Esca Underground Arcade

photo by HQA02330 · CC BY-SA 4.0

photo by HQA02330 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Eighty shops under the station, thirty-five of them for eating, and the cafés open at 7:00.

You come out of the shinkansen ticket gates and go down: it is the arcade closest to the fast trains. Eighty businesses on a single floor, and thirty-five of them are places to eat, lined up along the passage, serving Nagoya cuisine. Anyone with an early-morning train has breakfast here, because the cafés open at seven; anyone arriving in the evening finds the kitchens going until half past ten.

Esca opened on 1 December 1971 under the shinkansen side of Nagoya Station; the company that runs it had been founded seven years earlier, and its shareholders include the private railway Meitetsu, a local television station, JR Central and the municipality. It covers 29,179.6 square metres in all, of which just over six thousand are shops: the rest is passages and stairs, technical rooms and a car park on the second basement floor. The figure of eighty businesses dates from 31 March 2024. Nagoya has about 170,000 square metres of underground shopping arcades and ranks third among Japanese cities for the extent of its arcades, after Tokyo and Osaka.

ℹ️ Shops from 10:00 to 20:30, restaurants until 22:30, cafés from 7:00 in the morning; a few businesses keep their own hours. There is nothing to pay. On the other side of the station is Unimall, opened on 1 November 1970, with an almost identical floor area and without the row of local restaurants: together they are part of the same 170,000 underground square metres. The floor below Esca is the public car park, and anyone who uses it as a pedestrian shortcut ends up among the cars.

🚉 JR Highway Bus Terminal · 2 min walk

Sources: esca-sc.com · city.nagoya.jp · unimall.co.jp

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