Although writers like the late Kafu Nagai, Tokyo’s most prescient of chroniclers, were already beginning to lament the passing of old Asakusa even in the forties and fifties, fortunately for us, most of them underestimated the robustness of the shitamachi, downtown tradition and it’s gift for renewal. Though the shadows cast across the nearby Sumida River are more likely these days to come from office blocks and raised expressways than tea houses or the tenements of dissolute poets, they would undoubtedly recognize the essentials of present-day Asakusa, despite many of the distressing and mindless changes.
The heart of old Tokyo is still here in this quintessentially working-class district near the Sumida River. This quarter of the capital, a vital part of shitamachi, a word that translates, literally, as ‘downtown,’ but stands more precisely for ‘home of the common people,’ is a plebeian area synonymous in Japanese minds with hard work and equally hard play, a bustling mercantile mentality, romance, libertine pleasures, a colorful Bohemianism, and a strong sense of community. The bustling commerce and ribald good humor of Asakusa are still very much in evidence today.
In the 1930s, Asakusa was the largest entertainment district in Japan, before that role passed to Shinjuku. Once the lively center of Asakusa’s theaterland, Rokku Avenue, lined with fleapits and seedy strip joints had become by the 1950s, at least in the general public’s view, the unseemly haunt of derelicts, lechers and drunks. Attempts were made to revive and preserve some of the older entertainment centers of Asakusa in the 1980s, based on the glories of their pre-war days but, after bitter debates between the local community and the planners, many familiar monuments disappeared almost overnight, including two of Japan’s oldest Art-Deco cinemas which were replaced in 1994 with a series of featureless boxes, one of them, ingloriously, the Tokyo branch of the British chain store Mothercare
Sensoji, Asakusa’s great temple is, in many ways, still the spiritual center of the area, the core of the old quarter. Once a great pilgrimage site it was also, as Ryosuke Kami points out in his book Tokyo Sights and Insights, a place where worshippers came "not just for religious purposes but for the entertainment that abounded in the temple’s back yard, ranging from theaters, archery galleries, and circuses to brothels."
The main compound of the temple is best approached after passing under the Kaminarimon, or Thunder Gate, that weathered wooden entrance flanked by leering, twin meteorological gods and a magnificent red paper lantern with the character for ‘thunder’ emblazoned across it. In Asia, where there are temples there are markets, and the Sensoji is no exception. It’s main souvenir drag is the well-known and patronized Naka-mise, a covered avenue of cubby shops that lead to the main compound. Venture into the backstreets around the temple and more refined products are easily sought out.
Poet James Kirkup visited this area in 1960, recording his findings in his 1960 travelogue, Japan Behind the Fan. The writer discovered a small shop selling "miniature, bright-colored notebooks of fine rice-paper, boxes printed with Kabuki and Noh masks . . . white-tailed kites, about the size of a postage stamp, printed with the face of a monster, a devil, a dragon," and a number of envelopes lithographed with misty black-and-white brush paintings, having "a rustic texture, like dark porridge, made from chopped rice-straw." There are still such shops in the Sensoji area today.
The earthy community that lives in the Sensoji area of Asakusa are responsible for organizing one of Tokyo’s most dynamic festivals — the Sanja Matsuri, or Three Shrines Festival.
The Sensoji, and the roads and spidery lanes that run around it like containing tendrils, provide the epicenter for this mammoth four-day spectacle, one of the great spring events for a Tokyo family. Dozens of beautifully lacquered portable shrines are carried through the streets by young men and women, with much rough verve, jostling and caterwauling. It is said that the shrine gods enjoy being tossed and bounced around in this manner, something they get plenty of from the seething, swaying, rhythmically chanting crowds of humanity at Asakusa.

The seasons are not allowed to pass by without some festival, ritual or event of purely secular invention taking place: flowers in January, bean throwing in February, golden dragon dancing in March and again in October; a white crane parade in November, a traditional badminton racket and kite market in December, horseback archery in April and, a relatively new innovation, a Brazilian style carnival in August.
Asakusa has always been geared as much to the hedonist as to the incense-impregnated world of the priest and Buddhist acolyte. Just behind Sensoji, practically overlooking the little visited abbot’s garden, lies Asakusa’s sprawling entertainment district. Lurid posters outside cinemas and street barkers are a feature here.
This area is also the home of Taishu Engeki, a very shitamachi brand of popular theater. A ticket for these low-brow dramas, full of the verve and earthy humor associated with this area, cost little more than a thousand yen. The cramped, scruffy, albeit intimate playhouses they are staged in, provide the explanation for the cost. Strong plots are the order of the day here and audiences, equipped with boxed lunches and cans of beer, attend performance that re-enact the destinies of star-crossed lovers, double suicides, and tales of massively bloody vengeance. Appreciation is shown from the gallery by tossing money onto the stage.
Another Asakusa institution is the rickety amusement park called the Hanayashiki which can be glimpsed from the grounds of the Sensoji. This, one imagines, is how amusement parks used to be in Asakusa’s heyday. Most of the game machines here seem to have a certain vintage quality about them, and no one seems to know exactly when the eerily realistic obakiyashiki — ghost house — dates from. Visitors to the lavatory at the Hanayashiki — echoes of an old Parisian pissoir with a dented roof — will be amused, perhaps momentarily paralyzed in the vitals, by a sudden, hurtling vibration as the park’s roller coaster, with nowhere else to go in this cramped, rat trap of a park, thunders a meter or so overhead.
Here, among the busy and good-humored merchant streets of Asakusa, are real echoes of old Edo, its noise and rumbustious vitality, its enduring existence as an earthy testament to the joys of being alive.
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