Asakusa District

(Above:) Panorama From Ueno Showing Asakusa, Tokyo. (ca. 1910) Prominent structures in this view looking east from Ueno Park include (from left to center) the towering Asakusa Ryounkaku, Asakusa Senso-ji (the historic temple of the Asakusa Kwannon), and the Panoramakan.

"... Kyoto, with its shrines and handicrafts, is like grandmother's china cabinet; Asakusa is crazy Aunt Mae's steamer chest. It's been around a bit and is full of surprises, laughs and stories that'll put colour in your cheeks."

Asakusa has a long, colorful history of catering to the whims and fancies of both the pious and the profane. For a hundred years, until war-time fire-bombing in 1945 laid waste to the district, Asakusa served as the capital city's cultural beacon, hosting a bawdy mix of pleasures -- dance halls, cinemas, theaters, restaurants to suit all tastes, and unlicensed prostitution -- while simultaneously catering to the more pious business of religious pilgramage.

First and foremost, Asakusa owed its existence and historic prominence to an accident of history. Two brothers in the 7th-century B.C.E. discovered on a nearby riverbank a diminuitive statue, believed to be of the Kannon [Goddess of Mercy], around which Tokyo's most famous temple, Senso-ji, was built. Edo's Kabuki troupes, thought to be degenerate and subversive by puritanic Tokugawa authorities, were banished in 1841 to the then-hinderland of the Asakusa farm fields outside the feudal city limits. (Kabuki would return to respectibility -- and the city limits -- after the Restoration with the opening of the Kabuki-za near Ginza.) Relocated, too, were the prostitutes who had once catered to the carnal fancies of the Edokko [Edo child] with the establishment of Yoshiwara. That did not so much remove the problem as it did concentrate the "subversions" all into one place.