Musashi-Koyama Station (RotW)

RotW is my Railways of the Warrior project. Visiting all the Japanese train stations with Fuji in the name & the 12 castles with the original keep still standing wasn’t enough to satisfy my love of lists, so now I’m working through all the stations with Musashi in their name.

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Name in kanji : 武蔵小山
Kanji meaning: hill
Station opened : 11th March, 1923 (as Koyama; renamed in June 1924)
Trainlines: Tokyu Meguro
# Passengers daily : 54,000
Distance from CityHillsAndSea HQ: 47km
Located in: Shinagawa, Tokyo

Things to Do

You’ll never believe me when I tell you that there’s a park not far from the station – Rinshi-no-mori Park.

Other than that, not a whole lot. It does boast Tokyo’s longest shotengai – covered shopping arcade – which clocks in at an impressive 800 metres in length, and goes by the name of Palm.

All About Musashi-Koyama Station

Musashi-koyama doesn’t quite have that old Tokyo neighbourhood feel to it; you know the one I mean, the one where you come out of the station and things feel more like a sleepy Showa period town with a lived-in vibe, wee windy streets with slightly dilapidated shop fronts, noodle shops with grease covered fan outlets, that kind of thing.

On the other hand, it doesn’t fully have the new neighbourhood neon flash pizazz chain store thing fully in hand either, although there is enough development happening in little pockets about the place to suggest that this modern side of Tokyo is staging a steady encroachment onto the retro turf.

The battleground for this, it seems, is the shotengai Palm I mentioned in my introduction. If you come out of the station at the east entrance, you’ll see a shiny new shopping area – Park City Musashi Koyama The Mall, to give it its full due – which is clearly where all the young hip cats shop nowadays.

The shopping arcade is just the other side of this development, and is unabashedly old school:

The most interesting thing about this arcade for me though was the fact that there were several new apartment blocks built into – or in the process of so being – the shotengai itself, like some kind of curious symbiotic old meets new hybridization that I also noticed a few weeks after, when I stayed in Kamata.

That’s the kind of urban renewal I appreciate – revitalizing the old with something new, instead of tearing it down & putting something soulless in its stead.

It’s a tricky balance though, and probably comes down to a question of economics more times than not. Palm wasn’t without its share of tired shopfronts, as gloriously retro as they may look:

The park, in the opposite direction from the station, had its own story of urban decay to tell, in the shape of a fenced off housing development, empty & apaprently scheduled for demolition:

Some of the residents of the park proper could probably tell you about how this whole area used to be just fields. They may even be around when whatever replaces the above block of flats ends up scheduled for deletion too.

Station Rating

Another Musashi without anything staggeringly exciting about it, but charming nonetheless with a personality all of its own and a funky old shopping arcade that seems to be winning a war of attrition via a strategy of compromise…

… long may it last.