Tokyo Backstreets
Tokyo backstreets, station by station.
Every station guide on this site splits in two: the sights you already came for, and what stands one street behind them. This page collects the second half.
Not a secret, and not a discovery. Most of these places are known perfectly well by the people who live nearby — they simply sit off the line between the station and the landmark, so visitors walk past the turning. A standing bar under the tracks. A shopping street that kept its shutters. A temple at the bottom of a hill you would otherwise have no reason to descend.
The list is grouped by area. Each station links through to its own guide, where you will find how to reach the place, what time of day it is worth seeing, and — for most stations — our own photographs. Hours and shutters change; where somewhere is small, cash-only or open only after dark, the station page says so.
Neither the gate nor the bridge was ever in Asakusa; both stood on the road that led there. The doll wholesalers have been on this ground for three centuries.
Down the side streets
Two provinces, joined by a bridge after the fire of 1657. At the centre of the district is a park that exists because of what happened on the ground it covers.
Down the side streets
A temple founded in 628 around a figure two fishermen pulled from the river. The buildings you see around it are all reconstructions.
Down the side streets
The canal the district is named after has been filled in — the one where a voice was said to come out of the water and tell you to leave the fish behind.
Down the side streets
Until 2012 the station at the foot of the tower was called Narihira-bashi, after a poet who stopped at this river and asked a bird about the city he had left.
Down the side streets
Kamejima was an island of silt at the river mouth, said to be shaped like a turtle. The channels filled in long ago and the name is the only part left.
Down the side streets
The first post town on the Oshu highway, north of the Arakawa. Basho set out for the north from here, and the drinking alleys off the west exit are still narrow.
Down the side streets
The town is named after a rock in a children's playground. It is tuff quarried across the bay in Chiba, and only a little of it now shows above the soil.
Down the side streets
The east side of the station is called Yaesu, after a Dutch sailor. The name belonged to the west side until 1929, disappeared, and came back in 1954 on the other side of the tracks.
Down the side streets
The silver mint that gave the district its name moved away in 1801. The willows came later, and only because they were the one tree the high water would not kill.
Down the side streets
Edo kabuki began here. The theatres were moved to Asakusa by the Tempo reforms, and what stayed behind was the name of the souvenir — dolls
Down the side streets
Where Japan's first railway departed. The bars now fill the arches and the alleys, and SL Plaza is where television goes to interview drunk office workers
Down the side streets
Twenty-four minutes to Haneda, twenty-four hours to the islands — the station that faces the sea
Down the side streets
There is no Akiba shrine in Akihabara. The one the district is named for was moved three kilometres away in 1888, to make room for the railway.
Down the side streets
For most of the twentieth century this was where the north of Japan arrived in Tokyo — the overnight trains terminated here and everyone walked straight out.
Down the side streets
Six trees, or six households whose names carried the character for tree. Neither account has been proved, and no tree is left to settle it.
Down the side streets
Not on any map. The name is a contraction of three neighbourhoods, coined in 1984 by a quarterly magazine the residents started themselves.
Down the side streets
The Jizo at the centre of this district is never shown. By the temple's own account the image was taken from a seal less than three centimetres across.
Down the side streets
A brook from a school song of 1912 still runs under these streets, culverted. The crowd on the crossing is walking on top of it.
Down the side streets
For nearly twenty years, what is now Yoyogi Park was an American housing estate of 827 houses that you could not enter.
Down the side streets
A post town that townsmen paid the shogunate for the right to build, in 1697, because the first stage out of Nihonbashi had been set too far away.
Down the side streets
A building that grew out of a two-tsubo bookshop, and the ground that once held a hundred thousand dogs. Both are north of Nakano Station
Down the side streets
The lower reach of a stream called Kitazawa. The stream is culverted now and survives as a green walkway; Kami-Kitazawa is simply the top of the same water.
Down the side streets
A hollow where reeds grew, until the station opened in 1922. The antique shops are not on the main street — they are in the lanes behind it.
Down the side streets
Named Shinagawa, addressed in Minato Ward — the old post town is a kilometre from here
Down the side streets
The road drops the moment you leave the station. Everything named Meguro lies at the bottom of the hill
Down the side streets
After the earthquake the shopping street was paved with the bricks Ginza tore up, and took the name along with them.
Down the side streets
A shitamachi district that once made films, still working as a gateway to Haneda
Down the side streets