Edo's grandest roofed boats were legislated out of existence. In the seventeenth century, daimyo and wealthy merchants commissioned pleasure craft finished in lacquer and gold leaf, and successive shogunal sumptuary edicts pared them back to something plainer. What survived was the smaller wooden yakatabune: a flat-bottomed hull, a broad roof, tatami on the floor. The form predates Edo entirely. Heian-era nobles were poled along rivers under the same silhouette, composing verse while the banks moved. Ukiyo-e recorded the fleet. Hiroshige's views of the lower Sumida show roofed boats clustered beneath the bridges, lanterns doubled in the water, the same composition a passenger sees now from a rooftop deck. Shinagawa's claim to the tradition is geographic. The district was Shinagawa-juku, the first post station on the Tōkaidō road out of Edo, and its waterfront carried teahouses, fishing fleets and a working shoreline long before Tokyo Bay was filled and squared into container terminals. Boatyards clustered in the canals around Higashi-shinagawa, where operators running yakatabune dinner cruise shinagawa tours still keep their moorings. The address on the association's register — 1-1-17 Higashi-shinagawa — sits within walking distance of the old Tōkaidō route. The craft nearly disappeared twice: once to the railways, which made river transport redundant, and again to the Second World War, which burned most of the fleet. The Tokyo Yakatabune Association was formed to coordinate the operators who rebuilt it. Hulls are steel now, with rooftop observation decks, air conditioning and karaoke, but the interior grammar holds: shoji screens, low tables, tempura fried onboard rather than carried aboard. Tempura, an Edo street food, migrated onto the boats because the dish loses its point within minutes of leaving the oil. 屋形船 remains the only Tokyo dining room that moves. Geography does the rest of the work. A Shinagawa roofed-boat dinner tour leaves the canal, crosses open water under Rainbow Bridge with Odaiba to one side, then turns into the mouth of the Sumida River and threads the bridges toward Asakusa, with Tokyo Skytree lit at 634 metres. Illumination is the point; boats hang paper chōchin along the eaves, and the reflections double the city. Demand for yakatabune dinner cruise shinagawa tickets concentrates in the fireworks weeks of summer, when the river closes to nearly everything else.