Japan’s long-standing love affair with jazz, from Meiji era influence to the sonic sanctuary of the jazz cafe.

It’s an autumnal Friday evening, the air is as crisp as freshly washed sheets and the sky is dark, a kind of midnight blue. The streets of downtown Osaka are abuzz with fluorescence, aswirl with that new-weekend feeling. Lines are forming outside the izakaya and ramen shops. A maelstrom of noise floods out of the pachinko parlors and karaoke joints. Paper lanterns dangle and glow, saliva-inducing smells tumble from open kitchens, door curtains flutter and catch in the breeze. College kids, bedecked in baggy clothes and jewellery, hang out on street corners, scrolling through their social media feeds and puffing on American Spirits. A pair of women hand out advertisements for a “snack bar” folded carefully into tissue packets and a group of smartly dressed store clerks hold up signs advertising deals on cosmetics and earphones. Everything, from the gachapon machines standing ten abreast to the shaded arcade streets that seem to go on forever, pulses with the energy of potential.

But here, on the third floor of a building with an old spiral staircase clinging to the exterior, I have entered a pocket of calm. The walls of the rectangular room are black, covered in messages written in drunken scrawls and polaroids showing the smiling guests of yesteryear. There are cabinets on either side of the bar, full of old LPs, their fraying edges yellowed with age. It’s not so much that time has stopped in here, but moved in its own, irregular way.

The Master – as the owners of Japanese jazz cafes (or jazz kissa) are known – sees me enter and glances at the clock. Sumimasen, he apologizes, realizing it’s already opening time. I take a seat at the bar as he puts on a record – Art Blakey, A Night at Birdland – and we remain silent, listening, implicitly accepting this as an act of communication. When it’s time to talk I order a whiskey: Irish, single malt, on the rocks. He pours a drink for himself too, and another into a glass on the shelf. The glass sits in front of a photo and a small flower.

“That’s the previous owner,” the Master says. He looks at the photo for a lingering second. “He opened this place in the 1970s, but he died quite suddenly last year, so I took over the business. I was just a customer here, I had no idea how to run a jazz kissa, but I didn’t want this place to close.”

“So you pour him a Suntory every night?” I ask.

“Every night.” he says. “So he can join in, and enjoy the music.”

Being a sentimental sort, I raise a glass to the memory of the man I never knew.

I still think about this story from time to time. Something about the ritualism, the notion of the sacred, the exploration of the unknown embodies the very spirit of jazz. And it is a story, or the kind of story, I’ve encountered many times in Japan: a Master who runs a jazz kissa not because it’s profitable or glamorous, but because life would be missing an essential ingredient without it. In Japan jazz has always been about more than just the music.

The Sounds of the Revolution

The first Japanese to hear jazz, or something like it, were those rich enough to travel on the great ocean liners of the early 20th century, when proto-jazz and foxtrot swings were performed by traveling orchestras. Japan at that time was in the throes of the Meiji era, adopting Westernism and its cultural hallmarks – music, fashion, architecture, painting techniques, technology, economic models – and embedding them (and hybridizing them) into a reimagined version of Japanese society.

Foreign music, with its harmonic progression and major/minor scales, was deemed fashionable and soon made its way ashore, spreading as nascent technology allowed the music to be reproduced without a live band. By the 1920s songs like Walter Donaldson’s “My Blue Heaven” were being played, often with Japanese lyrics, in the music halls of Tokyo, Osaka, and Kobe. A growing middle class that was distancing itself from the traditional sounds of the shamisen and taiko drum would meet and dance to this strange, bewitching style of music. It might not have been of Japan, but it was fast becoming part of the fabric of Japanese society.

The postwar years were very much boom years in Japan, and so too for jazz. After a decade of rampant imperialism under a fascist regime – with dire wartime consequences – Japan was rekindling its love affair with the West. While job security and prosperity were distant dreams to most citizens in a country crawling out of the wreckage of war, Japanese musicians found relatively stable work in bands that played for the occupying U.S. troops.

The likes of Toshiko Akiyoshi, still a celebrated pianist at age 95, and Sadao Watanabe, a nonagenarian saxophonist who gigged with Akiyoshi in the 1950s, rose to prominence, particularly in the Black officers' clubs where bebop jazz was all the rage, creating new sounds that would define – and differentiate – Japanese jazz for decades.

