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
| Acknowledgments | 7 |
| Introduction | 9 |
| All That Jazz | 13 |
| Dance and Prance | 23 |
| Ethno-bop | 43 |
| Gaijin Ghetto | 65 |
| Les Girls and Boys | 91 |
| Mellow Yellow | 103 |
| Wild Cards | 129 |
| Appendix 1: Yokohama | 153 |
| Appendix 2: Late Eats | 158 |
| Glossary | 161 |
| Club Index | 163 |
| Area Index | 165 |
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