Japan's Jazz Bars, Live Houses & Music Venues

About this book

On any Japanese night, within a few streets of any large station, music is playing behind doors that give almost nothing away.

Why is nobody talking in that café? What is a music charge, a table charge, a drink ticket — and why does the whole night end with the last train? Japan's Jazz Bars, Live Houses & Music Venues is the complete English guide to the listening place itself: 200 entries in one uniform format covering the jazz kissa where whole albums are heard in silence, the jazz bars and flagship clubs, record bars and listening bars, the live house and its taiban bills and merch tables, the arenas, domes and festival fields, the music towns from Yokohama and Kobe to Okinawa, the systems of the night — charges, sets, sessions and manners — and the listening culture of audio, records and the Japanese ear behind them all.

This is a cultural guide, not a listings book: hours, charges and line-ups change with every house and season, so they are deliberately never asserted here. Every entry closes by pointing you to the official information, so the book cannot go out of date — while the rooms, the systems and the manners it explains are the permanent geography of the Japanese night.

Whether you are planning a first evening in a Shinjuku basement, a pilgrimage to a famous listening room, or a whole journey from port to port, this is the dictionary of Japan's night of music.