Nagaya neighborhood and environs (1840); Fukagawa Edo Museum Note the cat on the roof; cats weren’t pets but community property that killed vermin.
In a city with over a million people, where do you put them all?
Tokyo’s upper class had their estates and mansions, and the merchants had their townhouse businesses that lined the busy streets. As for commoners, many lived in back alley neighborhoods hidden behind the townhouses in row houses called nagaya (“long house”).
These were long buildings subdivided into multiple one-family rooms that provided affordable, if crowded, living options for everyone from laborers to craftsman and even teachers. Also called uri-nagaya or munewari-nagaya, nagaya were once a ubiquitous feature of Tokyo and potentially made up half the city’s housing area by the late 19th century.
Nagaya roji alleyway (1840); Fukagawa Edo Museum
I’ll be focusing on the nagaya of Edo/Tokyo’s Shitamachi, the “low town” of commoners. Broadly, Shitamachi stretches from Nihombashi with its merchants and craftsmen east to Fukagawa with its fishers and carpenters. Nagaya existed all over Japan, but I’ve found the most information on Shitamachi because of several local museums chronicle their history, construction and lifestyle.
Nagaya were mostly built of thin wood siding, wood and paper doors, and thin shingle roofs; walls between the individual tenement rooms were equally thin and provided little privacy. The room itself was mostly given to a living space between 4.5-8 tatami mats in size with an earthen floor entranceway. Most nagaya were about 10 m2 and held a family of 3-4.
Nagaya interior (c. 1920); Shitamachi Museum
In Shitamachi’s Fukagawa, the average nagaya had 5-9 units under each long roof with another facing it across the narrow roji alleyway and several between street facing establishments to create a backalley neighborhood. These shared common areas that compensated for what individual units lacked.
Nagaya roji alleyway (c. 1920); Shitamachi Museum
For an idea of just how tightly nagaya were packed in, the roji alleys between row houses were usually 1.8-3.6 meters but could be as narrow as one meter. A common feature was wooden dobuita gutter boards down the alley’s center covering the drainage ditch for rainwater running off roofs to keep it from pooling. If the space was available, laundry could be hung out to dry and pots with decorative or medicinal plants could be kept.
Nagaya roji alleyway (c. 1920); Shitamachi Museum
Flexibility was the key to ringing the most use out of every centimeter in these cozy quarters. During waking hours, women could mend and do chores in the tatami room; families could eat and interact quietly enough so as not to bother the neighbors just a few feet away on the other side of the flimsy partition between units. Then everything was hung up, put back in its chest or box, and set to the side so futons could be laid for sleep. The next morning, the futons were put up, meals were purchased from botefuri vendors roving the back alleys or made at the kitchen in the entranceway.
The suwari-nagashi, a seated or squatting kitchen, had a kamado oven and wooden sink, with utensils on shelves or hung on the wall. An overhead trapdoor could be opened for ventilation and to let in more light. Unlike the US, Japan has never been big on zoning laws so this space was even more flexible than the tatami room. Craftsman could make it into a workshop or entrepreneurs open a small business like a dagashiya candy store. That is the classic cheap toys and candy shop where children could fritter away their parent’s hard earned sen.
Nagaya (1840); Fukagawa Edo Museum The kamado oven is on the right in the entranceway
Nagaya dagashiya (c. 1920); Shitamachi Museum
The common areas had a well, public sokoka toilet with a half-door, garbage bin and Inari shrine. The well was for drawing water, but it’s also where women gathered to talk, wash and do other chores outside. Garbage was mostly broken pottery as anything that could be sold, re-used or repurposed was. The Inari shrine was most important as Inari is the god of fire prevention.
Nagaya common area (1840); Fukagawa Edo Museum
Nagaya well and garbage (c. 1920); Shitamachi Museum
The toilet had an odd double purpose; obviously you do your business there but it’s also how the oya landlord got paid. According to The Fantstic Edo Era, his salary typically came from selling the communal toilet’s excrement to farmers. Though, that book references Kojimachi nagaya, in the classier Yamanote part of Edo, with its higher quality excrement, so it may not have been true for Shitamachi oya.
I also need to note that while most of Shitamachi had potable well water, Fukagawa well water was non-potable so water vendors crossed the river and sold water door to door daily. This is because Fukagawa was built on marshy ground adjacent to the sea physically separated from the city’s bulk by the Sumida River.
