Tsukiji Jisaku

Our History & the Ryotei Tradition

History & Culture
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About Jisaku

Ginza’s quiet back room —
Tsukiji Jisaku.

Five minutes by car from Ginza. Step past the noren curtain and another world opens: a 2,600-square-metre garden and sukiya architecture, far removed from the city you have just left.

  • 01Access

    Moments from Tokyo Station.

    Close to Ginza, Tokyo Station and Haneda, yet standing in stillness on the bank of the Sumida River — a ryotei in the heart of the city that feels a world apart.

  • 02Architecture

    Sukiya rooms that hold their history.

    The gate, the entrance hall and the carved ranma transoms still carry traces of the Iwasaki family villa, of Mitsubishi lineage. More than ninety years have settled into this sukiya house, and it receives each guest quietly.

  • 03Garden

    Where the carp glide by.

    Nineteen rooms, large and small, are arranged around the pond — each one designed so that you may look out upon the pond where the koi swim.

  • 04Cuisine

    Mizutaki, and the kaiseki around it.

    Our signature mizutaki, handed down since the founding, takes the leading role. Around it we build a kaiseki of seasonal ingredients prepared in the Edo manner, with the menu changing each month.

  • 05Legacy

    One craft, one keeper.

    Since our founding, the making of mizutaki has been entrusted to a single chef in each generation. The movements and the reading of the fire are passed on by hand and by word, without interruption.

  • 06Culture

    An evening of Japan itself.

    Geisha entertainment, kabuki performance, tea ceremony, kimono dressing, zazen, table etiquette. Alongside the meal, we prepare occasions in which Japanese culture may be experienced first-hand.

Our Story

1657Meireki 3
Akashi-cho, the district where Tsukiji Jisaku stands, comes into being.
The great fire of that year consumed much of Edo. To rebuild, the shogunate reclaimed land here for the secondary residences of feudal lords, and a quarter known as Jikken-cho was born.
1869Meiji 2
Akashi-cho becomes a foreign settlement and a centre of Japan’s opening to the world.
This is the ground where the Kaitai Shinsho anatomical text was completed, and where Fukuzawa Yukichi opened his school of Western learning. It was here, too, that the British missionary Henry Faulds noticed the Japanese custom of the thumbprint and began the study of fingerprints. Rikkyo University, Meiji Gakuin and many other institutions were founded in this neighbourhood. On the very site of Tsukiji Jisaku stood the Tokyo Unjosho, the customs house of its day; the telegraph office within it carried Japan’s first public telegraph line to the courthouse in Yokohama.
1899Meiji 32
The foreign settlement is dissolved, and a villa of the Iwasaki family — founders of the Mitsubishi zaibatsu — is built on the site.
With the end of extraterritoriality the settlement was closed and the customs house moved elsewhere. In its place the Iwasaki family built a villa, and much of it survives today in the gate, the entrance and the ceilings of our house.
1931Showa 6
Tsukiji Jisaku is founded by Jisaku Honda, first head chef and proprietor.
When he came to Tokyo, Jisaku Honda insisted on a site along the Okawa, the lower reaches of the Sumida. From the Edo period until the early Showa years the river was a vital artery of the city, and almost every distinguished ryotei of Edo stood upon its banks.
1941Showa 16
The Pacific War begins.
Tsukiji Jisaku is said to have come through the Tokyo air raids of 1945 all but untouched. During the war the house served as a dormitory for the Ishikawajima shipyard, and marks left by the fittings of that time can still be found. It is said that the district’s history as a foreign settlement, and the presence of St. Luke’s International Hospital nearby, may be why the house was spared.
1951Showa 26
Tsukiji Jisaku is restored by Jisaku Honda and Toshiji Hase.
2021Reiwa 3
Tsukiji Jisaku marks ninety years since its founding.

The Founding

Jisaku Honda, founding head chef The foreign settlement in the Meiji era

Tsukiji Jisaku was founded in 1931 by Jisaku Honda, its first head chef and proprietor. He had already built a succession of celebrated restaurants across the country — enough to be called the king of pre-war Japanese cuisine — and Tokyo was the venture he had long been preparing for. He was a man of great warmth and appetite for life, who loved celebrations and loved, above all, to surprise people.

The immense stone lanterns and pagodas in our garden were found by Honda himself and brought from across Japan, each paired with a companion so that no piece would stand alone. Beside the entrance sits the bikkuri dobin, the “astonishing teapot” — a nod to the earthenware pots in which mizutaki was served in the earliest days, fired to his order at a kiln in Shigaraki. Its arrival is recorded as having caused such a commotion that it was reported in the newspapers. It remains a symbol of Tsukiji Jisaku, and a delight to our guests to this day.

Coming to Tokyo, Honda devoted himself to the Edo palate. To succeed here, he believed, he had to cook for the taste of Tokyo. And so, apart from himself, he engaged no chefs from Kyushu, hiring only those he had chosen in Tokyo. It was a decision only a cook of his standing could make — one who understood exactly how the cuisine of Edo differed from his own.

The Ryotei Culture of Edo

A tatami corridor

Establishments that could properly be called restaurants appeared in Edo around the Meiwa era (1764–1772), in the middle of the period. Until then, a banquet meant Yoshiwara and little else. In the Anei and Tenmei years that followed, celebrated houses opened one after another in Fukagawa, Ukiyo-koji, Mukojima and Nakazu, most of them serving the samurai class as places of hospitality.

Honda’s insistence on a site beside the Okawa was no accident. From the Edo period through Meiji, Taisho and into early Showa, the river carried the traffic of the city, and he knew that nearly every fine ryotei of Edo had stood along its banks. His choice was an act of devotion to that culture.

In the early Edo period the food and dress of the city were held to be inferior to those of the Kansai region — Edo was largely newly developed land, grown by people arriving from the surrounding provinces. Yet as the period matured and daily life grew settled, the city turned its attention to the pleasures of the table.

Fortunes Changing, and the Present Day

Koi in the Japanese garden

Tsukiji Jisaku opened in 1931, the year of the Wanpaoshan incident and the Manchurian incident. Word spread quickly among those who knew, and the house flourished. Encouraged, Honda carried Japanese cuisine far beyond these shores, as far as the continent.

During the war years, the house was requisitioned as a dormitory for the Ishikawajima shipyard.

In 1951 Jisaku Honda called upon Toshiji Hase. The two had been close since before the war, and Hase had long regarded him as a mentor; hearing his elder’s dearest wish, he was deeply moved, and resolved to restore Tsukiji Jisaku. Hase raised the funds and bought the house back, while Honda gathered furnishings to his own taste and called back the chefs and the nakai who had served here before. On 18 September 1951, Tsukiji Jisaku opened its doors once more. Its former popularity returned almost at once, and that prosperity is the foundation on which we stand today.

Jisaku Honda, our founder, was an entertainer in the truest sense, who wished only to bring people joy through the culture of food. Toshiji Hase was a man of great humanity, who loved the culture of Japan from the heart.

For more than ninety years we have worked without losing sight of that spirit. We hope you will continue to favour us with your custom, and that your time here — however brief — brings you pleasure.