Kjeld Duits

In July 1871 a strong typhoon devastated western Japan. It was one of the first strong typhoons that foreigners in the newly opened foreign settlements experienced and it shocked them tremendously. In Osaka and Hyogo prefectures alone some 700 people were killed. Even the sturdy brick buildings in Kobe’s brand new foreign settlement could barely withstand the storm’s fury. Japan had opened for international trade only twelve years earlier, in 1859 (Ansei 6).

A traveller observes the Kisogawa River (木曽川) near Agematsu Juku (上松宿), the thirty-eighth of the sixty-nine stations of the Nakasendō, now located in Kiso (木曽), Nagano Prefecture. The past few weeks I have covered how travelers in old Japan crossed its many and often furious rivers: by ferry, piggybacking, or using countless bridges. Today I would like to share a beautiful account about traveling through Japan’s mountains by the Englishman Arthur H. Crow.

Japanese porters carrying travelers across a wide river. For centuries this was the only way to cross several rivers on the storied Tōkaidō highway. One of the best eyewitness accounts we have of travel in Japan during the Edo Period (1603–1868) was written by German naturalist and physician Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716), who lived in Japan from 1690 through 1692.