was the thirty-second of the fifty-three stations of the Tōkaidō. It is located in Kosai,

Shizuoka Prefecture is a prefecture of Japan located in the Chūbu region of Honshu. Shizuoka Prefecture has a population of 3,637,998 and has a geographic area of . Shizuoka Prefecture borders Kanagawa Prefecture to the east, Yamanashi Prefecture to the northea ...

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 ...

. 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 ...

, it was the westernmost post station of

Tōtōmi Province was a province of Japan in the area of Japan that is today western Shizuoka Prefecture. Nussbaum, Louis-Frédéric. (2005). "''Tōtōmi''" in . Tōtōmi bordered on Mikawa, Suruga and Shinano Provinces. Its abbreviated form name was . The or ...

History

Originally, Shirasuka-juku was located very close to the shore of the ocean. However, in the earthquake of 1707, the earthquake and its

tsunami A tsunami ( ; from ja, 津波, lit=harbour wave, ) is a series of waves in a water body caused by the displacement of a large volume of water, generally in an ocean or a large lake. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other underwater explo ...

devastated the region. After that, the post station was moved to its present location on a plateau. Before the 1707 earthquake, it was recorded to have 27 inns for travelers, making it a middle-sized post station. When the post station was decommissioned in 1889, it was replaced with the new town of Shirasuka, which later merged with the city of Kosai in 1955. During the

Meiji period The is an era of Japanese history that extended from October 23, 1868 to July 30, 1912. The Meiji era was the first half of the Empire of Japan, when the Japanese people moved from being an isolated feudal society at risk of colonization ...

, the

Tōkaidō Main Line The is a major Japanese railway line of the Japan Railways Group (JR Group) network, connecting and stations. It is long, not counting its many freight feeder lines around the major cities. The high-speed Tōkaidō Shinkansen largely parallel ...

was established. However, the train line did not come through Kosai and major developments in the area were kept to a minimum. As a result, there are still a few areas with buildings from the

in existence today. There is also a historical archives museum that was established to mark the 400th anniversary of the founding of the post station, with the purpose of expanding knowledge of the culture and history of the post station.Shirasuka-juku Archives Museum
. City of Kosai. Accessed September 19, 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 ...

(''Hōeido'' edition) from 1831–1834 depicts a ''

daimyō were powerful Japanese magnates, feudal lords who, from the 10th century to the early Meiji era, Meiji period in the middle 19th century, ruled most of Japan from their vast, hereditary land holdings. They were subordinate to the shogun and n ...

'' procession on ''

sankin-kōtai ''Sankin-kōtai'' ( ja, 参覲交代/参覲交替, now commonly written as ja, 参勤交代/参勤交替, lit=alternate attendance, label=none) was a policy of the Tokugawa shogunate during most of the Edo period of Japanese history.Jansen, M ...

'', heading towards Edo from one of the domains in eastern Japan.

Neighboring post towns

;Tōkaidō :

Arai-juku was the thirty-first of the fifty-three stations of the Tōkaidō. It is located in the city of Kosai, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan. During the Edo period, it was located in Tōtōmi Province. The ''kanji'' for the post station were originally ...

- Shirasuka-juku -

Futagawa-juku was the thirty-third of the fifty-three stations of the Tōkaidō. It is located in what is now the city of Toyohashi, Aichi Prefecture, Japan. It was the easternmost post station in Mikawa Province. History Futagawa-juku was established in ...

References

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

History

Neighboring post towns

Further reading

References