A Walk Through Old Tokyo
AN EXCERPT FROM LITTLE ADVENTURES IN TOKYO BY RICK KENNEDY
In Japanese terms, Tokyo isn't an old city at all. It's only about as old as Boston. And because twice in this century it has been all but obliterated-once by the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923 and once by the firebombing of 1945 which spared only one building in ten-and also because a hefty percentage of the people who live in the city were not born here, there are few sections of Tokyo that evoke in anyone a nostalgia for things past.
Any Tokyoite will tell you, however, that the adjoining neighborhoods of Sendagi, Nezu and Yanaka near Ueno are the best places to go to get a sense of how things used to be, and it is to this part of the city that young scholars from Stanford and the Sorbonne come to rent old houses with rock gardens while they put the finishing touches on their dissertations on Kafu the Scribbler or the Staging of the Noh Drama.
They find here the essential coziness of the old style of Japanese urban living, with a lively street life, public baths that serve as neighborhood social clubs and shopkeepers who make a habit of setting aside something for their best customers, which means anybody who has ever dropped by twice. Sendagi, Nezu, and Yanaka make up the core of shitamachi Tokyo (the old "downtown").
This walk through the area can take as long as seven hours, depending on how good you are at lingering and on how contemplative a mood you are in. Even if you take me up on most of my recommendations, the day should cost no more than ¥5,000. Note that if you take the walk on a Monday or Friday, you won't be able to get into the Asakura Choso Museum, which is closed on those days. This would be a great pity.
Go to Sendagi Station on the Chiyoda Line. If you are coming from the direction of Hibiya, as you probably will be, sit near the front of the train so when you get off you'll be near the Dokanyama Exit, by which you should leave the station. This will put you on Shinobazu-dori, the area's main street. Turn right on Shinobazu-dori, then immediately turn right again into a narrow alley, at the end of which is
1. Sudo Koen Park. Tokyo has more than 7,000 parks, ranging from the rolling Shinjuku-gyoen to pocket parks just big enough for a single bench. Sudo Koen is a medium-size park taken absolutely for granted by the people of the neighborhood who come here to eat lunch, watch the children play, and doze off. It is a very Tokyo sort of park, with its landscaping all out of scale with the size of the park (it tries hard to make you think it is bigger than it is), its dusty pool of carp, and its vermilion Shinto shrine on a little island.
Cross the red bridge and walk around the shrine past the waterfall out to the right. Leave the park and take the alley in front of you back out to Shinobazu-Dori.
Turn left on Shinobazu-Dori and cross it at the next traffic signal, 20 meters away. Five years ago, none of these tall, totally undistinguished buildings you see along Shinobazu-Dori were here. Residents feel their way of life threatened.
Go down the street going off from Shinobazu-Dori at the traffic signal, leaving the hulking presence of the NTT Building on your right. At the end of this short street, turn left onto "Yomise Dori," so written in kana over the Buck Rogers-style arch spanning this street of typical old downtown shops.
There's a rice merchant (ten kilos for &YEN6,500-so expensive because the rice farmers are heavily subsidized and the outlets strictly controlled), a shop selling all manner of footgear from plastic sandals to wooden geta, a tofu maker, a saké shop, and on the left
2. Ikeda-ten, the kamaboko (fish cake) maker, under a blue awning. A quick Tokyo snack here, maybe? Ask for ba-ru and you will get for ¥100 five balls of deep-fried squid tentacles and chopped onion, perfect for munching on while walking, a little pleasure not yet full sanctioned by Japanese etiquette but which here in shitamachi is perfectly O.K.
Stroll on by the vegetable store with everything laid out precisely and the konnyaku maker with his great wooden and plastic mixing tubs. (Kenkyusha's Japanese-English Dictionary identifies konnyaku as "a paste made from the starch of devil's tongue," which only serves to underline the essentiality of experience over mere description.)
Even at the risk of the shopkeeper's not being able to move around in his tiny shop, everything is laid out for the customer to see and before any purchase can be made, it is necessary to pass the time of day. There is a bond here between merchant and customer which may well go back generations on each side.
On your right at the corner you'll come to a shop called Toho which sells bento lunch boxes. Next to it is a rather self-conscious archway labeled "Yanaka Ginza" in kana. Turn right through this arch onto a tiled road, very fancy, as befits the neighborhood's main shopping street.
Along Yanaka Ginza you will also find a wondrous profusion of shops, most with their goods for sale and their carefully tended pots of flowers and greenery spilling out into the street: a florist; a saké merchant; a store selling underwear; a toy shop; a barbershop, whose customers are submitted to an almost clinical concern (a Little Adventure for another day is a visit to a Japanese barber); a large fish store with an amazing variety of sea creatures laid out on ice, illuminated at dusk by lights as if jewelry. Then on the same side of the street you will come to the wonderful shop called
3. Kamekichi Tea Merchants. Go in, all the way to the back, to the finely tooled brass mural of cranes which decorates the doors of the shop's refrigerated storeroom. In the back of the shop there is a lovely garden off to the left, a little secret that everyone in the neighborhood knows about and now you do, too. Everyone also knows that every visitor is without fail offered a cup of tea; you can sip yours while inspecting the implements for sale and the many different kinds of tea shipped to the shop from Shizuoka, Saitama, and Kyushu in wooden chests.
