A Senbei Store in Ginza

Namiki-dori is one of my favorite strolling streets. In the volume about Mikasa Kaikan, I illustrated the townscape on the southern side of Harumi-dori, but the northern side is just as nice. First, as we enter the street, there is the Teijin Men’s Shop, which used to be the center of the then popular “Ivy League look.” I have been told that the current building was built in the year of the Tokyo Olympics, in 1964. (The store was established in 1960.) The building looks unchanged from how I recall seeing it as a junior high school student, back when I started to come to Ginza on my way home from school. Then, next to Teijin, stands the Matsuzaki Senbei store.
　I believe I first learned about this senbei store when I was in junior high school and I had just become interested in the VAN shirts sold at “Tei-Men’s.” I rarely turned the corner into Miyuki-dori, but since Hatoya Paper Store diagonally across the street from Matsuzaki Senbei was run by the family of Mizuno-kun, my classmate at Keio Chutobu Junior High School, I would sometimes stop by their store when I was in Ginza. I vaguely recall seeing Matsuzaki Senbei on one of such occasions and being surprised that Ginza had a senbei store.
　The store was not one of my frequent destinations as a student and it was a while later that I went to the store as a customer. In the mid-80s, when I was writing an essay on snacks for OLIVE, a fashion magazine for young girls, I visited the store for an interview and enjoyed some matcha tea and senbei in their tearoom.
　I had the opportunity of learning about the history of the store from the Vice President of the company, Mr. Sohei Matsuzaki, whom I had met before at a gathering in Ginza. The store has a magenta-colored signboard with its pine (matsu) logo. The building today is a seven-story building with a sword store and dentist, but the store was originally opened in almost the same spot on Miyuki-dori in the 1865 (Keio 1), toward the end of the Edo period. Before Ginza, they were located in Gyoran-zaka in Takanawa (established in 1804), so their initial customers must have been people visiting Sengaku-ji Temple.
“The trade name of the store in Gyoranzaka was called Mikawaya. I have been told that the founder of the senbei store was from Aichi and had trained in the Kansai area”
Despite its long history, there are no records from the Edo and Meiji periods because all materials have been lost in frequent fires. The store was completely burnt down three times: in the Great Fire of Meiji 5 (1872), which consequently led to Ginza’s modern development, in the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1937 (Taisho 12), and in the air bombs of 1945 (Showa 20). Every time, they had to rebuild from barracks.
“You see, we burn very well. After all, we are a senbei store…”
　Sohei-san joked about it, but I could also sense the confidence of generations of storeowners whose business had survived rough times.
“This is not very old.” He said, handing me a thick heavy album, which is called “The Recipe Book” among the employees. It was a scrap book with pictures of senbei molds and old ads. Judging from the fact that the address on one of the flyers was “Ginza-nishi” and the area code of the phone number was two digits, my guess is that they must have been printed not long after the war, from the late 1940s to 50s.

　For example, this probably comes from one of those leaflets found in a can of senbei introducing the product, but it is quite poetic.

　It was dusk when I gazed at Sumidagawa River, which one can never see enough of, Matsuchiyama is beautiful against the moon, and I could see a boat with a sail, when I heard, “The baby cries. The senbei is in the cupboard,” and so they started to sell a senbei named after the moon and snow, and “penpei” shaped like a plectrum, which were skillfully made fortune cookies with fortunes that everyone enjoyed, and in Mimeguri, known for good taste and gracefulness, with our daily mouths and tongue in Shirahige, and our heart, in Sekiya patiently, and our bodies with Chomei-ji Temple’s long life, floating down the river in a houseboat, looking through the reed screen from which, beyond the bank, we can see the Hyakugan show….

　I unconsciously started to copy the text and realized half way through that there was no end to the sentence. The entire text was just about double the length, and with the name of tourist spots here and there, it was written in the style of a tourist guide to Sumidagawa River. “’Penpei’ shaped like a plectrum” must have accompanied their most popular “Shamido” (sembei shaped like the body of a shamisen). I was able to find something close to that image among the senbei molds archived in the album. Then, “penpei” must be a play on words, linking “senbei” with the “pen-pen” sound of the shamisen.
　As I mentioned earlier that the text sounded like an introduction to the banks of Sumidagawa River, the album contained various elaborately designed molds depicting Edo and the landscape of Tokyo. There were also “hagoita” racket-shaped molds with the name of a Kabuki actor and a ukiyo-e. It is not known whether these were sold at performances at the Kabukiza Theater or at the Shimbashi Enbuji Theater or if orders were placed by the actors as gifts for fans.