Yamanote and Shitamachi
Areas of Tokyo
Yamanote (山の手; Japanese pronunciation: [ja.ma.no(ꜜ).te]) and Shitamachi (下町; [ɕi̥.ta.ma.tɕi]) are traditional names for two areas of Tokyo, Japan.
Yamanote refers to the affluent, upper-class areas of Tokyo west of the Imperial Palace. While citizens once considered it as consisting of Hongo, Kōjimachi, Koishikawa, Ushigome, Yotsuya, Akasaka, Aoyama and Azabu in the Bunkyō, Chiyoda, Shinjuku, and Minato wards, in popular conception, the area extended westwards to include the Nakano, Suginami, and Meguro wards after the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923.
Shitamachi is the traditional name for the area of Tokyo including today the Adachi, Arakawa, certain neighbourhoods in Chiyoda, Chūō, Edogawa, Katsushika, Kōtō, Sumida, and Taitō wards, the physically low part of the city along and east of the Sumida River, mostly consisted of commercial areas and chonin residential areas during the Edo period.
The two regions have always been vaguely defined, as their identity was more based on culture and caste than on geography. While Tokugawa vassals of the samurai caste (hatamoto and gokenin) lived in the hilly Yamanote, lower castes (merchants and artisans) lived in the marshy areas near the sea. This dual class and geographic division has remained strong through the centuries while evolving with the times and is still in common use today. Indeed, the two terms are now used also in other parts of the country. The term Yamanote still indicates a higher social status, and Shitamachi a lower one, even though de facto this is not always true.
Both the Yamanote and the Shitamachi have grown gradually over the years, and the map above shows them as they are today.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q67406560. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1923.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yamanote and Shitamachi” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.