Tokyo With A Twist

The Japanese have perfected the art of obsession. Japan, after all, is the place that gave us otaku, that wonderfully elastic word that refers to people obsessed to distraction with the details of a single thing. The first otaku were Japanese boys obsessed with manga or anime; back in the 1980s and ‘90s, the term implied a sort of dark geekiness--loners, antisocial kids who retreated to their rooms with their manga and anime, much of it erotic in content.

Otaku are mainstream now. These days there are millions of them, the term applied loosely as a suffix to anyone with a personal obsession. (You can be a Brad Pitt otaku, for example.)

But their spiritual home remains Akihabara, Tokyo’s high-wattage neighborhood catering to video games, anime DVDs and other fetishes. It began as a shopping area for teenage boys, and though it is now popular with tourists and women, it is still a magnet for the socially inept male. You don’t go to Akihabara to drink, unless it’s for a cup of coffee at one of the cafes where you pay for the privilege of having your sugar spooned into your cup by a young Japanese woman dressed as a French maid. This is a place that has much to teach about obsessive behavior--and it’s a perfect way to enter Tokyo’s otaku currents.

To get a close-up look, I go exploring with Leo Lewis, a journalist for the Times of London whose fascination with Japanese video games, anime and manga began when he was a teenager growing up in Oxford, England, and eventually enticed him to Japan to live. “Akihabara,” he says, “is essentially set up to cater to every obsession.” Lewis was a contributing writer for Roland Kelts’ “Japanamerica,” a book describing how Japan’s postmodern pop culture has infiltrated the U.S. imagination, but that credential is almost beside the point. A walk through Akihabara with Lewis reveals his sheer joy that such a mecca of obsession even exists.

Akihabara’s main street is a canyon of tall buildings where you’ll find one of the world’s densest concentrations of electronic goods. But Lewis whisks me away from the cacophony of amplified sales pitches and into the back alleys, ushering me past open-front shops devoted to retro Japanese pop culture items, such as miniature collectible characters from long-extinct anime and manga series.

“Now, this is particularly delicious,” he says as he takes me into one of the many shops that sell original versions of old video games. True otaku are devoted to old games, and many remember Sega’s Dreamcast--now relegated to the also-rans in the competition for global console supremacy--as the epitome of gaming. Manufacturers such as Nintendo and Sega have discontinued the original consoles on which the games were played, and enterprising companies have manufactured new ones that will bring the old games to life. But Lewis loves the ancient consoles.

He leads me up stairwells into shops that buy and sell clunky monitors and joysticks that look as if they were designed to fly a light plane. “It’s the physicality that I love,” he says. “Just imagine what it would have been like growing up in this old British house surrounded by heavy, traditional furniture. To see something like this,” he says, fingering an old Nintendo joystick displayed on one of the shelves that slice the store into narrow aisles, “was to be aware that there was an entire other world out there.”

He made his first visit to Akihabara as a tourist when he was 18.

“I thought I was never going to get here,” he says.

The retro fascination is just part of otaku culture, but it shows the degree to which purists take personal obsession to the deepest levels: ever more specialization, never reaching fulfillment, never collecting that last collectible. “Completing the quest would be problematic for an otaku,” Lewis says. “That would suggest that it was time to do something more serious with your life.”

So the niches are always getting narrower. Maid cafes have been the rage for about four years now, and a true otaku would never be satisfied to go to any old one. There must be a fetish about the experience. Perhaps you’d like to put your head on the maid’s lap and let her groom your ears. “Let me show you an extra-special level of nuttiness,” Lewis says. He leads me to a shop called Candy Fruit, where a maid cafe once stood. It’s now a shop selling glasses to two specific breeds of client: women who want glasses to wear with their maid uniforms. And men who want to buy their glasses from a woman in a maid’s costume wearing glasses.

“The maids never used to wear glasses,” Lewis says with an admiring shake of his head. “It’s another new twist.”

--

Old is the new new

Japanese pop culture is full of new twists, and to Americans--whose late-in-the-day embrace of manga and anime makes them nouveau otaku, if you will--it can seem cool because it ignores history. It’s disposable culture, perfect for a digital world.

But, as the retro obsessives of Akihabara show, the old is there, embedded in the new. Pop artist Takashi Murakami, creator of some of today’s most futuristic contemporary art, is now tapping Japan’s Zen Buddhist traditions for inspiration. “My new concept is back to history,” he told me in an interview last year.

I go on a second otaku tour of Tokyo, this time with American-born director Michael Arias, who took a step into the city’s past for “Tekkon Kinkreet,” his recent Japanese animated hit. Arias insists that he’s not an otaku, but his passionate 15-year quest to make the film and his reinvigoration of one of the classic otaku forms make him more than familiar with the turf.

