Tokyo Villages

by Steve Gillick

Shibuya

In his television series The Life-Sized City, Mikael Coleville-Andersen spoke about the best way to understand a huge city such as Tokyo. While 13.8 million people live in Tokyo (38 million reside in the Greater Tokyo Area), the city becomes more digestible when seen as “a cluster of tiny villages,” with each village or neighbourhood having its own personality comprised of local culture, unique attractions, festivals, history, entertainment, restaurants and shopping. Using the Tokyo Metro and Toei Subway Lines, visitors can pretty well disembark at any station and explore the area.

Here are a few of my favourite “villages” to explore in the city.

Sake in Ningyocho

Ningyocho literally means “Doll Town.” In the Edo period, this area was home to doll makers and puppeteers, and today the bell towers still present little puppet shows when the bells chime the hours.

Once a year in springtime, Ningyocho is home to one of the best outdoor community sake festivals in the city. After lining up outside the liquor store to buy our sake tasting tickets, we were handed our tasting tools: a small white porcelain cup (so we could check the clarity of the sake) and a map of the neighbourhood on which the participating bars and izakaya pubs had been marked. Then we joined hundreds of fellow aficionados sampling sake, chatting with brewers, exploring the neighbourhood and meeting lots of new friends along the way!

Yanaka

©JNTO

Culinary Kappabashi

Kappabashi is known as the kitchen and restaurant supply neighborhood of Tokyo. You can purchase everything from chopsticks to frying pans to Japanese curry powder. But Kappabashi is also the “village” where you can purchase plastic food of the kind that many restaurants in Japan use to display their menu items.

For the adventurous traveller who likes to get involved, classes are available to make your own plastic food—which is what we did! We watched our teachers demonstrate the technique, and then it was our turn to ladle green wax into a heated vat, then scoop it up and roll it together so that it looked like lettuce. The technique was repeated with different colours to make shrimp and vegetable tempura dishes. At the end of the class we learned how to “plate” our creations: we cut the lettuce in half to frame our tempura and then we boxed it up to take home for display. I’ll admit it looked good enough to eat!

Kabuki experience in Ginza

Kabukiza

©momo / PIXTA

One of the major attractions in the Ginza area is the Kabukiza, the theatre where Kabuki plays are featured. Kabuki is written using the characters for “sing,” “dance” and “skill,” and dates back to the early 1600s. While some plays may be several hours in length, we purchased one-hour tickets, rented the simultaneous translation earphones and enjoyed a short segment of the Kabuki theatre performance. But after a few such visits we were eager for a more interactive experience, so we signed up for the Kabuki makeup workshop at Kabukitaro near the Mitsukoshimae Metro station.

The instructor began with an explanation of how to identify the different characters in a play based on the makeup used to enhance their facial expressions. We learned to speak like Kabuki actors as we copied the instructor’s vocal intonations from a low, gruff rumbling to a high-pitched falsetto.

After practicing a few basic Kabuki dance movements, two members of our group volunteered to be made up with kumadori Kabuki makeup. First their complexions were whitened, and then black and red lines were applied to emphasize their eyelines, cheekbones, noses and mouths. Both those who observed and those who participated were totally absorbed in the process. The workshop was a unique opportunity to get hands-on with one of Tokyo’s iconic cultural experiences.