It grew up on its own in 1945: the stairway takes its name from the sun framed in it in the evening.
It sprang up by itself in 1945, after the war, with no plan: today it has about sixty shops and eateries. The neighbourhood around it, spared by the 1923 earthquake and by the bombing, is one of the hundred historic landscapes chosen by a national foundation for the preservation of ancient capitals.
Shopping street in Yanaka, in Taitō: about sixty shops and eateries, as they have been since the Fifties, and one of the ‘thirty landscapes of memory’ chosen by the ward office. The 夕やけだんだん (‘the sunset steps’) is the stairway that leads down into it from the Nippori side, and takes its name from the sun framed in it in the evening.
🚉 Nippori · 5 min walk
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The Yanaka shotengai, with the Yuyake Dandan stairway (‘the sunset steps’) leading down into it, is the real face of the working-class neighbourhood where Sakamoto runs his shop: in the anime's opening sequence it is the stairway Lu sits on. The author Yūto Suzuki has said, however, that he does not work from a single model but combines landscapes he has seen: the reference is to the atmosphere of the low-lying neighbourhoods of Tokyo, Saitama and Chiba between the Eighties and the early Nineties, rather than to a specific street.
Sources: ajin-movie.com · wazaanime.com
Nearby
Asakura Museum of Sculpture100 mphoto by Nesnad · CC BY 3.0
Yanaka Cemetery, with Tennō-ji400 mphoto by Gustave67 · CC BY-SA 4.0
Nippori Textile Street800 mphoto by Guilhem Vellut · CC BY 2.0
Nezu Shrine1000 mphoto by yamai36 · CC BY 3.0