Why you should experience Taruichi in Tokyo, Japan.
Taruichi is a storied izakaya where Kabukicho's nocturnal appetite, postwar drinking culture, northeastern Japanese heritage and decades of devotion to whale and sake survive beneath Shinjuku's electric performance.
Set along Kuyakusho-dori near Yasukuni-dori and just steps from Golden Gai, Taruichi belongs to a pocket of Kabukicho where drinking has long carried its own rituals, loyalties and fiercely individual establishments behind the district's blazing signs. The basement room continues a lineage begun in 1968, grounding an area famous for continual reinvention in a restaurant whose defining commitments to Miyagi, Sanriku and whale cuisine have survived more than half a century. Bottles of Urakasumi reinforce that continuity beside platters of whale and seafood, bringing the foodways of Japan's northeastern Pacific coast into one of Tokyo's most intense entertainment quarters. The result is an izakaya where Kabukicho's after-dark exuberance meets a remarkably durable regional tradition built on sake, Sanriku seafood and one family's enduring fascination with whale.
What you should know about Taruichi.
Taruichi is best known for founder Takashi Sato's creation of the restaurant on December 6, 1968, bringing Miyagi's Urakasumi sake, Sanriku seafood and whale cuisine to Tokyo after the Higashimatsushima native studied fisheries at Nihon University, worked at the Institute of Cetacean Research and carried forward a childhood ambition to captain a whaling vessel. Sato initially opened Taruichi in Takadanobaba before its success with Urakasumi, then scarcely available in Tokyo, helped propel the restaurant to Shinjuku, where it spent 40 years in a fifth-floor Kabukicho address and became closely associated with the sake produced by Saura in Shiogama. Second-generation proprietor Shintaro Sato inherited the restaurant and its northeastern focus, maintained the relationship with Urakasumi through the devastation of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, and moved Taruichi to its current Kabukicho basement in May 2013 after deterioration of the previous building forced another chapter in its history. More than five decades after opening, the restaurant still carries Taruichi-exclusive Urakasumi bottlings, including its Gold Label and a Silver Label created for the restaurant's 50th anniversary, while its signature whale sashimi platter assembles lean meat, saezuri tongue, skin, bacon, heart, kanoko and fatty cuts into a survey of an ingredient that has defined the restaurant since Sato's founding generation.
The whale platter makes the strongest introduction, moving from clean, iron-rich lean meat through the firmer bite of heart and the deeper richness of kanoko before saezuri and skin introduce increasingly fatty textures that reward small pours of chilled Urakasumi between pieces. House-made whale bacon concentrates salt and fat into a denser preparation, while tatsuta-age gives whale another form through soy-seasoned meat beneath a fried exterior and whale soup closes the progression with warmth and restraint. Sanriku broadens the table through raw oysters, hoya served with vinegar or as shiokara, matsumo seaweed, handmade sasa kamaboko and Shiogama oden, placing Miyagi's coastline beside the restaurant's whale specialties instead of treating them as isolated curiosities. Urakasumi completes the meal with styles ranging from dry honjozo and junmai to Junmai Ginjo No. 12, Zen and Taruichi's private bottlings, turning a dinner here into the continuation of the pairing between Miyagi sake and northeastern seafood that has sustained the restaurant since 1968.
How to fold Taruichi into your trip.
Taruichi works as the dinner anchor for an evening tracing the sacred, theatrical and postwar drinking history compressed into the streets surrounding eastern Shinjuku.
Begin at Hanazono Shrine, whose history predates Tokugawa Ieyasu's 1590 entry into Edo and whose present site came from land once belonging to an Owari Domain residence, giving centuries of religious continuity to a quarter now dominated by entertainment after dark. Continue to Shinjuku Suehirotei, established in 1897 and rebuilt in 1946, where Tokyo's surviving yose tradition places rakugo beside manzai, magic and other stage arts inside the only wooden building among the metropolitan area's four regular rakugo halls. Conclude at Golden Gai, whose 6,600-square-meter maze grew from relocated postwar black-market stalls and later became home to more than 280 tiny drinking establishments frequented by writers, editors, actors and filmmakers, with 1976 literary prize winners Kenji Nakagami and RyΕ«zΕ Saki among its celebrated regulars. Hanazono Shrine's pre-Edo continuity, Suehirotei's live performance tradition and Golden Gai's postwar drinking culture reveal why a 1968 izakaya devoted to Miyagi sake and whale feels so deeply rooted in the surrounding streets of Kabukicho.
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