The most expensive tea is Tenshi, 100 grams for &YEN3,000, but ordinary ocha for daily drinks ( Japanese when they first go abroad say the first thing they miss is ocha) is ¥300 for 100 grams. If the weather is fine the shop might put out in the street its battered old roasting machine which, as it turns the tea leaves over, produces a lovely, beckoning scent.
On the left just at the end of Yanaka Ginza, past the hardware store, the chicken-parts store, the gardening-supplies store, the stationery store and the kimono store which has found out that in order to survive it must also sell fur coats, just as the tiles give way to ordinary paving, you will find
4. Goto-no-Ame ("Goto's Candies"), an old-fashioned sweet shop which recently sold out to Monteyamazaki, a chain. As you can surmise from the sound of the ancient machinery grinding away out back, the shop still makes ten kinds of candy of its own. I am partial to the delicately sweetened hard candies called Tankiri at ¥250 a packet, while a lady I know prefers the Shoga Ame (same price) which is made of ginger.
At this point you might want to consider a quick detour. Running off the end of Yanaka Ginza to the left is a street, and 50 meters down you will come across
5. Buseki Flower Basket Shop. Here the friendly Buseki-san, who dresses in comfortable Edo-style home wear, and his son, who favors Ralph Lauren sweatshirts, make the most exquisite baskets and vases out of well-smoked bamboo 100 years old, which they have procured from under the thatched roofs of country cottages.
You will be most graciously received, probably offered tea, and invited to inspect some of the shop's work, like the beautiful vase just put on reserve by the Portuguese Ambassador or the little tray of woven bamboo for ¥500, which just might suit you-who knows?
Now back to Yanaka Ginza, to turn left to go up the stairs. On the left as you go up the hill you will pass one temple, then come to another. This is
6. Keio-ji, a fine neighborhood temple suffused with greenery. The temple's cemetery runs along the left, and to the right is a little building which has a long bench made of a single piece of wood running along under the eaves-a good place to sit down and try one of Goto's candies, if you bought some.
The most remarkable thing about this temple is the intricate system of copper pipes for draining water from the roof of the temple into the great stone cauldrons on either side of the stairs. This Rube Goldberg contraption has a purpose: the system provides water to fight a fire.
What's that low rumble from the building next door? Well, the building next door houses
7. Nakano-ya, manufacturers and purveyors of tsukudani, a sort of Japanese chutney made by marinating various things in a mixture of soy sauce, rice vinegar, and saké to preserve them-there were no refrigerators in the days when everybody ate tsukudani every day-to be spread over the top of a bowl of rice and eaten while drinking ocha.
This is real Tokyo provender-you won't find tsukudani in a restaurant. Most tsukudani costs ¥250 for 100 grams, but for a real tsukudani-connoisseur's treat you might like to try unagi yamato ni (marinated eel), 100 grams of which go for ¥1,400. This is not street-eating food, though.
Cross the street in front of the temple and continue on down the street that bears off from the main street in the same direction. (You'll see a marble-monument store on the corner.) There is a little alleyway off to the left, then a flower shop, then a Chinese restaurant, and then a covered arcade, which you should enter. A few meters in on the left you will discover
8. Miyako Senbei, an old shop selling rice crackers made here. Notice the four old hand blown glass globes in which the senbei are kept. Their best seller is a packet of goma (sesame seed) senbei for ¥200.
Now go back down the arcade to turn left again on the street, the direction you were going in when you entered. This street of old shops includes on the right a maker of copper kitchen tools, who displays his wares and other objets he thinks amusing in a little vitrine he has built into his shop and just after it, on the left, is what appears to be a huge black bunker with a kneeling figure of bronze perched on the roof as if daring someone to ask him to jump. From the outside, the place certainly looks forbidding, but inside is the high point of this little adventure. It's the
9. Asakura Choso Museum (¥300 entrance fee. Closed Mondays and Fridays, December 29 to January 3, and any day after a national holiday). It really isn't a museum in the ordinary sense. It's the atelier, house, and magnificent rock and water garden of Fumio Asakura, a sculptor, scholar, and contemplator of the meaning of life who died in 1954, at the age of 82. He designed the house and garden himself and it took six years to complete because the builders had never seen plans for anything like it before.
The garden settles everyone down as soon as they see it, a place of great tranquility on a wonderfully intimate scale. It is designed so that some plant is always in bloom, something always showing some color. The huge carp move slowly in the two-meter-deep pond. Underneath a rock as smooth and voluptuous as a Maillol sculpture-the rock nicknamed okame ishi-there is a place hollowed out for the carp.
In winter, you can warm yourself next to a pit of glowing charcoal set into the floor of a little room overlooking the pond for as long as you like. When it snows here, it is lovely. In the summer, the shoji are removed and the rooms are open to the garden.
You may want to wander further, to the second floor, to the third, to the roof. You may be offered a cup of tea in the atelier before you go. It is a shame to rush on, but as we all get caught up in one thing or another and might never have a chance to see more, perhaps we'd better go.
