Tokyo by its last streetcar: one slow day on the Toden Arakawa line

Tokyo has one streetcar line left, the Toden Arakawa (都電荒川線, Toden Arakawa-sen). It runs about 12 kilometres from Minowabashi in the northeast to Waseda in the west. A 400-yen day ticket turns its single carriages into the backbone of a slow day through neighbourhoods that most itineraries never mention.

Morning at the Minowabashi end

The eastern terminus opens onto Joyful Minowa, a covered shopping street of croquette counters, tofu makers and pickle sellers. Buy something fried in paper, take whichever tram comes first, and stop planning. The line keeps the pace for you.

Asukayama and the middle stretch

Get off at Oji-ekimae for Asukayama Park. The shogun Yoshimune had its hill planted with cherry trees in the eighteenth century so that ordinary Edo residents had somewhere to picnic. A small free monorail carries visitors up the slope. In May, roses bloom along the fences beside much of the track.

Further west, Koshinzuka is a short walk from Jizo-dori in Sugamo, a shopping street known for its red underwear shops and salted daifuku. It is at its busiest on the fourth, fourteenth and twenty-fourth of each month, when the temple holds its fair days.

Zoshigaya in the afternoon

Zoshigaya is the stretch to linger over. Near Kishibojin-mae, the grounds of Kishimojin, a temple to a guardian of children, hold a grove of old zelkova trees and Kamikawaguchiya, a sweets stall that has traded there since 1781. A few minutes away, the novelist Natsume Soseki is buried in Zoshigaya Cemetery.

一両の電車が、町と町のあいだをゆっくり縫っていく。(Ichiryō no densha ga, machi to machi no aida o yukkuri nutte iku. A single car stitches slowly between one town and the next.)

The line ends at Waseda, close to the Kanda River and its cherry-lined banks. The Tozai subway line is about ten minutes' walk away, so the evening can go wherever you like.