Old Tokyo East: Kayaba, Koguma and the Engawa Café

Old Tokyo does not announce itself. It waits in the wards to the east and north of the centre, where buildings are low, lanes are narrow and the word for medicine may still hang above a café door. This chapter belongs to The Kominka Café: A Reader’s Atlas of Old Houses and New Coffee and follows four old buildings that now serve coffee: a milk bar in Yanaka, a pharmacy in Sumida, a family house in Adachi and, newest of all, a tenement in Kyojima. It states what the pages state, it gives the dates they give, and where two accounts differ it says so. The stops are drawn on The Kanto Kominka Café Map.

Kayaba: A Milk Bar Becomes a Coffee House

The building was completed in 1916 as a milk bar and sweets shop, according to the Taito Cultural and Historical Society, whose page we follow throughout this section. It became Kayaba Coffee in 1938, when it was renovated with a western-style door, a lit sign and windows, and it stood as a Showa-era café in a Taisho-era frame until it closed briefly in 2006. It reopened in 2009 after a restoration, and in 1999 the ward had already given it an award as a scenic corner of Taito. It stands at the eastern entrance to Yanaka, and it is where Five Walks Through Tokyo and One Beyond It pauses in Walk Five.

The society’s own page is unusually exact about the fabric. The main building has two storeys under a hipped roof, measures 3.6 by 9 metres, and has a bungalow attached. A zelkova pillar of 24 centimetres runs through it, and the eaves are of the type called dashigeta-zukuri. The 2009 renovation brought out the Taisho-era exterior and kept the Showa-era atmosphere inside. The brick counter, the stools and the tableware are modern revivals, and on the second floor, which roughly follows the original design, acrylic panels are set into the tatami floor. The page credits Yuko Nagayama and Associates with the shop renovation plan and names Tokyo University of the Arts, the society and SCAI The Bathhouse in the restoration, with Gendai Art Inc. managing the shop. The address is 6-1-29 Yanaka, Taito-ku. The hours on that page were Monday to Saturday 8:00 to 23:00 and Sunday 8:00 to 18:00.

Koguma: A Pharmacy That Kept Its Shelves

Koguma stands in Higashi-Mukojima, in Sumida, on the shopping street called Hato-no-Machi. Nippon.com gives the building’s date as 1927 and describes a rowhouse of three units that was later separated into three independent structures, with the café in the end unit. The shop was a pharmacy, and the sign over the door still reads medicines. Atlas Obscura adds that the building survived the bombing of Tokyo, closed around the early 1980s and stood empty for decades apart from about two years as an antique shop. Nippon.com is more guarded: it says that the shopping street survived the fire-bombings of 1945 and does not say what happened to this building. The café opened in 2006.

The owners are Akiko Yamanaka, whom Atlas Obscura calls a stage actress, and her husband Masaya; Nippon.com says that they previously ran a theatre troupe in Musashino, in the west of Tokyo, and that after opening the café they became leaders in the local merchants’ association. Much of the pharmacy’s design remains, and the old medicine shelves now hold books and ceramics or, in Atlas Obscura’s account, local pottery. Accounts differ on the furniture: Nippon.com says that the desks and chairs came from a cram school run by Masaya’s family, and Atlas Obscura describes repurposed desks and chairs from local elementary schools with children’s graffiti still carved into them. The pine floor was finished with kakishibu, a persimmon tannin, and bengara, an iron-oxide red, over what had been bare concrete, and a wall clock from the pharmacy days is said to have started ticking again when the café opened. The signature dessert is an anmitsu-dama, which the city of Sumida certifies as Sumida Modern.

For a visitor, Nippon.com gives 11:30 to 18:30 with last orders at 18:00, closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and a walk of seven minutes from Hikifune Station on the Tobu Isesaki line; Atlas Obscura says under ten minutes, and the two accounts differ on the walk to Tokyo Skytree, 20 minutes in the one and about 15 to Oshiage in the other.

The Engawa Café: A Family House, a Workshop and a Grandson

Engawa Café Showa House occupies a house built in 1939 in Nishihokima, in Adachi, which the ward’s tourism page describes as a Japanese-style house with a Western-style room and as a nationally registered tangible cultural property. Nippon.com names the builder as Genshichi Hirata, who put up the house beside the workshop where he processed automobile parts, on a property of more than 6,500 square metres. Ten people lived there, it says, the family and also a houseboy and a maid. Redevelopment has since put a street in front of the house, so that what was the back door is now the entrance. A storage room and a servant’s room were turned into a western-style room decades ago, and the garden once had a waterfall, a pond and an air-raid shelter beneath an artificial hill.

