浅草

A fisherman's statue becomes Edo's entertainment quarter

You're standing beside Asakusa, a Tokyo neighborhood built around the temple of Sensō-ji. Around you, small stone memorials crowd the temple grounds: the Chikaraishi stones, a verse monument, a bronze statue of the writer Uryū Iwako. Sensō-ji itself sits about 400 feet from where you stand, one of the oldest Buddhist temples in Tokyo.

The story starts in the water. In 628, two fishermen named Hinokuma Hamanari and Takenari pulled a statue of the bodhisattva Kannon from the Sumida River. Hinokuma Hamanari and Takenari prayed over it. That act of worship became Sensō-ji, and the temple town that grew around it became Asakusa.

For centuries this was marshy, low-lying ground on the edge of old Edo, what Tokyo was called before 1868. Its fortunes changed because of rice. Nearby Kuramae stored grain used to pay the shogunate's soldiers and officials. Merchants called fudasashi handled that rice, taking a cut each time they changed it for cash. Over generations many of them grew wealthy, and they spent that money close to home. Theaters, geisha houses and teahouses sprang up in Asakusa to take it.

By the 1840s, the neighborhood had become Edo's entertainment quarter in earnest. After a fire destroyed several kabuki theaters elsewhere in the city in 1841, the shogunate ordered them rebuilt here, in a new theater district called Saruwaka-chō. The Yoshiwara pleasure quarter, forced out of its old home by an earlier fire, had already resettled nearby. Asakusa became the place Edo went to be entertained, and it kept that role for a hundred years.

The 20th century brought film, and Asakusa's "Sixth District," known as Rokku, became Tokyo's theater and cinema row. The writer Yasunari Kawabata set his 1930 novel, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, among its dance halls and crowds, capturing the neighborhood at its liveliest.

Asakusa's old entertainment world ended on the night of March 10, 1945. American B-29 bombers firebombed Tokyo, and the raid leveled most of Asakusa. The temple, the theaters, the old wooden streets, nearly all of it burned.

Rebuilding restores the temple but not the crowds

Rebuilding started slowly. Sensō-ji's main hall, its pagoda and the Kaminarimon gate all went up again through the 1950s, remade in concrete to match their old Edo-period designs. The neighborhood around them recovered its streets but not its old standing. Shinjuku, Shibuya and Ikebukuro had grown up on the west side of the city, and they drew the crowds that once filled Asakusa's theaters.

What survived was older than the entertainment district itself. The name Asakusa may come from a simple description: shallow grass, the kind that once covered this low ground near the Sumida River before anyone built a temple on it. That account comes from an old Edo-period record called the Edo Suna-ko. Whether that is truly where the name came from, nobody can say for certain, but it fits a place that stayed marshy and modest long after the city around it rose.

The temple itself carried a weightier story than any name. It is the story Sensō-ji has carried for thirteen centuries, and it is why people still come.

The temple's standing with Tokyo's rulers had shifted over time too. When Tokugawa Ieyasu made Edo his capital around 1603, he named Sensō-ji the shogunate's own prayer temple and gave it 500 koku of rice a year, a formal mark of favor that helped turn a minor village into a real town. Later, in 1625, Ieyasu pulled that status back. The temple became, by design, a place for ordinary townspeople rather than the shogun's court. That decision is part of why Sensō-ji still feels like it belongs to the street outside it rather than to any palace.

A samba carnival gives Asakusa a new draw

In 1981, Asakusa found a new way to fill its streets. Brazilian immigrants and their neighbors started the Asakusa Samba Carnival, a parade of sequins and drums held every August along the temple's approach roads. It had nothing to do with the old geisha houses or kabuki stages, but it did the same job they once did: it gave Asakusa a reason for the rest of Tokyo to show up.

Around you now, the ground still carries smaller markers of the centuries before the fire. A bronze statue honors Uryū Iwako, a writer tied to this place. None of it is grand, but all of it is old.

Asakusa today is a tourist neighborhood built on that same temple-town pattern it has followed since the 600s: a shrine, a crowd, shops selling souvenirs along the way in. Fifty million visitors a year walk the approach to Sensō-ji, past vendors much like the ones who worked here under the Tokugawa shoguns. Hanayashiki stands 450 feet away, Japan's oldest amusement park, open since 1853 and still running rides behind the temple grounds.