◆Looking for the Features of Old Japan◆

  Facing the long term stagnetion of economy, we are now forced to reflect the life-style and the feature of town. Under such a situation, The towns which have conserved the old feature of Stage-Town is attracting our attention.
  In Kiso area people began to conserve and revive the historical landscapes of their towns early on.

▲The street is crowded with many visiters.

  Into the landscape of town many aspects of history is anyhow congrgated.
  Now those towns which have been keeping historical landscapes are now envied by others so deeply.
  However there must have been a difficult time when they were forced to decide the surviving way. Then they seriously felt a crisis that they would be left behind the movement of modernizetion and industrialization.
  And since Post-War Aera until Economic Development Aera, the tendency and policy that every town would follow and immitate Tokyo, metropolis, were predominant throughout Japan .
  Under such a situation, people in those towns were forced to follow the trend or seek alternatives. They had to choose the way of town-making and the life-style.

  As a result of their efforts in long time, they made up the measure about conservetion of the tradition and aethsetics of town-landscape.
  Tsumago is one of those town.

  After Meiji revolution, the raiways and the roads have been constructed to built the transporting system connecting main big cities on the Pacific coast-side.
  Taumago had taken a important role as a stage-town of Kaido-system under Edo Shogunate government for over two centuries. But Thereafter the town has been left behind from the way for prosperity and got to downturn.
  However about a century later when the economic growth came a peak point in mid 1960s, people redisicovered the townscape keeping a shape of the stage-town in the late Edo period.

  In Tsumago they began to conserve their townscape as historic-cultural scene first in Japan.
  They established the people charter forbidding selling, lending their houses or lands to outside, and breaking them.
  They selectd the way compatible conserving the townscape with their economic life.
  Whenever I visit here, I am deeply impresed in fairness of the alternative.

Tsumago is encircled with
mountain-forests and greenfields

   Now they will hand down the great regacy of the traditional townscape to future.
  We would find the precious value of those which we have lost seriously.