Ginza, Tokyo

The closure runs on Saturdays, Sundays and national holidays. From April to September it holds from noon until 18:00; from October to March it ends an hour earlier, at 17:00. During those hours the carriageway is open to walkers along its full commercial length, tables and parasols go out into the middle of the street, and the pavement crowding that makes weekday Ginza unpleasant simply stops being a factor.

The custom is old enough to have its own name in Japanese, and Ginza's is the best-known of the several pedestrian streets in the city.

The practical effect for a visitor is that Ginza becomes a place to sit rather than a place to pass through. The photographs everyone takes of the district, the long straight view down the middle of the street with the clock tower at the crossing, are only possible in these hours. It is also the one time the district reads as public space rather than retail frontage, which is worth an hour even if you buy nothing at all.

What to do with the hours

Arrive around 12:30, walk the full length of the closed section from Kyobashi down to the eighth block, and go into whichever galleries and food halls you pass. Have lunch in a basement rather than a restaurant floor. Come back up onto the street for the last hour of the closure, when the light is better and the crowd thins.

If it rains, the closure is generally suspended, and the underground passages that connect the stations and the store basements carry you across most of the district dry.

The long-established houses on the main street are Ginza Mitsukoshi, Matsuya Ginza and Wako, whose clock tower at the four-chome crossing is the district's landmark. Alongside them sit the newer complexes, Ginza Six and Ginza Place among them, built in the last decade to a different formula of international fashion houses over restaurant floors. What they share is a service culture the city's own tourism pages describe as the reason people still come, and a layout in which the ground floor is cosmetics, the middle floors are clothing, and the money for a traveller is elsewhere.

Below ground is the food hall. Each is a run of individual counters, one confectioner, one pickle-maker, one tea merchant, one bakery per stall, most of them long-established businesses with a single specialism and no other branch. Nothing is cooked to order and everything is packaged to carry away.

Prices start at a few hundred yen for a single pastry and run up to figures that make no sense until you understand that a boxed fruit here is a formal gift rather than a snack. Prepared food is discounted in the last hour before the store closes, which is the single best-value meal in the district.

The top floors, and the stationery question

The upper floors of the older stores carry restaurant runs and, in several cases, a gallery. Ginza is also where Tokyo's specialist stationery and craft shops concentrate, which for a lot of visitors turns out to be the actual shopping of the trip: brushes, papers, inks and notebooks made by companies that have made nothing else for a century. None of it requires a budget.

What Tokyo shopping costs across the city, including how the tax-free rules work per store and per day, is on what Tokyo costs.

At the bottom is the standing counter, where you eat at a rail with no seat and the turnover is measured in minutes. The next rung is the department-store basement, where a made-up bento is bought and eaten elsewhere. Above that come the lunch sets of restaurants that serve a very different price at dinner, which is the single most useful arbitrage in Japanese dining: the same kitchen, the same fish, a shorter course and a fraction of the evening bill.

Then the ordinary neighbourhood sushi and tempura rooms, and at the top the counters that take one sitting a night and are booked months out.

Why the top of the ladder is hard to book

Two things about the top of that ladder are worth stating flatly, because they are what actually stops people. Many of the smallest starred rooms in Ginza seat eight or ten at a counter, take one or two sittings and do not accept reservations from people who have not eaten there before or been introduced. And the prices are frequently not published anywhere, which is not evasion but convention.

If a room does not print a price, assume the evening will cost more than you expect and either go at lunch or go elsewhere.

The cheap version of the district, in full

It is entirely possible to spend a good day in Ginza on the price of a bento and a theatre act. The street is free during the pedestrian hours, the galleries are free, the food halls are free to walk through, and the single-act theatre seat starts at about $3.24 (¥500). Set against a paid observation deck or a museum ticket, that is the least expensive interesting day in central Tokyo, and it is one reason free things to do in Tokyo leans on this district.

Single-act seats on the fourth level are sold by the act rather than by the programme. The price varies with the length of the act, running roughly from $3.24 to $16.20 (¥500 to ¥2,500), and the exact figure for a given month is published only a few days in advance. Online sales for a performance open at noon on the day before it, with roughly seventy seats released that way and about twenty more sold for cash at the theatre on the day itself.

Buying online adds a system fee of $0.71 (¥110). There is no interval service, no cloakroom access and no re-entry: you go up, you watch one act, you come down.

What that buys is about an hour of the real thing, in the real building, for less than a cinema ticket. Programmes change monthly and there are dark days inside each run, so check the month you are visiting rather than assuming a performance every evening. The full mechanics, including which acts suit a first visit and how the English audio guide works, are on the theatre's own page in this guide.

