Magome to Tsumago: Walking the Old Nakasendō

There were five great highways in Edo-period Japan, and the Nakasendō was the inland one — the road between Kyoto and Edo that went the long way, over the mountains, through sixty-nine post towns where travellers slept, ate and changed horses.

Almost all of it is under asphalt now. But in the Kiso valley in Nagano, a nine-kilometre stretch survives more or less as it was: stone paving, cedar forest, a waterfall, a pass at 790 metres, and a post town at each end that looks like the eighteenth century because the people who live there decided it would.

You can walk it in two and a half to three hours, send your bag ahead for ¥1,000, and sleep in a wooden inn where dinner is served on a low table by the woman who owns it.

It is, I think, the best short walk in Japan.

Why Tsumago looks like that

This is the part that makes the trip mean something, and almost nobody tells visitors.

In the 1960s, Japan's rapid growth was emptying the countryside. Tsumago was dying — a bypassed post town on a road nobody used any more. The residents could have sold up and left, and most villages in that position did.

Instead, in 1971, they signed a charter with three promises about the houses, the land, the fields and the forest along the old road:

売らない・貸さない・こわさない Don't sell it. Don't rent it out. Don't tear it down.

They meant it. Power lines were put underground with the help of the National Trust and the electricity company. Cars were pushed out of the street to car parks on the highway. Vending machines and signage were hidden. In 1976 the village became one of Japan's first designated preservation districts, and it became the model that other historic towns copied.

So when you walk into Tsumago and there is no wire in the sky and no machine glowing on a corner, you are not looking at a place that was lucky. You are looking at fifty years of a small community agreeing, repeatedly, to be poorer than they could have been.

That's worth knowing before you point a camera at it.

The walk

Distance: about 9km. Time: 2.5–3 hours at a normal pace, longer if you stop, and you should stop.

The pass — Magome-tōge — is at 790m, and it's also the border between Gifu and Nagano prefectures. Magome sits at roughly 600m, Tsumago at roughly 420m.

Which direction? Both are good and they're genuinely different walks:

• Magome → Tsumago is what most people do. You climb about 190m to the pass and then descend for the rest of the day. Less total climbing, and you finish in the more beautiful of the two towns.
• Tsumago → Magome is what the local tourist association suggests for an easier gradient: the climb from that side is longer but much gentler, where the Magome side is short and steep.
• Or skip the climb entirely. There's a bus to the pass, so you can start at the top and walk down. Nobody will think less of you.

Along the way: cedar forest, sections of original stone paving, the Odaki and Medaki waterfalls, and Ichikoku-tochi Tateba Chaya — a preserved rest house partway along where volunteers serve free tea. Sit down. Talk to them. This is not a tourist facility; it's a couple of local people keeping a two-hundred-year-old building warm.

The stone paving is slippery after rain, and there are handrails on the steep sections for a reason.

Send your bag ahead

This is the detail that turns the walk from a logistical problem into a pleasure, and it's the reason to plan the trip as Magome one night, walk, Tsumago the next.

The two tourist offices run a luggage forwarding service between Magome and Tsumago:

• ¥1,000 per bag
• Drop off by 11:30 (from 8:30) at the Magome or Tsumago tourist information office, Magome-shuku BASE, or your inn in Ōtsumago
• Collect from 13:00 to 17:00 at the other end
• Running 20 March to 30 November in 2026

Walk with a day bag and a water bottle. Your suitcase will be waiting.

Bear bells

There are bears in these mountains. This is normal and not dramatic — you almost certainly won't see one — but the local custom is to make noise so you don't surprise anything.

The tourist offices rent a bear bell for ¥100 (you pay ¥2,100 and get ¥2,000 back when you return it), or sell one for ¥2,000. There are also large bells mounted along the trail: ring them as you pass. It's oddly satisfying and it's the correct thing to do.

Staying in a minshuku

Both towns have minshuku — small family-run inns, usually eight rooms or fewer, in old wooden houses. This is the right way to do it, and it comes with the same unwritten rules as any Japanese shared lodging:

• Arrive by 17:00 and phone if you'll be late. Dinner is at a fixed time, usually around 18:00.
• Shoes off at the entrance, and swap the toilet slippers back when you leave the toilet.
• Dinner is what the house is making — river fish, mountain vegetables, sometimes horse or gohei-mochi, the local grilled rice cake with walnut miso. It's served to everyone at once. Say if you have an allergy when you book, not on the night.
• The bath is shared and it has hours. Onsen rules: wash first, towel out of the water. Sometimes it's a single bathroom used one party at a time — check how it works when you arrive.
• Walls are thin. Quiet from about nine.
• Cash. Many minshuku don't take cards.
• The building is old and made of wood. Be careful with anything hot, don't smoke indoors, and mind your head on the beams — genuinely, they were built for shorter people.

Book ahead. There aren't many rooms and weekends and autumn colour fill months in advance.

People live here

Both villages are lived in. The wooden houses along the street are homes, and some are shops on the ground floor with a family upstairs.

So: don't photograph through windows or doorways. Don't step into an entrance to get a better angle. Don't sit on someone's steps. Don't fly a drone. Keep your voice down in the evening after the day visitors leave — that hour, when Tsumago goes quiet and the lanterns come on and it is just you and the people who live there, is the best part of the whole trip, and it exists because the street is a neighbourhood rather than a set.

And spend money locally. Eat in the villages, buy the gohei-mochi, pay for tea. A preservation charter is a promise not to sell the buildings; it doesn't pay for a roof.

Getting there

• To Magome: shinkansen or limited express to Nakatsugawa, then a bus (about 30 minutes).
• From Tsumago: bus to Nagiso station (about 10 minutes), then the Chūō line.
• Both towns are reachable in half a day from Tokyo, Nagoya or Kyoto, which is why it works so well as a two-day break in the middle of a bigger trip.

Nagoya is the closest major city, and it happens to be where morning service comes from — a good breakfast before or after.

Why walk it

Because it's the rare experience that gives you something at both ends and in the middle.

The middle is a forest path with stones your feet land on that other feet have landed on for four hundred years. The ends are two villages that chose to stay themselves. And the thing joining them is a nine-kilometre decision to travel at the speed people used to travel.

You'll be finished by mid-afternoon. Have a bath, eat what you're given, and go to bed early.

Quick reference