Much of Kanagawa Prefecture, like Saitama and Chiba, is so close to Tokyo that it falls under the same broadluy defined metropolitan area. Whenever you see the figure of 30-35 million quoted as Tokyo’s population, they are including much of the population of these surrounding prefectures in the figure. As a result, the journey along the sunny Sagami Bay seafront going east from Odawara gives very little hint of the rural, and the hilly turn northeast to Yokohama begins to feel comfortingly familiar.
Despite having in many ways been absorbed into the insatiable amorphous monstrosity of Tokyo, Yokohama is the second largest city in Japan and still stubbornly retains its own distinct urban atmosphere – slightly faded, slightly more spacious, a bit more room for locally owned businesses to cling onto existence and continue to colour the neighbourhoods.
Musically, Yokohama’s history as an important port city and major source of overseas imports, as well as the postwar history of military bases in the general vicinity, helped contribute to it becoming the jazz capital of Japan. So-called jazz kissaor jazz listening cafés sprung up in the postwar years and into the ‘60s and ‘70s and were influential in the dissemination of new jazz music in Japan from that extraordinary period in the genre’s development. They are crumbling and fading now, as the owners retire and die out, but Yokohama is still home to a disproportionately wide array of bars and live venues specialising in jazz.
As far as rock music goes, Yokohama seems to be in a similar position to Chiba, with plenty of its own venues, clubs and bars, particularly around the busy Kannai area, but generally offering a range of music catering to a narrower range of more mainstream tastes – at least in the realm of rock music. More offbeat or experimental bands like low-key psychedelic postpunk trio Extruders or spiky, acerbic, dryly humourous art-punk duo Sayuu may hail from the general Yokohama area/Kanagawa Prefecture, but nearly all their gigs are in Tokyo.
Also like Chiba, the seafront area of Kanagawa Prefecture has its own culture of club music, reggae and hip hop, catering to a completely different crowd from the pasty-skinned indie and punk fans I typically encounter when I let my own musical prejudices guide my discoveries. During the summer season when they’re officially open, the beachfront bars of the Shonan area typically throb with club sounds as the bronze-skinned, bleached-haired surfer set descend.
I have vivid memories of taking the train down from Tokyo for an evening of whisper-voiced indiepop at one of the beach bars, with the small crowd of immaculately coutured tweepop kids strikingly out of place amid all the raucous beach bods. It was funny, but it also revealed something often invisible in the music scene: the extent to which social class – something most Japanese deny even exists in the country – defines musical taste. Their hairstyles and the abundance of tattoos the Shonan beach kids carry are very different social signifiers from the predominantly middle-class, university-educated, well-to-do indie kids with their boutique-bought ensembles, although both crowds are in some way marking themselves as something separate from, and inaccessible to mainstream culture.
Shonan also plays host to the live bar and club Oppa-la, near Enoshima Station. An unusual and interesting venue, it often operates at an intersection between club and punk culture, and it’s common for somewhat experimental artists from Tokyo and beyond to descend on Oppa-la for parties that often go on into the early hours of the morning, performing alongside DJs, MCs and other acts from the local area.
For most of the musicians I know in Kanagawa, however, the traffic with the capital is the other way. After arriving in Yokohama and taking a shower, I immediately took the train back the way I had come, as far as Fujisawa. A large town at the opposite end of Sagami Bay from Odawara, I disembarked in one of its quieter suburbs and made my way through the silent early-evening streets to the house where Matthew Guay of indie bands The Oversleep Excuse and Glow and the Forest had recently moved with his family.
A musician who had lived in Tokyo for most of his life in Japan, still works there, and plays live almost exclusively there, Matthew had taken the step to move out to the seaside mostly so that he and his wife could buy a house for their family, including two children. Another, related reason was to be closer to the children’s grandparents, who (as with many families in Japan) take an active role in supporting the parents in raising the children.
We sit at his kitchen counter knocking back beers and listening to music while the children mind their own business and grandma sleeps upstairs. Matthew has just got hold of a new demo CD-R by a mutual friend of ours from way back when we were first getting involved in the Tokyo music scene more than ten years previously, Rikinari Hata, who at this point is making synth-based lo-fi EBM/industrial music as Soloist Apartment (he currently goes by the more confrontational sounding Soloist Anti Pop Totalization). Matthew’s Oversleep Excuse bandmate Adam has moved out of Tokyo in the opposite direction, into Saitama, necessitating that they continue to meet up in Tokyo for rehearsals, even if that wasn’t where the band played most of their shows.
