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 send messages. Chiryu-juku sat at a critical geographic junction: it was the last station in Mikawa Province before travelers crossed into Owari, the domain that had produced Oda Nobunaga and reshaped Japan's history. Okazaki-shuku lay to the east, Narumi-juku to the west. For the average traveler covering roughly thirty kilometers per day, Chiryu marked the transition from eastern Japan's rural landscape to the urban density of the Nagoya region.

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 the most important in the area. The market was closely linked to the Chiryu Daimyojin, a venerated Shinto shrine that gave the town spiritual weight beyond its commercial life. Traders would arrive along the pine-shaded highway, their animals in tow, and the town would swell with the noise and energy of commerce. Despite the upheaval of the Meiji Restoration and the arrival of railroads that made horse transport increasingly obsolete, the market persisted. Remarkably, it continued well into the Showa period, a living tradition outlasting the world that had created it.

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 shogun's domain, a living declaration of authority. Two centuries later, the ukiyo-e master Ando Hiroshige walked the Tokaido and recorded each of its fifty-three stations in his celebrated Hoeido edition, published between 1831 and 1834. For Chiryu, he chose the horses and the pines: muscular animals beneath spreading branches, the highway stretching into the distance. The print became one of the most recognizable in the series, and the pine trees it depicted survived for over a century more, standing along the road until Typhoon Vera -- the devastating Isewan Typhoon of 1959 -- finally brought most of them down.

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 linger. The route of the highway can still be traced through the city, and local markers note where the post town once stood. The Chiryu Daimyojin shrine still receives worshippers. For those who know what they are looking at, the landscape reveals itself: the flat terrain where traders gathered, the road alignment that follows the ancient path, and the faint echo of a time when ten days of walking brought you to a town defined by horses, pine trees, and the rhythms of a road that connected the seats of power.