Shimotōri Arcade

photo by Asturio Cantabrio · CC BY-SA 4.0

photo by Asturio Cantabrio · CC BY-SA 4.0

511 m under cover and 15 m high; in 2018, 32,000 people passed through on weekdays and 50,000 on holidays.

You get off at the 通町筋 tram stop, cross the tracks and the roof goes on and on: five hundred and eleven metres of arcade, fifteen metres wide and just as high, which is the height of a five-storey building. Underneath, street musicians play in front of the shop windows and associations set up their stalls in the middle of the walkway.

It is the largest shopping arcade in the prefecture. The street burned down entirely in the 1945 bombing raids and was hit again by the 1953 flood; in the rebuilding the roadway was widened from nine to fifteen metres, and a partial canopy went up on each side. The fully covered arcade, today's 511 metres, was built in sections by the shopkeepers' associations between January 1969 and January 1971, and the street became pedestrianised. LED lighting arrived in 2006, and in 2009 a renovation added trees, panels that filter out ultraviolet rays and water misters against the heat. The street branches out into a grid of smaller streets (銀座通り, 西銀座, 栄通り) that in the evening are the nightlife district.

ℹ️ It is a public street and you can walk through it at any hour; the shops keep their own hours, mostly 10:00–20:00. Kumamoto tram: 通町筋 at the north entrance (1 minute), 辛島町 at the southern end. Inside the arcade is the entrance to 鶴屋百貨店, the department store. Earthquake of 28/07/2026: the shops in the arcade had reopened by 30/07/2026 (source toshoken.com, page updated on 27/08/2026); as of the time of writing, 01/09/2026, no ongoing closures are reported here.

🚉 Torichosuji · 1 min walk

Sources: kumamoto-guide.jp · ja.wikipedia.org · rurubu.jp · toshoken.com

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