Why Did Nobunaga Order Roads Three Ken Wide?

A fresh translation

Original text

Words and concepts

• Late in the previous year (去年月迫)
  The order belongs to the closing days of 1574, although it opens the scroll for 1575. The work is said to have been completed in the first month.
• Commissioners (奉行)
  Officials assigned to carry out and supervise a defined task. The passage names four rather than crediting construction to an anonymous order.
• Three ken (三間)
  A prescribed road width expressed in a traditional unit. Converting it into one exact modern measurement can imply a precision that the transmitted sentence does not supply.
• Boat bridge (舟橋)
  A crossing supported by boats or floating elements. It belongs to the same program as leveling steep routes and removing stones.
• Barriers and associated exactions (諸関諸儀)
  Checkpoints and the obligations or charges connected with them. The chronicler treats their remission as a reason that travel was no longer obstructed.

A road order opens a year of war

Scroll Eight later contains the famous account of Nagashino. Its first numbered section, however, begins with roads. The placement reminds readers that the chronicle does not consist only of battles, appointments, and ceremonies. It also records an attempt to reorganize movement through Nobunaga’s territories.

The order was issued near the end of the preceding year. Four commissioners were named, and a notice bearing the vermilion seal went through the provinces. By the first month, the chronicler says, the work was complete.

That timetable should be read as the narrative’s claim, not as a modern engineering report. No route-by-route schedule, labor register, budget, or inspection record appears in these lines. The entry compresses command and completion into a brief demonstration of efficacy.

Three ken is a standard, not a survey map

The road is ordered to be three ken wide. Modern summaries often turn historical units immediately into meters. A commonly used later conversion would put three ken at roughly five and a half meters, but the unit varied with period and context. The source itself gives no decimal measure.

What can be said safely is more important. A width was prescribed. The road was not described only as “broad” or “good”; the chronicler recorded a numerical standard that could guide those supervising the work.

Nor does the passage establish that every section of every road met that width. Mountain paths, settlements, bridges, and older alignments would have posed different constraints. The sentence reports the rule and praises its completion. Physical verification would require archaeological and documentary evidence beyond this excerpt.

Bridges, slopes, stones, and trees belong to one route

The three-ken width is only one item. Rivers receive boat bridges. Difficult inclines are leveled. Stones are removed. Pine and willow are planted along both sides of the central road.

These actions solve different problems. A traveler needs a crossing at water, manageable ground on a steep section, a clear surface, and a route that remains visible. The passage gathers them rather than isolating road width as the sole achievement.

The trees deserve attention because they are not described as timber for immediate construction. They are planted beside the road. The entry does not explain whether their principal purpose was shade, marking, stabilization, appearance, or a combination. Assigning one function would go beyond the words.

Still, planting implies a future. A boat bridge can be placed quickly; a tree must grow. The chronicler’s road is both an immediate passage and a corridor expected to remain.

Maintenance is assigned to people along the way

Construction does not end the entry. Young and old in each place are expected to come out, sprinkle water, settle dust, and clean. The route depends on recurring labor after commissioners and builders have passed.

This sentence changes the scale of participation. Four named officials receive the order at the top. Unnamed residents along the road perform maintenance locally. The passage joins centralized authorization with dispersed work.

It would be misleading to call that participation voluntary. The wording says what people were to do under an order. Praise for a clean, passable road does not tell us how the labor was allocated, how often it was demanded, or how residents judged the burden.

Road maintenance also has no final completion date. Dust returns. Water drains away. Vegetation grows, surfaces break, and bridges need attention. The line about cleaning acknowledges, perhaps unintentionally, that infrastructure survives through repetition.

Removing barriers comes before the new road in time

The chronicler says that numerous barriers and their associated obligations had already been remitted in earlier years. Construction and removal are therefore not presented as simultaneous decrees. The road order builds upon an earlier change in the conditions of travel.

