Ban on wheeled vehicles

The Ban on wheeled vehicles is presented as both a response to Japan’s difficult terrain and a rule that orders travel by rank. On the road from Mishima toward Yedo, carriages are absent: most people walk, while horses and palanquins are restricted to those entitled to use them. The rule turns the shape of the landscape into part of everyday social regulation.

Definition and Rationale

A carriage is explained as a vehicle with wheels, and wheeled travel is said to be forbidden to everyone except the Emperor. The stated practical reasons are Japan’s steep roads, its many rivers and streams, and the damage wheels would do to road surfaces. Between Mishima and Yedo, travelers may have to cross roughly sixty streams; many cannot be bridged, making wheeled vehicles difficult to use even apart from the ban.

The account distinguishes this restriction from a simple lack of available transport. A traveler cannot hire a horse or palanquin merely because he can afford one: permission depends on rank or an authorized exception. The rule therefore controls who may use particular forms of transport, not just which vehicles are suited to the roads.

Exceptions and Rank

The Emperor is the sole stated exception to the ban on wheeled vehicles, and even his travel by carriage is limited to a few ceremonial ri in Kyoto on a special road. For other travelers, horses and palanquins are permitted chiefly to important people, including daimyos and samurai, though not to every samurai.

Doctors, the very old, and the very sick may also travel by horse or palanquin, but only with written permission from their liege lord. That exception makes illness or age insufficient on its own: access is mediated by authorization. Peasants and commoners are expected to walk, and the explanation casts walking as healthier while also presenting the exclusion of lower-status travelers from privileged transport as a sensible social order.

Travel and the Social Order

The rule is encountered in the ordinary movement of people along the Tokaido, where travelers carry their belongings on foot and pack horses are few. The repeated crossings of streams make the physical inconvenience concrete, while the absence of carriages shows how transport customs shape the visible rhythm of the road.

Its practical rationale and its hierarchy operate together. Steep routes and unbridged waterways make wheeled travel problematic, but the regulations also reserve mobility by horse or palanquin for people of sufficient standing or those granted written leave. The rule thus presents travel as an activity governed by both terrain and social permission.