---
title: "Under the tracks in Tokyo: the brick arches of Yūrakuchō and Kanda"
description: "Why restaurants and shops fill the space under the railway at Yūrakuchō and Kanda: a brick viaduct modeled on Berlin's and completed in 1910, and a station closed in 1943."
url: https://kama-meshi.com/en/articles/yurakucho-kanda
language: en
published: 2026-11-11
category: "Places in Japan › Tokyo"
tags: ["Tokyo", "RailwayHistory"]
author: "Oginoya Editorial Team"
publisher: "Oginoya Co., Ltd."
translations:
  zh-TW: https://kama-meshi.com/zh-tw/articles/yurakucho-kanda
  ko: https://kama-meshi.com/ko/articles/yurakucho-kanda
  zh-CN: https://kama-meshi.com/zh-cn/articles/yurakucho-kanda
  zh-HK: https://kama-meshi.com/zh-hk/articles/yurakucho-kanda
  th: https://kama-meshi.com/th/articles/yurakucho-kanda
  de: https://kama-meshi.com/de/articles/yurakucho-kanda
  fr: https://kama-meshi.com/fr/articles/yurakucho-kanda
  es: https://kama-meshi.com/es/articles/yurakucho-kanda
---

# Under the tracks in Tokyo: the brick arches of Yūrakuchō and Kanda

![A long red-brick railway viaduct beside a river in Kanda, with a glass shop front set into each arch](https://kama-meshi.com/_astro/manseibashi-viaduct-arches-2013.BfKeHTAR_Ze7Vng.webp)

The restaurants under the railway at Yūrakuchō, in central Tokyo, sit inside the arches of a brick viaduct that was completed in 1910 and still carries trains. The line was raised above the streets so that trains could cross the city without level crossings, and it was built as a row of arches, which left a separate space at street level under each arch.

## A railway lifted above the streets

Tokyo's southern terminal was [Shimbashi](https://kama-meshi.com/en/articles/ginza-shimbashi) and its northern terminal was Ueno, and a plan made in 1889 by the committee that was replanning the city set out a railway to join them. The new line would leave the main line near Hamamatsuchō and run on a viaduct to a new central station.

Railways of the time were normally laid on the ground. In a district that was already built up, the new line was to avoid crossing roads on the level, which meant going over them or under them. Underground railways were not yet common even abroad, so the choice narrowed early to an elevated line. Elevated railways in other countries were studied, and Berlin's was taken as the model.

## Brick arches on the Berlin pattern

As in Berlin, the viaduct is mainly a continuous row of brick arches. Where it crosses a road, steel girders take the place of the arches, to give the span and the headroom that the road needs. The track lies on ballast over steel plates, a design chosen to keep down noise in the city. The viaduct was designed for four tracks, two for city trains and two for long-distance trains, kept completely separate, and that too followed Berlin.

Two German engineers had a hand in the line. Hermann Rumschöttel, who was in Japan as an adviser to the Kyushu Railway, was asked in 1887 to survey a railway from Shimbashi through the central station to Ueno. Construction of the viaduct began in 1900. Japan had never built an elevated railway, so Franz Baltzer was invited to guide the work, and the line as built follows the route that Baltzer planned.

The line was called the Shin-Ei-kan line, after Shinsenza-chō near Shimbashi and Eiraku-chō near Ōtemachi, the two districts it joined. Work stopped during the Russo-Japanese War and started again in 1906. In December 1909 the first section opened, from Hamamatsuchō to Karasumori, the station that is now Shimbashi. Electric trains ran from Karasumori around the Yamanote Line to Ueno from the day the section opened. The viaduct was completed in 1910. Yūrakuchō Station opened that year, and trains ran as far as a temporary station at Gofukubashi, a little north of the site of the central station. The central station opened as [Tokyo Station](https://kama-meshi.com/en/articles/tokyo-station) in December 1914.

## The arches at work

The Yamanote and Keihin-Tōhoku lines run on the brick viaduct between Hamamatsuchō and Tokyo Station. To prepare the viaduct for a large earthquake, JR East has lined arches from the inside with reinforced concrete 400 millimeters thick. In 2010 the Japan Society of Civil Engineers named the viaduct a Civil Engineering Heritage site, as a structure still in service 100 years after it was built.

Between Yūrakuchō and Shimbashi two newer viaducts stand beside the brick viaduct. The viaduct of the Tōkaidō Line came into use in 1942, and the Tōkaidō [Shinkansen](https://kama-meshi.com/en/articles/what-is-shinkansen) opened on a third viaduct in 1964.

In 1919 the Chūō Line reached Tokyo Station from Manseibashi, by way of Kanda, on arches of reinforced concrete instead of brick. The last gap, between Tokyo and Ueno, opened on November 1, 1925, the day the Yamanote Line began running as a loop. The Tokyo–Ueno viaduct is a frame of reinforced-concrete columns and beams, and that kind of frame became the basic structure of today's railway viaducts, such as those of the Shinkansen.

## What moved in underneath

A viaduct of arches divides the ground beneath it into small separate spaces. The Railway Museum opened in 1921 under the elevated tracks at the north entrance of Tokyo Station. The space under Japan's railway viaducts has been in use for more than 100 years, and under the viaducts of central Tokyo it has held warehouses, offices, shops and restaurants. Around Yūrakuchō, Kanda and Ueno stations the space under the tracks is known for izakaya, informal places for drinks and food, where office workers stop on the way home.

