Qualla: Station Thirty-Nine: Where Horses Met the Highway

Station Thirty-Nine: Where Horses Met the Highway: Introduction

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ten days of walking from Nihonbashi in Edo, past rice paddies, river crossings, and mountain passes, and a traveler on the Tokaido highway would finally reach the westernmost post town in Mikawa Province. Chiryu-juku was not the grandest of the fifty-three stations, nor the most scenic, but it had something none of the others could claim: a horse market so thriving that the master printmaker Hiroshige chose it as the defining image of the place. In his famous Hoeido series of woodblock prints from the early 1830s, station thirty-nine is all horses -- powerful, muscular animals tethered beneath the spreading branches of a pine tree that Tokugawa Ieyasu himself had ordered planted along the roadside.

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Station Thirty-Nine: Where Horses Met the Highway: The Road That Built a Nation

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Tokaido was more than a highway; it was the spine of Edo-period Japan, connecting the shogun's capital at Edo with the imperial court at Kyoto. Fifty-three post towns, or shukuba, punctuated the route, each one a regulated stop where travelers could rest, change horses, and s...

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Station Thirty-Nine: Where Horses Met the Highway: Hooves on the Tokaido

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every spring, from late April into early May, Chiryu transformed. Its annual horse market drew buyers, traders, and onlookers from across the region. Horses were essential to Edo-period Japan -- for transport, agriculture, and military readiness -- and Chiryu's market was one of ...

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Station Thirty-Nine: Where Horses Met the Highway: Hiroshige's Ink and Ieyasu's Pines

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate, ordered that Japanese red pine trees be planted along the Tokaido through and around Chiryu-juku. The pines served a practical purpose -- shade for travelers on the exposed highway -- but they also marked the road as the sho...

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Station Thirty-Nine: Where Horses Met the Highway: What Remains on the Old Road

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Modern Chiryu is a small city in Aichi Prefecture, swallowed by the suburban sprawl of the greater Nagoya metropolitan area. The Tokaido itself has been overlaid by modern roads, and the horse market exists only in memory and in Hiroshige's print. But traces of the old station li...

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