The mid-century instrumental mood music of Percy Faith flows through hand-built single-ended triode amplifiers into a three-way speaker array, honed over decades of valve and transformer collecting. The French blend coffee is brighter than expected, but still holds the smoky, chocolate, and ashen notes of a long, high-temperature roast. It is an elevated experience on all counts, set within the balance of meticulous arrangement and homely warmth at Crescendo, a listening kissaten in Kameido.

Every detail evidences Mr Kanamori’s taste. The master has been generous in conversation and in permitting photographs, but I sense this is no place to tap on a laptop or gaze into a smartphone. As the rotation shifts to the cinematic scores of Henry Mancini, I will be making notes by hand for later transcription.

Today’s Field Notes doubles as this week’s newsletter, opening a window into the series for all Tokyothèque readers. If you are just joining us, we have settled into a pattern of programming: each day brings one neighbourhood, one coffee shop, one bathhouse, and one wildcard location, bookended by my reflections on morning and nightly routines. Let’s begin.

Morning Routine

One of the virtues of nightly sentō bathing is that it renders the following morning shower unnecessary, allowing the day to begin more efficiently. There is also the bonus of deeper sleep, as the post-bath cooling mirrors the body’s natural pre-sleep cooling, helping to induce slumber.

Evening bathing endures in Japan, though more commonly in the household tub than in the sentō. I remember it from my childhood in England, being ushered into the bath before sleep. I cannot say precisely when the habit fell away, though it seems to have been in the 1990s, as electric showers gained cultural ground. In the process, British bathing rituals were reduced to the hurried morning shower before work. Quite lamentable.

And so, I call for a return to the nightly bath—reviving the unhurried evenings of the past while appealing to the priorities of the information age as a morning time optimisation.

Neighbourhood Walk 

Homes worn down to their joists, alleyways narrower and more cluttered than even this city is used to; 1960s bakeries on what feels like every corner of the covered arcade, and a gentleman in a pork-pie hat waiting for the Sakura tram. Minami-Senju is an outlier on my Tokyo neighbourhood shortlist.

The area’s past is as complex as its residential lanes. In the Edo period, this was the site of Kozukappara, one of the city’s three official execution grounds. Through the early twentieth century, the low-lying floodplain remained a place for what the capital preferred to keep at its edge: factories, slaughterhouses, and day-labourer barracks serving the freight yards of the Jōban Line.

After the Second World War, a large yoseba—a district where day labourers gathered for short-term construction work—formed in Minami-Senju. Men came from across Japan to its doya lodging houses, answering the morning call for jobs at the yards and building sites. When the recession of the 1990s slowed public works, many never returned to stable employment, and the district became known for its ageing population of men of no fixed address.

Walking here, I perceive a partial resemblance to Japan’s declining manufacturing towns. Unlike a rural backwater, though, Minami-Senju remains tethered to Tokyo’s powerful pulse. Public housing towers and municipal improvements along the Sumida feed new life into the neighbourhood without erasing its working-class grain. The metropolis breathes a vitality into the area that waning regional towns do not enjoy, but I imagine this is how they might begin to look if Japan were to discover other routes to renewal.

Market Interval

Earlier in the day, I began north of Minami-Senju, crossing the steel span of the Senju Ōhashi Bridge into Adachi-ku—just beyond my self-imposed Shitamachi limits—to visit the Adachi Shijō fish market. One gap in my Tokyo experience is never having visited the old Tsukiji fish market before it moved. As a city worker, I had other morning priorities, but today made me wonder if I should have made the time.

Adachi Shijō opened in 1945 as a municipal wholesale market serving the urbanising northern wards. It is barely one-twentieth the size of Toyosu Market, the waterfront complex that replaced Tsukiji in 2018. But Adachi Shijō remains a node for neighbourhood restaurants and small retailers. There is not a sightseer in the place; everyone inside is tied to the production, sale, or purchase of fish.

The atmosphere is pure working port: machinery clatters, vendors call orders, and one-person turret trucks with upright steering columns swirl in every direction. Intending only to stop by briefly, I was entranced and stayed for several hours, speaking with traders, and ending at the market’s lone sushi counter, where the morning’s catch had arrived. Already I feel a future newsletter forming on Adachi Shijō and the city’s other ward-level fish markets.

Sentō Time

From Minowa, immediately south of Minami-Senju, I crossed into Higashi-Nippori to reach Teikoku-yu, a sento that fires its baths with wood. At the entrance, a handwritten sign apologised for the day’s closure. Just then, Mr Ishida—part of the family that runs the bathhouse—emerged and offered his own apology.

While a sentō can sometimes be the only one for miles, Higashi-Nippori has a strong local bathing culture, with at least five others in walking distance. After a little deliberation, I turned the corner to Unsuisen. Fortune favoured the change: it was the most old-fashioned sentō I have yet visited.

The payment counter is positioned between the male and female changing rooms, overlooking both. Outside, a traditional Japanese toilet sits beside burning katori senkō on the engawa, while the baths themselves run challengingly hot. A Japanese Google reviewer recommends the place to tourists, though it is hard to know whether this is a genuine invitation of cultural immersion or a touch of trolling. For many, the system here would feel uncomfortable. By contrast, yesterday’s Akebonoyu offers a gentler entry point for the sentō beginner.

In the changing room, I was greeted by a nude Mr Ishida, whom I did not immediately recognise without his clothes. A man so versed in sentō surely knows where to bathe, and I was reassured to find myself in his second-choice establishment for days when the fires at Teikoku-yu are unlit.

Sleep Hygiene

After a day spent roaming the Shitamachi without regard for the clock, I found myself working later than planned on the newsletter. The pillow might have welcomed me sooner had I slept straight after finishing, but I resist moving directly from screen to sleep.

Instead, I traded an hour of potential rest for a walk through the dim backstreets around my hotel to let the mind decelerate. A period away from blue light, coupled with gentle physical activity, helps ease the transition into deeper sleep—a small wager of quantity for quality come morning.

Until we meet by the Sumida,

AJ

Pins

Crescendo
Minowabashi Tram Station
Kozukappara
Adachi Market
Teikoku-yu
Unsuisen

P.S.

Do join us if you would like to catch up with Field Notes and follow the rest of the series. At its conclusion, I will share my complete Shitamachi map, marked with the many places I visited that did not appear in the newsletters. Membership also brings access to the Tokyothèque archive and all the perks.