Higashi-Nihonbashi · Chūō · three subway stops down the river from Asakusa
The Last Market of the Edo Year
Sensō-ji's Hagoita-ichi closes on 19 December. Edo's year-end markets did not stop there. They kept moving across the city until the 28th, and the final stop is still held, on a back street of the garment wholesale district.
Osame no Toshi-no-ichi 納めの歳の市Yagenbori Fudō-in · typically 26–28 DecFacts checked October 2026
You have been to Sensō-ji (浅草寺) in mid-December, when the Hagoita-ichi fills the precinct with battledore stalls on the 17th, 18th and 19th. That market is the survivor of something larger. In Edo the toshi-no-ichi (歳の市), the markets for New Year goods, opened one after another through the second half of the month, each at a different temple or shrine. The one that closed the series was at Yagenbori Fudō-in (薬研堀不動院, Yagenbori Fudō-in), and it is still called the Osame no Toshi-no-ichi (納めの歳の市), the closing market.
Why go here instead of back to Asakusa? Because this is the end of the sequence, held where it always was, and on the evening of the 28th professional storytellers burn their worn-out fans in the temple yard. What you give up is scale. This is a handful of stalls outside a small city temple, there is no English, and the dates for 2026 had not been announced when this was written.
The end of a December circuit歳の市 · toshi-no-ichi
A toshi-no-ichi sold what a household needed to open the year: pine and bamboo for the gate, straw rope decorations, lucky objects, kitchenware. Edo did not hold one big market. It held a relay. Japanese sources agree on the start and the end: Fukagawa Hachiman on the 14th and 15th, then Asakusa Kannon on the 17th and 18th, Kanda Myōjin on the 20th and 21st. A local news account continues the route through Atago and the Tenjin shrines at Hirakawa and Yushima, without dates. Everyone puts Yagenbori on the 28th, last.
The dates follow the temple, not the shoppers. The 28th is the monthly feast day of Fudō Myō-ō, and the December one is the osame no Fudō (納めの不動), the last of the year. A market attached to it could not have come any later and still left time to hang the decorations.
By the organisers' count only two of these markets are left in Tokyo: Asakusa's, which turned into the Hagoita-ichi, and this one. Even this one stopped for a time. The temple's own history says local residents and shopkeepers formed a preservation society and revived it in 1965; a 2018 report in a Nihonbashi local paper puts the revival at 1962. Either way, what you see is a postwar restart of an Edo custom, and the society, the Yagenbori Fudō-son Toshi-no-ichi Hozonkai, still runs it.
What was a two-week relay is now two markets a week apart. If your trip runs past the 19th, the second one is the only one left to catch.
A statue carried east in a basket薬研堀不動院 · Yagenbori Fudō-in
The temple is the Tokyo branch of Kawasaki Daishi (川崎大師), the big Shingon temple south of the city, and has been since 1892. Its own account of its origin has two dates, and they fit together. The Fudō statue is said to have been carved in 1137 by the priest Kakuban and kept at Negoro-ji (根来寺) in what is now Wakayama. In 1585, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi's army attacked Negoro-ji, a monk named Daiin packed the statue into a wicker chest and carried it east on his back. In 1591 he set up a hall for it beside the Sumida River. So 1585 is when the statue left, and 1591 is the founding. All of this is temple tradition.
The temple calls itself one of Edo's three great Fudō, with Meguro and Mejiro, and says it appears in the Edo Meisho Zue, the illustrated guide of the 1830s.
The name is older than the neighbourhood's current one. Yagenbori (薬研堀) was a canal, cut from the Sumida in the 1640s to bring boats to a shogunal rice store. Its V-shaped bed looked like a yagen, the trough an apothecary grinds medicine in. Most of it was filled in 1771, and doctors moved onto the new land in such numbers that it was nicknamed the doctors' quarter. Satō Taizen opened a school of Dutch medicine here in 1838; a stone in the temple yard marks it as the starting point of Juntendō, now a university hospital. The last of the water went in 1903, and the place name itself was erased in 1971, when the area became Higashi-Nihonbashi. The temple and the shopkeepers' association are where the word survives.
