Patrick Carey was born in 1940 in Woodbridge, Suffolk. He grew up in London where he taught languages in a variety of schools. He went to Japan in 1980 on a one-year contract to teach English and has remained there ever since. He has taught at Tsuda College, Sophia University, both in Tokyo, and he was until his recent retirement a professor at Reitaku University in Chiba. His hobbies are walking and photography. He is married and lives in Yokohama.

For the first time in an English-language edition, published outside Japan, all fifty-five prints from Hiroshige's "Fifty-three Stages of the Tokaido" are reproduced in full-colour, supporting a detailed and intriguing account of the author's rediscovery on foot of the historic 303-mile road from Edo (Tokyo) to Kyoto.

Most Japanese imagine that the 'Old Tokaido', connecting the two ancient capitals, no longer exists. It is assumed that the road has been almost entirely obliterated by twentieth-century modernization.

Fired by some clues obtained from old books and maps, the author set out to investigate whether this was really so. More importantly, he followed 'in the footsteps of Hiroshige' and armed with copies of the famous woodblock prints that Hiroshige produced after his own journey in 1832, he tried to identify, in the modern landscape, the sites thatHiroshige had depicted.

This is his full and frank account supported by many parallel photographs of the Hiroshige locations as they are today, bringing the old and new Japan together for real-time and armchair travellers alike.