Two of the great roads of old Japan met at Kusatsu. The Tōkaidō, running along the Pacific coast from Edo, and the Nakasendō, crossing the mountains of the interior, joined here before the last stretch to Kyoto, and the town grew rich on travellers. The honjin, the official inn where daimyō lords stayed on their journeys, survives as one of the largest and best preserved in Japan, with its long wooden halls, gardens and a register of the famous guests who stayed.
This is not the hot-spring Kusatsu of Gunma, but a busy city on the south-eastern shore of Lake Biwa, in Shiga prefecture, between Kyoto and Nagoya. The lake, the largest in Japan, stretches north to the horizon, and the Lake Biwa Museum, on a peninsula near Kusatsu, tells the story of its ecology and the people who lived around it.
The local sweet is uba-ga-mochi, small rice cakes topped with sweet bean paste, shaped to resemble a nursing mother. They have been sold to travellers here since the Edo period, and the shop near the old junction still sells them.
The riding around Kusatsu is mostly urban, with heavy traffic on the national roads. The lakeshore road offers views over the water, and the hills to the east have quieter roads through forests and tea fields.
Fuel and food are no trouble in a city of this size. Give yourself half an hour in the old post-town street, with its signpost marking the fork of the two great roads, and walk where four centuries of travellers did, then buy a box of uba-ga-mochi for the road. They do not survive a pannier well, so eat them quickly.