Ginzaline

April 3, 2018

Sesame Mucho

The family that sells oil together sticks together. Masajiro Isomura began wholesaling sesame oil and other cooking oils in 1935 at a building across the main road from here, but it was destroyed in the US wartime fire-bombings. Friends lent him new premises to help him restart, and now his eldest son Kyoichiro – the…

March 27, 2018

Life’s Work

Went to an exhibition in some abandoned nagaya houses on this rainy day in Sumida Ward, came across this dog-legged lane, a jumble of corrugated tin-clad factories merging with clapboard houses and some piles of stuff. As with many districts where people make things, there seems to be no council zoning. The neighbourhood feels as…

March 13, 2018

Oranges and Lemons

The last Sunday of last month I met a man selling oranges and mandarins at Shirahige Park, north of Asakusa, from a truck marked Kitagawa Pig Farm. His wife makes jams from mandarins and figs. Her mandarin jam is something else. Sweet and bitter like marmalade, but delicate. Yoshihiko Naito is a fourth-generation farmer from…

January 30, 2018

Pink Portal to Time

Tumbledown drinking house standing alone near the Yanaka graveyard, a woman tending a pot-plant in the doorway, light snow flurries, a brown and white cat sips water from a plastic basin. Pink peeling signboard, the lettering fading to the west up Kototoi-dori, a long way from Kototoi bridge and the Sumida River back at Asakusa.…

November 14, 2017

Draining History

They’ve pulled the plug at Asakusa Kannon Onsen bathhouse, the Waters of the Goddess of Mercy. You might hope with a name like that, this fountain of youth could live forever. But the truth is, it was long circling the drain, with broken glass bricks, dripping water and crumbling concrete. The cloudy spring water and…

October 4, 2017

A Life in Shoes

Shoemaker Masahiko Harada left his sliding doors open to the breeze. It’s unusual for a Sunday, when he normally pushes the old frames shut to go play shogi, Japanese chess, on the other side of Asakusa. From the crossroads by Kototoi bridge, you can just make out the open doorway of his rust-clad workshop, the…

September 19, 2017

For Whom the Bell Tolls

On a normal day Kanegafuchi’s prospects look bleak. Stores stand shuttered down the long straight shopping street. The two-lane thoroughfare crosses a sort of isthmus west-to-east, above Asakusa, almost connecting the rivers Sumida and Arakawa. The direct morning and evening sun have hammered the buildings and awnings, fading the paint and fabric. Some of the…

August 18, 2017

Enough Rope

You don’t really want to buy string. You just want to luxuriate in some shadows in this minimally stocked store. Away from the humid clutter of Edo Dori. The front part was originally a barracks, temporary housing, erected after the 1945 US bombing raids. Katsuo Uchida’s father began business in 1948. The district was only…

June 26, 2017

Left Right In

The aisle at this used-books shop in the former redlight area of Hatonomachi separates more than the shelves; on the right are titles on nationalism and on the left are socialism and freedom. Owner Shigefumi Inaba coined the name, Usami-do, literally Right Left Look Store, to cater to everyone. Of course, left and right are…