Kanda is one of the old areas of Tokyo, although like most of Tokyo all buildings were destroyed during the fire bombings in WWII. Before then, this was the publishing and booksellers district – and there are still stores remaining who have been in business for three hundred years or more. Read on to find out.
Kanda Station on the Yamanote line, between the more famous Tokyo Station and Akihabara, is one of the oldest stations on the Yamanote line. It is also the only one (so far) to sell the train melody to a commercial company.
To make navigation of the crowded Tokyo trains easier, JR — the company who operates the Yamanote line — has set melodies played at the ststions when the train is arriving.
The first Yamanote line station using a melody was Shinjuku in 1989, but now all have them — some more than one, as different directions have different melodies on some stations.
On some stations, the melody is easily recognizable as international classics (Ebisu uses the theme from the Third Man), on others, international but special (the Tokyo Station theme was written by Hungarian avant-garde composer Görgy Ligeti).
Some stations use anime theme songs (Takadanobaba uses the theme song from the Atom Boy anime, as the lab where he was created was located in Takadanobaba).
But Kanda station, located near the headquarters of the Lion cosmetic and hygiene company, uses the advertising jingle for the Mondamin mouthwash.
The Kanda area has a long history, and one that is intimately intertwined with the cultural development of Japan. This is where the bookstores and stores selling writing materials were concentrated.
And of course, this made the place attractive to authors and would-be writers — there were a surprising number of them in old Edo. There were schools as well, although primarily for the children of samurai. The temples organized the schools, but towards the end of the Edo era, the government and private actors started educational institutions without ties to the religious establishment.
In Edo, all goods were sold in specialized areas, allocated their own blocks or streets. This was not by choice (or not just by choice). The location of stores and markets was among the many aspects of daily life that were regulated by the bakufu, the shogunate government.
Even though Japan arguably had the first department store in the world, sales took a different direction, with specialized stores being where everyone did their shopping. Often combined with manufacturing or at least cooking. In the Edo era, as today, rice was the main part of the meal, but toppings could be cooked somewhere else and bought separately.
This did not mean that housewives and other shoppers had to trek from, for instance, Sugamo to Nihonbashi when they wanted to serve fish for dinner. Instead, the needs of households, especially the palace-like damiyou residences, were served by distributors who made bulk purchases and resold the goods door to door. While a dying breed, there are still occasional salespeople walking the streets of Tokyo hawking their wares door to door, in particular tofu salesmen sounding their typical two-tone call, but also baked potato carts.
The Edo era salesmen would buy their goods at one of the wholesale markets. Today, the most famous surviving market street is probably Kappabashi Dougai, where the stores selling kitchen goods like pots, pans, and knives were concentrated in the Edo era. Today, there are many other places where it is easier to find kitchen goods (try the nearest Aeon department store), but the appeal of Kappabashi Dougai remains.
Books were hardly a survival matter in the Edo era, and nowadays even less so. But the literacy rate among the general population in Japan was surprisingly high at the time. Reading (and writing) was a popular pastime, and books — usually collections of woodcuts, combining text and illustrations — were in high demand. If you could afford them, because even though they were mass-produced, books were not all that cheap.
But since most people could read, they could write. Writing letters — about business, but also about personal matters — was common. Diaries were also common. And many people would copy the Buddhist sutras to further their enlightenment. You can still do this in many temples.
Writing with ink and brushes requires a different technique from writing with a pen or lead pencil.
To write in Edo-era Japan, you would need paper (made from mulberry bark; mulberry trees being common since they were used to feed silkworms). You would need brushes, made from extra fine hairs from wild boar, or even humans. And you would need ink, made in the same way today as in the Edo era, by making lanterns burn hot and produce extra black smoke, which is captured and dissolved in water, and then shaped into bars, which were ground up on special grindstones and used for writing.
You can still buy all of them in the specialist stores in Kanda. There are not as many as there were, and neither are the bookstores. But used books are still a common commodity on the streets of Kanda, and if you can find the right kind of illustrated books, they make for an excellent souvenir. And reasonable. Even if you can not read them, you can always look at the pictures.
But the bookstores are not the only traces of history in Kanda. A couple of hundred meters south of the station is a museum that is nostalgic to some, but educational to others. Those who were young before the 80s will regard it with a nostalgic smile, but younger generations will regard it with the same curiosity they afford a steam engine or foot-driven sewing machine.
The Extinct Media Museum showcases media technologies that have become obsolete. It is a private museum, so it is a bit short on analysis and presentation. You have to make sense of what you see yourself. But the collection is enormous if eclectic, and you can spend several hours in there nostalgizing over everything from super-8 projectors to minidiscs, and everything in between.
Just a couple of blocks away, across the highway, is another museum that showcases future technologies. The Eco Museum is a winding path through the park surrounding the office buildings of the Otemachi Financial City. In open-air exhibits, the museum displays renewable energy and environmental technologies. When the weather is nice, it is a thought-provoking walk.
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