Magical colours of Japan 1: Tokyo’s secrets & dark nooks 黒

1. Introduction

In the age of internet, Trip Advisor, travel forums, and social media it’s hard to be an explorer. Interesting places and “hidden gems” are shared, described and photographed to death. But every place has its secrets and if you’re willing to carefully observe and patiently dig under the surface, you can make discoveries. For me, visiting a foreign place is not the end goal but a starting point for researching things to explore further upon returning home.

Ever since I was introduced to the concept of Ero guro by a guest lecturer Mark Harwood during my studies at Central Saint Martins, I was fully aware that underneath the pretty tsutsumi packaging, the cult of cleaniness (kiyomeru), the innocent kawaii, all the bowing and the smiling, the Japanese culture has a much darker side. I was, admittedly, fascinated by this mix of innocence and perversion, and always wanted to visit the country. Also, as a huge fan of Nobuyoshi Araki, I wanted to dive into the darker nooks of the capital and take a closer look at Tokyo’s secrets.

And then it happened — almost exactly a year ago in November, my husband and I arrived in Tokyo. Incidentally, I used to think that the best time to go to Japan is the spring for the sakura season (cherry blossoms) which lasts approx. two weeks from the start of their bloom to peak bloom. However, it turned out that Koyo, which is the autumn foliage season when the shades of leaves start changing into dynamic shades of orange, red, yellow, and earthy brown, is just as magical, if not more. Autumn for me has always been a very romantic time of the year so the idea of travelling through Japan to observe autumnal colour changes, appealed to me a lot.

And as we travelled from one city to another, from Tokyo to Osaka, from Osaka to Kumamoto and so on, I realised that this fascinating colour dynamic is not just present in nature, but that Japanese cities too have a rich and distinct palette. And that gave me an idea for a colour-based series of posts. Given the number of places we visited and the richness of our experiences, I knew that I would need to divide my writing into chapters anyway (my previous travel essay which is just about New York, is in two parts) but initially I wasn’t sure how. Then the colour metaphor came to my mind and everything fell into place. The narrative started writing itself.

I’m going to start my essay in Tokyo, not only because that was where the trip started but because the city’s signature hue (according to my subjective perception, naturally) is black 黒. And black, besides being my favourite colour which dominates my wardrobe often features in my painting work, perfectly symbolises Tokyo’s secrets.

2. Tokyo’s secrets: girls, clubs & dirty tricks

We arrived in Tokyo in the late evening. Our hotel was in Otsuka, a neighbourhood sandwiched between the uber-dynamic Ikebukuro and the elderly-frequent shopping district of Sugamo. Until recently, the area was known for seedy bars and brothels, and while the recent development of OMO5 Hoshino Resort helped change the image of the district, there’s a hint of decay in the air. After checking into the hotel and leaving our bags, we went out for a walk to stretch our post-flight legs and that’s when I first saw The Girls.

The Girls were standing on the streets, a cardboard sign hanging from their necks with a price written on it. Prostitutes, you ask? Yes and no. In Tokyo, you’ll see a lot of girls who are advertising girl bars or hostess clubs (known as キャバクラ i.e. kyabakura in Japanese) which are small, dimly lit rooms with booths where men can sit with a massively over-priced drink and talk to the girls for a flat fee that can be anything between 2,000 yen (€12) to 10,000 yen (€62) an hour. According to the owner of a foreign hostess club, the girls’ job is to keep their companion’s glass filled, cigs lit, “and ears filled with music and nice conversation”. Reading this, you might be wondering who the hell would pay a girl just to talk to her when you can chat people up for free at any bar, but come to think of it, there’s a reason these bars exist. For a fee, a man can spend an evening talking to a pretty young girl who will pretend she’s interested in him and his problem whereas it’s actually not so easy to get a stranger to sit and listen to you if you’re self-conscious, shy or if all you need to express is your frustration with work, life, wife, etc. At girl bars, men are not allowed to touch the girls and the girls do not perform sexual favours. At least officially. Unofficially, these fake “dates” can have a continuation later on, outside of the bar.

