Sento, slums & the origins of Tokyo today

Join me for an urbanist walk through the birth and life of a Tokyo neighborhood

I’ve had my hands full with finishing our renovation of Tokyo Little House (re-opening on Wednesday!), but now that I have a few hundred subscribers in Tokyo, I want to start regularly running a historical walking tour that loosely follows the old Nakasendo highway from my neighborhood of Sengoku to Inari-yu, the historic bathhouse where my organization created a new community space at Inari-yu Nagaya.

If you are interested in how Tokyo emerged over the 20th century, this walk draws on my background in urban studies, the deep local research I’ve done for the Inari-yu project, and the personal attachments I’ve made to my neighborhood. I like to tell a macro narrative about the organic processes that shaped the city as it evolved from Edo into Tokyo, and the particular role of the bathhouse as a basic unit of 20th-century Tokyo’s urbanism, anchoring local lifeworlds about 150 meters in radius. I first did this walk in 2023 with Jordan Sand, whose work on Meiji-era slums in the area helped to fill in some of the missing pieces of the story. The resulting tour explains the relationship between sento, residential spaces, and the ecosystem of neighborhood commons and businesses.

Baths in the mid-1930s in Takinogawa Ward, with 150-meter zones (own work)

While much of this local granularity has disappeared, we can still find traces of it. Even in its absence, the imprint on the urban topography is there if you know where to look. In my neighborhood of Sengoku, we’ll pass by my favorite kakuuchi, grocer, fishmonger, and rice shop that has been in business since the 1730s. Further along, Sugamo’s lively stretch of the Nakasendo is a great place to consider the historical flows of people and commodities into and out of the city. And out past Koshinzuka, we can see how a new industrial metropolis arose in a few short decades in the early 20th century and swept away what was left of Edo.

Four of my handmade “MapCubes” let us look back at the area’s urbanization.

We’ll be visiting the sites of Meiji-era slums and digging into Nakasendo shop lists, bathhouse family trees, and other materials gathered from archives and interviews, but you don’t need to be a history nerd to understand. The whole tour is about 4 kilometers and takes a couple of hours. Best of all, you can take a bath at Inari-yu afterwards, and grab a drink at our community space at Inari-yu Nagaya.

Photo by TADA / Sento & Neighborhood

So here’s the deal: I will run this walk on September 14 (now full!) at 1:00 pm and about once a month with later dates TBD. Each walk will be limited to six people. Participation is ¥3,000, with all proceeds going to finishing my project at Onomichi Labyrinth House. If you’re interested in joining next weekend or coming on a future walk, fill out this Google Form here. And if you’re abroad but want an urbanist’s perspective on Tokyo during a future visit, or have a group that you’d want to do this with, you can always email me.

Shimada Yusuke apgm* / Sento & Neighborhood

In the meantime, I’ll be serving coffee at the new Tokyo Little House in Akasaka on Wednesday and Thursday. I’ll write about that project again soon, and perhaps if this goes well I’ll do a postwar Tokyo walk, too. For now, re-posting this story from last year again for new subscribers: