Chōjiya — 430-Year-Old Grated-Yam-Soup Inn on the Old Tōkaidō

Just off Route 1 in Mariko, the twentieth station of the old Tōkaidō highway, a wooden restaurant has been serving one dish, more or less unchanged, for over four hundred years. Chōjiya opened in 1596 as a teahouse for travelers walking between Edo and Kyoto, and it still serves the same tororo-jiru — soup made from grated wild mountain yam (jinenjo) mixed with bonito dashi and white miso, poured over barley rice — that made Mariko famous long before Shizuoka city grew up around it.

Why It’s Interesting

Chōjiya is the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Shizuoka Prefecture, and in 2022 the Japanese government registered its building as a nationally registered tangible cultural property. Its fame predates any of that paperwork: Utagawa Hiroshige painted it into his ukiyo-e series The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō as the “famous teahouse” of Mariko station, the haiku poet Matsuo Bashō name-checked its tororo-jiru in a verse (“ume wakana Maruko no yado no tororo-jiru”), and the comic travelers Yajirō and Kitahachi stop here in Jippensha Ikku’s Edo-period bestseller Tōkaidōchū Hizakurige. Few restaurants anywhere can point to a Hiroshige print, a Bashō haiku, and a national cultural-property designation for serving the exact same bowl of soup.

Best Time to Visit

Open year-round, any season — the wild yam harvest that supplies the soup runs in the colder months, but the restaurant keeps tororo-jiru on the menu every day it’s open.

Getting There

The easiest route is by car or bus along old Route 1: from JR Shizuoka Station’s north bus pool, a Chūbu-Kokudō-line bus takes about 20 minutes to the Marukobashi-iriguchi stop, right outside. A free lot on site holds about 80 cars. By train, the nearest station (Abekawa, JR Tōkaidō Line) is a fairly long 35-minute walk, so the bus or a car is the practical choice — useful to know for anyone, like the traveler who wrote in about it, driving through Shizuoka on the way to Nagoya or Kyoto.