Today I'm reading Edo e no shinshiten 江戸への新視点 Shûji Takashina, Yuko Tanaka 高階秀爾 田中優子 (2006); the article "Travel" 旅 by Kanamori Atsuko 金森敦子. Kanamori Atsuko has written one of the major books about Shokyûni, so she's someone I should follow.
The article starts out talking about the "closed country" policy of the Edo period, then brings up Kaempfer. While Kaempfer, being a foreigner, obviously had less time on the ground than did residents of Japan at the time, it's interesting and valuable to read his work because he writes about things that the average person wouldn't think of noticing, since he has an outsider's perspective. For instance, he points out how clean the Tôkaidô highway was. This would be unexpected, considering how much rubbish travelers would presumably generate, since they were riding horses or throwing out used straw sandals and even the trees along the roadside might be expected to litter the place with pine needles and so forth. However, it was clean to a surprising degree, Kaempfer says.
This can be accounted for because trash was treasure, from the perspective of people who lived along the highway. Horse manure was collected for fertilizer; pine straw and similar things could be used for fuel. (Unwittingly, perhaps, Kanamori gives us a nice sustainability angle here.) He also says he's amazed at the sheer number of people on the road. There are far, far more than what you'd expect to see in Europe. More people in Japan traveled.
Kanamori says that one of the best examples of travelers during this time were daimyô (lords) and their retinues, who had to make the trip between their home provinces and Edo on a regular basis, i.e., every other year. Since there were about a total of 260-70 daimyô, that meant a pretty large number were on the road. Big travel months were the Fourth Month for the daimyô, and for ordinary people, the First through the Third, the agricultural off-season. Aside from that, retainers would travel on various duties, as would merchants, and their were always a lot of pilgrims visiting various temples and shrines. Kaempfer says of Ise Shrine, while pilgrimage could happen any time, spring was a big season for it, and people would go together in huge groups and the roads would be full of them.
Some more interesting points about Ise pilgrimage: Ise and its environs were crowded with places to stay, from fancy luxury inns for the wealthy and cheap flophouses for the poor. There were also lots of entertaining things to do there besides the pilgrimage. Kanemori calls it a "wonderland." Thus you could well decide to go, whether you were a strict believer or not.
Also, while travel was expensive then as it is now, even if you ran out of money it wasn't that difficult to raise funds along the way, since people felt it was lucky to give money to pilgrims.
Even more interesting is the section on young people traveling. Apparently it was not uncommon for teenagers to run off and join a group traveling to Ise, or even children under the age of 10. You could tell that they'd run away because a lot of them were dressed in summer clothes even in the winter. Parents were not supposed to know, though in some cases they did but didn't stop them, because they assumed that facing the privations of travel was a good way to get their kids to grow up a bit.
Some other interesting points: While it was possible to use official services to send word home, people often gave letters to travelers going back in the direction of home. Also, a lot of people didn't actually carry their luggage, but used luggage forwarding services that would carry it between post towns (just like you can between Magome and Tsumago today). Thus when you see woodblock prints with travelers, the fact that they aren't dragging around their bags isn't artistic license.
Is she getting all this from Kaempfer, I wonder? I need to take a look at Kaempfer.
