Kasuga to Otemachi walk

Yesterday I walked from home to Otemachi to meet Tod for lunch. I’ve done this many times and it is a lovely little stroll through diverse neighborhoods. Let me describe them to you.

The main street in Kasuga is Kasuga Dori, a busy four lane road. It was a pilgrim route to Kawagoe and it still leads there. Once I tried to walk there. Yesterday I turned my back on Kawagoe and headed down to Korakuen station and Tokyo Dome.

Within ten minutes of leaving my apartment, I reached a bright and cheery entertainment and shopping area. Tokyo Dome itself hosts baseball games and concerts. It is flanked by LaQua, a shopping mall with a hot spring, roller coaster, and Ferris wheel on its roof. On the other end of the Dome, Meets Port has an event hall and many restaurants. “Tokyo Dome City” is a man-made, marketed, commercial destination. I walked through it as quickly as I could.

At the end of Tokyo Dome City is the Suidobashi JR station and the more down-to-earth Jimbocho neighborhood. Jimbocho is famous for used books and sporting equipment. The buildings are a mix of low tenements and 20 year old highrises, but all of them have street front shops. It seems like about a third of them are bookstores, but there are all sorts of things to buy and great places to eat at reasonable prices, too. I like Jimbocho; it is a human-scaled place in a city that is sometimes overwhelmingly glittery or depressingly sterile.

But it doesn’t take long to walk through Jimbocho and after skirting around some slow moving office ladies out for lunch, I turned east onto Kanda Keisatsu Dori. This strip is a broad street with bigger, taller buildings: a couple of schools, some minor corporate headquarters and the Kanda police station that names the street. Even though the buildings are blockier and larger than the ones in Jimbocho, the street feels sort of cozy. There are sculptures near several of the buildings and the cross streets are one-way. The street makes a good transition between Jimbocho and Otemachi.

Turning off Keisatsu Dori and crossing over the Kanda River (or is it the Nihombashi River at that point?) I reached Otemachi. This is where a lot of banking and business take place. Every building is a skyscraping office tower with a granite courtyard or a marble entranceway punctuated with a tree or two. It is modern and imposing and quite dull. I’m glad I don’t work there anymore, but I am always happy to visit Tod for lunch.

Posted by kuri at June 03, 2008 12:45 PM