Day 9 - Yokkaichi To Kuwana, Walking The Tokaido Road In Japan

 

Day 9 - Yokkaichi To Kuwana, Walking The Tokaido Road In Japan

We took the morning Express Train from Nagoya Station back to Yokkaichi Station, where we had stopped walking yesterday.
It was a cool and sunny morning, a good day for walking.

The Tokaido road runs right through a blocks-long covered shopping arcade with many shops, which unfortunately hadn’t opened yet when we walked saw past.
Still, the arcade was well maintained, and there were signs and banners indicating that this was the old Tokaido road.

Yokkaichi is known for its famous annual festival, that was advertised in the arcade by a mechanical doll that had a long neck that stretched up for three metres and then down.

The Yokkaichi Annual Festival is a colorful festival with an array of events held at the local Suwa Shrine.
The festival started during the Edo period, when Yokkaichi was a bustling post station on the Tokaido road.
The shrine's main gate faced the road, and many travelers used to stop here to visit the shrine along the way and pray for safety and blessings on their journey.

The Yokkaichi Festival features a portable shrine procession and four large festival floats.
The festival consists of a flower offering and a lion dance to express gratitude to the gods.

In later years, the festival incorporated other festival trends from Kyoto, Edo, Nagoya and other places, and the parishioners started competing with each other to produce the most creative festival floats, including processions of artificial and robotic objects, period parades, mechanical puppets and boat-shaped floats.

The old Yokkaichi Festival floats were all destroyed in an air raid in 1945, when they were burnt to the gr.
After the war, the lion dance and other festival floats were revived, and the festival seemed to have regained its lively atmosphere in the mid-1950s.

The ceremonies were cancelled due to a major flood in 1965, and the festival seemed to have been forgotten for a few years.
Later on, in an effort to revive the traditional festival that had been almost forgotten by the local residents, the Yokkaichi Festival was held again in 1997.
The Suwa Shrine revived all the festivities in 2008, and the annual festival regained its colorful past.

Yokkaichi was established by the lord Tokugawa leyasu, who spent seven years from 1601 to 1607 developing five roads: the Tokaido, the Nakasendo, the Koshu Kaido, the Oshu Kaido, and the Nikko Kaido.
All of these roads had their starting points at Nihonbashi in Edo, with mileposts built along the way and various facilities established as inns.

We took a detour around noon to eat lunch, after walking about 10 km.
We ate at the Aeon Mall, where there was an udon noodle restaurant called Marugame Seimen, specialising in freshly made udon noodles served in wooden bowls, and vegetable and shrimp tempuras.
Many branches of this same restaurant, Marugame, are also in Taipei, and it is a favorite of Wendy’s and Joseph’s, so they were excited to eat there.

After lunch, Jules was happy to get a hot drink at the Starbucks and Joseph got an ice cream.
Stopping in a mall always consumes more time than a stop in a roadside restaurant or cafe, but at the least we were all full and rested and ready for the final 10-12 km of our walk today, to Kuwana.

Between the post towns of Kuwana and Yokkaichi, there are Komukai, Shoji, Tomita, Hatzu, and Mitsuya no Tachiba.
These were small towns that existed during the Edo period, that offered a few shops where pilgrims could get a bite to eat, or a place to sleep for the night.

The grilled clams at Tomita Tachiba are famous and were depicted in woodblock prints (Ukiyo-e) by Utagawa Hiroshige.
Tomita was located in the territory of the Kuwana domain, so it was called "Kuwana's grilled clams" and the Haiku "The cuckoo cries as the clams are grilled" was written there.

On the road, we met two women from Tokyo who were solo-walking the Tokaido road from Tokyo to Kyoto.
The first woman takes a couple of days off every few months to continue her walk where she left off her previous time.
She was a funny woman who spoke English and she said it might take her ten years to finish the entire Tokaido!
She asked about the Suzuka pass that we walked near Seki town and warned us to be ready for a difficult day of crossing the upcoming Hakone mountain pass, notorious for being the most difficult part of the Tokaido.

Also walking by herself was the second woman from Tokyo, whom we met a few minutes after saying goodbye and good luck to the first Lady.
The two women weren’t walking together, or in the same way, as the second woman was doing the entire Tokaido all at once, like us.

We came upon a section of the road where the path ended, as pilgrims used to take a boat to cross the confluence of the Nagara and the Kiso Rivers. Nowadays, the boat is not running, and the new road that has been built to cross the rivers is not part of the Tokaido.

Wendy asked each of the women how they handled this interruption of the Tokaido, and both said the same thing - their reference books treated this section as something to be ignored, and that’s what they each did.
One took a train from Yatomi station to Kuwana station, and the woman who was walking the Tokaido in sections, simply ended her day at Yatomi station and started walking again the next time, from Kuwana station.

Wendy looked so relieved to hear that she doesn’t have to walk over long bridges that are not even part of the old Tokaido.
Joseph is afraid of bridges and crosses them by holding Wendy’s hand.
I agreed to skip the bridges, only because we are so far behind my original plan, which required us to walk an average of 20 kilometres per day.

Wendy thought it was a lucky coincidence that today, on the verge of encountering this new stretch of road, we met two solo pilgrims who each didn’t walk that section.

Jules asked me what I would have done, if we were walking this pilgrimage alone, and not influenced by Wendy’s desire to make things easier and Joseph’s fears of crossing over long bridges.
Would I have crossed the rivers on foot or taken the train?
I told him that honestly, it would not even have occurred to me to skip this part.
I would have walked over the Nagara River Estuary bridge which I thought looked so scenic, and over the Kiso river, I would have taken the National Route #1 bridge.
Although I do recognise that in olden times, there were no long bridges and people always took the boat or ferry that ran a few times per day.

So it was agreed that today we will finish walking at Kuwana station and tomorrow, we will begin again on the other shore of the river.

We arrived in Kuwana by late afternoon.
The Tokaido was 126 Ri long from Nihonbashi in Edo to Sanjo Ohashi in Kyoto.
A Ri is roughly 4 kilometres, making the Tokaido 504 kilometres long.
During the Edo period, it took only 13 nights and 14 days to walk the entire route, covering a staggering 9 ri per day.

We are going so much slower, with an estimated 37 days to finish the entire route.
Initially I planned for rest days and sightseeing days, but our pace as a group is so much slower than what I am used to planning for, that we will benefit from the time we will be saving by not crossing the rivers.

Sending you love and blessings,
Tali

Today’s Stats:
30,010 steps
20 km
Total walked: 176.5 km
Old Post Towns Visited:
Yokkaichi Juku #43
Kuwana Juku #42