Once the site of Edo's earliest horse ground, now a wholesale district with three linked stations
The Bakurocho area had a horse-riding ground during the Edo period. According to records from Hatsunemori Inari, which used to stand here, the horse-riding ground opened in 1551, making it the earliest one in Edo. Merchants who bought and sold cattle and horses (known as bakuro) gathered here, and the neighborhood's name was first written with characters meaning "horse trader" — still read bakurocho — before later changing to the characters used for Bakurocho today. The cattle and horses are long gone, and what's left is a wholesale district: Bakurocho and the neighboring Yokoyamacho together are known as a wholesale district for sundries and textiles, with clothing and general-goods wholesalers lining both sides of Yokoyamacho's main street. In recent years the streets have also been changing face, with old buildings and warehouses gradually being converted into cafes, galleries, and youth hostels. Every year on the first Sunday of July and December, wholesalers hold the Oedo Tonya Matsuri, when ordinary people can also go into the wholesale shops to buy things. Getting here is easy, because three stations are connected underground.
These three stations are JR Bakurocho Station, the Toei Shinjuku Line's Bakuro-Yokoyama Station, and the Asakusa Line's Higashi-Nihombashi Station, linked to each other by underground passages. From Higashi-Nihombashi Station, it's only 161 metres and 247 metres to the other two stations. As a result, public transit ranks 2nd among Tokyo's 219 neighborhoods, and convenience of daily life also ranks 2nd. Bakuro-Yokoyama Station alone handles about 112,000 passengers a day, ranking 3rd on the Shinjuku Line, after only Shinjuku and Jimbocho. In Higashi-Nihombashi 2-chome, Yagenbori Fudoin is the Tokyo branch temple of Kawasaki Daishi, and inside the temple grounds stands a stone monument marking the birthplace of Juntendo University.
From our street photos, greenery ranks 188th, near the bottom; cleanliness ranks 129th, a little below the middle. Higashi-Nihombashi is divided by Kiyosubashi-dori, with the wholesale district to the west and a mix of shops and homes to the east. Kodenmacho and Odenmacho to the west, where people mostly use the Hibiya Line's Kodemmacho Station, are not part of this neighborhood; Higashi-Nihombashi 1-chome and Hisamatsucho, on the other hand, are grouped into the Hamacho neighborhood.
In the Edo period, Bakurocho was a place where travelers stayed overnight; records from 1851 show more than a hundred inns. In 1972, JR Bakurocho Station opened, at the time recorded as 30.58 metres below sea level, the deepest station on Japanese National Railways; the figure was later corrected to 27.14 metres below sea level. Passengers could transfer to the Asakusa Line from the day it opened, and when the Shinjuku Line's Bakuro-Yokoyama Station opened in 1978, it joined the link, connecting all three stations.
Compared with the 219 Tokyo neighborhoods in this guide (scores 0–10)
Hospitals with inpatient beds (2020 data), public elementary and junior high schools whose catchment covers this area, high schools and universities within 1 km, stations, parks of 1 ha or more, and large shopping malls and department stores. Many Tokyo junior high students attend private schools, so junior high catchments are only a guide.
35 blocks · Curated boundary · Data version 2026-10-12
Compared against the Tokyo neighborhoods in this guide; metrics without enough data are not ranked. Shopping counts convenience stores plus the nearer of a supermarket or a traditional market (public and private retail markets); night markets, vendor zones and shopping-street shops are not counted. Transit is rail-first with a lower weight for buses.
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