Of course, it’s not just men paying for girls — host clubs where women come to drink, chat and flirt with pretty young men hired for their looks and conversational ability, exist too, and apparently, they can be much more problematic. While buying a conversation with a girl holding a price tag is a pretty transparent transaction, male hosts employ quite perverse tactics to make money for the club. Women will match with a man on a dating app, the man brings her to a bar supposedly on a date, pretending that he works as a host just to save money, and fakes his commitment only to make sure the woman keeps returning and spending more. According to Hidemori Gen, the founder of Nippon Kakekomidera [Japan refuge temple], a nonprofit that helps victims of host clubs, “the typical pattern is for the cost of an evening to rise 10 times on each occasion (…) By their third visit, women who have been tricked into believing the host is romantically interested in them are charged ¥300,000, and on it goes. The club takes photos of their ID as a way of pressuring them into honouring their debts.” In the end, the only way for the women to pay these debts is prostitution.

Walking down a street in Otsuka with an onigiri in my hand, I wasn’t sure if the girls I was seeing were advertising a nearby girl bar, or openly selling themselves to pay off debts incurred at a host club. Whatever the reason, the idea of standing on the street with a plaque around your neck, seemed incredibly sad to me. Besides the problem of exploitation and manipulation, the very concept that in Tokyo any kind of human interaction, a conversation, or a hug, easily becomes a transaction, shows a very dark side of the culture. It’s one of the darker Tokyo’s secrets that TripAdvisor doesn’t talk so much about.

3. Nobuyoshi Araki, nudity & nostalgia

That very first walk in Tokyo was a somewhat disturbing introduction to the country, but I had already been prepared for all sorts of phenomena I wasn’t familiar with. Nothing could taint my idea of Tokyo as a fascinating place which I had been curious about ever since I discovered Nobuyoshi Araki as a student in London.

Araki, who is the most famous and influential Japanese photographer of the post-war period, grew up in Shitaya (now Taitō), which is an older neighbourhood of downtown Tokyo. Known for his penchant for depicting nudity, bondage, and sex, he has been making work that pushes the boundaries of erotica and straddles the line between art and pornography. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Japan’s sex industry was booming. Araki went to sex clubs, private orgies, and other illicit sexual events, and documented everything he encountered. The fruits of his research were published in the cult Tokyo Lucky Hole book which brilliantly encapsulates some of the more explicit of Tokyo’s secrets — after all, brothels and s&m are not the first things we think about when it comes to Japan, where kissing in public is deeply frowned upon.

But while he photographed hundreds of women, his biggest muse was his wife Yoko, whom he photographed extensively until her death from cancer in 1990.The photobook documenting their honeymoon, Sentimental Journey (1971), is now considered to be one of the most important Japanese photobooks of the 20th century.

And after Yoko, the artist’s second biggest muse is Tokyo. Araki has been documenting the city with the same love and tenderness as his wife — and Tokyo loves him too.

In her 1995 interview with Araki, Nan Goldin wrote that in Japan, the artist is considered a superstar: “You will understand this when you walk with him through the streets of Shinjuku — young girls scream, yakuza gangsters point, office workers freeze in their tracks. No photographer in the West causes such resonance with the public. Tokyoites adore Araki — for them, he is one of their guys. This love is mutual — Araki’s work is a great poem about the city where he was born and which he never left.” It’s worth adding that while most famous people travel by car, Araki enjoys taking the subway and being on the street among people.

In a piece written for Michael Hopper gallery, Lucy Fleming Brown wrote that by the time she met him, she had already encountered traces of the artist all over Tokyo. “Photographs from his student days reflect the ramshackle reality of life in Tokyo after the war. Following schoolboys around the ruined shitamachi – a tangle of old-fashioned neighbourhoods at Tokyo’s heart — these pictures already illustrate Araki’s fascination with life and aliveness, humour and human interaction, intensified by the bleakness of the postwar landscape.”

