LITMIR.BIZ

      From Kabuki-za, it’s a walk of several hundred meters farther up the road to the Ginza Crossing, the center point of the Ginza area—Tsukiji’s most illustrious neighbor. Ask any Japanese about Ginza and you can guarantee one of the first things they will tell you is that the area is home to many of Tokyo’s finest restaurants, or many of the city’s most exclusive department stores and boutiques, or even its most expensive hostess clubs. Whichever response you get, it’ll somehow tie into wealth and the conspicuous consumption of it.

      That association with wealth goes back centuries, to 1612 when Tokugawa Ieyasu chose Ginza as the site for a silver coin mint (gin za actually means silver mint), but it wasn’t really until the onset of the Meiji era, 260 years later, that Ginza began to take its current shape. From the late 1870s onwards, after centuries of Edo isolation, the Western-influenced Meiji government took to rebuilding Ginza and other central districts, replacing the cramped wood-built neighborhoods, which were susceptible to fast-spreading fire, with European-style architecture and street planning. Rickshaws gave way to horse-drawn trams and later electric trams, while new paved sidewalks and street gaslights blended with brick and stone buildings (designed and built by European architectures and later their Japanese apprentices) to give Ginza a very Western make-over.