Magane Milestone

Magane Ichirizuka: A Surviving Edo-Period Mound Pair on the Old Sanyo Highway

Two earthen mounds face each other across a quiet stretch of road in the Kibitsu district of Okayama. Each is barely larger than a small front garden. A young black pine grows on the north mound; a Japanese hackberry, or enoki, rises from the south. They look unremarkable until you learn what they are: a surviving pair of ichirizuka, the distance markers that lined Japan's Edo-period highways at intervals of one ri, roughly 3.93 kilometers. Designated a National Historic Site in 1928, Magane Ichirizuka is one of very few places in the country where both mounds of a single station have stayed in place on either side of the original road.

Ichirizuka and the Old Sanyo Highway

The ichirizuka system was put in place in 1604, when the Tokugawa shogunate ordered earthen mounds raised at every ri along the main overland highways. Each station consisted of a pair of mounds, one on either side of the road, topped with a hardwood tree that gave shade to resting travelers and made the marker visible from a distance. The mounds functioned as milestones, rest stops, and as the basis for calculating fees for horses and palanquin bearers.

The Sanyō-dō, also known as the Saigoku Kaidō, was the great western artery of the Edo highway network, running from the Kyoto region along the Inland Sea coast toward Shimonoseki and the routes onward to Kyushu. By the seventeenth century it was carrying daimyo processions on their alternate-attendance journeys, pilgrims bound for Konpira and other shrines, and merchants moving rice, salt, and cotton between the western provinces. The road passed directly through what is now the Kibitsu district of Okayama.

Magane was the second ichirizuka west of the castle town of Okayama. The station before it, at Mannari, has long since vanished; so has the next one to the west, at Shinjo. Only Magane survives as a complete pair.

A Marker at the Border of Two Provinces

What gives Magane its particular character is its setting. The mounds stand within a few hundred meters of the old border between Bizen Province, which contained the Okayama domain ruled by the Ikeda family, and Bitchu Province to the west, partitioned among smaller domains including Niwase. A traveler heading west from Okayama Castle saw Magane as the first ichirizuka after crossing into Bitchu. Heading east, it announced that Bizen lay just ahead. The site doubled as a quiet checkpoint of geography, the kind of in-between place where one administrative world ended and another began.

The road through Magane was also a junction. About three hundred meters west, near the approach to Kibitsu Shrine, branched the Konpira-ōrai, the pilgrim route that drew travelers south toward Kotohira-gū on Shikoku. Many pilgrims walked through here on their way to and from that shrine, and the area around the mounds developed accordingly with small shops, lodgings, and eventually the post town of Itakura-juku another 850 meters down the road. The post town no longer functions as such, but a few old gates and a stone lantern dedicated to Kibitsu, Konpira, and Yuga shrines still mark the spot.

Designation and Preservation

Magane Ichirizuka was added to the national register of historic sites on March 24, 1928, by Home Ministry Notification No. 70. The reason was straightforward. Of all the ichirizuka along the Sanyo road, this was one of the very few where the form of the original station survived intact, with mounds on both sides of the road, in their original positions, and with trees still rising from them.

The original trees, a black pine on the north mound and a Japanese hackberry on the south, eventually died. Saplings of the same species have since been replanted in the same positions, holding to the historical pairing as they grow. The site is managed by Okayama City.

What to Notice on a Visit

Begin by looking at the line of the road itself. It traces almost exactly the route of the old Sanyō-dō, running east and west through this small valley between the foothills of Kibi-no-Nakayama and the Naogoshi range. The two mounds sit on either side, the north one with its pine, the south with its hackberry, framing the highway as travelers would have seen it for two and a half centuries.

The choice of trees was not accidental. Pine carried associations with durability and longevity, and its evergreen needles kept the mound visible in winter. The hackberry was prized for its dense summer canopy, which threw practical shade over anyone pausing in the road below. Together they made an ichirizuka both useful and emblematic. A small explanatory marker stands beside each mound, in Japanese only. There is no gate, no entrance fee, no opening hours; the site is part of the road itself.

Around the Site

Magane sits within easy walking distance of two of western Japan's most significant shrines. Three hundred meters west, the cedar-lined approach leads to Kibitsu Shrine, the ichinomiya, or first-rank shrine, of former Bitchu Province, whose main hall is a National Treasure renowned for its rare hiyoku irimoya twin-gabled roof. Roughly two kilometers east, on the Bizen side of the old border, stands Kibitsuhiko Shrine, the ichinomiya of Bizen. Both enshrine deities associated with Prince Kibitsuhiko, a figure linked to one of the source stories behind the Momotaro folktale, and were historically venerated together as a single sacred ground known as Kibi-no-Nakayama.

The combination of a complete ichirizuka, two ichinomiya shrines, the remains of a post town, and the surviving traces of an Edo-period pilgrim route makes the area a rewarding short walk for anyone interested in the old roads of western Japan.