While I’m at it, I decided to check on other tourism sites, to see if anything else has changed since.
The Kounan City website no longer offers the “Nobunaga and Kitsuno history route”. It has now been replaced with a generic “Historical sightseeing route”.
All that I can find of the old “Nobunaga-Kitsuno Route” was a blog post made by somebody who did the sightseeing walk and documented their experience.
It was basically just a tour map of places relevant to the Ikoma family, since I don’t think any of those had much to do with Nobunaga. It just had romantic-leaning comments in the location descriptions, echoing the “Kitsuno was the one Nobunaga loved the most” old stories. The only one that is somewhat relevant is one of the Ikoma family’s shrines, because it claimed that Nobunaga’s son was born in that very temple.
I’d wondered if they got rid of that because the old story is considered “debunked”, but they had also gotten rid of the Hachisuka Koroku and Maeno route, so I suppose not. Instead they made a new “temples” sightseeing route. Maybe they just wanted to repackage the walking routes to be more relevant to a wider range of audience/tourists, and not Sengoku-heavy.
The sites are still listed individually on their site, though, and some of them are still included in the new sightseeing route. So tourists wanting to see them will still be able to find them. It’s just no longer packaged together as a “full course”.
The website unfortunately has no English version, just an auto-translate toggle that is basically Google Translate. It’s still pretty navigate-able, though, if you really want to go there and take a look.
