Zodiac Street
You should have a car to get to reach Yamanashi’s natural highlights. And you should have a bicycle for typical daily life in Kofu. But strolling around a city reveals the delightful decorations, hung both by chance and by design.
If you’re taking your time, catching glimpses down alleys and looking at the second floors, you might see stray cats, peeling paint, and graffiti.
The city has also planted a few things you may overlook if you don’t know what you’re looking for. There are the city-specific manhole covers seen all around Japan. The Tepco boxes around the station that have paintings of houtou, wine, Takeda Shingen, and more. Some streetlights have statues of kingfishers (Kofu’s official bird.)
This post is about L Nishi Ginza エル西銀座.
Along the sidewalk on L Nishi Ginza are statues of the 12 Chinese Zodiac signs, known as 干支 (eto), or 十二宮 (juunijyuu) in Japan.
Why are these statues here? リビングセンターマエダ (Living Center Maeda), an interior goods store, and the place where I ask for stuff when I don’t know where else to look, has been a mainstay of L Nishi Ginza since…well before L Nishi Ginza (founded in 1877.) Mako Maeda tells me that, in the early Heisei period (about 30 years ago), the road received a bit of a makeover. Her mother, with other neighborhood shop-owners, chose to add the zodiac statues, based simply on people’s familiarity with, and fondness for, the Eto. They also decided to rename the street (perhaps formerly Nishiki Street) L Nishi Ginza. Now, some street signs display “Elle Nishi Ginza”, but Mako tells me the L is for “Large Life Love.”
If you’re looking to pair checking out the statues with a meal, you may want to visit around dusk. There’s izakaya food, Korean food, noodles, and Sam’s Chai Chai on L Nishi-Ginza and Basin Bar and Gurume Yokocho in the neighborhood but they all wait until evening to open. If you’re looking for lunch, you can try the Ginza shopping street to the east.
L Nishi Ginza at dusk
Another possibility for a daytime visit is to pick up something at the Pax supermarket in the basement of the Ogino department store, then have a picnic in the under-used Central Park to the west of L Nishi Ginza. The park has its own easy-to-overlook adornments.
