You met all kinds of people on the roads of old Japan ¡ª throngs of them. ¡°An incredible number of people daily use the highways of Japan¡¯s provinces ¡ª indeed, at certain times of the year, they are as crowded as the streets of a populous European city,¡± wrote Engelbert Kaempfer (1651-1716).

Physician, scholar, naturalist, explorer, Kaempfer was in Japan from 1690-92. Fifty years earlier Japan had barred its gates against the menacing outside world ¡ª an isolation it would maintain until the mid-19th century. The only foreigners admitted were a handful of Dutch and Chinese traders confined to the little island of Dejima off Nagasaki. Kaempfer, attached to the Dutch East India Company as a physician, writhed under the confinement but twice traveled to Edo (present-day Tokyo) as part the annual delegation that the Company was obliged to send for an audience with the shogun. His ¡°History of Japan,¡± published posthumously in 1727, was a bestseller ¡ª Europe¡¯s first full-length portrait of a remote, mysterious, inaccessible ¡°heathen¡± land.

¡°Japanese travel more often than other people,¡± Kaempfer wrote ¡ª not overseas, for leaving the country could be a capital crime, but along the storied network of roads known as the Gokaido (Five Highways) linking Edo, the shogun¡¯s capital, with the outer provinces and Kyoto, the imperial capital. Construction of these began early in the 17th century, symbolizing and reinforcing a national unity forged in battle and still fragile.