A smooth surface alone does not guarantee easy passage. A traveler can still be stopped, questioned, charged, or delayed. Conversely, removing a barrier does not help if a river cannot be crossed or a steep route remains blocked by stones. The entry places physical access and institutional access together.

The concluding claim—no obstruction on the road—rests on both. Bridges, leveling, width, trees, and cleaning address the route itself. Remitted barriers address what happens to people moving along it.

That combination also warns against reducing the passage to the modern phrase “road building.” The source is describing a regime of movement: who orders it, who maintains it, what width it should have, what crossings it requires, and what impediments should no longer intervene.

The traveler in the next sentence is not only a soldier

After the excerpt, the chronicle praises relief from difficult travel for horses and cattle and describes people moving peacefully along the route. The road is therefore not introduced solely as a march corridor for Nobunaga’s army.

Animals carried riders, goods, and loads. A steep, stony road or a delayed river crossing affected transport beyond the battlefield. Wider and clearer routes could serve messengers and troops, but they could also serve traders, cultivators, officials, pilgrims, and the pack animals on which movement depended.

The passage does not divide traffic into military and civilian totals, so assigning a single primary purpose would be unsafe. Its language is broader: roads throughout the territories, local residents maintaining them, barriers remitted, and people and animals traveling with less difficulty.

This breadth helps explain why construction and checkpoint policy appear together. The program concerns circulation through ruled space. Military movement was part of that circulation, but the chronicler’s praise extends to ordinary passage as well.

The entry speaks in the language of praise

After the selected lines, the chronicle describes travel without delay, relief for horses and cattle, and peaceful movement by the people. It then praises the order in elevated language. This is not a neutral public-works ledger.

The authorial voice matters. Shinchō Kōki frequently records dates, names, movements, and outcomes with valuable specificity, but specificity does not remove perspective. Here the administrative act becomes evidence of Nobunaga’s beneficent authority.

Readers can use the passage as evidence that the received chronicle attributes a road program, named commissioners, a width, maintenance duties, and barrier remission to Nobunaga’s rule. They cannot use its praise alone to calculate the program’s reach or the satisfaction of those who supplied labor.

The distinction preserves the source’s value. A celebratory narrative can still contain concrete administrative details. It simply requires readers to separate the details recorded from the judgment built around them.

What these three lines cannot establish

They cannot establish the total length of road completed, the precise provinces covered, the number of bridges built, or the cost. None of those figures appears in the excerpt.

They cannot prove that every earlier checkpoint disappeared permanently. The chronicler makes a broad claim about remission within the territories. Local practice and later changes would need separate evidence.

They cannot show that three ken was measured identically everywhere. The number is the reported standard; the surviving physical roads are another question.

Finally, they cannot make Nobunaga the inventor of roads, roadside planting, barrier remission, or standards of width. The passage concerns an order in his territories at a particular time. Earlier and contemporary authorities also regulated routes and markets.

Movement required both command and repetition

The entry begins high in the hierarchy: a vermilion-seal order and four commissioners. It then descends to the road surface. Rivers, slopes, stones, width, and trees receive attention. Finally, residents appear with water and brooms, while earlier barrier exemptions clear the traveler’s way.

No single act produces the claimed result. Authority circulates the order. Officials supervise. Laborers alter the ground. Communities maintain it. Previous decrees remove institutional obstacles.

That is why the three-ken measurement is memorable but incomplete on its own. The opening of Scroll Eight describes a network of construction, regulation, and upkeep. Before the chronicle reaches Nagashino, it asks its reader to travel on a road.

Source

Shinchō Kōki (信長公記), Scroll Eight, section 1, “The Order to Make Roads Throughout the Provinces” (御分国道作被仰付事), opening. The wording was checked against the National Diet Library image, middle volume, frame 4, from Hoki-yama Kageo’s 1881 edition. The Ikeda-family autograph Shinchō-ki, held by Okayama University Library as 貴-48, preserves Scroll Eight within its fifteen-volume witness.