was the fourth of the fifty-three stations of the Tōkaidō. It is located in Hodogaya-ku in the present-day city of

Yokohama is the second-largest city in Japan by population and the most populous municipality of Japan. It is the capital city and the most populous city in Kanagawa Prefecture, with a 2020 population of 3.8 million. It lies on Tokyo Bay, south of To ...

Kanagawa Prefecture is a prefecture of Japan located in the Kantō region of Honshu. Kanagawa Prefecture is the second-most populous prefecture of Japan at 9,221,129 (1 April 2022) and third-densest at . Its geographic area of makes it fifth-smallest. Kana ...

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 ...

. Occasionally, it is also written as .

History

Hodogaya-juku was established in 1601, and it was the westernmost post station in

Musashi Province was a province of Japan, which today comprises Tokyo Metropolis, most of Saitama Prefecture and part of Kanagawa Prefecture. It was sometimes called . The province encompassed Kawasaki and Yokohama. Musashi bordered on Kai, Kōzuke, Sagami, S ...

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 ...

. The ''

honjin The ''honjin'' at Inaba Kaidō's Ōhara-shuku.">Ōhara-shuku.html" ;"title="Inaba Kaidō's Ōhara-shuku">Inaba Kaidō's Ōhara-shuku. is the Japanese word for an inn for government officials, generally located in post stations (''shukuba'') dur ...

'' still belongs to the same family today as the one that owned it when it was first opened. Additionally, there is a stone

Buddha statue Much Buddhist art uses depictions of the historical Buddha, Gautama Buddha, which are known as Buddharūpa (literally, "Form of the Awakened One") in Sanskrit and Pali. These may be statues or other images such as paintings. The main figure in ...

that travelers often prayed to for safety while traveling along the Tōkaidō.''The stone Buddha and Pagoda''
. Yokohama City Hall. Accessed December 10, 2007. The classic

ukiyo-e Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surfac ...

print by

Andō Hiroshige Utagawa Hiroshige (, also ; ja, 歌川広重 ), born Andō Tokutarō (; 1797 – 12 October 1858), was a Japanese ''ukiyo-e'' artist, considered the last great master of that tradition. Hiroshige is best known for his horizontal-format l ...

(Hōeidō edition) from 1831 to 1834 depicts a bridge over a stream, with two porters carrying a closed ''

kago A is a type of litter used as a means of human transportation by the non-samurai class in feudal Japan and into the Meiji period The is an era of Japanese history that extended from October 23, 1868 to July 30, 1912. The Meiji era was ...

'' towards a village on the other side. By the bridge is a

soba Soba ( or , "buckwheat") is a thin Japanese noodle made from buckwheat. The noodles are served either chilled with a dipping sauce, or hot in a noodle soup. The variety ''Nagano soba'' includes wheat flour. In Japan, soba noodles can be found i ...

restaurant with waitresses standing in front beckoning travellers to enter.

Neighboring post towns

;Tōkaidō :

Kanagawa-juku was the third of the fifty-three stations of the Tōkaidō. It was located in Kanagawa-ku in the present-day city of Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. It was close to Kanagawa Port. Many of its historical artifacts were destroyed by the Gre ...

- Hodogaya-juku - Totsuka-juku Minor routes, including the Kanazawa-Kamakura-dō (金沢鎌倉道), the Hachiōji-dō (八王子道) and the Ōyama-dō (大山道), branched off of the Tōkaidō at Hodogaya-juku.

References

*Carey, Patrick. ''Rediscovering the Old Tokaido:In the Footsteps of Hiroshige''. Global Books UK (2000). *Chiba, Reiko. ''Hiroshige's Tokaido in Prints and Poetry''. Tuttle. (1982) *Taganau, Jilly. ''The Tokaido Road: Travelling and Representation in Edo and Meiji Japan''. RoutledgeCurzon (2004).

Notes

{{coord missing, Kanagawa Prefecture Stations of the Tōkaidō Stations of the Tōkaidō in Kanagawa Prefecture