Kita Senju
The post town Basho left from for the north, now packed with standing bars.
A town in the northeast of Tokyo, on the near side of the Arakawa. It was the first post station on the Nikko highway, and the old road is still a shopping street. The lanes off the west exit are packed with standing bars, and several universities have moved in, so there are students as well.
The bridge over the Sumida River from which Matsuo Basho set out on his Narrow Road to the Deep North in 1689. The riverside terrace walkways on either bank make for a quiet early-morning stroll well away from the shopping streets.
It is about a 20-minute walk south from Kita-Senju Station, or one stop on the Keisei line to Senjuohashi Station. Combine it with the Basho departure monument in Senju-Ohashi Park on the north bank.
The old Nikko highway, turned into a shopping street as it stands. For several hundred metres out from the station there are fishmongers, tofu makers, wagashi shops and cheap izakaya. The Senju Honcho and Sun Road arcades run on from it.
Weekday mornings are when the older people of the neighbourhood do their shopping, and you will find shopkeepers and customers standing about talking.
A quiet neighbourhood shrine tucked just off the main commercial strip, dedicated to local guardian deities. Far less crowded than the famous shrines tourists flock to, it offers a calm, authentic atmosphere.
There is no ticket gate and no gift shop, just a small precinct where neighbours stop to pray on their way past. Quiet enough that a weekday visit takes only a few minutes.
Behind the main shopping street, the narrow lanes of the old Senju post town still hold small snack bars and family restaurants. The anchor is the Yokoyama House, a former paper wholesaler's townhouse registered as an Adachi City cultural property, whose deep frontage shows how a Nikko Kaido merchant plot was laid out.
Explore after dusk, when the snack bar signs light up. The Yokoyama House can be viewed from the street at any time; the interior only opens on occasional public days.
A small monument in Senju-Ohashi Park on the north bank of the Sumida, marking the spot where Matsuo Basho wrote his first verse after setting out on the Narrow Road to the Deep North in 1689. Almost every visitor to Kita-Senju walks past it without knowing it exists.
It is about 20 minutes on foot from Kita-Senju, but only a couple of minutes from Senjuohashi Station on the Keisei line. The stone is small, so look along the park's river side.
About ten minutes east of the station the ground opens onto the Arakawa floodplain, where a walking and cycling path runs downstream toward Ayase. It appears on no tourist map: just grass pitches, herons working the shallows and the wide, flat sky of outer Tokyo.
There is no shade on the embankment, so bring water in summer. Sunset over the river from the Adachi bank is the reason to time it for late afternoon.
Kita-Senju is known for cheap drinking, and the centre of it is the standing yakitori and yakiton bars in the west-exit lanes and along Sun Road. Skewers are ordered one at a time, so you can eat your way along.
The places with hand-written menus and plastic crates for seats tend to be the cheap ones. Skewers can be ordered singly.
An eel specialist about eight minutes' walk from the station, serving the Kanto style — steamed first, then grilled — in a lacquered box.
Lunch usually comes in below the evening. Closed Mondays; arriving right at opening avoids the queue.
In the west-exit lanes there are still several horumon grills with walls darkened by smoke. Horumon-yaki Fukuya and Horumon Yakiniku En are among them. They serve the cuts — senmai, tetchan, tongue.
Ask for the miso tare, which handles the fattier cuts far better. On most menus it is written simply as misodare.
Within a few minutes of the station, several old-style coffee houses are still going — Kissa Kura and Senju-juku Kohi Monogatari among them. Velour chairs, and a clientele that has not changed in decades.
English menus are unlikely. Some shops still run a morning service, coffee with toast and egg, until around 11am, but it varies by shop, so check the sign at the door.
The Senju power station had four chimneys, eighty-three metres tall and four and a half metres thick at the base. Four is what you would expect to count. But the four stood at the points of a rhombus, so what overlapped with what changed as you moved. From some places there were four. From others three, or two, or one. People called them the ghost chimneys.
The angles at which they collapsed into a single stack were known: near the old Senju ward office, and on the left bank of the Arakawa, south of Motoki 1-chome. Children walked around checking how many they could see. The chimneys went up in 1926, ran for thirty-eight years, and came down in 1964.
After the demolition the stacks were sliced. A ring about three metres wide was cut into a U and set in the yard of Motojuku Primary School as a slide; children went down the inside of a chimney. The school itself closed in March 2005. The cut section now stands on the Sumida embankment inside the Teikyo University of Science campus, reproduced in concrete. The thing nobody could count is now fixed at one.
A few minutes from the west exit, the lanes around Senju 2-chome are packed with tiny counter-only izakaya and standing bars. Long-standing places like Taishu Sakagura Koraku and Senju no Nagami fill up by early evening even on a weekday.
Most places are cash only and have no English menu. If a shop is full, the next door along almost always has a gap.
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Six minutes from the station and a clear step up from the business hotels around it, with a women-only spa floor and rooms that are generally larger than the local norm. Five lines meet at Kita-Senju, which makes it a workable base for the north-east side of Tokyo.
A capsule hotel with a full bath and sauna floor, seven minutes from the station. Far cheaper than a room, and the bathing area is a proper one rather than a token shower — a practical option if you are passing through or have missed the last train.
Unlike most capsule hotels, there is a women-only floor behind its own security gate as well as male-only cabin floors, so check which cabin type you are booking. There is a large bath, an infrared sauna and a stone bath.
A small guesthouse in the lanes of Senju Yanagicho, converted by hand from a fifty-year-old empty house, with a wood-lined common room. There are dormitory beds and private rooms that sleep three or four.
It is about 15 minutes on foot from the station through residential streets, so the walk back after a late night is quiet. Reserve ahead; there are only a handful of beds.
Septhe second or third Sat–Sun
Senju Shrine and the districts of Senju
Each neighbourhood holds its own, and the shopping streets by the station and along the old highway are hung with jiguchi-andon lanterns and paper lanterns. The first day is called the yoimiya. Senju Shrine's own festival falls on the second weekend; in the years of its great festival, held once in five, the procession takes a whole day to cover the town.
Dates shift from year to year. Check the shrine or organiser before you plan around one.
Times are for a typical daytime weekday and fares are ordinary tickets, rounded. Both change — check a route planner on the day.
Kita-senju Station is one of Tokyo's busiest transfer hubs. It is served by five lines: the Tokyo Metro Hibiya Line and Chiyoda Line (direct from central Tokyo in around 20-30 minutes), the Tobu Skytree Line (for Nikko and Asakusa), the Tsukuba Express (direct to Akihabara in about 12 minutes), and the JR Joban Line. IC cards (Suica or Pasmo) are accepted on all lines.
Kita-senju is enjoyable year-round as a neighbourhood experience. Spring (March-April) brings cherry blossoms along the Sumida riverbank. The summer Obon festival period (mid-August) sees lively street stalls around the shotengai. Avoid Golden Week (late April to early May) if you dislike crowds, as locals return for the holiday and the shotengai gets very busy.
The east and west sides of the station have completely different characters. The west side is the main shotengai and izakaya district. The east side is quieter, more residential, and has the university-linked café scene. Most tourists only see the west side – crossing through the station to explore the east adds a whole extra dimension to the visit.
Senju was the first post town on the Oshu highway. The origin of the name is disputed: one account points to a thousand-armed Kannon kept at Shosen-ji, another to the Chiba family who held this ground in the warring states period. Kita-Senju is the part of Senju north of the Arakawa.