Speaking for Alsbeta Kossuthova from dofoto magazine, he spoke of his fondness of Umegaoka town, where he currently lives and considers a paradise: “I take so many photographs in the area that is close to me, because I think of it as “Jōdo” [Buddhist paradise]. The surroundings are changing steadily: new houses were built in vacant lots; many residential houses are rebuilt in the neighbourhood, for example, in Gōtokuji town where I used to live also.” He moved to Umegaoka in 2011, after the building in Gotokuji where his old apartment was got demolished. On the balcony of that old apartment, he used to photograph the Western sky, and upon moving to Umegaoka, he started photographing the sky on the Eastern side from the rooftop of the building, because to him the sunrise symbolizes a rebirth. “I take photographs in the same way that I live my life”, he told Dan Abbe from Autre Love.

His love of Tokyo is not without a healthy dose of criticism. In an interview for the Invisible Photographer Asia conducted a year after he moved to Umegaoka, he spoke of the changing landscape of the city: “Recently, I had a panoramic view on Shinjuku from Park Hyatt Shinjuku. I found that it was just like after the WWII as there are many empty spaces and construction sites. However, Tokyo in general has been developing in a bad way. There is less and less humanity. Everything has become automated and robotic. We cannot find human feelings or emotions in Tokyo. Nonetheless, I continue to wander and take pictures in this city with my camera and tripod – like Eugene Atget in Paris.”

On the other hand, he admits that cities are always changing, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and feeling nostalgic is an important aspect that he likes to capture in his photos: “I don’t like photos that don’t have a feeling of nostalgia. Nostalgia lasts forever. Even if you can’t see it, nostalgia remains. People look down on nostalgia and sentimentality, right? Like they’re not virile. Tears are good.”

When speaking of Araki and Tokyo, it’s impossible not to mention the bars in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district that the artist has been regularly frequenting. Apart from the Dug Jazz Cafe & Bar where Araki met with Nan Goldin, there was a bar called Hanaguruma, the name of which translates to “flower carriage”. Before it closed in 2015, Araki spent many nights there sketching portraits, photographing and drinking into the late hours. According to the curator of the Hanaguruma II exhibition of Araki’s sumi-e ink drawings at the Hamiltons Gallery in London (on show until 9 November), the bar was a regular spot for many visual artists and performers “from Nan Goldin, Robert Frank to Bjork and Lady Gaga. Those who visited were encouraged to make their mark on the walls with signatures, drawings, and Polaroids.”

4. Shinjuku Golden Gai: from brothels to literary bars

Another one of the bars where Nobuyoshi Araki can be met is the Kodoji bar in the Shinjuku Golden Gai district.

Shinjuku Golden Gai is a district of Kabukicho within the Shinjuku ward, composed of a network of six narrow alleys, connected by even narrower passageways which are about wide enough for a single person to pass through. Despite the small area, there are around 300 tiny shanty-style bars squeezed into it, many of them open 24/7. It’s not exactly a hidden gem and a lot of tourists are flocking to the area to experience drinking at one of those miniature bars, often to the displeasure of their owners. Shinjuku Golden Gai is revered for its decaying charm, but not everyone knows that it used to be much more dirty… both literally and metaphorically,

“The origin of the Shinjuku Golden Gai lies in the black market, which arose in the chaos after the end of the Pacific War.” The jakuza-administered black market shops were initially located on the east side of the Shinjuku train station but after the abolition of the black market in 1949, the stores were relocated to Kabukichō. There, under the guise of a pub, the stores were carrying out prostitution on the second and third floors of the buildings until the business had to close in 1958 when prostitution became illegal. From the 1960s onwards, those establishments turned into bars, and the area became such a popular drinking spot that when in the 1980s many buildings in Tokyo were set on fire by yakuza who wanted the land to be bought up by developers, Golden Gai survived because its supporters would guard the area at night.

According to the Japanese website dedicated to the Golden Gai, in the politically turbulent 60s and early 70s, the bars of the Shinjuku Golden Gai and the Hanazono Gai were roughly divided into three categories: the literary bars (bundan bar), gay bars and cutthroat bars (bottakuri bars, with unclear drink prices, where clients are often arbitrarily charged and ripped off).

