Mino Road

  • Japanese: 美濃路 (Minoji)

The Mino Road was a secondary road connecting the Tôkaidô and Nakasendô highways, overseen by the dôchû bugyô (Highways Magistrate). As such, despite being a secondary road, it saw much traffic from prominent travelers and famous events, including daimyô on their sankin kôtai missions to the capital, Ryukyuan and Korean embassies to Edo, and the chatsubo dôchû caravan carrying Uji tea to the shogunate, as well as, on one occasion, an elephant being brought up to Edo from the Dutch settlement in Nagasaki. The shogun himself traveled this road as well a number of times early in the Edo period, when journeying between Edo and Kyoto.

The road had seven "stations" along its route, around which inns and other facilities cropped up. The road began at Tarui-shuku on the Nakasendô, and ended at Miya-juku on the Tôkaidô, neither of which are counted among the seven stations of the Minoji. Each of the seven post-stations had, in 1843, an average of 13.7 hatagoya (commoner inns) and 2,836 residents.[1] While Tarui-juku was overseen by a daikan, and Ôgaki-juku was located in the castletown of the lord of Ôgaki, the remainder of the stations fell within the territory of the Owari Tokugawa clan of Owari han (Nagoya castle).[2]

Stations

References

  • "Minoji." Sekai daihyakka jiten 世界大百科事典. Hitachi Solutions, 2012.
  1. Constantine Vaporis, "Linking the Realm: The Gokaidô Highway Network in Early Modern Japan," in Susan Alcock et al (eds.) Highways Byways and Road Systems in the Pre-Modern World, Wiley-Blackwell (2012), 94.
  2. Asao Naohiro (ed.), Fudai daimyô Ii ke no girei, Hikone Castle Museum (2004), 328-329.