Ikedaya Yasubei Shoten

Since its founding as a medicine wholesaler in 1936, they have been producing Edo-Period’s popular stomach medicine “Etchu Hangontan” and other Japanese traditional medicine, Japanese-Chinese medicines and medicinal herbs. To this day, the in-house pharmacist Practices Seat Sale and sits with customers one by one, listens for their symptoms, conditions and strength, and dispenses natural medicines.

The store has a rare golden sign and the tools used for making medicines back then are displayed to represent the history of Toyama’s medicine. You can try making old fashioned pills for free and the adjacent restaurant offers healthy medicinal cuisine.

Toyama’s medicine goes back to the Edo Period, when the second Toyama Domain’s lord Maeda Masatoshi was researching medicinal plants, always carrying Hangontan with him. One day, he came across a samurai lord suffering from stomach pain. When he gave Hangontan, the samurai was healed immediately, and people witnessed it spreaded the word. Since then, generations of Toyama Domain lords strived to protect and cultivate Toyama’s medicine, which was sold by Toyama medicine sellers who delivered the household medicines to the rest of the country and collected the price for the usage when they returned a few times a year. It was they who established the fame of “Toyama’s Medicine.”