Why I decided to do research on the Thames as a highway

Ihave described various aspects of my life at Oxford, but my research was, of course, the most important part of my life there. My two years at Oxford were so precious to me that I did wonder if it would be a waste of time to spend them on the sort of research which I could do in Japan. However, looking back I realize that my research contributed significantly to my experience at Oxford. It certainly enabled me to have many valuable experiences, meet many people and to get the feel of what was involved in research. The theme of my research at Oxford was transport on the river Thames in the eighteenth century. I should first like to explain how I came to study this subject.

From the time when I was a child I had been interested in roads as a means of transportation. In my position I could not go outside the gates whenever I wanted to, but when I wandered along the paths in the grounds of the Akasaka palace, I felt that I was making a journey into a part of the world I did not know at all. For me these paths played an important role as a means of connecting me with the unknown world. It was, I think, when I had only just started school that I found, when wandering around the Akasaka palace grounds, a sign which read ‘ŌshūKaidō’. The sign was a modern one, but I was excited when I learnt that according to old maps and experts on the subject an old highway had indeed passed through the palace grounds during the Kamakura period (1192–1333). Then in my first year at high school when I was reading with my mother Bashō’s Oku no Hosomichi I became even more interested than I had been before in travels and in transport. Perhaps for this reason my main interest during my first two years at elementary school was learning about the road system and the posting stations along the highways in Edo Japan.