Nikko

“[T]he way to Nikko leads up a straight broad avenue, lined on both sides for twenty-seven miles with tall and ancient cryptomerias, whose branches meet in a Gothic arch overhead. … This road was made two centuries ago, when the Shoguns chose Nikko as their burial place, and these venerable trees have shaded the magnificent funeral trains of the old warriors, and the splendid processions, of their successors, who made pilgrimages to the tombs of Iyeysau and Iyemitsu.”




“From this point on to Nikko the road is one grand avenue between magnificent trees, whose continuity of shade was only broken by intervening villages. I never saw a road like it anywhere. … In truth, it continually suggested the long nave and aisles of some grand Gothic cathedral.”

… I have as yet seen noting in Japan more grand than this avenue of trees which for more than thirty miles lines the way to the shrines of Nikko”

Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore, Jinrikisha Days in Japan, (New York, 1891) p. 141

Albert Tracy, Rambles Through Japan Without a Guide, (London, 1892) pp. 45-46