But really it was in the 1960s, that most romantic of decades, when jazz began to reach an apex, becoming the sound of a growing rebel youth culture. At the start of the decade, students, intellectuals, leftists, and others who remembered all too vividly the horrors of the Second World War, were outraged that the governing Liberal Democratic Party was set to revise the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty – and in doing so continue what they viewed as America’s neocolonial rule over the nation.

By mid-June 1960, up to 30 million (mostly peaceful) protestors had taken to the streets and a horde of students had stormed the National Diet, where they were rebuffed with police water cannons and one young female was killed. The decade was punctuated by much more violent protests, spearheaded by a coalition of student unions called Zengakuren. The protests were sparked by corruption scandals and defrauding cases in Tokyo’s elite universities, and mirroring the hippy movement in America, opposition to the war in Vietnam. The bloodiest event took place in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station in October 1968, in which more than 1,000 police officers were injured, 770 protestors were arrested, and a section of the station was burned down.

Globally, the ‘60s are indelibly tied to ideas of revolution, epitomized by the American Civil Rights Movement and the music that was intertwined with it. Nina Simone was singing “Goddam Mississippi” and John Coltrane said more with his saxophone than he ever could with words in the song “Alabama,” a response to the racially motivated 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. While jazz was growing in cultural significance across the U.S., the musicians with whom it is synonymous – Blakey, Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis – were still consigned to the margins of polite society because of the color of their skin, hurtling across state borders every night, jacked up on a cocktail of amphetamines, heroin, and alcohol, just to play in dingy basement speakeasies.

But in Japan they were giants, their music speaking to the same kids that were taking to the streets to exercise their freedom of speech and enforce changes upon the world. It's no coincidence Art Blakey played in Japan in 1961 and that he and his band were so overcome with emotion that they cried the whole way home. Or that John Coltrane, not long before his death, played 17 concerts in Honshu in just four days. Or that Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald brought their iconic music eastward, too.

Records were expensive in those days, so jazz kissa – coming from the word kissaten, meaning “café” – sprung up across Tokyo and beyond allowing people to hear recordings of the in-vogue music. Students would frequent these places, drink coffee or beer, and listen to transcendent jazz melodies that had traveled to them from across the Pacific. But kissa weren’t just leisure venues; they were forums for planning the next protest or riot, and the music they played equated to a social ideal. Thelonious Monk believed that “jazz and freedom go hand in hand,” and in Japan it was a sentiment taken literally.

No Equivalent: Jazz in Japan Today

Jazz kissa are the last connective threads between today and that golden era. Photographer Philip Arneill, who has captured photos of these establishments across Japan, once told me that he viewed visiting a jazz kissa as something like a religious experience, with the kissa serving as the temple, the Master presiding over the evening like a priest, the records acting as canonized texts, and the music played through speaker systems that look like Shinto shrines. James Catchpole, who’s been chronicling the Japanese jazz scene for more than two decades and collaborated with Arneill on an audiovisual project called Tokyo Jazz Joints, also believes that Japan’s relationship to jazz is special. When I met him one night in a kissa called Eigakan in northern Tokyo, we talked about Japan and jazz over several bottles of beer. “Being in these places reminds me that this country loves jazz more than any other country in the world,” he said. “It’s not even close.”

But kissa are also fragile. In his photo book, also called Tokyo Jazz Joints, Arneill writes that he wanted to document Japan’s jazz kissa because they would soon disappear from the country’s musical landscape forever. “There are many joints to visit, photos to make, stories to uncover and memories to create,” he continues, “before those photos are all that is left of this magical, fading world.”

It is reverential language, the kind you might hear at a funeral or wake, and it is fitting. Tokyo had 250 or so kissa by the 1970s, but as proprietors passed away or struggled to find successors, many have since played their final track. The kissa that still exist are like living museum pieces, with their low ceilings and dusty shelves and old photos and signed memorabilia and records accumulated over the course of decades. They are reflections of their owners’ personal tastes and windows onto Japan’s storied musical past. They are symbols of people who chose struggle over tyranny, and they are the epitome of Japan as jazz’s spiritual home.

About the Author: David is a Northern Irish freelance journalist, writer and author based in the UK and Tokyo. Fusing reporting and social commentary with extensive experience traveling throughout the country, he has published stories on travel, arts and culture, business and current affairs, and sports in Japan. His work has appeared in a range of national and international publications online and in print. He's also the author of two travel books, Intrepid Japan and the most recent edition of Frommer's Japan. You can find links to his work at www.davidmcelhinney.com.