Tsumago: Preserving a Town That Supported Travel

The street of Tsumago, in Kiso, invites thoughts of travel in the Edo period. Wooden buildings follow the road, and the town’s appearance encourages the visitor to imagine an earlier journey. Yet the history of a post town cannot be understood through the image of a traveler finding a bed alone.

A post town also supported journeys on official business and the movement of people and goods. Accommodation and transport were connected functions. Looking at both helps explain why a settlement along a highway had work to do beyond welcoming someone for a single night.

Tsumago provides an entry into this history: the roles of the honjin, other inns and the transport office; preparations against fire; and the preservation that followed changes in transport. The buildings are approached through the tasks associated with them, rather than through an invented traveler’s diary.

The townscape visible today contains buildings of different dates and the results of later repairs. The history belongs both to people passing through and to people living there. Keeping those two perspectives together makes it possible to ask how a town supported travel and how its residents subsequently preserved its landscape.

Tsumago’s official account explains that the Nakasendō post stations were established to provide rest and accommodation for official travelers and to transport their people and goods. Continuing a journey required somewhere to stop, but it also required arrangements for moving onward.

These two functions bring different kinds of work into view. One task was to receive travelers needing a place to stay; another was to connect them and their loads with the next stage. Thinking about the town’s workers in this way gives the buildings a practical setting.

The evidence does not supply a particular traveler’s arrival time, conversation or movements through the town. No such individual is invented here. An account of the functions of a post station is valuable in its own right, even when it cannot become a minute-by-minute reconstruction of a day.

Separating those functions also changes how a row of buildings can be read. Doorways and rooms become part of the work of supporting travel, while transport arrangements extend the town’s role beyond its own street. This is an interpretation of the documented functions, not a newly recovered itinerary.

The honjin and wakihonjin were lodging facilities associated with journeys on official business. At Tsumago, the Shimazaki family held the honjin role and the Hayashi family the wakihonjin role. These names preserve the history of functions, but a function’s age is not automatically the age of the building now carrying its name.

The present honjin is not a structure that has stood unchanged since the Edo period. According to Nagiso Town Museum’s introduction, the earlier building was demolished in the Meiji period. In 1995, the honjin was reconstructed using a late Edo-period floor plan.

The present main house of Wakihonjin Okuya, meanwhile, dates from the Meiji period. Cultural Heritage Online records its framework raising in May 1877 and the completion of construction in April 1879. Its architectural value includes the combination of an early-modern townhouse tradition with design from the modern period.

These are different layers of time: an established lodging role, a later reconstruction, and a main house rebuilt in the Meiji era. Reading the building name alongside its construction history makes the evidence more precise. The town can illuminate Edo-period travel without every building having to be an untouched survival from that period.

Tsumago’s official explanation also considers the relationship between a post town and fire. It notes surviving records of fires and discusses udatsu, high walls and the town’s water channels as features that can be considered in relation to fire prevention.

Protecting a settlement of adjoining buildings involved more than receiving travelers. Fire was another concern for the town and its residents. However, the shape of a surviving building cannot establish exactly how a feature performed during a particular fire.

An explanation of a feature’s possible role is different from an account of the course of an individual disaster. The distinction matters when looking at a wall or a water channel. Their presence should not be converted into an undocumented story of a fire successfully stopped.

Considering these preparations adds another way of reading the townscape. The buildings and the water running beside them can be approached through the work of protection as well as appearance. The place supporting journeys was also a place where people had lives and property to safeguard.

In Tsumago, the decision to carry out a preservation project was made in 1968. A three-year plan began the following year, undertaking reconstruction and work to improve the townscape. The official account describes different categories of work, including dismantling and reconstruction and repairs of different scales.

The fact that old houses survived does not, by itself, explain the town’s present appearance. Investigation, repair and work on the landscape also contributed. Preservation has its own history of action, which belongs alongside the earlier history of the post station.

Learning which parts were reconstructed does not negate the townscape’s value. It offers a way to understand what people sought to pass on and how they approached that task. A repaired building can carry evidence of both an earlier form and a later decision to preserve it.

Rather than assuming that every house visible today was completed in the same year, we can read the changes and repairs as part of its history. The landscape is supported not only by the work of the old post town but also by the subsequent work of keeping the town in existence.

Tsumago-juku was selected as an Important Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings on September 4, 1976. Cultural Heritage Online describes the post-town district, rural settlement areas and surrounding extent. The object of preservation was therefore wider than a single building.

The same account describes the post-town area as retaining the character of the late Edo and Meiji periods. The national council of preservation districts also introduces the reconstructed honjin alongside the Hayashi residence, a modern Japanese-style house. Different architectural histories coexist within the same preserved district.

An Agency for Cultural Affairs document for fiscal 2007 contains a renewed proposal concerning Tsumago, Magome and the Nakasendō for addition to the World Heritage Tentative List. A proposal of this kind is not evidence of a decision to inscribe the site as World Heritage. It must also be distinguished from the 1976 district selection.

The history followed here is that of a post town and a district preserving its landscape. Looking at roads and surrounding environments as well as buildings makes the meaning of district preservation more concrete. It also helps keep distinct the different forms of recognition and documentation associated with the place.