrom New York, three New Zealanders, amother and daughter from Melbourne, andmy partner and I — is lucky to have as ourtour leader Llewellyn Thomas, the managingdirector of Walk Japan. The unassumingEnglishman is immensely experienced, funnyand full of stories both droll and dreadful. (Itbeing Japan, about half of them end with “ …and was compelled to commit suicide”.)

You can do this walk on your own, but thevalue of a guide can’t be overstated. Having afluent and chatty Japanese speaker who getsstories out of everyone and sees beyond thesurface of things makes the experience muchricher and more immersive.

At Ena, we visit a museum dedicated toartist Utagawa Hiroshige who evocatively,and sometimes imaginatively, captured someof the scenery we are about to see. There is ahuge private collection of prints, plus a print-ing set-up that allows us to try our hand. Weleave with some smudgy approximations ofukiyo-e masterpieces and a renewed respectfor the craft.

Back at Ichikawa ryokan, bathed and inour yukata robes, we have our first kaisekidinner, a succession of small, exquisite dishes— usually including salmon or ayu, a local

river trout, seasonal vegetables, soba noodles,miso and pickles — with lashings of beer andsake. Breakfast is just as opulent, minus thesake. Walking begins next morning, after ashort train and taxi ride, at Ochiai. TakashiMiike’s incredibly violent film 13 Assassins isset here, but there’s no mud or flying headstoday. It’s late May, the end of spring; the lastcherry blossoms have fallen and the country-side has burst into green. We pass small farmsand rice paddies that reflect the sky; wild-flowers bloom by the road; it’s warm but notyet humid, and utterly serene.

Writers in the 17th century described high-ways teeming with palanquin bearers andretainers, the air ringing with the cries of

IN THE KNOW

The Kiso Road walk is offered from spring to autumn, starting at Y216,000 ($2660) a person, with a six-night version over winter (from Y304,000). The 10-night Nakasendo walk is offeredfrom spring to autumn (from Y484,000).■ walkjapan.com

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TRAVEL + INDULGENCE 11THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN, SEPTEMBER 8-9, 2018theaustralian.com.au/travel

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Post town Narai, far left; on the road into Magome, main; statues at a temple at Narai, left; Iwaya ryokan in Kisofukushima, right; bamboo forest on the Kiso Road, below; the torii gate of Yabuhara shrine, below left

MORE TO THE STORY

This is no gruelling hike; we walk with day packs, as luggage is sent ahead. In the pre-tour information pack, you are nonetheless asked to pack light. If travelling as a couple, put everything you need on the walk in one case. Walking is leisurely, about 12km a day with some gentle ascents and descents,and unless you have compromised kneesyou won’t need poles.

Guestrooms are booked as singlesand doubles, perplexing as that is to theinnkeepers, since Japanese tend to bunkdown many to a room. Some have privatetoilets, some communal, and bathing is done in the evening, either by turns or allat once, separated by gender.

You’ll be drilled in the rules: wash first,then soak; nothing goes in the bath but yourself; tattoos are banned or at least must be covered up (it’s a yakuza thing).Footwear is the other main source of potential faux pas; don’t be the person who wears toilet slippers to dinner.

Futon mattresses were de rigueur inAustralian share-house bedrooms in the1990s, but those were bouncing castlescompared with some of the authentic Japanese bedding we encounter, so if you’re bony or otherwise hard of sleeping, pack an inflatable pillow or two.Almost every meal is included, with booze paid for at the end. Rural Japan has little truck with Western food fads, but two of our group who prefer to avoid red meat and raw fish respectively are catered for.

ALL PICTURES EXCEPT MAIN: PENNY DURHAM

hawkers. Thomas asks us to picture the prin-cess Kazunomiya travelling from Kyoto toEdo in 1861 to marry the 14th shogun, Toku-gawa Iemochi, with a combined escort ofabout 25,000 retainers, plus some diabolicallyheavy luggage. Today we are almost alone onthis narrow road, except for a fit older gentle-man we meet perusing an information board.He mentions, offhand, that he has alreadywalked the Nakasendo from Tokyo to Kyoto(about 500km) and is on his way back. Hetells us he is 77.

