“The beauty of Tokyo is that the really cool places are off an alley, off an alley, in a quiet residential part of town.”
Very true. I remember walking down a street in Kyoto with a friend who had lived there for thirty years. As we passed a small side street something caught his eye. There was a small neon sign on the second floor of a building that he’d never noticed before.
We went up the stairs to find a tiny little Jazz bar. We were both rabid BeBop fans and the owner was delighted to talk to us about Jazz for the next three hours. After a while my friend asked the owner how long the bar had been open. He said nine years.
That’s what Japan is like, boxes within boxes within boxes. You never know what you’ll find hidden no matter how long you live there.
And weirdly, ten years later I was living in Beijing and there was a sort of unofficial bar area near the embassy district that was all made up of ramshackle buildings down a dirt road which were technically illegal. There I found another little Jazz bar which had an enormous collection of LPs(many of which were from Japan) and the owner was just as crazy about BeBop as in the bar owner in Kyoto. After I’d been regular there for six months I mentioned the little bar in Kyoto and amazingly he knew the bar!
