Kaempfer roads of Japan

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Engelbert Kaempfer on the old roads of Japan

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©　japantimes.co.jp.. 2020/02/08..


an illustration from Engelbert Kaempfer's "The History of Japan," (1727 version)
translated by Johann Caspar Scheuchzer.
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You met all kinds of people on the roads of old Japan — throngs of them. “An incredible number of people daily use the highways of Japan’s provinces — indeed, at certain times of the year, they are as crowded as the streets of a populous European city,” wrote Engelbert Kaempfer (1651-1716).

Physician, scholar, naturalist, explorer, Kaempfer was in Japan from 1690-92. Fifty years earlier Japan had barred its gates against the menacing outside world — an isolation it would maintain until the mid-19th century. The only foreigners admitted were a handful of Dutch and Chinese traders confined to the little island of Dejima off Nagasaki. Kaempfer, attached to the Dutch East India Company as a physician, writhed under the confinement but twice traveled to Edo (present-day Tokyo) as part the annual delegation that the Company was obliged to send for an audience with the shogun. His “History of Japan,” published posthumously in 1727, was a bestseller — Europe’s first full-length portrait of a remote, mysterious, inaccessible “heathen” land.

“Japanese travel more often than other people,” Kaempfer wrote — not overseas, for leaving the country could be a capital crime, but along the storied network of roads known as the Gokaido (Five Highways) linking Edo, the shogun’s capital, with the outer provinces and Kyoto, the imperial capital. Construction of these began early in the 17th century, symbolizing and reinforcing a national unity forged in battle and still fragile.

Most famous and frequented of the five was the Tokaido (East Sea Road). The appalling European roads of the day, scarcely improved since Roman times, prepared Kaempfer for a pleasant surprise: “The roads are … lined on both sides with a straight and thick row of fir trees to provide shade and enjoyment for the traveler. … The ground is always kept clean and level. … The road is diligently maintained due to certain sharing arrangements between neighboring villages and headmen and, like the floor of a farmhouse, is cleaned and swept daily.”

Recyclers needed no environmental crisis to spur them on: “Headmen have no problems keeping the road clean, since everything that might dirty the road is of use to the farmers living nearby, and one person vies with another to pick it up. …The children of the farmers gather horse manure for the fields the moment it drops, and the excrement and other droppings of the travelers are also collected and used in similar fashion.”

The Japanese as Kaempfer saw them were, unless very rich, very poor: “The farmhouses are so wretched and small that they can be sketched with a few strokes. … There are few household goods, many children, and much poverty, but people live happily off a little rice and a lot of field and mountain roots.”

Who was very rich? The daimyo, represented along the Tokaido by vast processions, en route to obligatory periodic sojourns in Edo, where a perilously insecure shogunate could keep an eye on potential rebels. Most traffic was pedestrian. The lord, attended by up to 1,000 retainers — counselors, bodyguards, a ceremonial escort, servants, porters, quartermasters, scribes, cooks, grooms for the decorative and pack horses — traveled in a palanquin.

Who else would travel in a land where every movement was suspect and under official surveillance? Checkpoints were everywhere — the Tokaido bristled with 53 — and inspection of travel permits rigorous. There was a loophole, however — the pilgrimage. Degrees of religious devotion varied. Prayer at temple or shrine was its own reward, no doubt, but so was the journey itself, the pleasure of the open road, and in the Japanese pilgrimages of early modern times, we see the bud of the massive industry known today as tourism.

Kaempfer took it all in, reveling in the spectacle, finding much to admire. Japan’s peace, order and cleanliness, its cultivation of and respect for beauty, more than made up for its prison-warden approach to government in the eyes of a European whose native Germany had been wracked by decades of religious warfare.

“Our highway is well supplied with inns,” he wrote. “The best ones are found in those post stations that are so well furnished that even the important lords … stop here and occupy rooms.”

Each inn had a bathhouse, “for people in this country are used to bathing daily when traveling; the bath not only removes the sweat but also the tiredness of the limbs.”

Eating houses and roadside food stalls “are somewhat meager and wretched, because they belong to poor people who have to scrounge for food, but there is always something to attract the eye of the traveler. It might be a verdant courtyard with its flowering trees, a small decorative hill, running water, and so on.”

Beggars abounded. “Many (pilgrims) have to beg for their board and food along the way; because there are so many of them, travelers are constantly accosted, and this is a great nuisance for people going to the court, even though they approach with bare head and meek voice and say only once, ‘My dear lord, please give a pilgrim … a coin for his journey.'”

Among the pilgrims were vagrant children: “Yes, even unruly children who are to be punished for their misdeeds often run away from their parents to (the main Shinto shrine at) Ise, and when they return with a letter of indulgence they must be absolved from any punishment.”

