For someone in Kentucky or Tennessee it might be called nostalgia, but can you be nostalgic for a time and place you never knew? These two Japanese bourbon temples represent a bold act of imagination. Back in the States I phone up bourbon bars from Manhattan to Louisville, and their responses are all the same: We have old-style bourbons, but not anything old.
Not in Japan, I think, and I imagine Tatsumi 25 years ago roaring across the small roads of the American South and discovering bottles that only he knew to treasure.
He had a primitive video camera trained on the sleeve of the record album he was playing, and he projected that image onto the wall. They offer a kind of jazz experience based on pure appreciation of the act of listening. Jazz kissa were the only places in the city where fans could listen to the music they loved. Even with a GPS-equipped iPhone, a print atlas and the help of police guarding a nearby embassy, I spend half an hour wandering the back streets of Yotsuya, a residential Tokyo neighborhood not far from Shinjuku, before I turn the corner and see the discreet sign for Sakaiki.
An eight-seat pub stands out in New York as supremely small, yet in Tokyo there are at least three nightlife neighborhoods consisting almost entirely of eight-seat bars. When I enter Sakaiki, owner Fumito Fukuchi, wearing a gray newsboy cap turned backward, waves me to the bar. Seated next to me is a Swedish free-jazz clarinetist speaking English to a group of Japanese.
I tell Fukuchi that Mr. OK Jazz sent me. He nods a welcome and serves me a cold beer. I ask Fukuchi how he came to run Sakaiki. As soon as I came to Tokyo, I headed for Eagle.
The obvious question is why go out of your way to hear recorded music with other people when technology has made it easy to listen alone? The answer comes to me as I look around the room at the people brought together by the music Sakaiki has collected: International jazz musicians, local workers and jazz fans from all over the city are here because they appreciate the act of listening to a record together.
Before he hatched the idea of his own collection, Tateno spent years making clothes himself and working in a factory.
At the same time, he launched a Japanese-language website that was absolutely alone in its single-minded pursuit of knowledge about the plans, patterns and procedures that old American work-wear manufacturers used to make their garments under such labels as Crown, W. Tateno ushers me into his upstairs space. One room is filled with all kinds of clothing, everything from the work wear he collects to contemporary Italian jackets by Boglioli.
There is also machinery, including an ancient riveting machine, plus old sewing-machine accessories that Tateno purchases so the factories he hires to produce his collection can make things to the exact specifications of, say, or , with the same tools in use back then. Though the kind of skilled manufacturing he admired in these garments had largely disappeared in the United States—a consequence of apparel production moving abroad and garment workers no longer finding work—he saw older Japanese people around him in Okayama with high-level sewing skills.
And so he realized that if he could unearth the manufacturing secrets behind these old garments, he could make them in Okayama—and perhaps make them even better than the originals. The cult of the artisan is ensconced in contemporary urban American culture. This is the ideal of a person who can handcraft a pair of jeans or a necktie, conscious of the most minute details of fabric, workmanship and authenticity. The irony is that this ideal of the American worker, which sounds like something lifted from old-school union advertising copy, can be hard to find in America today.
As of , the show was running on network affiliates during after-school hours. But there was much more to Japanese culture than US audiences generally knew, and had older roots than they realized. But he helped establish a manga tradition, and became one of the first Japanese artists to achieve popularity in the West, specifically among French painters during a craze for Japanese design called Japonisme that swept Europe in the decades after the US Navy steamed into Edo Bay—now Tokyo Bay—in and forced Japan to open its ports.
The modern form of manga took shape in the s and s, when publishers started printing weekly manga magazines similar to graphic novels. It has since found fans everywhere with the explosion of Japanese culture, and the fantastical stories and characters that populate it. There are various theories about why Japan has proved so adept at producing them. During the Edo period from about to , those personifications resulted in monster-like characters dubbed yokai , which emerged first in local tales before becoming part of Japanese folklore.
They could appear as anything from a sentient broom or shoe to a fully invented creature. Alt argues all these elements laid the groundwork for the present. The artist Takashi Murakami has provided a different explanation.
Japanese creators, he believed, turned to manga, anime, and other forms of pop culture to grapple with and express their anxieties. Whether or not the apocalyptic events of World War II were the crucible for modern Japanese pop culture, the conflict certainly prompted a reinvention of the country. After the war, the US occupied Japan and instituted a number of political and social reforms, including creating a new constitution and policies meant to make Japan more democratic.
Japanese schools began to instruct students in democratic values, and when the Korean War started in , UN forces used Japan as their primary supply base , refashioning the country as an ally of the West. To catch up with other industrialized nations, the country mobilized to rebuild and expand its manufacturing base. It found its footing making cars and electronics, which it churned out for export around the globe.
When it hosted the Olympics in Tokyo, it used the opportunity to reintroduce itself to the world as peaceful and prosperous. Another shift was occurring too. But after the war, its manufacturers steadily morphed into paradigms of quality and productivity. By the s, companies such as Sony, Matsushita now Panasonic , Mitsubishi, and Toyota were becoming worldwide leaders in their industries.
A generation of Western executives began looking to Japan for management techniques, helping give rise to the image of Japan as a hyper-efficient business culture. In the US and Europe, the idea of Japan as a military enemy had mostly subsided. It was the first personal cassette player , allowing the average consumer to listen to music whenever and wherever desired.
These successes helped reshape ideas about Japan outside the country, and led to a major game-changer: Nintendo. Nintendo had started as a small maker of playing cards in Kyoto nearly a century before, but after that business declined in the 20th century, it dabbled in different ventures, including electronic toys.
Its game console was a mega-hit. Within three years of the release, the New York Times reported the company had sold some 10 million systems in the US.
It was weird and inventive and established Japan as a builder of worlds as much as electronics. The company would keep producing successful games, and in released the handheld Game Boy. That year, another Japanese gaming company, Sega, launched its first console in the US, giving Nintendo its first real competition and delivering another Japanese hit to American kids. Japan, it turned out, had a talent for keeping kids affixed to TV screens.
The ideas it produced were different, which was integral to its appeal. She found a live-action superhero series in the style of old Japanese monster movies, called Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. The other was a Nintendo product, at least partly. From the s onward, American media began to make its way into Japan. They also quickly became enchanted by American and British music, as well, with icons like Elvis Presley and The Beatles becoming just as revered in Japan as they were in the west.
Image courtesy dressspace. James Dean, denim icon. Image courtesy denimfuture. It was no surprise that Japan became enamored with the style of America present in this crossover media: from electric guitars like the Fender Telecaster and Stratocaster to futuristic cars like the Chevrolet Bel-Air and Ford Thunderbird, and even architectural styles typified by the large, drive-in diners of southern California.
Though Japan did enjoy a spectacularly quick recovery by most standards, the young people coming of age in the late 50s and 60s remembered the hardships of the war and the reconstruction, and the prosperous postwar America they saw on screen was the ideal toward which many Japanese aspired.
Image courtesy mofa. The real reason goes a little bit deeper. This means that Japanese people typically pursue the interest of a larger group, rather than only their individual motivations.
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