JSランゲージスクールブログ | Tokiwa-sō
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by Patrick
One of my favourite Japanese traditions is Hatsumōde, so on New Year’s Day I went to Nagasaki-jinja near Shiinamachi station, which is the closest shrine to my home. However, I didn’t realise that Nagasaki-jinja is so popular! There was a long line of people, even though the shrine is quite small. I later learned that it has been the most important shrine in the area since the Meiji period.
While I was there, I had a brief conversation with a Miko. She told me that somewhere in the neighbourhood around the shrine, there was a place associated with famous old Japanese cartoonists, like Osamu Tezuka and Fujiko Fujio. However, she didn’t know any details about the place, and she couldn’t remember the name. Because I’m interested in comics, I did some research and learned that the place the Miko was referring to is an apartment building called Tokiwa-sō.
Tokiwa-sō was a two-storey, wooden apartment building in the Minami-Nagasaki area west of Ikebukuro. It’s famous because in the 1950s, in the very early days of Japanese comics, many popular cartoonists lived there, including Osamu Tezuka, Fujiko Fujio — the duo who created Doraemon — Hiroo Terada, Hideko Mizuno, and others. Since all of their apartments were in the same building, the building became like a studio, and since other cartoonists would often visit them, it was also the centre of a community. For this reason, Tokiwa-sō has become a legendary location in the history of Japanese comics.
Unfortunately, the building no longer exists; it was demolished in the 1980s. Recently, however, efforts have been made in Minami-Nagasaki to promote the area’s history as a hub for cartoonists. If you walk along the road called Tokiwa-sō-dōri, you can find a monument to Tokiwa-sō in a park, with a model of the building on top. There’s also a shop called Tokiwa-sō-dōri Oyasumi-dokoro, where you can relax and read comics by the cartoonists who lived in Tokiwa-sō. If you’re interested in comics, and you have a free afternoon, you should visit this street. While you’re in the area, you can visit Nagasaki-jinja too.
