Kōenji 高円寺
Second-hand clothes shops since 1987; since 1975 the JIROKICHI live house, with no stage, at floor level.
The station opened in 1922 on the line that would become the Chūō, and has been elevated since 1964. The neighbourhood burned almost entirely in the air raid of April 1945; after the war the traders on the two sides of the station quarrelled over the reconstruction plan, and in 1957 their children organised a dance to stitch the neighbourhood back together (they jokingly called it ‘Baka Odori’, the ‘fools' dance’), which would become today's Awa Odori. In the same years the music scene was born: the rock café Muvin opened in 1968, the singer-songwriter Yoshida Takurō released the song ‘Kōenji’ in 1972, tying the neighbourhood to folk and rock, and in 1975 JIROKICHI opened, among the first live houses in Japan. From the 1980s the second-hand clothes shops followed the same crowd: from the first, opened in 1987, to two hundred in the early 2000s; today over a hundred remain, concentrated above all along the Pal shōtengai.
Tokyo
Kōenji
