Koenji 高円寺

Koenji is the unwashed cousin of Shimokitazawa, and prefers it that way. The neighborhood became the center of Japanese punk in the late 1970s, and the basements under the Chuo line tracks and along the shopping streets still host noise, hardcore, folk and experimental acts most nights of the week, in rooms where the sound engineer is also the bartender. The south side’s PAL arcade and Look street are lined with vintage clothing stores, around seventy of them, selling everything from 1960s American workwear to the kind of remade pieces that end up in Harajuku at three times the price.

North of the station the mood turns to drinking: alleys of standing bars, a covered arcade, and one of the city’s highest concentrations of cheap, serious izakaya and old-school coffee houses with velvet seats. Then, every last weekend of August, the whole place explodes. The Koenji Awa Odori, imported from Tokushima in 1957, brings 10,000 dancers in straw hats and a million spectators to the streets for two evenings of drums, flutes and synchronized stomping, the biggest festival of its kind outside Shikoku. Come for a gig, come back for the dance.