
A Walk around the Yamanote Line
From Takadanobaba to Shinjuku: Schools, Culture, and Wild Nightlife on Tokyo’s West Side
Travel Lifestyle Culture- English
- 日本語
- 简体字
- 繁體字
- Français
- Español
- العربية
- Русский
Constant Change
Takadanobaba is where I enter the home stretch of my walk around the Yamanote Line. From here to Shibuya, my final goal, this is my home turf, an area full of memories and personal connections. Yet, it hardly feels like a homecoming. Unfortunately, the district has changed so much that I hardly recognize it.
Granted, when I get off the train, I’m still welcomed by the Astro Boy (known in Japan as Tetsuwan Atomu) theme song that’s been used since 2003 as a departure melody for trains on these platforms. However, the atmosphere along Waseda-dōri, the station’s main commercial street, is utterly different.
The stations on the Yamanote line stations loop. (© Pixta)
Located close to Waseda and Gakushūin universities and several other vocational and training schools, Takadanobaba is still a favorite student hangout. Over time, though, it has become a little trendier, a little pricier, and a lot blander.
Thirty years ago, it had more character, starting with the tacky steel arcades on the north side of the street. There, one could find cheap diners and bars catering to penniless students, secondhand shops where I hunted for old books and video games, and two wonderful art theaters showing both Japanese and foreign films. Nearly all that is gone.
Once the area’s lone example of corporate shopping and dining, the Big Box commercial center is now surrounded by scores of chain stores. From mobile phone dealers to cafes and fast food joints, they are all over the place. Even the secondhand game shop I loved was replaced by Suit Select, which is happy to provide you with an order-made suit ready in 10 days for just ¥45,000!
Big Box is one of Takadanobaba’s oldest landmarks. (© Gianni Simone)
Constantly changing, inexorably replacing the old with the new, the up-to-date, the money-making convenient, Tokyo is the best demonstration of Marcel Proust’s dictum that you can never really get back time lost. To me, no other place drives home this painful fact with more bittersweet poignancy than Takadanobaba.
Now, every visit I make becomes an incomplete, deeply unsatisfying stroll along memory lane, a missed chance to reconnect with my younger self. But I haven’t lost all my hopes. The mom-and-pop ping pong joint is still there, hidden in an alley north of the station, and the Waseda Shōchiku cinema, which first opened in 1951, keeps showing cheap double-bills.
Human traffic, as usual, is decidedly young, though near the station, hidden underground, there are bars and eateries targeting salarymen and other working people. It’s like they don’t want to attract the students’ attention. By the way, if you are tired of the ubiquitous chain restaurants, Takadanobaba is home to several excellent Burmese diners providing simple, tasty, hearty dishes.
Takadanobaba is famous for its many Burmese eateries. (© Gianni Simone)
A Different World
Speaking of Asian cuisine, our next stop has plenty of it. Nowadays, Shin-Ōkubo is mainly associated with Korean Town, and the hordes of Japanese youngsters and foreign tourists who clog its streets every day are mainly there to taste the latest colorful Korean snacks and buy Korean cosmetics.
Food lovers converge on Shin-Ōkubo’s Korean Town on a daily basis. (© Gianni Simone)
However, on the west side of the Yamanote Line, a completely different kind of Asian experience awaits you, as the Korean places are easily overwhelmed by Vietnamese, Nepalese and other Asian shops and restaurants lining up on both sides of the street. It’s a different world that looks and smells like no other place in Tokyo. So next time people tell you how homogeneous and monocultural Japan is, take them to Shin-Ōkubo.
Walking around Shin-Ōkubo doesn’t even feel like being in Japan. (© Gianni Simone)
Now, the east side is a different story. You will need to walk some 15 to 20 minutes and get away from the Yamanote’s acoustic footprints, but it’s worth the trip, at least if you are interested in Tokyo’s deep history.
Tokyo has many danchi (public housing complexes), but Toyama Heights is arguably the only one located inside the loop. It is also one of the first and largest such projects in Tokyo. Initially constructed in 1948 on a former military site as a response to the postwar housing shortage, the original 1,062 structures were wooden, single-story houses. However, over the years, the area underwent significant redevelopment, and between 1968 and 1976, the complex was rebuilt into high-rise buildings made of reinforced concrete.
Toyama Heights is one of the more successful examples of danchi in Tokyo. (© Gianni Simone)
Coming from Takadanobaba, even before reaching the danchi, we find Toyama Park, a significant green area in the district. Once the residence of members of the Tokugawa clan whose garden was one of the best in Edo, even rivaling Koishikawa Kōrakuen, it was later used by the military, becoming a shooting range and the site of the Army Toyama School.