Getting there: Higashi-Nihombashi Station (東日本橋駅), Toei Asakusa Line, exit B3 or B4, about 3 min on foot · Bakuro-Yokoyama Station (馬喰横山駅), Toei Shinjuku Line, exit A3 or A4, about 5 min · 中央区東日本橋2-6-8
When: Fudō feast day on the 28th of every month, fire ritual at 15:00. Temple phone answered 9:00–16:00.
Reality check: A compact concrete city temple. Outside feast days, ten minutes is enough.
The last market sits on the same bank and the same subway line as the famous one, three stops south, at the foot of the bridge to Ryōgoku.
Two markets in one streetやげん堀楽市楽座 · Yagenbori Rakuichi Rakuza
Stalls line the temple yard and the streets beside it. The New Year side is what you would expect: kadomatsu, shimekazari straw decorations, lucky charms. Hagoita have been sold here too, in past years by a stall from Yoshitoku, the old doll house. Lion dancers from an Edo daikagura troupe and a chindon band have worked the street in recent years.
The other half is what makes this market belong to its address. Higashi-Nihonbashi and the blocks around Bakurochō are Tokyo's garment wholesale district. From 1965 the wholesalers ran a clearance alongside the temple market, the Ōdashiko-ichi (大出庫市), emptying stockrooms of clothes, shoes and household goods. In 2018 the local paper counted 54 local firms taking part, prices under half of retail, and 30,000 visitors a year.
That sale is gone. Demand fell as fast fashion took over, and it was cancelled in 2023. In 2024 the neighbourhood relaunched it as Yagenbori Rakuichi Rakuza (やげん堀楽市楽座), with the popular clothing and food stalls from the old sale plus stage events on the 26th and 27th: juggling, comedy, a foam-sword game. The head of the neighbourhood association said the aim was the young families who have been moving into the area. You are watching a wholesale district turn residential, one market at a time.
Part
What it is
Hours last published
Osame no Toshi-no-ichi 納めの歳の市
New Year decorations, charms, stalls in and around the temple
2024: 10:00–19:00. One 2025 listing says 11:00–16:00.
Rakuichi Rakuza やげん堀楽市楽座
Successor to the wholesalers' clearance; clothes, food, stage
2024: 11:00–17:00
Osame no Fudō 納めの不動
Fire ritual and storytellers, 28th only
15:00 and 18:00 (temple site)
At a decoration stall, where the display pieces are sized for shopfronts: 一番小さいのはどれですか (ichiban chiisai no wa dore desu ka).
Getting there: Same exits as the temple. The stalls start within sight of it.
When: Typically 26–28 December. In 2026 those are a Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
Reality check: Bring cash; nothing found says the stalls take cards. Straw and pine decorations are plant material, so check your own country's import rules before buying one to take home.
2026 dates are not confirmed. As of 11 October 2026 neither the temple site nor Chūō's tourism pages had posted this year's market. It ran 26–28 December in 2024 and 2025, and the temple lists those dates as annual. Check yagenborihudoin.com in December before you go.
The 28th: storytellers burn their fans講談 · kōdan
Kōdan is the art of a single narrator at a small desk, rapping out the beat of a war tale with a paper-wrapped fan called a hari-ōgi (張扇). It grew out of public readings of the Taiheiki, and reference works place one of the best-known Edo readers of the 1690s at the Asakusa gate, the old checkpoint by the Kanda River just north of here, on a pitch that stayed in use into the Meiji era. A monument to those readings, first put up in 1858, was moved into the temple yard and destroyed in the 1923 earthquake. The stone there now, the Kōdan Hasshō Kinen no Hi (講談発祥記念之碑), dates from 1984.
The link is not only a stone. Since May 1982 a kōdan performer has given a free dedicatory performance at the temple on the 28th of every month at 14:00. The October 2026 one is numbered 525.
