Which is the oldest bar in Japan?

The Kamiya Bar in Asakusa carries the earliest year here, 1880, and its own chronology says what happened that April: Kamiya Denbei opened Mikawaya, a shop selling liquor by the glass. Retailing drink is not serving it over a bar. The Western-style bar and the Kamiya Bar name date from 10 April 1912, which is the year this site records.

A brandy-based house liqueur, still the thing people order at the Kamiya Bar. Japanese Wikipedia dates its ancestor to 1882, when Kamiya Denbei was making his own quick-matured brandy behind the shop. The name means "electric brandy", from an age when electricity was the word for anything startling.

Why does the Ginza Lion have the only grade A?

Because the room and the trade in it are dated by two different publishers to the same year. Japan's Council for Cultural Affairs recommended the building for registration on 19 November 2021 and dated it to 1934, calling the ground-floor hall a masterpiece among the country's beer halls; Sapporo Beer's own published history dates the completion of the Dai-Nippon Beer head office to 8 April 1934 and the beer hall's reopening in it to the same year.

Is the Ginza Lion really from 1899?

Not this hall. The company counts its business from Japan's first beer hall, the Yebisu of 1899, which stood at Ginza 8-chome and is gone. The room a visitor sits in dates from 1934 and is two streets away, which is the distinction this site draws between a company's age and a drinking house's.

How old is Daijin Honten in Nagoya?

Its own chronology dates the founding to about 1907, and Japanese Wikipedia gives the same year from printed Nagoya guidebooks and the Chūnichi Shimbun. No licence, directory or newspaper of the period has been traced, so the year reaches us as the family's account and the grade is a C. The trade was interrupted rather than ended by the war: the premises burned in 1945, sake was a controlled commodity until 1948, and the present building dates from 1954.

3 pubs checked · updated 18 September 2026

The oldest pub in Japan

The short answer

Oldest claim

Kamiya Bar

Says 1880. The first record is 1912.

Grade B · Building dated

By claim the earliest year in Japan on this list is 1880, at the Kamiya Bar in Asakusa — and what that year dates is a liquor shop selling sake by the glass, not a bar. The earliest record of bar trade here is 10 April 1912, when the same house reopened Western-style under the name it still uses. The one grade A belongs to the Ginza Lion, whose 1934 is dated by the state: the Council for Cultural Affairs registered the building in 2021 and its papers date both the hall and the beer poured in it.

Japan keeps superb records of buildings and thin records of counters, and the two rarely meet. A drinking house here is usually a rented room on a ground floor, and the fire, earthquake and bombing of the last hundred and fifty years have moved most of them at least once, so the year a house gives is frequently the year of a business rather than of a room. What the country does document, and document better than most, is fabric: the national register of tangible cultural properties carries dates, descriptions and reasoning, and where it reaches a beer hall it will say when the hall opened and what is in it. That is why our one Japanese grade A rests on a government file and our one grade C rests on a family's own chronology. Three houses stand on this page — a bar in Asakusa that began as a liquor shop, a beer hall on the ground floor of a pre-war brewery head office, and a Nagoya izakaya where the bill is added up on an abacus — and between them they show the two ways a Japanese date goes wrong: the year belongs to a shop, or the year belongs to a company.

A liquor shop, a brewery’s head office and an izakaya

Kamiya Bar stands a minute from Asakusa station by the Azuma bridge, in a concrete building of 1921, and it is the house with the earliest claim in Japan. It began as Mikawaya, a shop selling liquor by the glass, and the bar proper — Western fittings, Western name — opened on 10 April 1912. Ginza Lion Beer Hall occupies the ground floor of the block built in 1934 as the head office of Dai-Nippon Beer, the brewer that later became both Sapporo and Asahi: tiled walls, square columns, and a glass mosaic of the barley harvest across the end wall, with draught poured from half past eleven in the morning. Daijin Honten is the one house here that is not in Tokyo, and the plainest of the three: an izakaya in Sakae opened by Yamada Tokugorō about 1907 and kept by four generations of his family, where drinkers take bowls of simmered and vinegared dishes from a serving stand, order sake at the table, and are added up on an abacus.

The register that dates a beer hall

If one entry justifies this page it is the Ginza Lion, because it is the rare case where a government file describes the drinking rather than the architecture. The Council for Cultural Affairs, recommending the Ginza Lion Building for registration as a tangible cultural property in November 2021, dated it to Shōwa 9 — 1934 — described a six-storey commercial block in Ginza 7-chome, and went on to the hall on its ground floor, its tiled walls and its mosaic mural, which the papers call a masterpiece among the country’s beer halls, trading since before the war. Set beside Sapporo Beer’s own history of the building, that gives two independent publishers dating the same room and the same trade to the same year, which is what a grade A on this site means. It is also unusual. Most national registers in Europe date a wall and say nothing about the counter in front of it, a difficulty set out in how historians date an old pub.