Arias’ movie, based on a cult-classic manga series from the early 1990s, unfolds on the streets of an unspecified Asian metropolis as two urchins battle to save their patch of urban wasteland from developers. In creating his imaginary city, Arias drew inspiration from his travels in Asia, and in particular from his favorite parts of Tokyo: the rare undisturbed remnants of the Showa era (1926-89), which spans the city’s annihilation and rebirth.

In a city where development pressures are constant, and nothing much is built to last, this “ancient” world endures because of its location: the spaces tucked inside the brick foundations that support the elevated railway lines. These neighborhoods under the tracks are where you feel the age and the intimacy of a place fashioned on the fly out of postwar rubble. That mood has hung on even as developers have thrown up skyscrapers around them and the futuristic Tokyo known to the rest of the world has crowded in.

From sunset to dawn, there is life in these marginal spaces, and it’s this atmospheric realm that Arias mined for his movie, a love letter to the city in which he’s lived for 15 years. It’s my favorite part of Tokyo as well, and it’s where our tour begins.

We meet in the pouring rain in the Yurakucho neighborhood. Squeezed between the expanses of Hibiya Park and the swish Ginza shopping mecca, Yurakucho is defined by the elevated trains that cut through its heart on their way into Tokyo Station. When we plunge under the tracks, Arias is a bit disoriented and initially leads us in the wrong direction, but the wrong-way tour reveals places I’ve never seen before: Japanese izakayas (casual restaurants where people gather to eat, drink and talk after work); bars paying homage to the American West; the Travel Cafe, where a video screen behind the bar displays pixilated visions of exotic vacation spots.

I turn Arias around, but thirst rules. I pull him into a wonderfully boisterous fish restaurant and bar I know well: Andy’s Shin Hinomoto, named for the smiling Englishman who married into the Japanese family that owns it. We pop up the short flight of stairs (go upstairs, not down, if you have the option) and take seats at the long common table that runs through the middle of the room like one you’d see in an English gentleman’s club. Trains rumble just above the low-ceilinged bar. The vibrations feel like a mild earthquake.

We are joined by Arias’ friend Ayumi Sawa, who buys foreign films for Japanese distribution, and we head down the street to our first film location: Manpuku, a small yakitori and sashimi restaurant tucked beneath the tracks at a spot where a street crosses under them. The restaurant is long and narrow, but its tables spill out onto the sidewalk under the arch. In Western cities, the walls of the underpass would be stained by graffiti and worse. But in clean Tokyo, the underpass is almost pristine and the wall is an extension of the bar, with faded posters of Japanese gangster movies and Hollywood musicals papering the concrete.

We’ve organized the evening around drinking spots that will conjure up the guiding spirits of “Tekkon Kinkreet,” and to fortify us, Arias orders food for all: a big plate of grilled hokei (flounder) and some tofu and goya champloo, an Okinawan dish of egg and pork sauteed with bitter melon, a sharp green vegetable reportedly high in nutrition. Arias switches from beer to shochu, the clear Japanese spirit made from distilled rice, barley or sweet potato.

The table talk turns on the common obsession these days among people in the film industry: Can they survive in the digital age? “Who’s gonna pay for anything?” Arias asks. He recalls the day of “Tekkon’s” DVD release, when he sat at his computer and watched online as someone uploaded his film in 10-minute segments. “Right in front of my eyes,” he says. “And every time I refreshed, I could see the number of hits going up.

“My movie was not even out in the United States, and someone was giving my baby away for free,” he says.

We pay our bill and push on to Shinjuku, the fashionable hub on the western edge of central Tokyo that is a playground of lights and activity. Arias came to the Kabukicho neighborhood of Shinjuku during the planning of his film to check out the male host clubs, the newly booming pleasure dens where women buy expensive drinks for the privilege of chatting with young men. The men are unmistakable in Kabukicho with their Rod Stewart hair, tight suits and jewelry. “The surprising thing is that the top earners are not the guys you’d expect,” Arias says. “They’re not the best-looking guys. They’re the best talkers.”

But we’re not stopping to look. Arias waves us instead into Shomben Yokocho, or Piss Alley, a narrow corridor alongside the Shinjuku railroad tracks where the lights fade into the haze of smoke pouring out of the open-sided yakitori restaurants. We duck into Albatross, a bar with decor that’s a cross between Marc Bolan glam rock and Victorian England, and crowd into a corner near a low-hanging chandelier. The sound system plays Damien Rice and American songstress Rachael Yamagata. Ayumi starts with a gin and soda, but the others talk her into a Sakura soda for the second round. The cherry blossom (sakura) season is just ending, and Tokyo bars often get their own seasonal spirits. Ayumi’s comes in a flower-shaped glass.

