Tsumago-juku

A historic town in Nagiso, Nagano Prefecture, and the forty-second of the sixty-nine post towns on the Nakasendō, the road that connected Edo with Kyoto. Before that it was the tenth of eleven stations on the Kisoji, a minor trade route through the Kiso Valley, and it was prosperous and cosmopolitan enough to run on currency. Residents began restoring the place in 1968; by 1971 some twenty houses were done and a charter agreed that nothing in Tsumago should be sold, hired out, or destroyed. The government made it a Nationally Designated Architectural Preservation Site in 1976.