The bundan bars attracted some big names, like Kenji Nakagami, known as the first and only post-war Japanese writer to identify himself publicly as a Burakumin*, i.e. a member of one of Japan’s long-suffering outcaste groups, and Ryūzō Saki, famous for non-fiction books about Japanese crimes. When in 1976 the writer Kenji Nakagami received the 74th Akutagawa Literature Prize and Ryūzō Saki the 74th Naoki Literature Prize, the area became known nationwide as a gathering place where everyone who considers themselves as an artist should have their go-to pub. And it was not just writers, but also film and theatre directors, actors and models who frequented the bars, partially because of he rise of the film production company Art Theatre Guild (ATG) and the boom in underground theater in Shinjuku.

Nowadays, according to Reddit, the Golden Gai attracts people from all walks of life — from porn actresses to lawyers, programmers, musicians, office workers, people of different gender and sexual orientation, as well as different political views. If you’re a tourist and want to feel welcome at one of those bars, without sticking like a sore thumb, you should follow a special etiquette and a set of unspoken rules. Start by saying “Ippai Dozo” (“Please have a drink”) to the bartender, have a “chawari” (shoshu with green tea, regular or with katame, strong). Be prepared to pay a cover charge and have some cash, a lot of the bars don’t have terminals. You can smoke inside but not outside, and you don’t necessarily need to come in the evening, some bars are open from as early as 6am and you can get some food too. Because the places are so tiny, it is important for the owner to have patrons who can contribute to the special atmosphere — and make the bar enough money to justify their occupying of the few available stools.

I personally find a lot of charm in this very cosy, personal, non-fancy bar culture: an owner, some chairs, a few people around the table, a bottle of whiskey, and conversations that go well into the night. I’m not a fancy lounge bar kind of person, I much prefer an underground spot with a wonky chair and an owner who truly loves serving people. Despite being popular among the tourists, these Golden Gai bars are in a way Tokyo’s secrets because knowing which one to walk into and how to behave is like saying a magic spell that turns the act of drinking into a magical encounter and exchange with other human beings.

5. Butoh: the dance of darkness

And speaking of underground gems, this brings me to another of Tokyo’s secrets: butoh.

I first learned about Japanese theatre when I studied history of theatre as part of my MA art degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. The three most famous traditional Japanese theatre forms still performed today are: Nō, a spiritual drama dating from the 15h and 16th century (with a comic accompaniment called kyōgen), kabuki (17-18th century) which combines music and dance; and bunraku (17-18th century) which is a puppet theatre. These forms of theatre, according to Mae J. Smethurst, grew from earlier traditions: jōruri storytelling to the accompaniment of the shamisen, the three-stringed instrument from Okinawa (15-16th century); biwahōshi narrators of epic tales from the 11-13th century and gypsy-like wanderers kugutsu mawashi, who from the 9th century onwards entertained audiences by dancing through the streets and manipulating their puppets.

The 20th century brought a few more forms: shingeki (Western-style realistic drama), shimpageki / shimpa (new school drama) and angura / shōgekijō (underground experimental theatre). The last one, invented in the 1960s by Shūji Terayama, was heavily inspired by the French visionary Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) and his Theatre of Cruelty. “Terayama wanted to blur the line between play and real life, not allowing the audience to sit back passively, safe in their seats”, writes Larry Avis Brown, who describes how in Opium War (1972) the audience arrived at the warehouse where the performance was to take place only to find it locked, and were subsequently led to another space, interrogated by the actors, and some of them got handcuffed, strip-searched and dragged away by the “authorities” while others were ordered to drink soup laced with a mild sleeping potion.

When in 2007, pushed into an industrial lift at a warehouse in East London and then pushed out onto a dark corridor by actors performing in Punchrunk’s Faust, I marvelled at the group’s ingenuity and boldness, little did I know that similar things had already been done 30 years earlier across the globe.

