Shintengai: A Street Growing Older Under a Young Name

Pass beneath the sign and the doorway becomes a lane. Shops face one another across the narrow passage, while pipes, cables and air-conditioning units find space along the walls. There is a great deal installed here, and very little room to stand back and appreciate the arrangement.

Shintengai is generally said to have taken shape around 1949, during the postwar reconstruction years. A longtime proprietor’s recollection describes a busier period when almost every unit was a drinking establishment, with living quarters upstairs.

Work, home and somewhere to drink: a considerable amount of adult life fitted into a very small strip of buildings.

That density is still easy to feel. The opposite shopfront is never far away, old signs sit close to eye level, and the buildings crowd the passage from both sides. Looking up offers rather more room.

The roof did not simply wear away. According to one account, it burned in a fire in 1963, and some legal restriction kept it from being put back as it was. One shop’s second-generation owner is said to remember the fire, from the age of three.

If the street took shape around 1949, the roof lasted fourteen years at most.

The street has now spent more than four times as long without it.

The frame still gives the street a ceiling of sorts. Now it mostly divides the blue sky into rectangles.

It also makes the earlier enclosure easier to imagine. Put a roof back over those beams, lights behind the signs and customers in the bars, and the same small space begins to feel quite different.

Beyond the surviving shops, the paved route extended into open ground. After the tightness of the alley, there was suddenly space to see it from a distance.

Earlier photographs show buildings continuing into areas that were vacant when I visited. What now looks like the end of a short alley was once part of a more continuous streetscape.

Here, the narrowness acquired a different meaning. Between the shops, it was simply the width available. Out in the open, it recorded how closely the missing buildings had stood.

The path still followed an arrangement the buildings were no longer there to explain.

That was more striking to me than the worn walls. From the open ground, I could follow the route back towards the surviving shops and see it become a tightly enclosed alley again.