"Gerry" > wrote in message
.. .
> In article >, Musashi
> > wrote:
>
> > The name of the store on the ground floor is KOBEYA.
> > The upstairs is a Chinese restaurant that advertises
> > "Chinese Cuisine", "Sechuan style" and "Peking style".
>
> Thanks so much, bro! I can read kana so I could see that it said
> Kobe-Ya. But since I used to hon-ya (bookstore) and sushi-ya (sushi
> store), I thought Kobe-Ya might mean "a store in Kobe", and assume the
> (completely different) sign above may have been their family name or
> some such.
>
> If it's sincd 894, you'd think they'd crow about it!
>

I don't know about 894...that would put it in the Heian Period, back when
Kyoto
was the capital. I suspect that maybe the sign had a "one" in front that
fell off...1894.
But who knows? The "ya" ending meaning "store" was common certainly in the
Edo period but thats from the 1600s till 1860 or so.