Setagaya Boro Ichi

Your Guide to Design and Pop Culture in Tokyo

Dec 12, 2004

This week sees the flea market to end all flea markets in Tokyo: the Setagaya Boro Ichi.

It’s December, time again for the huge fleamarket that’s being held every winter on two days each in December and January. A total of about 700 stalls will be selling antiques, 2nd hand clothes, used books and a lot more that make Setagaya the place to spend the four days if you like to dig up curiosities and negotiate prices. Nice is also the downtown sort of air of the Setagaya Line that takes visitors to the uptown venue of the market, the beginnings of which, by the way, reportedly date back to the year 1578. One of the thrills about the event is certainly the headache you’ll have later when looking at the rubbish you bought… Don’t forget to try the festival’s original Daikanmochi, if possible in all versions! (REALTOKYO)

It’s a 3-minute walk from Setagaya Station, and happens December 15-16 from 9:00 to 21:00.

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Jean Snow is a contributor to Arcade Mania, your guide to the arcade gaming scene in Japan (Amazon US/Amazon Japan). He also provided assistance on Tokyolife: Art and Design, a guide to Tokyo's cultural output of the past few years, covering the works of over 80 influential creatives.

He will be contributing to the upcoming fifth editions of The Rough Guide to Tokyo and The Rough Guide to Japan, due for release in 2011.

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Jean Snow is Executive Director of the PechaKucha organization. He also helps run the PechaKucha Night in Tokyo -- please get in touch if you are interested in presenting at a future event. For a more intimate salon-like discussion group, join him at his monthly PauseTalk event.

A longtime resident of Tokyo, he lives and breathes design, pop culture, and gaming, sustained by an unhealthy addiction to magazines and frequent visits to his favorites cafes. He has reported on these obsessions for various online/offline publications, including the following: Time, Inside (Australian Design Review), Gizmodo, Gridskipper, Kotaku, 1UP, Tokyo Q, Superfuture, OK Fred, Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel, I.D. (International Design), Metropolis, Azure, MoCo Loco, Kateigaho International Edition, Wired's Game|Life, PingMag, CNNGo, Phaidon, and The Japan Times.

You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this site, and also follow him on Twitter and Facebook, or get in touch by email.

He serves as editor-at-large at Néojaponisme, a web journal covering social and cultural aspects of Japan. Read the manifesto, by founder and chief editor W. David Marx.

He also writes a monthly column covering Japanese product design for The Japan Times, called "On Design." It appears on the last Tuesday of every month, in both the print edition and online.

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