Shintomicho Tekkinro Store

A Restaurant House That Outlived Its Own Neighbourhood

Shintomicho Tekkinro Store (新富町躍金楼店舗, also written Shintomichō Tekkinrō) is a two-storey wooden restaurant building at Shintomi 1-chome in Chuo City, Tokyo, put up around 1949 and entered on the national Register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 10 May 2018. The business it houses, the kappo restaurant Tekkinro, has been trading on this stretch of eastern Tokyo since 1873.

To understand why a building from 1949 was worth registering, you have to know what Shintomi used to be. In 1872 the Moritaza kabuki theatre was moved here from Sarugakucho in Asakusa and renamed Shintomiza after its new address. Theatre teahouses, actors' lodgings, caterers, prop workshops and musicians filled the surrounding blocks. A short-lived licensed quarter called Shinshimabara had occupied the same ground only a year or two earlier; when it was abolished, the district reinvented itself as a kagai, a geisha quarter. Tekkinro opened in 1873, right at that pivot.

The name is unusual enough that people ask about it. Tradition holds that the calligrapher and swordsman Yamaoka Tesshu supplied it, borrowing from the Chinese prose piece Yueyang Lou Ji, in which light on water is described as gold leaping across the waves. The restaurant sat close to the old Tsukiji fish market, and the image was meant to promise fish still bright enough to flash. No contemporary document confirms the attribution, and it is best treated as a story the house has kept.

What does survive on paper is the restaurant's fame. Toyohara Kunichika (1835 to 1900) included it in his 1878 print series on thirty-six celebrated eating houses of the new era, and Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839 to 1892) drew it the same year in a series comparing beauties of the capital's restaurants, with a handsomely trained pine standing in the courtyard behind the figures.

Why the Register Took It In

The Agency for Cultural Affairs registered the building under the criterion of contributing to the historical landscape of the country, which is the register's category for structures whose value lies partly in the streetscape they hold together rather than in individual craftsmanship alone.

The registered fabric is a single building of timber construction, two storeys, tile roofed, with a footprint of 186 square metres. The gabled roof runs so that the entrance falls on the gable end, a plan called tsumairi, with lean-to roofs pushed out on either side to widen the ground floor. A separate volume of living rooms is attached at the side. One further detail in the official entry rewards attention: the phrase hei-tsuki, meaning that the boundary fence and gate wall are counted as part of the property. The enclosure is not scenery around the building. It is the building.

The construction date carries its own history. The original premises stood in a block further west, and the postwar rebuild nearly failed. The family had already demolished the old structure when Japan's 1946 currency conversion rendered their savings unusable, and banks would not lend to the entertainment trade. Chuo City's survey of the district's modern buildings records that the house was raised with investment from patrons and the cooperation of the carpenter foreman. A wing was added at the end of the 1950s or beginning of the 1960s, dated by the ward to 1960, and repairs followed in 2012. The interior has been altered over the decades. The street face has not.

What to Look at Before You Sit Down

The approach is the point. Black board fencing runs along the frontage, and the entrance is marked by a gate wall whose lower courses are faced in dressed stone. Behind it, in a gap of roughly half a ken, about ninety centimetres, someone has managed to fit a front garden. In a district of ten-storey office blocks this sliver of planted ground is doing most of the work of signalling what kind of establishment stands here.

Inside, the private rooms carry names, and the fittings were chosen to match them: the Rabbit Room, the Gourd Room, the Bamboo Room. The plan also follows a rule of old restaurant design that modern buildings rarely bother with, keeping the corridors angled so that no one walking past can see into an occupied tatami room. A storehouse of plastered dozo construction is said to have already stood at the rear of the plot and to have been absorbed into the new building rather than cleared.

There is no visitor route and no admission ticket. Tekkinro is a working restaurant and the only way through the door is to eat there. Lunch runs from 11:30 to 13:30 and dinner from 17:30, with last entry at 20:00; the house closes on Sundays and public holidays, and Saturday evening is by advance booking for parties of six or more. Monday lunch and lunch on the Tuesday after a holiday are reservation-only. Hours shift, so check the restaurant's own site first. Exit 5 of Shintomicho Station on the Yurakucho Line leaves a three-minute walk; Hatchobori Station on the Hibiya and Keiyo lines is about five minutes away, and Tsukiji Station roughly seven.

Photographing the exterior from the public street is unproblematic. Inside, ask the staff before raising a camera, since other guests have booked private rooms for a reason.