The Tokaido Road, Shinagawa

In the Edo period, Shinagawa was the first post town a traveler would reach after setting out from Nihombashi on the Tokaido highway [Kyu-tokaido] from Edo to Kyoto. Japanorama’s editor, Alfie Goodrich, has begun a photo-documentary of the area.“The Tokaido runs through neighbourhoods all the way from where we live in Minami-oi to Shinagawa itself and has many charms”, says Alfie, “with a very olde-worlde feel and you’ll find the main street is the same width as it did in the Edo era.”

The old post town area was called Shinagawa-syuku [Shinagawa-juku], through which the Keikyu Line now runs and the whole area around the road is easily accessible from the stations of Kitashinagawa, Aomono-yokocho, Samezu and Tachiaigawa.

Samezu is a particularly interesting neighbourhood. The name either comes from “clean water” [mizu] springing out of the “sand” [sa] at low tide. Or from the fact that a shark [same] was washed on the shore [su].

The Tokaido road in Samezu is what would once have been a promenade and if you look hard traces of old Edo period fishing activity close to it can be found. There was at one time a famous fishmarket in Samezu called Ohayasahi, which delivered fish to the imperial palace and it is also known that the Emperor himself fished on the shore in Samezu.

Tokyo Bay is still only a short walk from Samezu, where Edo style fishing stopped in 1962, and between the shore and the Bay proper nowadays are all the new man-made islands formed when land reclamation took off in the ’60s.

With many shrines and temples, including the famed Shinagawa ‘Seven Gods’ Route [which ideally should be walked between the 1st and 7th of January], Kyu-tokaido has a rich religious heritage which to be honest forms 99.9% of the remnants of any Edo life you can still find. But that aside, the streets are cosy, interesting and filled with the kinds of small, independent shops and traders which many a UK town would love to have back but which are disappearing under an every-encroaching tide of chain-stores and coffee-shops.

For further information about The Old Tokaido Road in Shinagawa, try the following links:

• City Guide, Shinagawa - some good information and more photos
• Tourism Metro Tokyo - their pages on ‘old and new Shinagawa’
• The Japan Times - an archived article about Shinagawa as a coastal town

Check out Alfie’s full photo documentary on Flickr, where there are currently about 35 photos of the area with more being added each week. The photos below are a selection from that gallery:

[flickr]set:72157603543834000[/flickr]