Students Recreate 19th-Century Bento Boxes Made for Ino Tadataka’s Survey Team in Hot Spring Town on Nakasendo Road

The Yomiuri Shimbun

15:30 JST, December 21, 2025

NAGANO — University students recently devised recipes to re-create a menu that was offered to the surveying team of Ino Tadataka, who created Japan’s first surveyed map, when they stayed in Shimosuwa, Nagano Prefecture.

A bento box lunch using the recipes was unveiled in October at Honjin Iwanami House. A historical facility that used to house high-ranking individuals such as feudal lords and members of the Imperial family. Ino and his team also had stayed there. The bento will be offered to tourists in the future.

In the Edo period (1603-1867), Shimosuwa prospered as a hot-spring inn town on the Nakasendo road because it was located at the junction of that road and the Koshu Kaido road. The 220-year-old main building of the facility has been designated as a prefectural treasure.

Two years ago, a book of menus from four days in autumn 1809 which has been kept by the Iwanami family, was found to describe dishes offered to Ino’s surveying team when they stayed at the facility. Naohiro Iwanami, the 28th head of the family, came up with the idea of re-creating the menu items. Through Hiroko Okubo, a former professor at Jissen Women’s University and an expert on the food culture of the Edo period, he asked for the cooperation of Sachiko Sato, a professor in the Faculty of Human Life Sciences at the university.

The menu book only lists the names of dishes and ingredients, such as honzen (main dish) and obento (box lunch). In February 2024, Sato published recipes to reproduce some of the menu items and created a bento using only the ingredients from the book.

This fiscal year, Yui Ozawa, 22, and Yuka Yamazaki, 22, both seniors at the university, decided to develop a bento for tourists and made it their graduation thesis topic. They guessed at cooking methods and created recipes based on “Nihon Ryori Hiden Shusei” (Collection of secret Japanese cooking books), a compilation of culinary literature from the Muromachi period (mid-14th century-late 16th century) to the Edo period.

They created three types of bento recipes, including the Honjin Edo Bento, which consists of four main dishes such as char-grilled chicken, grilled eel and steamed abalone and six side dishes, as well as rice, soup and sweets. The bento, prepared by Akihiko Takei, head chef of a local Japanese cuisine restaurant, were presented to those involved on Oct. 8 at the facility.

Commenting on the bento prepared by the professional chef, Ozawa and Yamazaki admired the way he had arranged them and said that the carrots were sweeter and tastier than they had expected.

According to Iwanami, the bento will be offered at future events at the facility and at Suwa Garasu no Sato glass museum in Suwa, Nagano Prefecture.