The Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 began in Kagoshima, besieged Kumamoto Castle, was fought out at Tabaruzaka and ended on Shiroyama, where Saigō Takamori died. This route follows the samurai army from its first march to its last stand.
Six stops run from Kagoshima Castle through Kumamoto, Hitoyoshi and Mount Enodake and back to Kagoshima. Three are exact landmarks you can visit; the battlefield and retreat stops are approximate.
Hashima, nicknamed Gunkanjima or Battleship Island, lies about 15 km off Nagasaki, and its coal mine grew from the same story as Glover Garden, the Kosuge Slip Dock and the Takashima mine.
The route follows Nagasaki's industrial rise from 1859: the Scottish merchant Thomas Blake Glover, Japan's first western-style dock, a pioneering coal shaft, the Mitsubishi shipyard and finally Hashima, packed with 5,259 people in 1959 and empty after 1974. It also records the wartime forced labour of Korean civilians and Chinese prisoners of war on Hashima.
The Ryukyu Kingdom ruled Okinawa from Shuri Castle in Naha, and its story can still be walked at Nakijin, Zakimi and Katsuren castles and the Tamaudun royal tombs.
The route follows the kingdom from the three-principality era and Shō Hashi's unification in 1429, through a rival lord's fall in 1458, to the royal tombs of 1501. Most of these castle sites are ruins or reconstructions.
NHK's 2008 drama Atsuhime follows Tenshō-in from Kagoshima and Sakurajima in Satsuma to Edo Castle in Tokyo, where she became wife of the 13th shōgun.
Born Okatsu in the Imaizumi branch of the Shimazu clan, she is adopted by Shimazu Nariakira, moves into Tsurumaru Castle and leaves for the shōgun's court in 1853, the year of Perry's Black Ships. The route follows five places from the drama's first half in Satsuma to the Ōoku. The Imaizumi pin and the Kurihama stop are approximate.
The Shinsengumi, the squad of Kondō Isami and Hijikata Toshizō, began in Hino in the Tama region and ended in Hakodate. Their story runs through Mibu-dera and the Ikedaya Inn in Kyoto, the battle of Fushimi, and Kondō's execution in Itabashi.
The route follows Kondō Isami and Hijikata Toshizō from a dojo in Hino to the Boshin War. Several stops can still be visited, though some pins mark an area rather than the exact spot.
Sakamoto Ryōma, the Tosa samurai of the last shogunate years, is remembered across Kōchi, Nagasaki and Kyoto: from his birthplace memorial to Kameyama Shachū, the Teradaya inn and the Ōmiya Inn.
The route follows him from his birth in 1836 through the founding of Kameyama Shachū in 1865, the Teradaya raid of 1866 and his death at the Ōmiya Inn in 1867, then ends at the Katsurahama museum that keeps his letters.
Team Ninja's open-world samurai game drops a masterless Blade Twin into the last years of the shogunate. Between 1858 and 1868 the story runs from Yokohama's foreign quarter through the killing of a Chief Minister to Kyoto's Shinsengumi and a plot to burn Edo.
This route follows the game's main story through seven places, from the port to the capital, pairing each scene with the real site that history ties to it. Where the game names only a district, the pin marks the nearest well-known landmark.
The Boshin War ran from Kyoto to Hakodate in eighteen months: the battlefield at Toba, Edo Castle, the hill of Ueno, Aizu's castle and Goryōkaku. In January 1868 the young emperor was declared ruler in fact as well as name, ending more than 250 years of Tokugawa rule, and the last shogun's supporters fought on until a breakaway republic made its last stand.
The route follows that war in six places, all of them visitable: the battlefield at Toba, Edo Castle, the hill of Ueno, Aizu's castle and the hill where its teenage soldiers died, and Goryōkaku. Dates are given in the Western calendar, converted from the Japanese lunar dates used at the time.