Around the same time as angura overturned traditional Japanese theatre, a new form of dance theatre emerged which used novel body movements to subvert the conception of dance: butoh. This avant-garde dance form was born through a collaboration between Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno with a desire to embrace natural and crude movements of ordinary people, in contrast to the refinement (miyabi) and understatement (shibui) aspects of Japanese aesthetics. The name comes from “ankoku butō” meaning “dance of darkness”, which focuses on the darker side of human beings. It’s powerful, raw, weird and deeply emotional. “Against a background of New Theatre (Shingeki) created early in the twentieth century and inspired by western realism”, writes Catherine Curtain in her essay, “Hijikata’s performance offered a radical corporealism, a body naked and in extremis — one that was both released and constrained.”

Interestingly, before Tokyo Butoh Festival in February 1985, very few Japanese had seen butoh, it seemed to have been yet another one of Tokyo’s secrets. According to Bonnie Sue Stein, because of the “gyaku-yunyu” phenomenon (literally: go and come back) where in order to gain approval in Japan, an artist has to become famous abroad first, it was only after butoh groups began performing outside Japan in the early 1980s, that the Japanese audience began to perceive them as a genuine art form.

But while butoh continued to grow in Europe and US, in Japan it doesn’t seem to have gained a real significance and today it is surprisingly difficult to see a butoh performance in Tokyo. Prior to our trip, I spent a lot of time trying to find a show in any of the various cities we were to visit, but the only thing that coincided with a trip was a performance of “Wonderful Sunday” by Tokyo-based Karas Apparatus, a theatre group led by Saburo Teshigawara and Sato Rihoko, which sadly took place on the day when we were going to Osaka.

Thanks to my rsearch, I learned that The Kazuo Ohno Dance Studio, established in 1949 by Kazuo Ohno, offers mainly workshops and shares choreography techniques via their online Butoh Choreo Lab platform. The only Butoh-dedicated theatre, Butohkan in Kyoto, closed in 2021 after a merely 5 year run. Founded by Ushio Amagetsu, the all-male Sankai Juku group famous for hanging outdoor dances and striking visuals performs abroad more than in Japan.

While there are several artists who incorporate butoh into their dance, they also don’t perform regularly. Butoh is sometimes performed as part of Yokohama Dance Collection, a contemporary dance festival held annually in Yokohama and you can keep an eye out on the Dance Archive Network website which lists various contemporary performances, but from what I’ve seen, one has to be lucky to see a butoh show in real life. Your best bet is to watch it online: the Tokyo Real Underground, an experimental arts festival held in the underground spaces of Tokyo in 2021, has an online archive which includes recordings of butoh performances.

When my search for butoh in Japan yielded no results, I was reminded how Marcin Bruczkowski, author of the fantastic Sleepless in Tokyo memoir detailing his life in Tokyo in the late 1980s, described his surprise at the absence of karate schools in Japan when it’s so easy to learn karate literally everywhere else. It’s the exact same problem with butoh: one is more likely to find a butoh performance abroad than in the country of its origin, Japan.

Rebellious Bodies is a new festival set up in 2023 to re-introduce Butoh to a UK audience. In Australia, there’s ButohOOUT!, a platform focusing on this distinctive art form, which offers a series of Butoh workshops, a performance-making creative laboratory, a performance season, an outdoor free performance and public forum. There is Helsinki Butoh Festival, Butoh Festival in Amsterdam, and a Butoh Institute in New York. Germany has Tadashi Endo and his Butoh-Festivals MAMU Butoh & Jazz in Göttinge, France has NUBA (originally established in 1990 in Tokyo by Juju Alishina before the company moved to France in 1998) and in Italy there’s New Butoh Shool, originally founded by Sayoko Onishi.

Perhaps the disappearance of butoh is yet another one of Tokyo’s secrets. And because secrets are great at stirring up our curiosity, I promised myself that sooner or later I’ll be back in Tokyo — and then I’ll make sure to find a butoh performance, no matter how many nooks I’ll have to scour.

The second part of my Japan trip-inspired essay, will be published soon.

* Burakumin are descendants of outcaste populations in the feudal days. According to one article, when the social status established in the Edo era identitfied three classes (warrior, peasant, townsfolk), “those outcastes, origin of the present Buraku people, were placed at the bottom of the society as Eta (extreme filth) and Hinin (non-human) classes.”