Nihombashi, Ginza, and Yuraku-cho

When Ieyasu Tokugawa had the first bridge constructed at Nihombashi, he designated it the starting point for the five great roads leading out of his city, the point from which all distances were to be measured. His decree is still in force: the black pole on the present bridge, erected in 1911, is the Zero Kilometer marker for all the national highways and is considered the true center of Tokyo.

The early millionaires of Edo built their homes in the Nihombashi area. Some, like the legendary timber magnate Bunzaemon Kinokuniya, spent everything they made in the pleasure quarters of Yoshiwara and died penniless. Others founded the great trading houses of today—Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo—which still have warehouses nearby.

When Japan's first corporations were created and the Meiji government developed a modern system of capital formation, the Tokyo Stock Exchange (Shoken Torihikijo) was established on the west bank of the Nihombashi-gawa (Nihombashi River). The home offices of most of the country's major securities companies are only a stone's throw from the exchange.

In the Edo period there were three types of currency in circulation: gold, silver, and copper. Ieyasu Tokugawa started minting his own silver coins in 1598 in his home province of Suruga, even before he became shogun. In 1601 he established a gold mint; the building was only a few hundred yards from Nihombashi, on the site of what is now the Bank of Japan. In 1612 he relocated the Suruga plant to a patch of reclaimed land west of his castle. The area soon came to be known informally as Ginza (Silver Mint).

Currency values fluctuated during this time and eventually businesses fell under the control of a few large merchant houses. One of the most successful of these merchants was a man named Takatoshi Mitsui, who by the end of the 17th century created a commercial empire—in retailing, banking, and trading—known today as the Mitsui Group. Not far from the site of Echigo-ya stands its direct descendant: Mitsukoshi department store.

The district called Yuraku-cho—the Pleasure (yuraku) Quarter (cho)—lies west of Ginza's Sukiya-bashi, stretching from Sotobori-dori to Hibiya Koen and the Outer Garden of the Imperial Palace. The "pleasures" associated with this district in the early postwar period stemmed from a number of the buildings that survived the air raids of 1945 and were requisitioned by the Allied forces. Yuraku-cho quickly became the haunt of the so-called pan-pan women, who kept the GIs company. Because it was so close to the military post exchange in Ginza, the area under the railroad tracks became one of the city's largest black markets. Later, the black market gave way to clusters of cheap restaurants, most of them little more than a counter and a few stools, serving yakitori and beer. Office workers on meager budgets and journalists from the nearby Mainichi, Asahi, and Yomiuri newspaper headquarters would gather here at night. Yuraku-cho-under-the-tracks was smoky, loud, and friendly—a kind of open-air substitute for the local taproom. The area has long since become upscale, and no more than a handful of the yakitori stalls remain.