Matsudaira Sadanobu and vehicles

[Jordan Sand]

Colleagues,

Can anyone help me find a source for Matsudaira Sadanobu's position concerning vehicular traffic on the highways? I have read Kodama Kōta on the history of transport in the Tokugawa period along with a couple of related articles I found online. A few non-authoritative sources (blogs, etc.) state that Nakai Chikuzen recommended in his Sōbō kigen that the bakufu should permit wheeled horse carts for efficiency of transport but that Sadanobu rejected this proposal. His rejection is explained variously as because (1) he deemed it a luxury; (2) it would present a military threat; and (3) it would put porters in some post towns out of work. I am particularly intrigued by this last explanation, which accords with Constantine Vaporis's explanation of the continued use of porters to carry people across the Ōi River (Breaking Barriers, p55). I would like to see Sadanobu's own words on the subject, but I haven't turned up any print source either recording or discussing Sadanobu's response. I start to wonder if all of the answers I have seen are merely conjectures based on the general tenor of the Kansei reforms and Sadanobu's conservatism. If someone on the list has published on the subject, please forgive my ignorance.

thank you,

Jordan

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Jordan Sand
Professor of Japanese History and Culture

Georgetown University / Kokugakuin University

[Jordan Sand]

Pardon, that should be Chikuzan (中井竹山).

JS

[Beatrice Bodart-Bailey]

Hi Jordan,

If you look at Engelbert Kaempfer's detailed description of travelling from Nagasaki to Edo in late 17th century Japan (in my Kaempfer's Japan: Tokugawa Culture Observed, Hawai'i UP, 1999) you'll find relative few stretches a cart with horses could have been used. Moreover, the cost of the upkeep of the highways would increase dramatically considering the damage the wheels would have caused. As it was, some sections between Mishima and Hakone were so easily eroded by heavy rains and usage that they were paved with cobble stones. Very painful in a cart with no springs, as would be other parts of the road. Some sections were so steep that even horses with riders could not manage and those with no right to the use of a palanquin (norimono) were carried up and down mountains in what practically consisted "of no more than the round bottom of a basket, with two handles running up to the height of the small roof" (p. 246).

There was, moreover, the idea that shortening the time required to approach Edo would be dangerous as it would not permit the bakufu sufficient preparations to stop someone considered dangerous. For this reason, only cargo boats were permitted to approach Edo along the sea route. Daimyo processions had to take the slower and less comfortable route by land. For the same reason, a speedier river crossing by boat or the construction of bridges with wide spans that would withstand floods were generally not permitted.

Best,

Beatrice.

Beatrice M. Bodart-Bailey

Honorary Professor, Australian National University, College of Asia and the Pacific

Professor emerita, Otsuma Women’s University, Tokyo

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[Rômulo Ehalt]

Dear Prof. Bodart-Bailey,

That is quite interesting considering the Jesuits extolled Xavier’s tenacity in making the journey from Kyushu to Kinai entirely on foot in the mid-sixteenth century. I imagine conditions were even more grueling back then.

Best,

Rômulo Ehalt

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[Tim Screech]

In writing my semi-bio of Sadanobu long ago (The Shogun’s Painted Culture) I read a great deal of Sadanobu’s work, but I don’t recall him ever mentioning this. As Beatrice notes, wheels rut roads be degrade them. All foreign travellers in the Edo Period extol the quality of the highways and none (I think) ever suggested that introducing wheeled vehicles would be an improvement. It feels rather Eurocentric to suggest that wheels are somehow necessarily better.

Timon Screech

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[Jordan Sand]

My thanks for these sensible replies to my question regarding Matsudaira Sadanobu and wheeled vehicles. Constantine Vaporis’s excellent Breaking Barriers, my chief source concerning management of the Tokugawa highway system, covers the issue well and confirms Tim's point, noting that foreign visitors from John Saris in the early 17^th century to Rutherford Alcock in the 1860s all praised the evenness of the Tokaido and other highways. Thunberg pointed to the lack of wheeled carts rutting the road surface as the reason. Wheeled carts were allowed between Kyoto, Fushimi, and Ōtsu, which resulted in damage to the roadway. Certainly, the problem of maintenance provided one good reason for the bakufu to restrict the use of wheeled vehicles on most of the highways.