Once his wife is home to keep an eye on the kids, we take a walk over to the beach just in time to catch the sunset. It’s still May, so the beach isn’t officially open and the summer beach culture hasn’t yet descended, so we’re able to sit there undisturbed except once, unexpectedly by a coworker of mine from the job from which I’m at this time goofing off, who happened to be marauding the area for his own mysterious reasons. Matthew remarks that he’s lucky that he has the flexibility in his life to still carry on two bands as well as caring for his family. I suggest to him that a lot of the musicians in Kanagawa are in fact transplanted Tokyoites who have moved away from the city to raise families, but whose musical activities are still tied to the networks of friends and connections they had fostered in the capital.
The following night I meet my friends Konatsu and Maru, from the bands Nakigao Twintail and Hakuchi respectively. A different thread connects them to Tokyo. They’re both young musicians from saga in Kyushu, who are using the industrial city of Kawasaki as a jumping-off point in advance of an eventual move to the capital. At this time, Konatsu is still a university student, so she needs to commute to school in Shibuya while Maru must travel to work at an office out in the western suburban fringes of Tokyo. For them, Kanagawa Prefecture is a temporary stopping-off point in a process that will see them shacked up in the urban warrens of Tokyo’s busy Shibuya commercial and entertainment district within a year of my visit.
The third night of my stay in Yokohama is really the first time I get to explore the city itself, rather than dashing out to meet people in its satellites. Moving from the hostel where I’m staying in the backstreets of Ishikawacho, near the tourist areas of Chinatown and the seafront, I make a move over to a hotel in the gentrified former red light district of Koganecho. There, I have lunch at Shichoshitsu Sono 2, an arts centre that has a sister venue in central Tokyo. Containing a series of art studios and a café/bar/bookshop/CD shop/used clothes shop/live venue, it’s a venue I’ve been to before for evening events, including one party I co-organised in the middle of a typhoon and which coaxed out a grand total of two customers. In the daytime, though, it’s a peaceful spot on an attractive riverside promenade where old women from the neighbourhood feel just as confortable dropping by as members of the arts crowd. The Koganecho location didn’t stick around for much longer after my visit, but a fresh “Sono 3” location also in Yokohama has since opened. At the time, however, Shichoshitsu feels like a valuable local cultural hub on the Koganecho area.
I briefly drop by again in the evening for a beer with Kohei from Yokohama-based indie-rock band Come To My Party. Unlike Matthew, Konatsu and Maru, he and his bandmade and drummer Emily are Yokohama locals, but like most of them, his band play primarily in Tokyo.
One reason for this is that, while indie fans in Yokohama are usually happy enough to take the 30-40-minute train ride into central Tokyo, Tokyo-based fans can very rarely be coaxed out to make the reverse journey. Talking about this situation with Kohei raises the question of, “What’s the more authentic Yokohama music experience: travelling all the way to Tokyo to see the best local Yokohama band, or missing out on all the best local bands because they’re playing all the way over in Tokyo?”
The acoustic blues covers act playing at Shichoshitsu this night wasn’t really our speed, so Kohei suggests moving down the river to Chojamachi. The Chojamachi and Nogacho area lies near the mouth of the same river that runs through Koganecho and just to the north of the main entertainment and commercial district of Kannai. Its narrow, bar-filled alleys are deeply infused with the atmophere of the Showa Period, and in particular the era of post-war reconstruction. Several of the jazz clubs, bars and cafés that Yokohama is famous for are scattered throughout its streets, while hostess bars cluster along the riverside, threatening to spill out over the water itself in places. There’s even a bar that appears to be themed after the goth-tinged British ‘90s alt-rock band Placebo, although we’re both too hungry and afraid to investigate it for ourselves.
Over the course of my journey, I’ve speculated that musical subcultures can transcend location, creating circles of belonging that span hundreds and thousands of kilometres. At the same time, though, just as towering, horizon-obliterating geological forms like Mount Fuji can impose themselves on their surroundings and help define even mundane aspects of existence, the cultural power embodied in the cluster of places we call Tokyo can have a powerful impact (and in subcultures like indie and alternative music perhaps a destructive one) on even a city as large as Yokohama, with all its obvious and distinctive character.
Burn Your Hometown 