![Restaurants set into the arches of a railway viaduct along a sidewalk, with overhead-wire gantries above the parapet](https://kama-meshi.com/_astro/tokyo-viaduct-restaurants-2020.CKLOXtMn_1Ck9lS.webp "Restaurants in the arches of the viaduct near Tokyo Station, 2020.")

In 2020 the space under the three viaducts between Yūrakuchō and Shimbashi opened as Hibiya Okuroji, a passage about 300 meters long lined with shops and restaurants. The original brick of the 1910 arches was kept.

[Oginoya](https://kama-meshi.com/en/articles/oginoya-history), which has sold [ekiben](https://kama-meshi.com/en/articles/what-is-ekiben), the bento of Japan's railway stations, since 1885 and makes [Tōge no Kamameshi](https://kama-meshi.com/en/articles/what-is-kamameshi), opened Oginoya Gen Yūrakuchō under the tracks at JR Yūrakuchō Station in March 2021. Oginoya Gen Kanda followed under the tracks at JR Kanda Station in June 2022.

## Manseibashi, a station on a brick viaduct

Kanda has a brick viaduct of its own. The Manseibashi viaduct, completed in 1912, runs along the Kanda River between Kanda and Ochanomizu stations on the Chūō Line, and Manseibashi Station was part of it. The station opened on April 1, 1912, as the Tokyo terminal of the Chūō Line, with a two-story red-brick building designed by Tatsuno Kingo, the architect of Tokyo Station, and his partner Kasai Manshi. Passengers changed there to the city's streetcars, and the Kanda-Sudachō district around the station became as busy as Ginza.

![A black-and-white photograph of a large brick station building with a streetcar, rickshaws and a bronze statue in front of it](https://kama-meshi.com/_astro/manseibashi-station-1912.DpuU3u4-_Z1rGdLA.webp "Manseibashi Station at the time it opened in 1912.")

In 1919 the Chūō Line was extended to Tokyo Station, and Manseibashi became a stop along the way. The station building burned in the Great Kantō Earthquake of September 1, 1923, and a single-story replacement was finished in 1925. In 1936 the Railway Museum moved in from Tokyo Station, and the station gave up its main building to the museum and was much reduced. In 1943, with fewer passengers using it during the Pacific War, Manseibashi Station was closed. The museum was renamed the Transportation Museum in 1948 and stayed until May 2006. Its collection passed to the Railway Museum that opened in the city of Saitama in 2007.

In September 2013 the Manseibashi viaduct opened as mAAch ecute Kanda Manseibashi, a shopping complex with shops and cafés set into the brick arches. Two of the old station's staircases, one built for the opening in 1912 and one added in 1935, lead up to the platform, which is now a deck walled in glass. Chūō Line trains pass close by on both sides of the deck.

## References

- [Onoda Shigeru, "100 years of the Yamanote loop" (Tokyo Metropolitan Library lecture handout)](https://www.library.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/guide/event/uploads/yamanotesen_kanzyounten_100nen.pdf)
- [Tokyo Station City, history panel 01](https://www.tokyostationcity.com/learning/pdf/history_panel01.pdf)
- [Tokyo Metropolitan Government, Bureau of Urban Development, "The opening of Tokyo Station and the growth of Marunouchi"](https://www.toshiseibi.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/keikaku_chousa_singikai/pdf/tokyotoshizukuri/1_10.pdf)
- [Japan Society of Civil Engineers, "Civil Engineering Heritage selected in fiscal 2010"](https://committees.jsce.or.jp/doboku_isan/node/18)
- [Nakamura and Funakoshi, "Seismic reinforcement of a brick arch viaduct" (JSCE annual conference, 2002)](https://www.jsce.or.jp/library/eq10/proc/00035/57-04-0155.pdf)
- [JR Central, press release on the development under the viaducts between Yūrakuchō and Shimbashi (September 3, 2019)](https://jr-central.co.jp/news/release/_pdf/000039928.pdf)
- [Hibiya Okuroji, "Concept"](https://www.jrtk.jp/hibiya-okuroji/concept/)
- [mAAch ecute Kanda Manseibashi, "About"](https://www.ecute.jp/maach/about.html)
- [nippon.com, "The former Manseibashi Station and its red-brick arches, a new Tokyo sight"](https://www.nippon.com/ja/articles/-/5577)
- [Kotobank, "Transportation Museum"](https://kotobank.jp/word/%E4%BA%A4%E9%80%9A%E5%8D%9A%E7%89%A9%E9%A4%A8-62772)
- [Kotobank, "Yūrakuchō"](https://kotobank.jp/word/%E6%9C%89%E6%A5%BD%E7%94%BA-144903)
- [Kotobank, "Kasai Manshi"](https://kotobank.jp/word/%E8%91%9B%E8%A5%BF%E4%B8%87%E5%8F%B8-1064859)
- [GO TOKYO, "Food & Drink in Tokyo"](https://www.gotokyo.org/en/see-and-do/drinking-and-dining/index.html)
- [Nihon University, "A study on the transition of land use under elevated railways" (2018)](https://www.cst.nihon-u.ac.jp/research/gakujutu/62/pdf/F2-6.pdf)
- [Oginoya, chronology](https://www.oginoya.co.jp/tougenokamameshi/history/)

Image credits (resized for display):

- [Ocdp / Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maach_Ecute_001.jpg), [CC0](http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en), 2013
- [Scott Kouchi / Real Estate Japan / Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Restaurants_near_Tokyo_Station.jpg), [CC BY 2.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), 2020
- [田山宗尭 (ed.), Nihon Shashinchō (National Diet Library Digital Collections) / Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NDL-DC_762376_0042_0011crd-ManseibashiTeishaba.jpg), Public domain, 1912