Memories of Yurakucho
From the mid-60s to the dawn of the 70s, Ginza and Yurakucho were my playground. Those neon-lit streets, the smoky jazz joints—they shaped me through my high school days and into university. But before all that, Ginza was something else: the place where I held my mother’s hand, all dressed up for an afternoon in town.
She was the daughter of a Kanda bookbinder, a master of foreign tomes. Born in the first year of Showa, she grew up in a world torn apart and stitched back together. Yet, through all the chaos, she found her rhythm—fluent in English, savoring Western music, film, and cuisine as if they were second nature. Even after my father, a man who once worked with GHQ, passed away, she never let go of her Western ways.
I still remember the first time I tried to fake my way into jazz. A girl asked me, “What kind of music do you like?” Cornered, I blurted out, “Jazz.” That same day, I ran to Yamano Music and picked up Jimmy Smith’s The Cat, spinning it on my mother’s record player as if I’d been a lifelong fan. She took one listen and smirked. “Oh my, quite the refined taste you’ve picked up,” she said, her words laced with amusement. I flushed, caught in my own bluff. But the next day, she handed me some money. “Go buy a different record at Yamano,” she suggested. “This one’s going in the bar’s jukebox.”
That was how I started picking records for the jukebox, curating a soundtrack for a world I only half understood. My mother’s bar, tucked away at the foot of Kachidoki, became a haven for the night-dwellers of Ginza—band members, barflies, foreigners who spoke flawless Japanese. One name kept coming up, murmured over glasses of whiskey: “Konde-san, Konde-san.” It wasn’t until I started playing in Ginza’s cabarets and clubs that I realized who he was—Raymond Conde, the jazz clarinetist, a legend in his own right. And our home, with the bar on the first floor and our living quarters just above, was always filled with his music.
It was only natural that I found my way into the smoky embrace of jazz cafés. The first was Mama, down in Yurakucho’s Subaru Street. A rite of passage. Back then, a high school kid in uniform could step into a jazz café after school, order a 130-yen coffee, and soak in the roar of ALTEC speakers for hours. In that dim, tobacco-scented sanctuary, I scribbled notes on the records playing, reviewed for exams, and jotted down thoughts on ATG film screenings. And every now and then, I’d spot a lone cockroach skitter across the table—a tiny drifter navigating a world as alive and chaotic as the city itself.
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