Why you should experience HUB Gaienmae in Tokyo, Japan.
HUB Gaienmae is a convivial British-style pub where Kita-Aoyama's sporting culture, match-day crowds, draft ale and the social rituals of Japanese spectator sport converge beside Jingu Gaien.
Set along Stadium-dori near Aoyama-dori and just steps from Meiji Jingu Stadium, the pub sits directly on the route connecting Gaienmae Station with Tokyo's century-old sporting quarter. Baseball, rugby and football broadcasts turn its screens into an extension of the surrounding venues, with supporters arriving before matches and returning after the final whistle. Pints, fish and chips and standing-room drinking preserve the casual rhythm that HUB adapted from British pub culture for Japan. The result is a Kita-Aoyama pub whose location beside Jingu Gaien makes spectator sport part of the room's character.
What you should know about HUB Gaienmae.
HUB Gaienmae is best known for opening on December 1, 2010 as a branch conceived specifically around the sporting institutions of Jingu Gaien. The location became the 53rd HUB in a company whose origins reach Daiei founder Isao Nakauchi's encounters with British pub culture and the first branch opened in Kobe's Sannomiya in 1980. Tokyo followed that August with a Roppongi pub inside the newly completed Haiyuza Building, beginning an expansion that reached ten branches by 1985 before the original company dissolved in 1986. The surviving operation passed through Daiei subsidiaries Captain Cook and Rikishaman before the present Hub Co., Ltd. was created in 1998 and inherited 15 branches. Gaienmae arrived during a far larger second expansion, explicitly chosen for its proximity to Meiji Jingu Stadium, Prince Chichibu Memorial Rugby Stadium and the former National Stadium. The opening described the branch as an attempt to reproduce the British relationship between a neighborhood pub and local sport, giving this particular HUB a purpose unusually specific to its address.
HUB Ale gives the drinking experience its strongest house signature, beginning with a recipe developed in 2005 after an employee returned from Britain and proposed creating an original ale. Masayuki Sasaki and Echigo Beer president Hirofumi Gyoda became central to its development, with ten HUB managers participating in early tastings before production settled at Echigo Beer in Niigata. Spring-summer and autumn-winter recipes alter the malt-and-hop balance across the year, and each keg leaves the brewery under refrigeration on the day it is filled. Fish and chips supplies the natural food counterpart through crisp batter around moist fish, giving the ale's bitterness something fried and substantial to cut against between drinks. A match broadcast completes the sequence as attention moves repeatedly between pint, plate and screen, turning HUB Gaienmae's version of the British pub into an experience shaped as much by collective watching as by drinking.
How to fold HUB Gaienmae into your trip.
HUB Gaienmae works as the evening anchor for an outing through Jingu Gaien that traces Tokyo sport from a Taisho-era baseball ground through Olympic history and the rebuilding of Japan's principal national stadium.
Begin at Meiji Jingu Stadium, completed with assistance from the Tokyo Big6 Baseball League in 1926, when its 31,000-capacity stands gave the collegiate competition founded the previous year a permanent stage that later hosted Babe Ruth in 1934. Continue to Japan Olympic Museum, opened on September 14, 2019 with Olympic torches, medals and athlete-focused exhibits, plus furniture incorporating wood descended from seeds carried by Japanese representatives to the 1964 Tokyo Games. Conclude at Japan National Stadium, completed in December 2019 on the lineage of the 1924 Meiji Jingu Gaien Stadium and the 1958 National Stadium that hosted the 1964 Olympic opening and closing ceremonies. The progression moves from the rise of collegiate baseball through Japan's Olympic inheritance into the newest generation of national sporting architecture, making a post-match pint at HUB Gaienmae part of a century of sport concentrated around Jingu Gaien.
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