Tokyo On The Cheap

By Joe Kern

Hotel Rooms For ¥2500!

New Koyo has all the amenities you would expect to find in your typical youth hostel, including internet, a community kitchen and a cute Dutch undergrad in the corner just waiting to meet a special friend. In addition, there are a few uniquely Japanese touches such as a community ofuro (showers are also available) and a free massage chair, which remained curiously unused during my visit. I suspect that none of the greenhorn gaijin knew what it was, nor how to operate the controls.

Based near Ueno, New Koyo is one of a number of bafflingly cheap places to stay around that area, albeit the only one that’s really aimed at foreigners. To an uninformed outsider, Ueno seems to be the same as every other area in the city, so why the insanely cheap prices?

Located ten minutes from Minowa station, the New Koyo Hotel is just a stone’s throw from the infamous Sanya slum. This is a significantly short distance in this case  because the area was famous in the 80s for its "riots" and the corner police box was frequently stoned by disgruntled locals; eventually, someone drove a truck into it and finished it off. The hotel is also a figurative underpants’ throw from the former Yoshiwara area (now Senzoku 4-chome), Tokyo’s biggest flesh district of years past, but today a sort of quieter, mellower Kabukicho.

The area is home, too, to the Sumidagawa freight yard, which attracted unskilled single men from all over Japan who wanted to work just enough to stay drunk when not working. They could then grab a nights’ rest in one of the over 200 flophouses in the area. Seven years ago, one of those flophouses became the New Koyo when the son of the original owner took over and started advertising it in English as the cheapest hotel in Tokyo. Soon, the Lonely Planet noticed, their website caught fire, and it became the biggest genuine backpacker’s dive in Tokyo. It now operates at the brink of capacity any night of the week, in any season. I was there on a weekday in early November and there was only one room open out of 76. Make reservations.
The admittedly tiny rooms start at ¥2500 for single occupancy, and there is a choice between Japanese and Western styles. The Tepui bar and café down the street serves the hotel community, creating the well-known travelers' experience of an intimate gaijin enclave.

Don’t fret about being in a ‘slum’ (‘suramu’ in Japanese). For one thing, the violence happened over two decades ago. And let’s be honest, what they called a ‘riot’ in Tokyo might be called, say, ‘Carnival’ in Rio or ‘Thursday’ in L.A. For another, the old clientele of local drunks and vagrants are flopping in the other houses anyway. One must of course be ever vigilant for the Angkor-Wat-shirt-and-Teva-sandal-wearing backpacker drunks and vagrants, although to be fair New Koyo does make an effort to keep the wrong element out irrespective of race, creed, or the loudness of the shirt they’re wearing.
For reservations and very detailed directions, check their excellent English website www.newkoyo.jp (also in 8 other languages) or call.

New Koyo

2-26-13 Nihonzutsumi, Taito-ku
Tokyo
(03) 3873-0343

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