Dewa Sendai Kaido Nakayamagoe

Dewa-Sendai Kaidō Nakayama-goe: A Mountain Road Bashō Walked

On the first day of July in 1689—the fifteenth of the fifth lunar month, year two of the Genroku era—the poet Matsuo Bashō and his companion Sora reached a guarded gate set among the cedars north of Naruko. They carried no traveler's permit. The warden questioned them at length, and only after considerable difficulty were they allowed through. Bashō recorded the incident in a single dry line of Oku no Hosomichi: the road was so little used, he wrote, that the gatekeeper found them suspicious.

The path Bashō took that morning still exists. A 4.2-kilometer stretch of the old Dewa-Sendai Kaidō, between the Shitomae checkpoint in Miyagi and the Sasamori checkpoint in Yamagata, was designated a National Historic Site in February 1990. It runs across the lowest saddle of the Ōu Mountains, the long spine of the Tōhoku region, at an elevation of roughly 350 meters. Today walkers can follow the same forest track that Bashō climbed, complete with sawn-log steps on the steeper grades and small plank bridges over the streams where the originals were never built.

From Ancient Pack Route to Edo Highway

The line of the road is older than the Edo period by many centuries. Court records of the early Heian state describe a path along the narrow valley of the Eai River used by the army of Taga Castle, the northern provincial seat, when it dispatched men to Dewa Stockade during the long campaigns against the Emishi. Whatever the actual route then was, the geography forced traffic into the same gap: the Ōu range presents no easier crossing for a hundred kilometers in either direction.

By the Edo period the road had taken its definitive shape. Splitting from the great Ōshū Kaidō at Yoshioka post-station, it ran west through Nakaniida, Iwadeyama and Naruko, climbed over the Sakaida pass into Dewa Province, and dropped down through Sakaida village to Funagata on the Mogami River. The Sendai domain's official 1699 cartographic survey, the Sendai-han Goryōbun Ezu, marks the route clearly. It was a side road, not a sankin kōtai highway, and so received less maintenance than the major arteries—no bridges across the side streams, for one thing, a detail visitors of the day complained about.

Traffic grew steadily nonetheless. The hot springs at Naruko developed into a destination for long-stay cures during the Bunka and Bunsei eras, and copper was extracted from mines in the surrounding hills. After 1814, safflower harvested in northern Yamagata moved east along this road on its way to the dye markets of Edo. In 1815 the Shinjō domain began using the route for its alternate-attendance journeys, and processions from Akita and Shōnai followed. For most of two centuries it was a working road, busy with packhorses and porters.

Why It Became a National Historic Site

National Historic Site status under the Cultural Properties Protection Law is reserved for places of high value in the country's economic, transport, or political history. The Dewa-Sendai Kaidō Nakayama-goe was admitted under criterion six, covering remains of transport and communication infrastructure. Three factors weighed in its favor.

First, the route had documentary continuity from ancient times through the Meiji period—rare for a non-trunk road. Second, the unmodernized section between the two checkpoints had survived intact: when the Ministry of Construction laid out the modern Route 47 and the Rikuu East railway along the river valley below, the old footpath on the slope was simply abandoned and forgotten, sparing it from being widened or paved. Third, the road carries the literary weight of Oku no Hosomichi, which from the eighteenth century onward made every village along it a place of pilgrimage for haiku poets.

Survey work began in 1977 and continued for four years. The team identified the original alignment, cleared collapsed sections, and rebuilt the path to its documented standard width of one and a half ken—about 2.7 meters. Steep pitches were rebuilt with stone treads or log steps; the surface was reset with river sand. Wayfinding posts and interpretive panels went in last. The work was complete in 1981, nine years before the formal designation.

What the Walk Looks Like Today

The eastern end is the Shitomae barrier site (Shitomae no Seki), a flat clearing on the slope above Route 47 reached by a steep flight of stone steps. The reconstructed gate, two simple posts and a beam, stands at the head of the clearing; behind it are an explanatory plaque, a stone monument inscribed with Bashō's haiku, and a small statue of the poet himself. The actual structure that Bashō passed has gone—the present gate is a recent reconstruction—but the site is the original one, established by the Date domain in 1670.