On 28 December the temple's calendar lists three things beyond the market. Two fire rituals, at 15:00 and 18:00. A tsuji-kōshaku (辻講釈), storytelling in the open air the way it was once done on street corners, in the early evening; in 2023 it began at 16:00. And at 17:30 the hari-ōgi kuyō (張扇供養), in which the performers burn the year's worn fans in front of the monument and pray to get better at their craft. The temple says visitors may attend.
At the temple office window, if no schedule is posted: 講談は何時からですか (kōdan wa nanji kara desu ka).
Getting there: Inside the temple grounds.
When: 28 December, from mid-afternoon. Monthly performance on the 28th at 14:00, free.
Reality check: Kōdan is fast, formal Japanese full of period vocabulary. Expect to follow the rhythm and the fan, not the plot. The yard is small and you will be standing.
The reason to choose the 28th over the 26th or 27th is a three-hour window. Arrive by 14:30 and you see all four.
The name on the shichimi tinやげん堀 七味唐辛子 · Yagenbori shichimi
If the word Yagenbori looks familiar, it is from Asakusa. The shichimi tōgarashi shop Yagenbori (やげん堀), on Shin-Nakamise by Sensō-ji, takes its name from here. The shop's story is that its founder, Karashiya Tokuemon, began selling a seven-ingredient chili blend at Yagenbori near Ryōgoku Bridge in 1625, borrowing the idea from the Chinese-medicine trade around him. In Tokyo the blend is also called nanairo, seven colours.
Treat the date as the shop's tradition. The canal itself is usually dated to the 1640s, two decades after 1625, and the doctors arrived later still. The connection between a district of apothecaries and a spice mix ground like medicine is sound; the exact year is not something I could pin down.
A 2019 Japanese write-up of the market describes a shichimi stall where the seller mixes the blend to order. Whether it still comes is unconfirmed. If it is there:
When the seller asks how you want it: 山椒多めでお願いします (sanshō ōme de onegai shimasu).
Getting there: The shop is in Asakusa, not here: Shin-Nakamise arcade, by Asakusa Station (浅草駅). Three stops on the Toei Asakusa Line from Higashi-Nihombashi.
When: Shop hours not verified. Check before you go.
Reality check: There is no shichimi shop at Yagenbori itself any more. The name moved north; the place stayed.
The honest part
It is small, and it is not Asakusa. No published stall count could be found. A visitor in 2021 reported few stalls and a scaled-down market. If the Hagoita-ichi is what you are picturing, expect a fraction of it.
The sale that drew the crowds for half a century was cancelled in 2023. Its replacement is a neighbourhood fair with a stage for children. It is friendly, and it is not a reason to cross the city.
The hours are unreliable. Listings for the last two years disagree by three hours on closing time. The 28th falls on a Monday in 2026, so the storytellers perform on a working evening while the weekend crowd has already gone.
"The last market of Edo" is true of the calendar, not of the stalls. The market lapsed and was restarted in the 1960s. And "only two survive" is the organisers' phrase; other listings count differently.
If you have no Japanese at all, the kōdan will be a long stretch of someone striking a desk. Go on the 26th or 27th for the stalls and skip the evening.
If you only have one evening
The 28th, built around the temple's own times. Confirm them in December.
Asakusa. Buy a tin at Yagenbori on Shin-Nakamise, so the name means something when you arrive.
Toei Asakusa Line from Asakusa Station, three stops to Higashi-Nihombashi Station. Exit B3 or B4.
Walk the stalls once, end to end, before the light goes. Find the three stones in the yard: kōdan, Juntendō, and the market's own, set up in 1996.
First fire ritual in the main hall.
Street kōdan, if it keeps the 2023 time. Stand where you can see the fan.
Hari-ōgi kuyō at the monument.
Second fire ritual, or walk east to Ryōgoku Bridge, which begins a few blocks from the temple, and look up the river toward Asakusa.
Running late? Drop Asakusa and start at 14:30. Keep 17:30: the fan burning happens once a year, and nowhere else.