Shimokitazawa is the neighbourhood that Tokyo's artists, musicians, students, and people who have decided they are done with the rest of the city have been living in since the 1960s. It is built on an awkward grid of narrow streets that were never widened, which means no large-footprint retail arrived to displace the record shops and coffee counters and theatre venues. The neighbourhood survived by being structurally inhospitable to the forces that redeveloped everywhere else.
The record shops are serious. There are several on the main commercial street and several more on the smaller streets behind it, and they are arranged by genre with the specificity of people who care about the difference between City Pop and New Music. The live houses are the other thing: Shimokitazawa has a higher concentration of small live music venues than any neighbourhood in Tokyo, and the shows that start at 7pm on a weekday are for audiences of forty people seeing bands that are either very good or very interesting or both.
Koenji, two stops east on the Chuo line, is the earlier version of the same neighbourhood: older record shops, a Sunday flea market that has been running for fifty years, a community of craft workers and vintage dealers and people who have been in the same apartment for thirty years and have no intention of leaving.
Anyone who came to Tokyo with a specific interest in music, whether recorded or live. Vintage clothing people, for whom Shimokitazawa is one of the most concentrated vintage districts in the world. People on a longer Tokyo trip who want to spend a full day in a neighbourhood that has no famous temples or skyline views. Travellers who find the tourist Tokyo slightly exhausting and want a different register.
Not the right area for first-time visitors with limited time. Shimokitazawa and Koenji reward slow walking and return visits; they do not have discrete attractions that can be ticked in an afternoon. And neither neighbourhood has hotels to speak of, so this is a day trip from wherever you are staying.
The record shops on Honda Fudo-do Street in Shimokitazawa, starting with Village Vanguard and working outward. One of the live houses on a weekday evening: Shelter, Three, or Fever are the long-running ones. The Ichibangai shotengai, the old shopping street, on the east side of Shimokitazawa station for the older businesses. Koenji on a Sunday morning for the flea market on the pavement in front of the station. The coffee shops that have no signage in English and do not need any: enter, point at the handwritten menu on the wall, sit at the counter.