Another common nagaya neighborhood feature was a storehouse residents could put their important items, such as the family’s rice, in. Even if the neighborhood was lost to fire or flood, what was inside a kura stone storehouse had a better chance of surviving. This regular possibility of loss and limited living space also gave rise to a lending culture where every day items could be rented and returned when no longer needed. This includes clothing, like kimono or underwear.
Nagaya common area and kura storehouse (1840); Fukagawa Edo Museum
I believe a strong sense of community was necessary to live in these places as everyone was on top of each other and what one person did may affect others. Fires and epidemics could spread quickly in close quarters, so watching out for your neighbor was also watching out for yourself. This is taken a step further when considering nagaya units usually had a front and rear entrance; neither of which had locks. Instead, the entire neighborhood locked in at night. As mentioned, the neighborhood is hemmed in by buildings, and also walls with an ura-kido gate entrance. The gate was locked from evening until dawn and potentially tended by a gatekeeper or community member on duty.
Nagaya ura-kido gate (1840); Fukagawa Edo Museum
This way of living stayed consistent, even into the Taisho-era (1912-26). Progress was when wells gave way to cast-iron water pumps and the communal toilet was replaced by a personal one behind your unit. The city grew around nagaya and even as Asakusa’s streets lit up the night with incandescent lights, the rowhouse neighborhoods behind them lacked electricity. Unfortunately another thing about nagaya remained the same, their macabre nickname: Yakeya or “fire house.”
This was fitting as Edo was the “City of Fires.” According to the Tokyo Fire Department, Edo suffered more than 100 major fires over the Edo era or roughly one every 2.6 years. Shitamachi’s Nihombashi burned down completely 10 times during that period. There were another 50 major fires between 1875 and 1925, many in Shitamachi.
Tokyo had professional and volunteer fire fighters; every ten blocks a 10-meter fire tower looked out over the city to sound the alarm if a fire started though if it was in your machi (town) it was already too late. Fire spread rapidly through these humanity-filled tinder boxes. Standard practice was to contain a fire and let it burn out so once the perimeter was established, everything within it was forfeit.
Firetower (right); Fukagawa Edo Museum
The 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and its resulting fires were the last non-manmade city-leveling event that left 70,000 Tokyoites dead. This would also see nagaya, one of the reasons fires spread so readily, begin to be replaced with what the Great Kanto Earthquake Museum called “stacked collective housing with earthquake-resistant structures.” Thus, the apartment complex was introduced to Tokyo.
While great mansions and townhouses alike have been preserved as they were, no original nagaya in their original state exist in Tokyo. The closest examples are life-sized replicas in Shitamachi museums. Edo-Tokyo Museum and Fukagawa Edo Museum nagaya replicas depict them as they were in the mid-1800s. The latter goes a step further by also recreating the merchant street and waterside businesses that would have surrounded it. The ability to walk through a recreated chunk of the old city, aided by English speaking guides, makes this the best place to learn about traditional life in Edo. It is also decorated according to the season and experiences day/night cycles to give ideas of what it was like at any time.
Shitamachi Museum in Ueno Park had a nagaya depicting life in 1920, though it was renovated to depict Shitamachi in 1960 since my last visit.
ADDRESSES
Edo-Tokyo Museum
1 Chome-4-1 Yokoami, Sumida City, Tokyo 130-0015
https://www.edo-tokyo-museum.or.jp/en/
Fukagawa Edo Museum
1 Chome-3-28 Shirakawa, Koto City, Tokyo 135-0021
https://www.kcf.or.jp/fukagawa/
Kanto Earthquake Museum
2 Chome-3-25 Yokoami, Sumida City, Tokyo 130-0015
https://tokyoireikyoukai.or.jp/museum/history.html
Shitamachi Museum
2-1 Uenokōen, Taito City, Tokyo 110-0007
https://www.taitogeibun.net/english/shitamachi/
REFERENCES
Shitamachi Museum Hand Outs
Edo-Tokyo Museum Permanent Exhibition Catalogue
Fukagawa Edo Museum Guidebook
The Fantastic Edo Era by Zenyoji Susumu and Lynne Hobday
Low City, High City by Edward Seidensticker
IDE-JETRO Urban Society
The Three Great Fires of Edo –Major fires 1603-1868
https://www.tfd.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/learning/elib/times/times02.html
The History of Firefighting (Tokyo and Yokohama) – Major fires 1875-1925
https://www.kaigai-shobo.jp/files/fireserviceinjapan_eng/20221001_History-Japan(T-Y)_eng.pdf