Today, Toyama Park is a rare green oasis in the heart of Tokyo. The park has been left to gently go wild, creating just a few little rough touches here and there that add a certain charm you won’t find in Yoyogi or other central Tokyo public parks.
Toyama Park is a rare green oasis in the heart of Tokyo. (© Gianni Simone)
Toyama Park is bisected by the major thoroughfare Meiji-dōri, and its inner, or eastern, half is a little jewel of unpretentious, quiet beauty. Although this area is more centrally located than the Yamanote stations, it has a suburban, almost rural feel. When I visited the park in the middle of a lazy weekday afternoon, the only people I crossed paths with were elementary school kids going home and pram-pushing moms. I sat on a bench to write down a few notes and the only sounds I could hear were small birds chirping, an impatient crow calling out his gang, and the subtle murmur of tree branches.
If you are still hungry for unique landmarks, here you will find Hakone-yama, an artificial hill that, standing at 44.6 meters above sea level, is the highest nonstructural point within the Yamanote Line area. (Atagoyama, in Minato, remains the highest naturally occurring point.) However, to me, the district’s most striking feature is Toyama Heights itself. While some of the buildings show their age and the whole complex looks rather dreary and lacks aesthetic charm, they are clean, with manicured lawns and walls unmarred by graffiti. In sharp contrast to the ominous atmosphere that pervades similar places in Europe and America, children play freely, the streets are immaculate, and gangs and drug dealers are nowhere to be seen. (Those things may be easier to find a little southward, in Shinjuku.)
Love Hotels and Host Clubs
As one of Tokyo’s main subcenters (it also features the world’s most trafficked station), Shinjuku is many things all at once: a shopping Mecca, a sexual playground, and a cultural and intellectual enclave, so much so that one would need to write a whole book to do the place justice.
Entering the district from the north, sex—or at least the titillating promise of it—is what you encounter. Welcome to Kabukichō, Japan’s largest red-light district. In a city where streetwalkers are far from the norm, the area around Ōkubo Park has long been known as a spot where prostitutes solicit customers, many of them being very young runaways coming from around Japan. There is quite a lot of human traffic during the day, and after a while, you start wondering whether that blonde-dyed girl with the impossibly short miniskirt is just meeting her friends or on her way to some kind of naughty work.
There are plenty of love hotels and host clubs here, but under the harsh glare of the midday sun, the place looks particularly drab, unremarkable, and unappealing. It’s only when the sun goes down and the lights go up that Kabukichō turns into a riot of colors, a sleepless playground devoted to the neon god.
At night the entrance to the Kabukichō district promises glitzy good times. (© Pixta)
And to think that Shinjuku used to be a hotbed of student protests and political turmoil; a place where artists and intellectuals gathered to change the world, or at least Japanese culture. So, I leave behind the recent news stories and dive into deep time to look for traces of the past.
Starting at the square in front of the station’s east exit, we find a very old fountain, a gift from the city of London, where it once provided water for both people and horses. The round building just behind it is the station’s parking lot. Both of them can be clearly seen in a rare color scene about halfway through Ōshima Nagisa’s 1969 film Diary of a Shinjuku Thief.
Not far from there, on Shinjuku-dōri, no history of local architecture would be complete without mentioning the Kinokuniya Bookstore main building (1964). Being squeezed between other lesser buildings, it’s easy to overlook, but for more than 60 years it’s been the heart of the local cultural scene.
Shinjuku used to be full of jazz cafes and clubs, and one of the most famous was Fūgetsudō, where in the late sixties all the rebels and arty people used to gather. Here you could find poets such as Takiguchi Shūzō, Shiraishi Kazuko, and Tanikawa Shuntarō, actors like Mikuni Rentarō and Kishida Kyōko, and of course all-round creator and enfant terrible Terayama Shūji. Then, from the late 1960s onward, more and more hippies made their appearance, selling and doing marijuana and LSD.
Unfortunately, the place was closed in 1973, so I find refuge and rest my feet at the retro-looking L’ambre, whose location is very close to the old Fūgetsudō. Here I can still enjoy a whiff of old-time café culture, albeit in a more domesticated, bourgeois atmosphere.
L’ambre’s retro atmosphere is a reminder of Shinjuku’s roaring sixties. (© Gianni Simone)
(Originally written in English. Banner photo: The Shin-Ōkubo district provides a Korean flavor to Tokyo travelers. © Pixta.)