Imahan Honten

What Is Imahan Honten?

Imahan Honten (今半本店) is a sukiyaki restaurant on Shin-Nakamise Street in Asakusa 1-chome, Taito City, Tokyo, in business since 1895, and the three tatami-room wings behind its dining hall, built between about 1951 and about 1956, were entered together on the register of Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on February 27, 2023. The three are the West, East and North Inner Zashiki, registered as numbers 13-0472 to 13-0474.

Each wing is a single-storey timber building, and all three were registered under the criterion of serving as a model of design. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes them as restaurant zashiki wings standing in the middle of the block east of Nakamise Street, and as sukiya-style buildings made up of the small private rooms typical of a sukiyaki house.

A note on the name: Honten means the original or main restaurant. Asakusa has other places called Imahan, including Asakusa Imahan on Kokusai Street, Imahan Bekkan (the Imahan Annex) in Asakusa 2-chome, and Ningyocho Imahan, whose main branch is in Nihonbashi. Imahan Honten states that each is a separate company. Three buildings of Imahan Bekkan were registered in 2003, but that is a different restaurant and a separate registration, not part of this group.

The Agency's database gives the address of the three wings as 1-2-5 Asakusa, while the restaurant gives its own address as 1-19-7 Asakusa.

From Okayama to "Imahan Palace"

According to the restaurant, Imahan Honten was founded by Aizawa Hantaro, a man from Okayama, who opened a restaurant in Tokyo in 1895. The "han" of Imahan comes from his given name. The "ima" (now) has several explanations, one being that it signalled something modern in the years when beef eating was new to Japan; the restaurant does not settle on one. In the Taisho era the business moved to a site just behind Nakamise.

The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 brought the building down. The restaurant rebuilt in the early Showa years on a lavish scale, and the new premises came to be known as "Imahan Goten", Imahan Palace. That building burned in the Tokyo air raid of March 10, 1945.

After the war the second-generation owner, Aizawa Kunio, came back from evacuation on the Izu Peninsula and reopened in 1951 as a limited company, Imahan Honten. The restaurant says the present buildings, including the inner zashiki wings, were finished by around 1955. The Agency dates the West and East wings to about 1951 and the North wing to about 1956, slightly later than the restaurant's account.

The Three Wings of Imahan Honten

Based on the Agency's descriptions, the three wings of Imahan Honten line up as follows, in order of construction.

• The West Inner Zashiki (about 1951, 36 m²) has three 4.5-mat rooms with a Tokonoma alcove, set along a single-sided corridor on the north. The rooms are named Kasuga, Yoshino and Jindai. The floor is raised high, and the space beneath serves as storage.
• The East Inner Zashiki (about 1951, 53 m²) is the largest of the three. A corridor with its own entrance runs along the north side, serving three 6-mat rooms named Matsu, Take and Ume (pine, bamboo and plum).
• The North Inner Zashiki (about 1956, 35 m²) has three rooms of roughly 4.5 mats along a corridor on the south side.

All three have gabled roofs, originally tiled and now covered in steel sheet. The West and East wings were renovated in 2014, the North wing in 2005 and again in 2014.

What sets them apart is where the effort went. In the Agency's words, the East and West wings indulge in fine named timbers chosen to match each room, while the North wing puts its care into craft: Kumiko lattice in the sliding fittings and woven ajiro ceilings. One wing shows off its wood, another shows off its joinery, and seeing the three together is the point of visiting Imahan Honten.

Small rooms of three to four people strung along a corridor suit the way sukiyaki is eaten, around a shared pot at a low table. The food writer Mukasa Chieko has likened the restaurant to a kimono coat with a showy lining: a plain, everyday dining hall at the front, and refined Japanese rooms hidden past the courtyard.

Visiting Imahan Honten

The inner zashiki of Imahan Honten are still private dining rooms in a working restaurant, so the only way inside is as a diner. The private rooms are by reservation only, for parties of two or more, and you cannot ask for a particular room, so which wing you are shown to is decided on the day. A cover charge of 500 yen per person applies in the inner rooms. Seats in the front hall cannot be booked and are filled in order of arrival.

Hours are 11:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. (last order 8:00 p.m.), with a break from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. The restaurant is closed on Tuesdays, though this can change around Asakusa temple fairs, public holidays and the New Year. It refuses unauthorised video uploads, so ask the staff before taking photos. Because the three wings face an inner courtyard and passage in the middle of the block, they are unlikely to be visible from the street.

Imahan Honten is about a 3-minute walk from Asakusa Station on the Tokyo Metro Ginza Line, the Toei Asakusa Line and the Tobu Line, and about 7 minutes from the Tsukuba Express Asakusa Station. There is no parking; the restaurant suggests the Kaminarimon underground car park nearby.