Japan · Fukuoka Prefecture · Fukuoka
Kiyokawa, Fukuoka — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Kiyokawa runs from 1-chōme to 3-chōme at the southeast corner of Chūō-ku in Fukuoka, and it grew out of the Shin-Yanagimachi quarter that was moved here.
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Where to stay in Kiyokawa
Where the beds are, and what that means for the visit.
Two subway stops serve it from outside. Watanabe-dōri and Yakuin sit within a short walk on the Nanakuma Line, both of them past Kiyokawa's own boundary, and Nishitetsu Hirao adds a third for anyone heading south. The district itself is quiet. Sumiyoshi-dōri carries the shops along the north edge, where the Kiyokawa Sun Road arcade and a supermarket cover the daily errands, and one turn off it puts you among houses on lanes narrow enough to walk down the middle of. Tenjin is the night out, not here.
About Kiyokawa
What are the main landmarks in Kiyokawa?
The fixed points here are small and local. Kiyokawa Park and Kiyokawa-naka Park take up two of the three chōme, the police box stands in the third, and Inaribashi carries a camera trained on the river level rather than any claim on a visitor's morning. Two broadcasters moved in instead.
Fukuoka Broadcasting built new premises here in 2005 and left Suncelco behind, and FM Fukuoka followed in 2008 out of the Kyushu Electric Power building on Watanabe-dōri. What survives of the old quarter is a handful of buildings from the Shin-Yanagimachi years, standing in ordinary street fabric without a plaque between them.
What is the history of Kiyokawa?
The quarter was moved here whole. Hakata's licensed district had stood at what is now Shimo-gofuku-machi under the name Yanagimachi, borrowed from a street in Kyoto, until the decision in 1909 to found Fukuoka Medical College displaced it. Watanabe Yohachirō did the arranging.
The ground he brought it to was known then as Sumiyoshi-mura Takahata, and the transplanted quarter opened as Shin-Yanagimachi, growing large enough to be named beside Maruyama in Nagasaki and Nihongi in Kumamoto. Half of it burned in the Fukuoka air raid of 1945, the trade came back as a red-line district after the war, and the Anti-Prostitution Law of 1958 closed it for good.
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Updated September 2026