Two ways a Japanese date goes wrong

The Kamiya Bar’s 1880 and the Ginza Lion’s 1899 fail in opposite directions, and both failures are honest. The Kamiya year is right about the premises and wrong about the trade: a liquor shop is not a bar, and the house’s own chronology is the source that says so, which is why the row is a grade B with 1912 as its record. The Ginza Lion’s 1899 is right about the company and wrong about the room: the Yebisu beer hall it dates from stood at Ginza 8-chome and no longer exists. Neither house is hiding anything — a business dates itself from its own beginning, which is what businesses do — but a ranking of drinking houses has to ask which thing the year belongs to before it can put two houses in an order. The reasoning is the same one applied to a Seville wine shop and a Valletta grocery, and it is written out in full in the methodology.

What is missing here

Three houses is thin for a country with a drinking culture this old, and the gap is ours rather than Japan’s. Two Tokyo names are known and unpublished for want of a second publisher: Bar Lupin in Ginza, dated to 1928 at its present site, and Mimasuya in Kanda, which is generally called the city’s oldest izakaya and which OpenStreetMap maps as a pub, so the question of whether a walk-in can be served is already settled and only the year is missing. Kyoto, Osaka and the sake towns of the north are unworked. For the nearest comparison — a country where the old drinking room is a counter and the founding year usually belongs to a shop — see the oldest pubs in Italy; the full international ranking is at the top 100 oldest pubs.

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The contenders, oldest claim first

ClaimProof

Kamiya Bar
Grade B
Tokyo, Japan
The 1880 is the bar's own: its website carries the line 'founded in Meiji 13, always in Asakusa', and its own chronology opens with April 1880, when Kamiya Denbei opened Mikawaya, a sake shop selling drink by the glass. Japanese Wikipedia gives the same year and adds that he was making his own quick-matured brandy — the ancestor of Denki Bran — from 1882. Retailing liquor is not serving it over a bar. The
Claims 1880; first recorded 1912; building c.1921.
Daijin Honten
Grade C
Nagoya, Aichi
The 1907 is the house's own. Its chronology dates the founder Yamada Tokugorō's move from Ōharu to Nagoya, and the opening of the izakaya, to about Meiji 40, and the year is in its web address. Japanese Wikipedia gives 1907 in its infobox and in its history section, citing Nagoya guidebooks and the Chūnichi Shimbun, although its opening sentence prints 1909 beside Meiji 40, which is a year out and is the error to
Claims 1907; no early record found; building c.1954.
Ginza Lion Beer Hall
Grade A
Tokyo, Japan
Japan's Council for Cultural Affairs recommended this building for registration on 19 November 2021, and its papers date it to Shōwa 9 — 1934 — describing a six-storey commercial block in Ginza 7-chome whose ground-floor beer hall, with tiled walls, beam-shaped ornament and a glass mosaic mural, it calls a masterpiece among the country's beer halls, trading since before the war. The Tokyo Shimbun reported on 15
Locally dated 1934; first recorded 1934; building c.1934.

The photographs above are other people's work, used under open licences. Every photographer, licence and source page is named in the image credits.

Common questions

Which is the oldest bar in Japan?: The Kamiya Bar in Asakusa carries the earliest year here, 1880, and its own chronology says what happened that April: Kamiya Denbei opened Mikawaya, a shop selling liquor by the glass. Retailing drink is not serving it over a bar. The Western-style bar and the Kamiya Bar name date from 10 April 1912, which is the year this site records.
What is Denki Bran?: A brandy-based house liqueur, still the thing people order at the Kamiya Bar. Japanese Wikipedia dates its ancestor to 1882, when Kamiya Denbei was making his own quick-matured brandy behind the shop. The name means "electric brandy", from an age when electricity was the word for anything startling.
Why does the Ginza Lion have the only grade A?: Because the room and the trade in it are dated by two different publishers to the same year. Japan's Council for Cultural Affairs recommended the building for registration on 19 November 2021 and dated it to 1934, calling the ground-floor hall a masterpiece among the country's beer halls; Sapporo Beer's own published history dates the completion of the Dai-Nippon Beer head office to 8 April 1934 and the beer hall's reopening in it to the same year.
Is the Ginza Lion really from 1899?: Not this hall. The company counts its business from Japan's first beer hall, the Yebisu of 1899, which stood at Ginza 8-chome and is gone. The room a visitor sits in dates from 1934 and is two streets away, which is the distinction this site draws between a company's age and a drinking house's.
How old is Daijin Honten in Nagoya?: Its own chronology dates the founding to about 1907, and Japanese Wikipedia gives the same year from printed Nagoya guidebooks and the Chūnichi Shimbun. No licence, directory or newspaper of the period has been traced, so the year reaches us as the family's account and the grade is a C. The trade was interrupted rather than ended by the war: the premises burned in 1945, sake was a controlled commodity until 1948, and the present building dates from 1954.