Writing about bridges, Constantine suggests we should not overemphasize the defense explanation, since many bridges were built entering directly into the capital. Observers stated that some rivers were impossible to bridge. The Ōi is the most famous example. But here is where bakufu policies intended to protect people’s livelihoods also seem to enter. This was my initial point of interest in Nakai Chikuzan’s proposal to allow wheeled vehicles and Sadanobu’s alleged rejection. As Constantine notes, locals in the post towns on either side of the river depended on providing lodging and porters to travelers. They protested against attempts by Edo entrepreneurs to start a ferry service and the bakufu seems to have accepted their position. Similarly, pack-horse drivers objected to the use of carts, and their interests seem to have been acknowledged. I have seen Nakai Chikuzan’s modest proposal (and it is modest), and I was hoping to see the words of Sadanobu’s response, to hear it from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, that the bakufu was allowing traffic to remain slow so as to protect post-towns and pack-horse drivers. But it sounds likely that that response has not come down to us, if he ever bothered to respond.

I agree with Tim that it is faintly Eurocentric—or perhaps naively extolling speed as progress—to suggest that wheeled transport is better. If we consider the many baleful effects that wheeled vehicles eventually brought in their wake (I write this while listening to the dull roar of rush hour on the highways entering Washington, DC), we might have been better off continuing to walk. But the point I am trying to pursue is not about the superiority of wheels, but about the bakufu’s social and economic priorities. Viewed from the other side of the Meiji Restoration, they remain striking. Ferry service was introduced across the Ōi in 1871, and a bridge followed in 1879. Admittedly, the bridge had to be rebuilt a few times. But the porterage business the two local post-towns had depended on for centuries was decimated almost overnight. (a colleague on the list privately shared with me the link to a fine website about the Ōi crossing by the Hamamatsu branch of the Kokudo kōtsūshū, which is here: https://www.cbr.mlit.go.jp/hamamatsu/road/route1/toukaidou_detail_02.html). Although the cost of road maintenance was doubtless high on the list of reasons the bakufu did not allow vehicles along most of the highways, the continued employment of post-town residents in their accustomed occupations seems always to have been a significant factor as well.

Jordan

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[Howell, David L]

If I may add a small footnote to Jordan Sand’s latest. According to Robert Hellyer (Green with Milk and Sugar, pp. 72–73), porters left unemployed by the new ferries across the Ōi River took up tea farming in Makinohara, a former commons occupied mostly by direct retainers of the Tokugawa shogunate who likewise had to support themselves by farming. Hellyer says the porters lived near to, but segregated from, the snooty samurai-cum-dirt farmers. Since Makinohara was part of the short-lived Sunpu domain—the main Tokugawa house’s home after the fall of the shogunate—their experience underscores the idea that protecting employment rather than national defense concerns lay behind the prohibition of a ferry or bridge.

David

David L. Howell
Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of Japanese History
Professor of History

Harvard University

Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
2 Divinity Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02138
dho...@fas.harvard.edu

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[Jordan Sand]

I must correct myself again: the principle advantage of wheeled vehicles at the time was not speed but labor-saving efficiency. My point is generally the same, though, since this too was presumably not something the bakufu felt a compelling need to prioritize in most cases.

And incidentally, I decided to ask our friend ChatGPT what it thought about the matter. Its answer was not enlightening, but among the sources it listed in the sidebar was this very conversation we are having on PMJS, a reminder that we are all being "scraped" as we speak.

Jordan

[Amy Stanley]

Hi everyone,

This is a great discussion!

 I think there are two separate issues regarding post station employment/packhorses - one is whether transportation should remain slow, and the other is whether using wheels would put porters out of work. I can see why it might have been desirable to regulate speed - already, people could walk past a few stations a day on the Nakasendō or Tōkaidō, and this meant the stations were always competing for *paying* (that is, private) travelers. This is why they all wanted to establish as much prostitution as possible - and why I ended up knowing a lot about post stations! 

The livelihood and employment of porters seems like more of a mixed bag. As far as I remember, there were never enough porters for all the official traffic, which is why there was so much contention between sukegō (support villages) and the shogunate, which came to a head at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The sukegō were pressured to supply more and more horses and porters, which they resented. So if anything there was a labor *shortage* on the major roads - for official travelers, at least.

Meanwhile, the porters themselves ended up being kind of transient migrants who lived in crowded back rooms of station dispatchers - not the kind of nice, stable agricultural workers the shogunate usually concerned themselves with. And then these “porters” ended up forming gangs and engaging in highway robbery - there are complaints about this as early as the middle of the eighteenth century. (The hikyaku are a different story - they’re private and they’re actually the ones angry about the porter/outlaw situation. Maybe the shogunate wanted to make sure *they* had business?) But I think it’s just as safe to assume the shogunate might have wanted to get rid of all of these people rather than making sure they continued to be gainfully employed. 

Amy 

On Feb 4, 2026, at 10:39 AM, Jordan Sand <sa...@georgetown.edu> wrote:



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