All Road Leads to the Bridge

Nihonbashi

(Chuo City, Tokyo)

Nihonbashi district is one of the busiest districts in Tokyo. There are the Japanese wall street and famous modern and historical shopping departments. People and vehicles are crossing a busy bridge that spans the Nihonbashi River.

The bridge is called Nihonbashi, which means Japan Bridge in English. It is one of the most famous historic bridges in Japan, first built in 1603 under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate. The bridge was designated as the starting point for the Five Routes, the main state roads that connected the political center of Edo (the former name of Tokyo) to other regions of Japan. Among them, the most important and renowned route was the Tōkaidō, which spanned 488 km and connected Edo to Kyoto, where the Emperor resided. These roads were vital for the administration and control of the country, as well as for the transportation of goods and people.

The bridge was depicted in ukiyo-e paintings by artists such as Hiroshige, Hokusai, and Kunisada. In ukiyo-e prints, the travelers and peddlers with buckets hanging from a balance pole are walking on the bridge and ships are going up and down on the river. This scene expresses the liveliness of the town centered around this bridge.

The current bridge is made of stone and has two arches. It was modernized in 1911. The bridge is decorated with ornamental carvings of lions, and qilins, which are legendary hooved chimerical creatures. The lions with the symbol of Tokyo under its front paws are placed at four corners to protect the bridge. The qilins with wings are situated at the center of the parapets. Qilins do not have wings in their legend but they were given wings to add the image of flying from the starting point of the road. If you look at the center of the road, there is a bronze plaque that marks the zero milepost for measuring distances from Tokyo.

On the pillar of the bridge, there is a bronze plaque of “Nihonbashi” written by Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the 15th and final shogun of the Edo shogunate. He did not have any power or authority at that time as he already had voluntarily returned his political power to the emperor in 1867, ending the feudal system that had lasted for over 250 years. The Tokyo governor, however, asked him to write this inscription because he believed Yoshinobu was the right person to engrave the name of this historical bridge as a memory of the Edo era built by his ancestors.

Unfortunately, the bridge is partially obscured by an elevated highway that was built over it in 1964 during the Japanese economic miracle years. Although the highway is a symbol of the economic miracle of the 20th century, it spoils the scenery of the historical bridge from the 17th century. There are plans to relocate the highway underground in 2040.