During the tumultuous years of Japan's Sengoku period (1467-1568, also known as the Warring States period), travelling was a perilous affair. But during the Edo period peace, prosperity, and the existence of the appropriate infrastructure combined to allow people of all walks of life to move about the country safely. In 1603, when Tokugawa Ieyasu took over as seii tai shogun ("Barbarian-Subduing Generalissimo," commonly known simply as shogun) and established the Edo shogunate, he promptly embarked on the construction of a nationwide transport system, including a highway network and post-station towns that supplied lodging, labor, and horses. This network allowed people to communicate, transport goods, and travel with peace of mind. Common people were permitted to travel freely as long as their stated purpose was a pilgrimage. Of the countless temples and shrines scattered throughout Japan, Ise Shrine had a special cachet as a pilgrimage destination. The desire to make a pilgrimage to Ise Shrine, at least once in one's life, was universal among Japanese people of the day.

Ise Shrine drew an average of 200,000 to 400,000 individual pilgrims a year, and according to some historians, the total reached about a million in some years. Along with the steady stream of individual pilgrims, spontaneous mass pilgrimages descended upon Ise Shrine about four times during the Edo period. Mass pilgrimages are known to have taken place in 1705, 1771, and 1830, when the shrine received concentrated bursts of 3 million, 2 million, and 5 million visitors, respectively. A modern-day statistic puts these figures into perspective: Meiji Shrine, now Japan's most popular destination for the first shrine visit of the new year, drew 3.26 million visitors in the 2002 New Year period. From these figures, it is readily apparent that the large-scale pilgrimages of the Edo period were veritable mass migrations that brought people together from every part of the country.

The Edo period travel boom began building momentum in the early 1700s and peaked in the nineteenth century. This trend is apparent from the number of guidebooks, maps, and other travel-related materials published during the period. One such publication, the 1810 Ryoko yojin shu ("Travel Precautions"), showed the highway system (including point-to-point distances) and the locations of checkpoints, rivers, mountains, famous places, hot springs, and temples that issued amulets; and offered descriptions of travel equipment and medical remedies for seasickness, falling off a horse, and poisonous insect bites. Such guidebooks provide an interesting glimpse into the travel information needs of the day. Other publications reflecting the widespread wanderlust of the times included picture books such as Utagawa Hiroshige's woodblock print compilation Tokaido gojusan tsugi ("Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido"); Jippensha Ikku's Tokaidochu hizakurige (translated as "Shank's Mare"), a comical tale of commoners hoofing it along the Tokaido; and publications that introduced specific places, such as Tokaido meisho zue ("Pictures of Famous Places along the Tokaido"), Edo meisho zue ("Pictures of Famous Places in Edo"), and Dochu sugoroku (a board game with a picture map).

Of course, travel costs money, and one might well wonder where everyday people got the funds to travel. One answer to this question lay in the pilgrimage funding associations set up by villages and other small communities. Separate associations were organized for each of the most popular deities, such as Jizo (a bodhisattva known as the savior of children), Fudo (an incarnation of Buddha tasked with saving those resistant to Buddhist teachings), and Inari (a fox deity associated with the harvest); and destinations, such as Ise Shrine. At association meetings, which were held regularly, each member contributed a certain amount of money to the pilgrimage fund. When a year had passed or a certain amount of money had been accumulated, the association members used a lottery or other mechanism to choose several representatives, who were given the money to cover their expenses on the pilgrimage. When a community in Edo or elsewhere in the Kanto area sent pilgrims to Ise Shrine, it was typically in groups of four or five, and groups from neighboring communities often made the trip together. During the Edo period, inns that took in commoners sprouted up and shrine and temple towns developed, assuring everyday people of plenty of safe places to stay. And at the famous shrines, temples, and ruins, businesses that specialized in helping pilgrims find lodging are known to have existed. At Ise, people engaged in this business were known as onshi. Through the middle ages, onshi were just parishioners who had some connection with the shrine organization, but in the Edo period, this relationship became formalized, and onshi evolved into something resembling innkeepers who specialized in lodges that took in pilgrims.

Onshi provided lodging to pilgrims arriving at Ise and hosted them at prayers, ceremonies, and offerings of ancient Shinto music and dancing. Fees varied depending on the scale of the event or offering, but guests generally paid about 10 or 20 ryo to watch or participate. This was a considerable amount of money in those days, and all of it went into the onshi's pocket. Furthermore, the meals served to the guests at onshi houses were lavish, with each meal's rice accompanied by three to five cooked dishes, as well as the finest offerings of the ocean served fresh - red snapper, conch, abalone - and the best local sake.

After paying their respects at Ise Shrine, pilgrims headed off to the pleasure quarters of the Furuichi district, where banquets known as shojin otoshi were held for them. There the pilgrims were entertained with singing and dancing and disported themselves with prostitutes. This blend of spirituality and entertainment, of the sacred and the worldly, was a defining feature of travel in the Edo period.

For the select few commoners who got to make the pilgrimage to the shrine, the four- or five-day stay at Ise was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. And the journey there and back was also packed with rich experiences. The round trip from Edo took a minimum of 40 days. But with stops on the way back for sightseeing in Nara and Kyoto, and a visit to Kotohiragu shrine in today's Kagawa Prefecture - with a side trip to Zenkoji temple via the Nakasendo highway thrown in - it was not unusual for an Ise pilgrimage to turn into a 50- or 60-day odyssey.

Upon returning home from their long trip, the pilgrims passed out souvenirs to their fellow villagers and, no doubt, bragged about the things they had seen and heard on the journey. These travelers' tales surely inspired others to undertake the journey, in a cycle that perpetuated the legendary status of the Ise pilgrimage as something that everyone should do at least once in their lives.