Nagarekawacho

This guide to Nagarekawacho in Hiroshima starts underground, with the buried stream that once ran from the daimyo's garden at Shukkeien and gave the district its name before the city paved it over in 1913. It follows the pleasure quarter of teahouses and geisha houses that grew above it in the early twentieth century, the leveling of the whole area in 1945, and the shopkeepers who, just two years later, bet on nightlife to rebuild the district first, borrowing a name from Tokyo's own Ginza. Stand here after dark to see what that postwar gamble became.