Uptown, downtown: The origins of Tokyo food and drink culture

The food and the words for it

Yakiton literally means grilled pork, but in Tokyo it typically refers to yakimotsu: grilled pork offal on skewers, served at small, often crowded counter restaurants. The culture of eating it here traces back to the working-class neighborhoods of the east, where nose-to-tail cooking was practical necessity. Pork has traditionally been the default meat in Kanto: the region historically raised pigs rather than cattle, which were more associated with Kansai (western Japan).

There is a detail in the language that reflects this. In Kansai, offal is called hormon. The most widely cited origin is the Osaka dialect horu mono, meaning "the thing you throw away," though some trace it to the German Hormon, reflecting a 1920s belief in offal as a stamina food. In Tokyo and the Kanto region, the word is motsu, meaning simply "innards." My client noted there were fewer hormon restaurants in Tokyo when he was growing up: the Kansai term for the dish hadn't fully crossed over yet.

How the city was divided

When the Tokugawa shogunate established Edo as its seat of power in the early 1600s, it organized the land around the castle deliberately. The elevated ground to the west went to the military aristocracy, including the hatamoto (direct shogunate retainers) and the daimyo (feudal lords) with their large residential compounds. This area became yamanote, literally "mountain's hand," meaning the hilly, uptown side of the city. The flatlands to the east, much of it reclaimed marsh along the Sumida River, were assigned to merchants, artisans, and craftsmen. That area became shitamachi: the low town, or downtown.

The distinction was practical as much as social. The high ground was cooler in summer, easier to defend, and had better drainage. The low town was dense, commercially active, and organized around mutual dependence among neighbors. Both words have carried those associations across four centuries.

The Yamanote Line now loops through both zones. Its east side, from Tokyo Station through Kanda, Akihabara, and Ueno, follows the old shitamachi corridor. Its west side, Shinjuku through Harajuku and Shibuya, runs through what was yamanote: originally quiet residential territory for the military class, later adopted by Meiji-era intellectuals, now the commercial center most visitors recognize.

Shibuya as grassland

My client mentioned that Shibuya was essentially open land in his father's time. The west side of the Yamanote grew fast, largely populated by people arriving from outside Tokyo during the postwar economic expansion. The eastern shitamachi neighborhoods were also destroyed and rebuilt, but rebuilt by the same communities in the same places. The density and outward-facing social life of the east reflects that continuity.

Food, place, and what connects them

Tokyo has a rich and diverse food culture across the whole city. But the specific tradition of offal cuisine, crowded counter restaurants, and communal drinking has its deepest roots in the east, in neighborhoods built by working people who cooked what was affordable and shared what they had.

Ginza sits at the southern edge of the old shitamachi commercial district. The sharing culture I noticed at the wine bar there is connected to that culture. You share your bottle with whoever is there. That behavior likely didn't develop as a bar policy or customer tendency, but grew out of a deeper culture of the surrounding area: neighborhoods where cheap, working-class food was enjoyed in close company with strangers.

That a wine bar in Ginza still carries a strong sharing culture shows how enduring that neighborhood character can be, even when the setting has changed completely.