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    Tokyo Night City Where to Drink & Party
    Tokyo Night City Where to Drink & Party
    Tokyo Night City Where to Drink & Party
    Ebook298 pages1 hour

    Tokyo Night City Where to Drink & Party

    By Judith Brand

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    About this ebook

    Tokyo Night City will take you on a trek through the previously unmapped maze of Tokyo's myriad bars, clubs, and dives. Cool jazz clubs, Latin salsa, throbbing house, and reggae bars, Tokyo Night City has the place for every mood and every pocket and includes:
    • The latest information on drinks, music and prices
    • Addresses, phone numbers, and maps from the nearest station
    • Appendixes detailing late eats and where to party in Yokohama
    Jude Brand, following her indefatigable instinct for the party scene, has been working and playing in Tokyo for the last ten years.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTuttle Publishing
    Release dateAug 28, 2012
    ISBN9781462904259
    Tokyo Night City Where to Drink & Party

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      Book preview

      Tokyo Night City Where to Drink & Party - Judith Brand

      Charles E. Tuttle Company

      Rutland, Vermont and Tokyo, Japan

      This book is dedicated to my liver

      The information in this book was checked as thoroughly as possible before going to press. The publisher accepts no responsibility for any changes that have occurred since, nor for any variance of fact from that recorded here in good faith by the author.

      All photographs taken by and copyright of the author.

      Published by the Charles E. Turtle Company, Inc.

      of Rutland, Vermont & Tokyo, Japan

      with editorial offices at

      Osaki Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo 141-0032

      © 1993 by Charles E. Turtle Publishing Co., Inc.

      All rights reserved

      Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 93-60060

      ISBN: 978-1-4629-0425-9 (ebook)

      First edition, 1993

      Printed in Japan

      Contents

      Plates following page 72: Wired; Fare game;

      Infinity within; Deep; Body con; The vibe

      meisters; Hi lite; and Life's a drag

      Acknowledgments

      Hard-earned thanks go to Piotr Podworski and Sandro Klein, two indestructable party boys who partied hard with me and managed to keep up most nights. I would also like to thank the following people who took me places, gave me tips, or threw me freebies: Kieran Daly, Torin Boyd, Charlie Parisek, Don Morton, Bryan Harrell, Steve Herman, Bill Hersey, Kenny Abrahams, Johnathan McDowell, Monday Michiru Akiyoshi, Snezana, Gary Callicot, Monica Grab, Mike Cline, Joarie, Brad and the boys from The Hitmen, Johan Engblom, Laura Hanifin, Eric Kelso, Rick Kennedy, Georgina Pope, Tom Conrad, Philip Sandoz, Mark Schilling, Muramasa Kudo, Bobby Ettienne, Alison Panamaroff, Bernie Warrell, JD Wilson, Mayumi Nakazawa, Bernard Ryan, Machan, Anya Block, Vincent Young Jones, Corky Alexander, Momoko Saito, Will (Piotr's friend), Shogo Watanabe, Ralph Cassell, and Titus Boeder.

      Additional thanks go to my photography teachers David Wade and Tim Porter, who taught me that an f-stop is not an expletive and provided endless instruction and support, and to Kato and Togashi at National Photo, who created excellent-quality reproduction prints of my photographs for this book.

      For computer-related support I must thank Richard Keirstead, Adi Computer (Indonesia), Jim Merk, Dennis Davis, Malcolm Sullivan, and Johan, Gilles, and Zebastian.

      Introduction

      There are literally hundreds of thousands of bars and clubs in Tokyo. Finding your way through this maze can either be delightfully entertaining or irritatingly frustrating. This volume maximizes your chances of finding what you want and helps to eliminate expensive mistakes. Tokyo Night City offers a comprehensive overview of the nightlife in this city, describes over 100 establishments in detail, tells you what to expect, and shows you how to get there.

      Tokyo is full of diversity and subcultures. Since the push for internationalization that emerged during the last decade or so, the range of nightlife available has become even more varied. Now, in addition to the omnipresent nomiya and the exorbitantly expensive hostess club, there are also hundreds of Western-style bars and clubs. By Western I don't mean exact replicas. They are based on a Western concept which has then been reinterpreted to create bars like nowhere else in the world. They are not all new either. Some of them have been around for years, like Lupin, which opened in 1928.

      The difference between traditional Japanese drinking establishments and these newer offshoots is pretty simple. In a typical nomiya or hostess club your enjoyment as a customer is based on your relationship with the mama, master, or other member of staff and not so much on your interaction with other customers. But in Western-style bars it is OK to interact as well.

