THE WAY OF THE SHOGUN 

The Way of the Shogun was hiking into the Kiso Mountains of Japan and it also had the dreamlike beauty of an anime fantasy. In 1810 ,A Japanese guidebook was written included dire warnings about supernatural threats,Solitary wayfarers met on remote trails might really be ghost,or magical animals in human form. 

  For two centuries the Nakasendo Way was a major pedestrian route that connected a string of villages providing lodging and sustenance for the shoguns, retainers and daimyo, or feudal lords, travelling between Tokyo and Kyoto.The trail and its villages were largely abandoned in the late 1800s as the power of the shoguns faded and as travellers between the two capitals began making the trek by train or automobile.

But in the 1960s Tsugamo and several other villages along the route began campaigns of rediscovery. Modern buildings were removed, and those remaining from the Edo period (1600-1868) were restored or reconstructed. Streets were repaved with period stone and closed to automobile traffic.

Curtains of gentle rain, the tail-end of a typhoon in the South China Sea, were drifting across worn cobblestones that had been laid four centuries ago, swelling the river rushing below and waterfalls that burbled in dense bamboo groves. And yet, every hundred yards or so, a brass bell was hung with an alarming sign: “Ring Hard Against Bears.”

 Only a few hours earlier, I had been in Tokyo among futuristic skyscrapers bathed in pulsing neon. Now I had to worry about encounters with carnivorous beasts? It seemed wildly unlikely, but, then again, travelers have for centuries stayed on their toes in this fairytale landscape.Beautiful women walking alone were particularly dangerous, it was thought, as they could be white foxes who would lure the unwary into disaster.

Looking for the soul of modern Japan on an ancient road once traveled by poets and samurai. The forest trail I was hiking into the Kiso Mountains of Japan had the dreamlike beauty of an anime fantasy. Curtains of gentle rain, the tail-end of a typhoon in the South China Sea, were drifting across worn cobblestones that had been laid four centuries ago, swelling the river rushing below and waterfalls that burbled in dense bamboo groves. 

And yet, every hundred yards or so, a brass bell was hung with an alarming sign: “Ring Hard Against Bears.” Only a few hours earlier, I had been in Tokyo among futuristic skyscrapers bathed in pulsing neon. Now I had to worry about encounters with carnivorous beasts? It seemed wildly unlikely, but, then again, travelers have for centuries stayed on their toes in this fairytale landscape. 

Beautiful women walking alone were particularly dangerous, it was thought, as they could be white foxes who would lure the unwary into disaster.

In 1789, the year Europe was plunging into the French Revolution, harbinger of decades of chaos in the West. At the same time here in rural Japan feudal, hermetic, entirely unique an era of peace and prosperity was underway in a society as intricate as a mechanical clock, and this remote mountain hostelry was welcoming a daily parade of traveling samurai, scholars, poets and sightseers.

Modern Japan seemed even more distant when I emerged from the woods into the hamlet of Otsumago. Not a soul could be seen in the only laneway. The carved wooden balconies of antique houses leaned protectively above, each one garlanded with chrysanthemums, persimmons and mandarin trees, and adorned with glowing lanterns. I identified my lodgings, the Maruya Inn, from a lacquered sign. It had first opened its doors .

It was the Eastern version of the Pax Romana. The new era had begun dramatically in 1600, when centuries of civil wars between Japan’s 250-odd warlords came to an end with a cataclysmic battle on the mist-shrouded plains of Sekigahara. The visionary, icily cool general Tokugawa Ieyasu a man described in James Clavell’s fictionalized account Shogun as being “as clever as a Machiavelli and as ruthless as Attila the Hun” formally became shogun in 1603 and moved the seat of government from Kyoto, where the emperor resided as a figurehead, to Edo (now Toyko), thus giving the era its most common name, “the Edo period.”

 He immediately set about wiping out all bandits from the countryside and building a new communication system for his domain. From a bridge in front of his palace in Edo, the five highways (called the Tokaido, Nakasendo, Nikko Kaido, Oshu Kaido and Koshu Kaido) spread in a web across crescent-shaped Honshu, largest of Japan’s four main islands.

This is where Shoguns religion mechanics began hammering in my coffin's nails. As I'd been dispatching troops from neighbouring Bungo to reinforce my main army the local Christian population took it as an opportunity to rise up against their Buddhist oppressors. Given that whenever the game gave me the choice to either spare of execute local Christian preachers I can understand why. Two moderately sized armies appeared in both Bungo and Buzen provinces. They pounced on the heroic defenders of Bungo who and with my small reinforcing army still 4 seasons away I threw in the towel.