From here the path enters mixed forest of cedar, beech and oak and immediately begins to climb. Within the first kilometer it crosses two ravines named Kofukasawa and Ōfukasawa, "small deep marsh" and "great deep marsh," where Edo-period travelers had to wade through whatever water was running. Today simple wooden planks bridge them. The grade through these sections is steep enough that the restoration team set in stone-faced steps, a detail mentioned in the official designation report and easy to see as you climb.

The middle stretch passes through the abandoned site of the Nakayama post-station, where local farmers once kept inns for travelers. Foundation stones can be picked out in the undergrowth. The path then descends gradually toward the Sakaida watershed—a remarkable spot, since the small open meadow there is the central divide of northern Honshū. Water on the east side runs to the Pacific via the Eai and Kitakami; water on the west runs to the Sea of Japan via the Kogunigawa and Mogamigawa. A signboard in the meadow shows the split visually, one of the very few places in Japan where the country's principal watershed lies on flat, walkable ground.

The western terminus is the site of the Sasamori barrier, just inside Yamagata Prefecture. From there it is a short walk down to the Border Warden's House, the second great landmark of the route.

The Border Warden's House at Sakaida

The phrase hōjin no ie in Oku no Hosomichi—"the house of the border keeper"—refers to a real building that still stands at Sakaida. It is the Former Ariji Residence (Kyū Ariji-ke Jūtaku), now owned by Mogami Town. Designated an Important Cultural Property in December 1969, the house is a hipped-roof, thatched-roof hiroma-gata farmhouse of the type once common across eastern Yamagata, built no later than the early Edo period and probably earlier. It measures roughly 24.8 by 10.0 meters—about 81 tsubo—with five rooms grouped around an earthen-floored central hall and, unusually, an indoor horse stable opening directly off the living space.

The Ariji family served for generations as headmen of Sakaida village under the Shinjō domain. They ran the place as part farmhouse, part inn, part wholesaler's depot, and part border post for the domain's frontier with Sendai. When Bashō and Sora arrived on the evening of July 1, 1689, they were given lodging here because rain made further travel impossible. The poet stayed three days while the storm passed and wrote a haiku that has shaped the way every visitor since has read the building:

Nomi shirami / uma no shito suru / makuramoto
Fleas and lice—
a horse pissing
right by my pillow.

The verse is not a complaint so much as a record of where he was. The Mogami uplands, called Oguni at the time, were the leading horse-breeding district in Yamagata. To keep mares warm through the bitter winter wind that funnels down off the divide, families housed their animals indoors, in the same volume of air as themselves. Visitors today can stand in the room where Bashō slept, with the horse stall a few meters away, and see the arrangement intact. The fire in the central hearth is lit on most days, both for atmosphere and as a fumigation measure against insects in the thatch.

Visiting the Trail

The most rewarding way to experience the Historic Site is to walk the full 4.2 kilometers from Shitomae barrier to Sasamori, then continue another kilometer or so to the Border Warden's House. Allow three to four hours. The trail is one-way in practice—you'll need to arrange a return by train or taxi—and it is closed by snow from late November until April.

Wear shoes with grip. The path is well marked but the surface is natural earth and stone, with some exposed roots, and after rain the lower sections can be slick. Carry water; there are no facilities between the trailheads. Mid-October to early November is the most popular time, when the surrounding gorge fills with color, but spring with the new beech leaves and early summer—the season Bashō walked it, in rain—are quieter and arguably truer to the road's literary mood.

The trail is open without charge. The Border Warden's House charges a small admission fee (currently 250 yen for adults) and is open April through November only.

Around the Trail

Naruko Onsen, immediately east of the trailhead, is one of Japan's most varied hot-spring towns: nine of the eleven recognized water types are represented among its springs, an unusual concentration. The town is also the historical center of Naruko-style kokeshi wooden dolls, with workshops and a dedicated museum, the Nihon Kokeshi-kan, near the gorge.

Naruko Gorge (Naruko-kyō), a kilometer west of the Shitomae barrier, is a V-shaped canyon roughly 2.6 kilometers long cut by the Ōya River. The cliffs reach 100 meters; the autumn foliage there draws large crowds in the last week of October and the first of November. A 2.2-kilometer walking path called the Ōfukasawa Trail loops from the rest house and lookout, closed in winter.

At Sakaida station, a short walk from the Border Warden's House, the rail platform abuts the meadow that holds the central watershed. The site is one of the few in Japan where the continental divide of the main island can be observed at flat ground level; a wooden channel actually splits a small stream of water to show the two directions of flow.