Yanagase District In Gifu
About the Yanagase Camera
Yanagase is Gifu City's central shopping district, a grid of covered arcades and side streets north of the station toward Mount Kinka and the Nagara River. For much of the Showa era it was the commercial heart of the whole prefecture.
Its fame outlasted its peak. The 1966 hit song Yanagase Blues turned the district's name into shorthand for a certain kind of postwar nightlife, and the song is still the first thing many Japanese associate with Gifu. The decades since brought the same decline that hit covered shopping streets across regional Japan, as trade moved to roadside malls.
What the camera shows now is a district in the middle of a slow revival, with markets, new independent tenants and events filling arcades that had emptied out. It is an honest view of what regional Japan is working through rather than a postcard.
Highlights & Nearby
- •Watch for: arcade foot traffic, weekend markets and events, the changing shopfronts
- •Nearby: Mount Kinka and Gifu Castle, the Nagara River, JR Gifu Station
- •Note: the district was made famous nationally by the 1966 song Yanagase Blues
