This article will deal with the various meanings of the road called Zushi (辻子) to illustrate certain features of urban development in Japanese history. It first considers Zushi linguistically, studying its orthography, pronunciation, meaning, and origin. It then becomes clear that Zushi derived from Juji (十字) which meant crossroads in the Heian Period. Zushi then did mean a small road, but it also came to mean a newly developed road formed according to principles quite different from those of Heiankyo's traditional system of roads and blocks (Heiankyo Jobo-sei 平安京条坊制). So, this meaning of Zushi thus expresses changes in the nature of the Heian capital. In the medieval period, Zushi acquired the new meaning of a new block, as we see in the growth of Zushi-go (辻子郷) in Nara and Zushi-cho (辻子町) in Kyoto. Thus, Zushi were very instrumental in the formation of new streets and towns at a time when in the Tensho period (1513-1591) the new city planning of Kyoto began and when the redevelopment of towns played an important role in the urban development of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. New words like Tsukinuke (突抜) and Shinmichi (新道), which were formed during the urban development of the Edo period, were words that were really nothing but a fresh expression of the word Zushi.
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