Architecture of old Edo

There was an article in the Times this week about a town just North of Tokyo that maintains the old architecture of Edo, as Tokyo used to be called in the era of the Shogun.

Kawagoe is a city that invested in the past by refusing to allow train service to come  to the city in the Meiji era.  This retarded the growth of modern commerce in the intervening years but also made the city an unattractive target for American bombers in WWII, since there were no factories in the town.

The town has many examples of the old storefront homes called kura that used to be prevalent across Japan.  According to this beautifully illustrated work, the kura has been a fundamental pattern in Japanese architecture from prehistoric times and evolved through the design of treasure houses in Buddhist temples.

Though I haven’t had a chance to visit Kagaoe, I did have lunch in Nara at a restaurant called Ragamala that fits the pattern of a kura, housed in an old storefront house off the main arcade.

The integrated nature of the kura, functioning as a warehouse, storefront and home was what traditionalists had in mind for the redesign of Kyoto Station in 1997. 

In Tokyo itself there’s an old neighborhood I’ve visited that retains a lot of this ambiance just behind busy Ueno Park. Yanaka is an area that’s managed to survive both the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and the bombings in WWII to maintain it’s characteristic feudal era charm. The small streets house craft stores selling the traditional mulberry bark  paper called Washi. Here’s a store in Osaka that uses the appropriately named website kura.com to sell Washi.

Yanaka is also home to a cemetery famous for its beautiful flowering trees that people visit every spring during cherry blossom time. Both Natsume Soseki, the great Meiji era author and the last Tokugawa Shogun, Yoshinobu are buried here.

Another historical association with shogunal times in the neighborhood is Kannon-ji where two of the members of the 47 Ronin were students. The group met here sometimes to plan their revenge according to a sign in front of the temple.