      There are now hundreds of these new-era bars but the network of nomiya honeycombing through the city accounts for the thousands in the overall nightspot figure. Because there are so many traditional drinking spots and because your enjoyment of them ends up being so personal, it's up to you to find the best one near your home. But I have included some irresistible little nomiya and the odd hostess club because they have a curious appeal outside their usual realm.

      The purpose of this book is to provide entertainment alternatives. No two partiers are alike and every individual has different moods, so I have covered as wide a variety of clubs as possible. As I made my way through Tokyo's previously unmapped night city labyrinth, various groupings of clubs became apparent. These were jazz venues, discos and dance clubs, Latin and reggae bars, gaijin bars, gay and lesbian bars, low-key bars patronized mainly by Japanese, and other hard-to-categorize or one-off establishments. These groupings became the seven chapters of this book: All That Jazz, Dance and Prance, Ethnobop, Gaijin Ghetto, Les Girls and Boys, Mellow Yellow, and Wild Cards. An overview of each scene and an outline of what to expect appears at the beginning of each chapter. There are also two appendixes, one covering Yokohama and the other where to eat late.

      The night map of a city always changes more rapidly than its day grid. Descriptions of the clubs listed in these pages will start changing even as the book is being printed. Keep in mind that the names and faces of bars may change, but something usually takes their place. Roppongi will always be relatively easy to plug into, but if that party mecca doesn't satisfy your needs, this book will allow you to find what you want. To keep on top of the turnover of information, regular updates are mandatory and already scheduled for publication.

      Each page features a description of the club, lists its hours of operation, address, phone number, and a yen symbol to rate the initial cash outlay necessary to get a drink. ¥ means that your first drink will cost you up to or the equivalent of ¥1,000, ¥¥ means that it will cost you more than ¥1,000 but no more than ¥2,000, and so on. Dance clubs and venues with a cover charge that sometimes include drinks have also been rated according to your initial outlay. If it is ¥3,000 to get in but you get two drinks, it's still going to cost you ¥3,000 to get the first one, so it rates ¥¥¥.

      In addition to the above information, each page features a walking map to the club from the closest train station. Symbols used in the maps are:

      for the closest subway exit

      for a gas station

      for a koban, a neighborhood police station

      for a temple or shrine

      for the location of the club

      Japanese words and English words with specialized local meanings have been italicized and explained in the glossary.

      So, get out there and grab a thread and follow it through the night city. See you there.

      All That Jazz

      Japan has embraced jazz like no other genre of Western music. Interest has existed here since the 20s, after which it steadily developed to generate a soft jazz boom during the big-band, dance-hall days of the 30s. Popularity continued to grow during the American Occupation, when the USO were the first to bring such stars as Benny Goodman to Japan to entertain their enlisted personnel. The Officers' Club was the only place to catch these acts until the advent of luxury nightclubs like the New Latin Quarter and the Copa Cabana. Many American musicians who found themselves working for Uncle Sam began teaching local artists how to play. The first major wave of jazz was breaking across Japan, but toward the end of the 50s the dance-hall days were dying. Big bands were crumbling into small combos whose playing styles were evolving into bee-bop and beyond.

      By the 60s jazz was developing a new image in Japan. At the beginning of the decade it was lumped in with pop, country and western, and even Hawaiian music. It was at this time that Oscar Peterson invited Toshiko Akiyoshi to study jazz piano at Berkeley. She in turn invited Sadao Watanabe. Toward the end of the decade the first pure jazz clubs were opening— some big and fancy, some small and dirty. Watanabe returned to Japan to teach modern jazz workshops, which were popular with younger people and led more local musicians to form their own groups. This paved the way for the second wave in Japan, but this time it was modern jazz that swept through the scene. At the same time that America's youth was preaching free love and draft dodging, there was an equivalent social, cultural, and intellectual rethinking in Japan. Jazz had taken on the dimensions of an esoteric youth movement. It was mostly snubbed by the establishment, but imensely popular with freedom thinkers. Anyone you meet who was here then will tell you that it was wild. Customs officials were still relatively naive so a lot of drugs made it onto the scene. All the big names and their entourages were touring Japan. Eventually someone was caught and immigration started cracking down on visas for musicians.

      By the 70s jazz had become big business and, therefore, part of the establishment again. The first large outdoor festivals were organized and more mainstream, luxury clubs were opening. By the 1980s, however, interest had started to wane. The audience was aging and younger people just weren't taking their place. Before the recent emergence of acid-jazz and jazz-rap, the genre had waited many years to exert an influence (beyond history) on current musical styles. Venues now tend to be extremely up-market and a little too sanitized. It is also hard for young people to afford an interest, as serious amounts of money can

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