Newbie Reporting On Japanese Bars

[Mulboyne]

[GuyJean]

.. this article is trying to be so hip it hurts.

No shit. Ouch!

GPS devices on the handlebars?

GJ

[Red Floyd]

I'm going to Tokyo soon, is this article actually accurate or is it all BS? I mean, it'd be nice to find a bar with the personality of Gas Panic, but without the noise.

[Taro Toporific]

Infused with a knowing, postmodern nostalgia for pre-Sony Tokyo

Oops. Any true cool-hunter would be infused with a knowing nostalgia for post-Sony Tokyo of 1999.

This article is pure fun (pronounced foon).

...the Golden Gai became a refuge for boozy intellectuals..
...a British architect who is an owner of a gallery-cum-nightclub, Super Deluxe, took me there. The secrecy cultivated by a bar....
....Le Baron, a branch of the celebrity-packed Parisian club, opened near Omotesando Street last December. Marc Newson...
... a trend spotter who recently started a concierge service...
IF YOU CAN'T FIND HIDDEN TOKYO
Don't despair. For a price, there are concierge services that will hand-lead you to secret, impossible-to-find spots. Bespoke Tokyo... run by two British expatriates

Let me guess, Bespoke Tokyo dragged the reporter on her expense account to their friends' dives in Tokyo. Ni-i-i-ce!

[Mulboyne]

...it'd be nice to find a bar with the personality of Gas Panic, but without the noise.

The information on the bars is accurate enough but you couldn't describe any of them as "Gas Panic without the noise". What you get out of a smaller bar in Japan is really down to you. I wasn't comfortable enough to dig them out until I had a reasonable amount of the language but I've got non Japanese-speaking friends who seem to happily hold court in them. Golden Gai, mentioned in the article, was recently rated a Tokyo highlight by the Australian edition of Vogue.

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[jim katta]

To new FG readers...

ANY fucking article about Japan that was not written by a 30 year resident of Japan or some FG.com superfriend, they basically shit on. No Japan article is good enough.

My take,
The article was fine, and it reflected real nightlife in Tokyo with no more hyperbole or inaccuracies than someone reviewing New York or L.A. nightlife.

You have to realize that part of the FG.com profile is that no one can write or say "anything" authoritative about Japan without inviting derision and negative critique from FG's born of nothing more than expat blues. Thus, the only kind of stuff you will ever read on this site that gets the thumbs up is random wacked out shit from Rob Pongi (or some similarly crazed clown), a crazy photo or product from Japan, or a historic text/film that has been around so damn long no one can legitimately find fault with it.

My point? Ironically, if you really want to find out about the real Japan or have serious discussions about the country--with the exception of a few members of this board--this is not the place for you. If, on the other hand, you want mostly meaningless jokes and random Japan ephemera links, stick around, you've found the place.

[jim katta]

p.s. Let it be known that despite my comment above, I actually enjoy Rob Pongi and I'm glad he's around.

[Greji]

Golden Gai, mentioned in the article, was recently rated a Tokyo highlight by the Australian edition of Vogue.

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"....The largest remaining tract is Golden Gai, a ghetto of vintage bars on a bamboo-lined backstreet in the Shinjuku district that is clogged with so-called hostess bars. In the 1960s and 70s, when prostitution moved elsewhere, the Golden Gai became a refuge for boozy intellectuals, including the writers Yukio Mishima and Akiyuki Nosaka. (It is also where Wim Wenders filmed scenes for his 1985 documentary, "Tokyo-Ga.")...."

When what moved where? He obviously has not been anywhere in Shinjuku lately, regardless of what is reported in the media and what Blinky says!

[Captain Japan]

Thus, the only kind of stuff you will ever read on this site that gets the thumbs up is random wacked out shit from Rob Pongi (or some similarly crazed clown), a crazy photo or product from Japan, or a historic text/film that has been around so damn long no one can legitimately find fault with it.

Oh no, we'll rip on the wacked shit, too.

I thought overall the article was fine as an idea. But when I read stuff like "GPS devices on their handlebars" and "a society intraveneously hooked up to high-speed gadgetry" I really find it hard to not wonder what exactly is going on.

[Charles]

Golden Gai, mentioned in the article, was recently rated a Tokyo highlight by the Australian edition of Vogue...

There goes the neighborhood.

[Mulboyne]

Jim, the article has more interesting leads for travellers than most such pieces and I've already sent it to some friends who will enjoy it. However, I don't know why the writer tries to put it all in a "going back to their roots" context. There's nothing remotely new about people hanging out in small bars off the beaten track and the dichotomy drawn up between "Western" clubs and "Japanese" nomiya is just fake colour.

I actually think reporting on Japan is getting better after a dreadful downturn following the bursting of the bubble. I wrote this a couple of years ago (apologies for quoting myself):

"Newbie-style" seemed to proliferate from around the mid-90s. Journalists on the Japan beat found that their editors got tired of articles about Japan's decline or possible recovery because nothing tangible seemed to be happening either way. The only way they could get their byline in the paper/magazine more often was to come up with "wacky Japan" stories. About the same time, news agencies began to downsize their Tokyo bureaus - often covering Japan from Singapore or Hong Kong - so many writers had little in-country experience and ended up recycling the same stuff. Certainly, there will always be "first impressions" pieces about any country but "newbie" reporting is frustrating because it is just lazy journalism. Editors may have been less interested in Japan but that put the onus on journalists to dig deeper. It was shocking, for instance, how little information there was about politics in Japan. The Economist magazine often went two or three weeks without a single article about the world's second-largest economy.

Take a look at this guy's reporting in the seventies: he wasn't a Japan hand but he wrote intelligently and there was very little like that in the late nineties. I think these days we now have more informed commentary on a wider range of subjects. Some of that is down to the internet. If a foreign bloke was deeply engaged with some obscure aspect of Japan in years gone by, you generally wouldn't hear about it unless you knew him personally or he wrote a book. Chances are now that he'll have a blog or photos on flickr.

As the volume of stories on Japan increases, there's bound to be more rubbish alongside the quality product. Every country gets misrepresented in the overseas press. American friends of mine often don't recognize the portraits of their compatriots that appear in the European papers.

[eighty5er]

With all this talk about real Tokyo, I'm becoming more and more interested in fake Tokyo.

[baka tono]

I think fake Tokyo is supposed to be the ordinary crap surrounding the secret bars.