Exit this miraculous place and turn left, continuing down the same road. Almost immediately on your right, you will come across
10. Jinenjiyo Curry Shop, which grows all its own herbs and which would be a fine place for lunch.
There is a temple every 50 meters, it seems. Nothing higher than two stories here, because when this part of town was built, people were very conscious of the wrath of the Earthquake God. More little alleys crammed with potted plants and bicycles.
After a few hundred meters, you will come on the right to Choan-ji Temple, so marked with a rakish sign in English. Turn left here. We are going to walk through Yanaka Bochi-Yanaka Cemetery.
Turn right at the police box and continue along a tree-lined road where you will find a number of flower shops patronized by people paying a visit to the family grave who want to leave some flowers and perhaps something the deceased particularly enjoyed, such as a bottle of saké or a bar of chocolate.
At the little art gallery, bear right under the icho trees, whose leaf is heart-shaped, a common Tokyo design motif. The street curves around to the left and the sidewalk is confidently paved. Now we will visit, if you like, a series of craft shops. We go down the hill called Sansaki-zaka-saka or zaka means "slope." Every single shop has its pots of flowers or vines out front, as a talisman to keep urbanity at bay. Again, there seems to be a temple every 50 meters. At the bottom of Sansaki-zaka, on the left-hand side of the street, you'll come across
11. Isetatsu Decorated Papers. Here they carve out of wooden blocks the patterns which adorn their papers. There is a great variety, some of the blocks having been carved in the era of Emperor Meiji. The more sophisticated (and expensive) papers are on the second floor. A print from a classic block can cost ¥7,000 or more.
At Isetatsu, turn left off Sansaki-zaka and go down a very ordinary downtown street, neither modern nor traditional but caught, as is most of the city, somewhere between. At the Kodak sign follow the road as it curves around to the left.
Take the first right at Sawanoya, an inexpensive (¥4,600 a night) Japanese-style hotel. Down this street on the left-hand side at the second corner you will come across
12. Imojin, an old-fashioned ice-cream shop. It couldn't be plainer, a lovely old place, with what must be the world's first take-out window on the side. This is not fancy ice cream of many flavors, but honest, unadulterated stuff just like the ice cream families must have made themselves before it was easy to buy ice cream in a store. It is made on the premises, of course.
If you ask for abekku, you will be served a dish with a scoop of vanilla and a scoop of azuki-bean ice cream for ¥200. Abekku is the French avec, ice cream for two, you and your date.
As you exit the shop turn left, then left again on Shinobazu-Dori. (Although it's another distraction, if you cross Shinobazu-Dori here the street will take you right to Nezu Jinja shrine, the progenitor of all the dozens of shrines you have seen today.) Go three traffic lights to Kototoi-Dori, so labeled, and turn left onto it. After 100 meters the street will begin to rise. This is Zenkoji-zaka. Almost at the top of the slope on the left-hand side of the street will be
13. Kinkaido, a shop which sells color. Japanese-style paintings, called nihonga, do not use oils. The colors are from minerals, plants, and insects which are glued to a board or canvas. This shop is ablaze with colors, all in glass vials in wooden racks. They make the eyes swim. Art students from nearby Tokyo University of the Arts come here or to the competing shop across the street to buy their materials.
Turn left as you exit the shop and continue on up Kototoi-Dori. On the right-hand side of the street, just after the Konica sign, you will find
14. Bunkaido. Mr. Tanabe, the shopkeeper, has made brushes for Miró and Picasso. He has made a brush so large it takes three men to hold it and guide it through a fierce, swooping kanji. You could buy one of Mr.Tanabe's brushes for ¥1,700 if you like, or maybe a mizuire, a tiny vessel to keep water for mixing ink, for ¥300to ¥1,300.
Back on Kototoi-Dori on the right hand side of the road, and on through the traffic signal. At the second light by the sushi shop, turn right into an alley. (In case you are wondering, that edifice diagonally across from this corner is a replica of an old saké shop.) Past Pepe le Moko, a little French restaurant of no particular distinction. At the end of this alley on the left you will find
15. Torindo, a perfect place for a cup of tea if you can make it before 5 p.m. when they close. A lovely little shop. Just say "Ocha kudasai," and maybe point out one of the wagashi cakes to go with it. The tea will cost ¥450 and the cake maybe ¥150.
Now let's go home. To return to more familiar surroundings, cross the street. Geidai (Tokyo University of the Arts) will be on your left as you walk toward Ueno Park. At the beginning of the next block you will come across the (now closed) Dobutsuen Hakubutsukan Station of the Keisei subway line, which looks like a sullen Greek temple.
Or you can just keep walking down the street to the Tokyo National Museum on your left, at which you should cross the street to enter Ueno Park. In the park, go around the pool lined with benches, turn left at the plaza at the end of the pool and, with the National Museum of Western Art on your left and the Le Corbusier-designed Tokyo Metropolitan Festival Hall (Tokyo Bunka Kaikan) on your right, cross the street to Ueno Station.
MAP BY KELLY FRANKENY
