Joyful Minowa Shopping Street
ジョイフル三の輪商店街 · Joyful Minowa Shopping Street
- Ward
- Arakawa
- Price
- Free to walk through
- Hours
- Varies by shop (broadly 10:00–
- Closed
- Varies by shop; many close on Sundays
- Getting there
- Right at Minowabashi tram stop (Toden Arakawa Line)
- Founded
- 1919
- The eleventh of each month is Benten's day
- Elderly in the morning, households at dusk
- The tram came first, then the street
We do not republish copyrighted photographs. Use the links below to see the actual venue.
Obvious to locals, invisible to visitors
There is a simple reason guidebooks leave this out: to the people who live here it is too obvious to be worth explaining.
On the eleventh of every month the arcade runs its Benten-sama day with special offers. Regulars come for it, so the street is busier than usual. If you want it quiet, pick another day.
This is a shopping street for living, not for sightseeing. Prepared-food shops dominate; in the morning the customers are elderly neighbours, at dusk they are people buying dinner. The hours when visitors come to photograph 'unchanged Showa' are not the hours when the street is actually working.
The association dates the street to 1919, and the cause to the tramway that opened six years earlier. People gathered at the terminus, and the shops followed. The arcade still runs parallel to the tracks, from Minowabashi stop to Arakawa-itchumae.
What it is
A fully roofed arcade running from Minowabashi, the terminus of the Arakawa tram line. The association dates its founding to 1919, formed after the opening of the tramway's predecessor in 1913. Today some eighty shops line about 480 metres of arcade, with a heavy concentration of prepared-food stalls and long-standing coffee houses.
What to order
Why locals keep coming
Used as a location for films including Shoplifters. In 2025 Airbnb named Arakawa Ward one of ten global 'culinary hidden gems' in its summer travel trends, singling out this arcade. Sources give its length variously as 400, 480 or 500 metres.