What would a child feel, trudging alone in such a crowd, seeking “indulgence”? One imagines children streetwise in ways long lost to us, and yet fearful, too, in ways long lost to us. The ubiquitous prostitutes, each one “calling out to travelers and lovingly offering her warm fare” — for “every public inn on the island of Nippon (Honshu) is at the same time a public brothel” — might not be too disconcerting, but what of the public execution grounds along the roads? “Any transgression,” Kaempfer observes, “invariably results in the death sentence.” He was not altogether disapproving (as we shall see in next month’s column) — but what child could pass by without trembling?

And foxes. Foxes, too, were ubiquitous. They haunted humans, bewitched them. To them, too, we shall return next month.

Michael Hoffman’s book, “In the Land of the Kami: A Journey into the Hearts of Japan,” is currently on sale.



. Kaido 街道 Highways - ABC Index .


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"Kaempfer's Japan': Tokugawa Edo as never before

Engelbert Kaempfer, German physician and historian, first arrived in Japan in 1690 to take up the position of physician at the Dutch trading agency on the island of Deshima in Nagasaki Harbor. Although Japan had already secluded itself, the Dutch traders were allowed a certain amount of freedom. This included traveling to Edo (now Tokyo) on the annual tribute mission. Kaempfer went twice, in 1691 and 1692.

At that time, the middle of the Genroku period, Edo was already a metropolis, with a population of 1 million people. It was orderly, clean and “modern.” Nonetheless, in Shinagawa “the execution grounds was an ugly sight for the traveler: Several human heads and disfigured bodies were lying thrown together . . . a large emaciated dog was rummaging with its hungry snout in a decaying human body.”

The observant Kaempfer noticed that this prosperous metropolis was somewhat untidy because “it was not planned at one time but gradually grew to its present size.” At the same time, he was favorably impressed by the grandness of the shogun’s castle and the person of the shogun himself, whom he found “a clever, just and strict ruler.”

This was Tsunayoshi, a leader who does not now often enjoy such adjectives. Not that Kaempfer actually saw him. He and his fellow merchants had to crawl, face down, into his presence, and crawl back out in the same position. In addition, the ruler and his courtiers were behind latticed screens.

But if Kaempfer did not get to see much of Tsunayoshi, the shogun got to see a lot of him. “He had us take off our ceremonial robes … had us pay compliments to each other, then dance, jump, pretend to be drunk, speak Japanese, read Dutch, draw, sing, put on our coats, then take them off again.”

But even while “providing amusement and performing innumerable other monkey-tricks,” Kaempfer kept his eyes open. Though given little freedom and often locked up in the various inns in which he stayed on these processions, he nonetheless amassed an enormous amount of information.

Nothing was judged too minor to be noticed. He put down what they ate: “a piece of boiled bream in brown soup . . . and finally two pieces of lemon with sugar”; and what they saw: “The ascent [of Mount Fuji] takes three days, but the descent three hours thanks to a wicker basket which is tied around the hips to slide down.”

He also put down what he was told. There are sections on geography, geology, flora and fauna; there are genealogies of deities and emperors, and much, much more. As the historian C.R. Boxer has said, “the amount of valuable and accurate information to be found in Kaempfer is astonishing.” An even more impressive tribute was paid by a somewhat later Japanese scholar who stated how “terrible” it was that Europeans had acquired such wonderfully precise information.

Guarded, watched, spied upon — one wonders how the man managed to keep such an accurate record of what he saw and what he did. He suggests one of his methods when he mentions that he often questioned curious guests “while cordially serving them European liqueurs.”

Also he was fortunate to have had as assistant “a learned young man” who had been sent to study medicine with him. The administrator allowed the relationship and “permitted this clever fellow to remain with me for the whole two years of my stay and to travel with me twice to the shogunal court.” History is silent as to what happened to the clever fellow once Kaempfer returned to Europe in 1692.

Perhaps nothing, because these findings were not published until much later. The first publication was in 1727, in English, printed in London as “The History of Japan.” It became a best seller at once although the author, dead in 1716, reaped nothing from it. And though the manuscripts have long been published in the original German and translated into other languages, including Japanese, that early English edition has been, until now, all that was available.

How welcome then is this new translation, fully annotated, with notes, glossaries, a number of interesting appendixes and the full scholarly paraphernalia that such a massive undertaking demands. Beatrice Bodart-Bailey has been scrupulous, and this edition of Kaempfer now supersedes all others.

Among its many qualities is the portrait of Kaempfer himself that emerges. He is curious, attentive and often maddeningly methodical. He is also fair to a fault (most adverse opinions are due to the political intentions of the first English translations), is rarely given to moral judgments and is for his time most unusually cosmopolitan. He said that in his various journeys he was inspired by the hope of finding the lost Asian courts of Alexander the Great. He instead found something much more real. To him we owe a vanished Genroku Japan, alive again before us, on the page.

- reference source : japan times 1999/06/29 -



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