Arias is drinking a cocktail whose main ingredient contains the powdered green tea called matcha that is used in the traditional Japanese tea ceremony. “Funny,” he says, examining the bottle’s list of ingredients. “All it says is: ‘alcohol and natural flavorings.’ ” He makes a face.

“Three of these and your tongue turns green,” he says.

There’s nothing fancy in the alley--just neighborhood places that have been here for the Tokyo equivalent of forever--but even on a rainy night, it’s packed with businessmen grabbing a bite on their way home.

--

Bar culture, otaku style

We leave Albatross and enter the Golden Gai, a glorious four-block-wide stretch--just beyond the tracks--of about 200 drinking shacks in rows of two-story buildings. Most accommodate no more than half a dozen drinkers. It feels faintly red-light in atmosphere, reflecting the area’s roots in a postwar mix of black marketeering and prostitution. The prostitutes left in the 1960s--they’re down the street and around the corner now--and the area survived the concrete tsunami of the 1970s and ‘80s because developers could not persuade many individual bar owners to sell.

A number of the rickety buildings were, however, abandoned for a while. The buildings lean as though they’re about to fall. Wires drizzle down their sides and pipes leak water into buckets set out in the alleys. This is four blocks of heaven if you want to see the most imaginative use of space in which to sell booze and whip up a little meal behind the bar.

Until recently, the Golden Gai remained a bit of a secret among those seeking the ruins of bohemian Tokyo. It owes its comeback to a cocktail of cheap rents, an urge among some Tokyoites for a more authentic, grittier Japan and the sheer pleasure of seeing bars built around themes that reflect the obsessions of their owners.

One bar caters to 1960s British music. Another to Humphrey Bogart. There’s one that celebrates pro wrestling. Jazz. French cinema. It’s bar culture by otaku, and it somehow makes Akihabara’s maids and figurines feel almost like an extension of some impulse that’s been rooted here for ages. The pleasure of building a shrine to a fantasy.

You feel as though you should whisper as you walk down the narrow alleys where the only sounds are the murmurs and laughter that seep out whenever a bar door is opened. Owners and customers--the patrons in the Golden Gai tend to be regulars--break off conversation to size up new arrivals, and there can be a sense of intruding on a private party when you walk in. But most will welcome you.

We end the night in Krishuna, a Middle Eastern theme bar that is bigger than most of the Golden Gai bars and bills itself as a “lounge and event space.”

A week later, I’d be back in Krishuna and there would be a Japanese belly dancer entertaining couples inhaling deeply from hookahs, but tonight there are just four salarymen in their late 20s who’ve missed the last train home to the suburbs.

They are drinking and smoking cigarettes, waiting--as is common--until Tokyo’s transportation system starts up again at around 5 a.m. to get them home.

We’re all outside time here--plopped into an oddly themed fantasy, ticking into the obsessive Tokyo future.

--

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Guidebook

By Bruce Wallace

Following the trail of obsession in Tokyo is best done by feel. Here are four starting points:

Akihabara

Take the Japan Rail Yamanote or Sobu Line to Akihabara Station. The electronics district is to the west. To find Candy Fruit, cross the main street (Chuo Dori) as you come out the Denkigai exit, turn left and walk six blocks. You will see Times Tower on the right, just along the railway track. When you see a Mos Burger shop, turn left. You’ll pass one narrow lane, then turn right at the next corner. Candy Fruit is just around the corner. Phone: 81-03-3252-4902.

Yurakucho

To reach Andy’s Shin Hinomoto Cafe, take the Hibiya Line to Hibiya Station. Use Exit A2. Look for Andy’s Guinness banner just ahead and on the left. Phone: 81-03-3214-8021. Manpuku is on the same side of the street at the next underpass. Phone: 81-03-3211-6001.

Shinjuku

Take one of the many trains to Shinjuku Station and use the west exit to reach the narrow alleys of Shomben Yokocho. Albatross bar is at 1-2-11 Nishi-Shinjuku. Phone: 81-03-3342-5758.

Golden Gai

From the east exit of Shinjuku Station, cross Shinjuku Street and walk past the Mizuho Bank on the corner. When you reach Yasukuni Street, cross to the other side, turn right and walk one block. At the Mister Donut shop, take a left into a pedestrian walkway. Follow it to the Golden Gai area, which is marked with a large sign.

--B.W.