The city's own guide names four in particular: the long-running gallery of a cosmetics company on the western side, the exhibition space of a French luxury house in its own glass-block building, and two graphic-design galleries founded by an advertising firm and a printing company. Between them they cover a range from established painters to first shows by young designers, and they rotate every few weeks. Add the exhibition floors inside the department stores, which frequently host serious touring shows, and the district carries more free contemporary art on any given afternoon than most cities manage in total.

Two things to know. Each space keeps its own closed days rather than following a district pattern, so the reliable method is to walk in when you pass one rather than to plan a route between them. And several occupy a single floor of a working office building, which means finding the right lift bank and pressing a number rather than walking through a door at street level.

If a lobby looks like it belongs to a company rather than a gallery, you are usually in the right place. For the ticketed institutions elsewhere in the city, museums in Tokyo has the comparison.

The essential point of confusion is worth clearing first: the wholesale market moved to Toyosu, across the water, and the tuna auction goes on there. What remains at Tsukiji is the outer market, the several hundred retail stalls, knife shops, dried-goods sellers and small restaurants that always sat outside the wholesale walls and never went anywhere. That is the part a visitor wants, and it is the part within walking distance of Ginza.

The two are covered separately on the Tsukiji page and the Toyosu page, which is where the auction rules live.

Time it in the morning. The stalls are trading from early and wind down through the early afternoon, which is the opposite rhythm to Ginza, where little opens before 11:00. The market association's information centre runs 08:00 to 14:00 on weekdays and Saturdays and 10:00 to 14:00 on Sundays, holidays and market closure days, and it has English-speaking staff and maps.

Individual stall hours are not published centrally and vary by shop, including which day each closes. A morning at the stalls, lunch there, then the walk west into the pedestrian hours is the sequence that works.

If the stalls themselves are the difficulty, and for a lot of people they are, the guided walk of the market at $12.99 is the cheapest way to be shown which counters do what, and the food walk with five tastings turns the same ground into a meal. Neither is necessary; both remove the standing-in-the-middle-of-an-alley problem that a first visit tends to involve.

The name is a job description. In 1603 the new shogunate moved its silver coin mint from Sunpu to what is now the second block of the district, and the office that ran it was called the ginza. The town's official name was something else entirely, but the mint's name stuck to the neighbourhood and survived long after the office itself was moved to Nihonbashi in 1800 following a run of bribery cases.

The gold equivalent stood where the central bank's head office is now, which is why no district in Tokyo is called Kinza.

The width comes from a fire. After the district burned in 1872 the Meiji government rebuilt it as a Western brick town to a design by the British architect Thomas James Waters, widening the main street to twenty-seven metres, more than double what it had been, and separating carriageway from brick pavement for the first time. Gas lamps and street trees went in with it.

The same year the country's first railway opened between Yokohama and Shimbashi, putting Ginza directly in front of a terminus, and the merchants who filled it with imported goods and glass shop windows created the habit of walking the street to look rather than to buy. The word for that habit dates from around 1915 and is still in the dictionary. All of this is set out on the street association's own history pages at ginza.jp.

The willows, briefly

One more detail explains a recurring motif in the district's signage. Willows were planted as the street trees and became the district's emblem, then were removed in 1921 when the road was widened again, over public objection loud enough to reach the city council. They were replanted in 1932 after a campaign, and the willow has stayed the district's symbol ever since.

It is a small thing, and it tells you that Ginza has been arguing about its own street furniture for a century.

Three subway lines meet at Ginza Station, the Ginza, Marunouchi and Hibiya lines, and their exits open directly onto Chuo-dori. Ginza-Itchome on the Yurakucho Line covers the northern end and Higashi-Ginza on the Hibiya and Toei Asakusa lines the eastern edge. From the JR loop, Yurakucho Station is a five-minute walk and Tokyo Station about fifteen.

The city's own guide puts Ginza at three minutes from Tokyo Station and sixteen minutes from Shinjuku on the Marunouchi Line, which is as central as Tokyo gets. Fares and the pass arithmetic are on getting around Tokyo.

On time: two hours covers the street, one food hall and a gallery. Half a day adds the theatre act and a proper lunch. A full day only makes sense combined with the walk east to the stalls in the morning, which is the pairing this page recommends.

The district is small, roughly eight numbered blocks along one street with a grid either side, and nothing in it is more than fifteen minutes from anything else on foot. Where Ginza sits against the rest of the city is on the Tokyo city guide homepage.