The café is run by the builder’s grandson, Shigeru Hirata, who, in Nippon.com’s account, opened it after his mother died because he wanted to share the view with people outside the family. The engawa, the wooden-floored corridor along the garden, is the main café space. Past the sliding doors lies a zashiki room of 30 tatami, with two small rooms at the ends of the engawa and, in the north-west corner, the western-style room, now a waiting area, with a coffered wooden ceiling, old windows and doors, and a chandelier. The article also notes shoji screens, a tokonoma alcove, transoms and a round window with a fishing-net motif. The menu includes pour-over coffee, seasonal fruit tarts, matcha with Japanese sweets and anmitsu.

The ward’s page gives 20 seats, no reservations, no takeaway and no barrier-free access, as of 28 May 2024. It lists 11:30 to 18:00 with last orders at 17:30 and closing on Mondays, Saturdays and Sundays, and says that the café is sometimes closed on other days. Takenotsuka Station on the Tobu Skytree line is the nearest, and here the accounts differ: the ward’s page says about 20 minutes on foot, and Nippon.com says 14.

A Newcomer in Kyojima: Blue Brew Coffee Roaster

The newest of the four opened in April 2026, in a former tenement house at 2-25-3 Kyojima, in Sumida. Nippon.com calls the building a precious prewar structure and gives no construction year. It was first a residence, then a school for the koto, then an okonomiyaki restaurant that closed in 2022, then a wine bar called Un, and the barista Kenta Sekine took the building over from Un’s owner. Inside are grey mud-plaster walls coated with Kyojima clay, old roof tiles set into the floor, scratched wooden pillars and a long camphorwood counter; the article says that the renovation was limited to seismic reinforcement of the walls. The hours it gives are 8:00 to 18:30, until 13:00 on Tuesdays, closed on Wednesdays, and it places the café 11 minutes’ walk from Hikifune Station, with Keisei Hikifune and Oshiage as alternatives at 11 and 15 minutes.

Reading the East

Hours are as stated on the pages cited, at the dates those pages bear, and small cafés change them. Confirm before travelling; How to Visit a Kominka Café: Hours, Shoes and Patience explains what else to check.

Our Reading: Four Houses, Many Lives

None of the four was built to be a café, and none has had only one use since. Kayaba began as a milk bar. Koguma was a pharmacy and then, by one account, an antique shop. The Showa House was a family home with a workshop beside it, and the Kyojima tenement has been a residence, a music school, an okonomiyaki restaurant and a wine bar. In our reading, the café is rarely the first use of an old house and not likely to be the last; what these houses share is that each found someone willing to keep the fabric while changing the function, and the keepers differ: a cultural society, a couple who had worked in the theatre, a grandson and a barista. A reader of this atlas will recognise the principle from the collector’s side of the site. An object is kept by being used, and an old house is kept the same way.

After a Showa-era object of the kind these rooms keep? Our Hunting Salon™ searches across Japan's private collector circles on your behalf.

For the objects themselves, see Shōwa Tin Plate and Soft Vinyl and our retro machines and toy archives.

Questions and answers

Where is Kayaba Coffee?

At the eastern entrance to Yanaka, in Taito. The Taito Cultural and Historical Society gives the address as 6-1-29 Yanaka.

When was Koguma built?

Nippon.com and Atlas Obscura both give 1927 for the former pharmacy. The café opened in 2006.

How far is the Engawa Café from the station?

Accounts differ: the ward’s tourism page says about 20 minutes on foot from Takenotsuka Station, and Nippon.com says 14.

Is Blue Brew an old building?

Nippon.com calls it a precious prewar structure and does not give a year. The café itself opened in April 2026.

References

Dates and figures in this chapter were checked against these pages. Where accounts differ, the text says so.

• Taito Cultural and Historical Society: Kayaba Coffee
• Nippon.com: Kominka Café Koguma
• Atlas Obscura: Koguma
• Nippon.com: Engawa Café, Showa House
• Adachi Tourism: Engawa Café Showa House
• Nippon.com: Blue Brew Coffee Roaster
• Tokyo Tourism: Yanaka guide

Continue reading

• The Kominka Café: A Reader’s Atlas of Old Houses and New Coffee
• Kamakura and Hase: Four Houses Between the Hills and the Sea
• How to Visit a Kominka Café: Hours, Shoes and Patience
• Five Walks Through Tokyo and One Beyond It
• The Tokyo Atlas: A Reader’s Guide to the Capital and Its Counterpoint
• The Kanto Kominka Café Map
• Shōwa Tin Plate and Soft Vinyl
• The Japonista Universe
• Collector Guides
• The Japonista Thesis

Index terms: kominka cafe tokyo · kayaba coffee · yanaka cafe · koguma cafe · hato-no-machi · higashi-mukojima · engawa cafe showa house · adachi cafe · takenotsuka · blue brew coffee roaster · kyojima · sumida cafe · registered tangible cultural property · showa kissaten · tokyo old house cafe