Humbled, we make our way to Magome, abeautifully preserved post town of darkcypress buildings, swallows nesting in theeaves. This is the childhood home of TosonShimazaki, author of the bleak realist novelBefore the Dawn, set during the turbulenttransition out of the feudal period. Afterlunch — this is soba noodle country — wepass a kosatsuba, or board, carved with Edo-period edicts such as the prohibition onChristianity and the rewards (handsome) fordenouncing practitioners, and penalties (sev-ere) for cutting down valuable cypress trees.

We walk over the Magome Pass, withmountain views and into forest, where theconcept of shinrinyoku, or forest bathing,suddenly makes perfect sense. We take ashort detour to the Odaki-Medaki (men’s andwomen’s) waterfalls, where legend has it two

historically important cold showers weretaken, and forest bathing takes on anothermeaning again.

Our next lodgings are in O-Tsumago (theO prefix denotes big, a joke at the expense ofthis micro-village) at Maruya ryokan, datingfrom 1789. After another superb dinner, wehave our first communal bathing experienceat a mountain onsen about 15 minutes awayby bus. The weirdness of getting naked withnew acquaintances evaporates immediately,and sliding out of the cold mountain air intosteaming water, frogs croaking around us inthe dark, feels perfect.

On day three we head off early and beatthe crowds to Tsumago, another incrediblyphotogenic post town, where we visit thepreserved waki-honjin — the second-mostimportant inn — its cypress rafters black withthe soot of centuries. Taking a slight detour,we walk over the Jizo Pass through wisteria-laden forest, clapping to warn off bears (rarebut not unknown), and past the lovely Kara-sawanotaki falls. A mid-afternoon pause fortea and cakes at the cafe Kaida no Poppoyagives us our best view yet of Japan’s largestvolcano after Mount Fuji, the sacred MountOntake, which erupted in 2014 and killed 63people. The spectacular view is, however,thoroughly upstaged by the irrepressible pro-prietors, Hideji and Mitsuko Ando, who keep

a large model train set in their backyard andgive a warm musical welcome to all WalkJapan guests. Descending to the town of Kiso-fukushima, we come to a barrier station, thekind through which all travellers in the Edoperiod had to pass. Travel was all but forbid-den for commoners and for women, whomight be wives of daimyo trying to flee thecapital. To prevent this, any insufficientlymasculine-looking man would be taken into aprivate room to have his credentials checked.

We stay at the palatial Iwaya ryokan inKisofukushima, which boasts 11 imperial visitsin its 300-year history, although the currentbuilding is a mere 90 years old. On day fourwe stop at Yabuhara shrine, dating from theseventh century AD. We catch the youngshrine keeper on a visit home; he is based inParis, where he educates Europeans aboutShinto and, incredibly, is the 25th generationof his family to hold the inherited position.

Over the Torii Pass, under bright blueskies, we descend to Narai, another post townwhere long eaves tell us we have crossed themountains into a region of heavy snows andtorrential rains. We have some time to pokearound (the area specialises in lacquerwareand fine combs; one 88-year-old artisan combmaker has a full head of dark, wavy hair thatproclaims the benefits), then it’s onwards byrail to the pleasant city of Matsumoto.

Spending our last night at a modern hotel,we are woken early by the announcementthat the next-door restaurant is on fire. Aftera couple of hours on the street in our pyjamaswatching the futuristically silver-coated fire-men do their work, and being interviewed bylocal press, normal service is resumed. Thehotel is untouched but the restaurant isgutted. I mention this only for the impeccableway the emergency is handled by everyone,not least our unflappable tour leader, and be-cause it makes us reflect on the extraordinarysurvival over centuries of the many woodenbuildings we have admired and slept in.

Our last wooden building is the imposingMatsumoto-jo, one of just four originalcastles in Japan to survive without rebuilding.Called Crow Castle for its menacing blackaspect, it is a thing as much of beauty as milit-ary ingenuity, nothing like the stone hulks of

Europe. As we squeeze up the tight cypressstaircases to inspect the armoury, pursued bya pack of schoolchildren, we’re struck by theabsurd fact that the average fearsomesamurai was a diminutive 1.5m tall. We com-plete our tour at the local art gallery and aretrospective of the work of the city’s famousdaughter Yayoi Kusama. It feels like a sling-shot back to modernity; yet while her pump-kins seem worlds away from Hiroshige’swoodblocks, both are interpretations of thenature we have just walked through, and thusmake perfect bookends to our journey.

Penny Durham was a guest of Walk Japan.

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