Seki post town; a secret sightseeing resource

Before the Meiji Era there wasn’t any internal-combustion engine by coal or gasoline, naturally there wasn’t a steam locomotive nor an automobile. People had to walk or ride a horse or ride a “kago”, a Japanese moving carriage to carry a person by more than two carriers who carried a bar set the carriage on their shoulder, to take a trip to a distant place. Roads that people moved along for a long distance were called “kaido”, a walking highway. Kaido developed in the early time of the Edo Period because not only were they an economic transfer network developed around Japan but also all samurai lords of clans across Japan and samurai officers serving their lords had to come and go between Tokyo and their home clans.


Along a kaido there were many post towns which had a lot of hotels for samurais and normal people in any principle places. The kaido between Tokyo and Osaka was the most useful kaido and it was called the Tokaido kaido. The starting town of the Tokaido kaido was Nihonbashi, Tokyo, and there were fifty three post towns along the way to Osaka. The average distance between two post towns were approximately 10km, because human foots, horse foots or kago carriers weren’t strong. The first post town was Shinagawa, Tokyo, the second post town was Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture over Tama River. And the forty seventh post town was Seki, Mie Prefecture.

Seki post town is in current Kameyama city, which is between Nagoya and Kyoto and located approximately twenty kilometers inland from The Ise Harbor.




The Seki post town

A renowned ukiyoe drawer, Hiroshige Ando, depicted fifty three post towns of the Tokaido, the picture above was a work which he depicted as the aspect of Seki.

The history of Seki post town is older than the one of the Tokaido kaido and it dates back to the 8th century, the time when the Imperial Court had its capital in Heijo-kyo, Nara city. This land was a place where some kaidos intersected and it was an important protecting gate-town. In the Edo Period Seki post town had the Ise-betsu kaido leading to Ise and the Yamato kaido leading to Nara along with the Tokaido kaido. Thus, Seki post town was larger than the average post town.

When I visited Seki post town, the town was silent and had few people even including travelers. Two-story wooden buildings neighboring each other without a gap, which were lined consecutively for the long distance along the main road, were old but alive. Nowadays there are very few hotels in operation, former hotels were transformed into Japanese restaurants and Japanese confectionary shops and so on, but parts of the aspects of hotels are alive. Residents in the town operate their own work dispassionately and calmly live there, naturally accept the situation of few travelers and keep the town as it was in the past.

The town is much larger than I guessed. While strolling through the town along the road seeing each building, I felt uncomfortable. The town has an aspects like a town set for a movie or a nostalgic theme park of the Edo period. But yet there were extremely fewer people than the expected number of people in a commercial theme park. I didn’t know the reason, yet the town seemed not to have popularity with travelers.


Nonetheless, each building was similar but different, it made subtle fluctuation. A short time later, I dwelled in the atmosphere of the old post town. That fluctuation with softness of wooden buildings relaxed me. The situation of almost nobody in the town gave me a chance to make my selfish imagination in which several samurais and travelers wearing kimonos were choosing today’s hotels and staff of hotels were calling them to stay at their hotels. Cheerful and vital voices were blending on the road, and the sounds of wooden clogs echoed in the air surrounding the buildings, it added the color of business.


I walked further east more. At the east boundary of the town there is a torii, a shrine gate. The place is the intersection of the former Tokaido kaido and the former Ise-betsu Kaido leading to Ise. This torii was relocated from the former torii of Ise Shrine (Ise Shrine has been rebuilt every twenty years). It proves the importance of the town.

Seki post town is a wonderful sightseeing place. Moreover, it is rarely polluted by commercial power, so it is like a secret treasure for foreign travelers. I recommend to visit there.