The Nakasendō has a bewildering amount of different kinds of designs and looks for the signs, markers and stones along the way. It’s not so easy either that a specific section only has of one type of design, although that happens infrequently. Regardless of exactly how all the different signs look you can divide them into four broad types.

• Signs that tell you that you are on the Nakasendō in a general sense.
• Signs that tell you that you are on the Nakasendō by marking a specific historic site or event. For instance signs for the various ichirizuka (milestones) and shukuba (post stations).
• Signs that tell you which way to turn at intersections and at other possibly difficult sections.
• No signs at all

While it is rather facetious to list “no signs” as a type of sign, there are long stretches of the path with no signage at all, where you have to rely 100% on maps you’ve brought with you.

The Nakasendō doesn’t make sudden turns off the road you’re walking on very often at all, so when you have to decide whether you should continue straight in an intersection or if you whould turn, the answer is almost always to continue straight on. However, when this isn’t true it’s easy to run into trouble when the signs are missing from that particular intersection. And sometimes there is a sign to tell you turn, but it’s suddenly of a completely different type to the ones you’ve become used to, making you miss it anyway.

For instance, between Iwamurada-shuku and Shionada-shuku the signs are usually white with brown text. Then suddenly you encounter the green one instead, and it’s even set in the wrong direction, ie the text is only easily visible if you’re coming from the other direction.

The risks of missing this small green sign is indeed rather huge. In this particular case, however, it’s not that important if you happen to continue on the main road instead of turning off the road as the Nakasendō merges with it again quite quickly. But if you’re hiking the Nakasendō, you want to hike on the Nakasendō, right, and not the modern road next to it?

Here are a few samples of all the signs you can and will encounter along the way.

All these types of signs are just from the eastern third of the path. There are many, many more different kinds of signs yet to come, even though I know that a lot of these designs are used further on as well. In any case, the point of this post is that while the signs are often plentiful along the way, they are not a great alternative to up-to-date digital maps.