One of the most difficult sections of the Tokaido Highway is the Ōi River in Shimada City in Shizuoka Prefecture. It was written in a poem that: “Hakone-hachiri wa uma demo kosuga / Kosuni kosarenu ōi gawa (A horse can pass over Hakone at 32 kilometres long, but Ōi River is extremely hard to traverse)”. The Horai Bridge across the Ōi River is a wooden footbridge with a length of 897.4 metres and a width of 2.4 metres. It was built in 1879 and has been used as a farm road to manage the tea plantations that spread spectacularly across the Makinohara plateau. Before the bridge was built, the Ōi River had to be crossed by a small boat, which was a dangerous way to travel.

On the 30th of December 1997, the bridge was certified by Guinness World Records in the United Kingdom as the longest wooden footbridge in the world. It is popular with visitors as a bridge of good fortune because of its length, which suggests a long life, and as 897.4 can be read as Yakunashi, meaning “no evil”.
If you go to the middle of the rustic wooden bridge on a clear day, where no cars can pass, you can see Mt. Fuji against the blue sky. The view of the beautiful outline of the mountain in the distance, which Japanese people always remember somewhere in their mind, is heart-warming.

In the time before the bridge was built, Shimada-juku, a post town on the Edo (Tokyo) side of the Ōi River, was the 23rd stop on the 53 stages of the Tokaido Highway, and is depicted in a print by Hiroshige Utagawa. When the Ōi River swelled and river crossing was banned, visitors to the Ise pilgrimage stopped at Shimada-juku and the area became crowded. It is said that when heavy rains continued, many people spent all their money on accommodation and entertainment.
Today, the post town is designated a national historic site as the “Shimada-juku Ōi River Kawagoe Ruins”.

Crossing this wooden bridge and looking out at Mt. Fuji will surely make you feel like a traveller in ancient times.