Tokyo / Ryogoku & Kiyosumi
Ryogoku & Kiyosumi両国・清澄白河
Sumo's home, the museum that explains Edo, and across the canal a warehouse district of coffee roasters, a contemporary art museum and a perfect stroll garden.
East of the Sumida river the city was warehouses and rice granaries, and it still has the wide streets and low sky. Ryogoku is sumo: the Kokugikan stadium, the stables where you can watch morning practice, the chanko restaurants run by retired wrestlers, and the Edo-Tokyo Museum's life-size reconstruction of the old city. Walk south to Kiyosumi-Shirakawa and the warehouses have become coffee roasteries — this is where Tokyo's third-wave coffee began — around the Museum of Contemporary Art and Kiyosumi Garden, a Meiji-era stroll garden of stepping stones across a carp pond.
One-day itineraries
One day · Ryogoku and Kiyosumi
A sumo morning in Ryogoku: practice at a stable, chanko for lunch, the museum, a painted bath and a garden with a pond
Ryogoku is sumo's home town: the arena, the stables, the restaurants that serve the wrestlers' stew. Practice is the real thing and it happens at dawn, so this day starts before most of Tokyo is awake and rewards you with a quiet river, a garden and a bath by the afternoon. The stable visit is the one stop to book; Arashio-beya lets you watch through the window without one.
Ryogoku & Kiyosumi · 7 stops
One day · Ryogoku, Kiyosumi-Shirakawa
East of the river: sumo practice at seven, a stroll garden at nine, coffee roasters, and the contemporary art museum in the park
Across the Sumida the sky is lower, the streets are wider and nothing is in a hurry. This is a day of things that happen early and slowly: two hundred kilograms of wrestler doing the splits in a silent room, a pond you cross on stepping stones, a cup of coffee that takes five minutes to make, and a museum with wide top-lit galleries and no queue. It is the day to take when the west side has worn you out.
Ryogoku & Kiyosumi · 7 stops
Places (5)
Ryogoku Kokugikan and sumo両国国技館と相撲
Sumo's home stadium — three fifteen-day tournaments a year, a museum, and the stables where practice starts at dawn.
180 min · Ryogoku (JR), west exit, 1 minute; Ryogoku (Oedo line), 5 minutes
Kiyosumi Garden清澄庭園
A Meiji stroll garden of stepping stones across a carp pond, built by the founder of Mitsubishi with stones from every province.
50 min · Kiyosumi-shirakawa (Hanzomon / Oedo lines), exit A3, 3 minutes
Edo-Tokyo Museum江戸東京博物館
A life-size Nihonbashi bridge, a kabuki theatre and a merchant's house inside a museum shaped like a warehouse on stilts.
120 min · Ryogoku (Oedo line), exit A4, direct; Ryogoku (JR), 3 minutes
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT)東京都現代美術館
Japan's largest contemporary art museum, in a park east of the river, with a collection that starts in 1945 and a library of art books.
120 min · Kiyosumi-shirakawa (Hanzomon / Oedo lines), exit B2, 9 minutes
The Kiyosumi-Shirakawa roasters清澄白河の焙煎所
Where third-wave coffee reached Japan — Blue Bottle's first roastery, Arise, Allpress in a timber warehouse — on streets of low workshops and canals.
150 min · Kiyosumi-shirakawa (Hanzomon / Oedo lines)
Experiences
Operators
Food
- Chanko-nabe · ¥¥
- Specialty coffee · ¥