As part of my great endeavor to walk all of the five highways of old Japan (the go kaidō, or 五街道), this summer a friend and I set out to walk the shortest of the five, the old Nikkō Kaidō from Nihonbaashi to Nikkō and its main attraction, the Tōshōgū, the mausoleum honoring the first shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu. The distance for this journey is not too great, only around 140 km. Walking an average of around 30 km a day, the goal is reachable in only five days, although if you did not need to return to Tokyo after each walk and then later return to where you left off, a very time consuming thing made possible by there now being rail lines along the entire route, you could easily do it in three and a half days.

Unlike the old Tōkaidō road linking Edo and Kyoto, or today Tokyo and Kyoto, there is not a lot of famous foods along the route. And this is why my Tōkaidō walk friends did not want to travel the old Nikkō road with me. So instead my friend Gerhard and I did the walk.

Sure enough, just like my friends said, there is not a lot to eat along the road between Tokyo and Nikkō. The top three places along the way for interesting or famous foods were first, Sōka, at the end of the first day’s walk; Utsunomiya, a bit after the end of the third stage; and finally, Nikkō. Sōka, in Saitama Prefecture, is best known for its senbei, so famous that Sōka Senbei is a popular style of rice cracker throughout the region. Utsunomiya is famous for its gyoza, and for having the most gyoza shops per capita in Japan. Nikkō is famous for several somewhat obscure foods, including yuba (ゆば or湯葉, mizu yōkan (水羊羹), and tamari tsuke (たまり着け).

Yuba, sometimes called tōfu skin in English, is the semi-solid film that forms on top of soy milk when it is heated. It can be served as sashimi or in rolls of many layers, alone or with soba noodles. I have yet to discover why it is so popular in Nikkō (it seems that half the restaurants serve yuba ryōri). Mizu yōkan is a Japanese confection made from an (red bean paste, kanten (agar), and sugar. One mizu yōkan shop has been there since 1787. Unlike not knowing why yuba is so popular in Nikkō, my wife and I can up with a theory that it might have been some sort of Edo period nutrition or power bar, something travelers could easily carry on the road and eat for energy. Tamari tsuke is interesting as tamari is not otherwise used. Instead, people seem to primarily use a local shoyu that is extremely salty, probably due to the history of very strong salt being sent to the north while milder salts stayed in Edo.

There was one thing food related along the entire route that was interesting: sake. We came across some interesting and very old sake shops, as well as many local brands I had never seen before. I brought several bottles home when the opportunity presented itself.

One thing bad about Nikkō is that restaurants for the most part close early. We had to clear out of a decent craft beer brewery bar at 5:00! Not wanting to dine in the hotel’s French restaurant, we did a quick internet search and came up with one place that looked promising for dinner, Shiori (栞). It turned out to be very, very good, and cheap. We had age dashi tōfu, yuba sashimi, kaki fry (Hiroshima oysters), kara-age, and more, plus several beers and sakes, all for ¥14,000—for four people. Not bad. It was so good we went back the next day for lunch, a meal that was responsible for us getting to the

Tōshōgū just after it closed at 3:30. At least we were able to stroll through the grounds among the enormous sugi cedar trees, trees that dwarfed the 350 year old trees that lined most of the road we walked that day. I guess we need to go back, maybe the next time by train.