was the name given to minor

route Route or routes may refer to: * Route (gridiron football), a path run by a wide receiver * route (command), a program used to configure the routing table * Route, County Antrim, an area in Northern Ireland * ''The Route'', a 2013 Ugandan film * Ro ...

s that created detours around the difficult crossings (or river crossings) of main routes during the

Edo period The or is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's 300 regional '' daimyo''. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengoku period, the Edo period was characteriz ...

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

. These routes could be found on many of the

Edo Five Routes The , sometimes translated as "Five Highways", were the five centrally administered routes, or ''kaidō'', that connected the ''de facto'' capital of Japan at Edo (now Tokyo) with the outer provinces during the Edo period (1603–1868). The mos ...

, as well as on other sub-routes that crossed the country.

Naming

When there were difficult passes or river crossings on the main routes, ''hime kaidō'' were established to avoid them. Because there were fewer travelers, less danger, a lower chance of an attack by bandits (compared with the main route they were avoiding), it was said that people could relax while traveling the route. It was for these reasons that women often chose to travel these routes, giving rise to the routes being called ''hime kaidō'' or ''onna kaidō'' ("women's route"). There were different definitions of what made a ''hime kaidō'', as some detours just went around one difficult area, while others were much longer and avoided most of the dangerous routes. Because of the various definitions, the

Nakasendō The , also called the ,Richard Lane, ''Images from the Floating World'' (1978) Chartwell, Secaucus ; pg. 285 was one of the five routes of the Edo period, and one of the two that connected Edo (modern-day Tokyo) to Kyoto in Japan. There were 6 ...

was sometimes referred to as a ''hime kaidō'', because the distance was much greater and the danger was much less than that of the Tōkaidō, which started and ended at the same location. Other features employed the same naming conventions, including hills. Some hills in front of temples and shrines that had steep gradients were called "men's hills" (男坂 ''otoko no saka''), while hills that were easier to climb were called "women's hills" (女坂 ''onna no saka'')

Notable hime kaidō

;Tōkaidō :Between

Mitsuke-juku was the twenty-eighth of the fifty-three stations of the Tōkaidō. It is located in what is now the central part of the city of Iwata, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan. The post station received its name, which means "with a view," because it was ...

and

Goyu-shuku was the thirty-fifth of the fifty-three stations of the Tōkaidō. It is located in Goyu-chō in the city of Toyokawa, Aichi Prefecture, Japan. A pine tree colonnade, one of the few remnants from the Edo period post town, is a well-known touri ...

, which bypassed six other post stations on the Tōkaidō.

Naming

Notable hime kaidō

See also