Kokubunchō

photo by 石巻敎祖 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Two thousand seven hundred venues, and at Tōyōken you can eat until three in the morning.

It is the neighbourhood where Sendai goes drinking in the evening, and the largest in Tōhoku: about 2,700 restaurants, bars and nightspots, 2,350 of them packed into the second block alone and the two alleys that run alongside it, Inari-kōji and Toraya-yokochō. At Tōyōken, a historic Chinese restaurant, the stir-fried noodles with mābō cost 1,000 yen and are served until three in the morning; at Gyūtan Ippuku the grilled beef tongue set meal starts from 1,950 yen.

In the Edo period it was the stretch of the Ōshū Kaidō (the great road that ran north from Sendai Castle) where the merchants lived: ten houses on the east side of the road and nine on the west, which is why it was also called ‘the nineteen hearths of Kokubun’. The name comes from the residents the Date clan moved here, people who served the Kokubu family. It turned from a market into an entertainment district at the end of the nineteenth century, and after the economic boom the second block grew to become the largest in Tōhoku. It stretches from the south, at the Bashō crossroads, to the north as far as Omote-kōji, beyond Jōzenji Avenue.

ℹ️ The district is made up of public streets and you can walk through it at any time, but it comes alive from seven in the evening onwards: by day it is a grid of unlit signs. Each venue has its own hours: Tōyōken stays open until 3:00, Gyūtan Ippuku closes at 22:30. It is just outside Kōtōdai-kōen metro station, and 5–10 minutes' walk from Hirose-dōri station. In the second block, touting in the street is common and is banned by a city ordinance: the venues you reach that way are the ones with surprise bills.

🚉 Kotodai-Koen · 4 min walk

Sources: sentabi.jp · ja.wikipedia.org · mapple.net

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