My town was also like Ginza and Yurakucho, just like my Mom's.
When I was in high school, I’d tell my mother, “I’m heading to Shinjuku,” and she’d scold me, saying, “Don’t go somewhere so far away! That place is so remote that cows are still mooing in front of the station.”
For my mother, who had lived her entire 90 years within a 2-kilometer radius of Ginza, places like Aoyama and Harajuku were already considered the countryside. Shinjuku must have seemed like an impossibly far-off land.
At the time, I just laughed it off. But looking back now, I realize that, in a way, I wasn’t so different from her.
My world, too, revolved around Ginza and Yurakucho.
If—just if—my high school days had been centered in Shinjuku instead, the landscape of my 1960s would have looked completely different.
Back then, Shinjuku was just the place I went to visit Pit Inn; otherwise, my daily scenery was always Ginza and Yurakucho. That’s why my world didn’t include Jūrō Kara or Shūji Terayama.
Maybe because of that, even when I started university and began using the Odakyu Line for my commute—expanding my territory from Ginza to Shinjuku—I never really fit in with the people there.
There was always something off about the way they spoke. Not a sense of superiority, but rather an unmistakable, unshakable feeling of foreignness. A strange dissonance in their intonations made me feel like I had stepped into another world. Kotodama—the soul of words—is powerful.
So, in the end, I remained an outsider in Shinjuku. Even now, it still feels like an alien world to me.
To be honest, Shibuya and Ikebukuro feel almost the same as Shinjuku—equally foreign, just a matter of degrees. That’s why I never go there unless I have to.
The last time I had a reason to visit Shibuya was for Gotō Planetarium. As for Ikebukuro, I’ve never had any reason to go.
“There’s nothing you need that isn’t in Ginza. And if something isn’t there, you don’t need it,” my mother used to say, firmly and without hesitation. And somehow, I’ve ended up walking the same path she did.
I recently realized this because of my wife. Her youth was spent in the area between Kameido and Oshiage. Ginza wasn’t a part of her formative memories.
And yet, now she knows Ginza better than I do. When she talks about it, it’s almost as if she could tell you exactly how many rats are hiding under each gutter grate in every back alley.
Our kids went to Taimei Kindergarten and Taimei Elementary School, and she was deeply involved in the PTA, so she got to know a lot of the local families in Ginza.
That’s probably why, the other day, I casually brought up the old Nichigeki and its basement theater, the little café, and the barbershop down there. But she just said, “I have no idea. My Ginza is Marion.”
That caught me off guard. Oh! She doesn’t even know about the sushi alley in front of Yurakucho Station.
Her Ginza began only after the postwar years had burst like a bubble.
That moment made me realize something—Tokyo is a city where the past disappears completely. It doesn’t accumulate and layer itself like NYC or Paris.
And now, more than ever, I feel that truth.
いいなと思ったら応援しよう！
