It's always bittersweet when I visit Japan and come across old establishments or traditions that an ageing proprietor or volunteers are trying to keep going. You can see the love and spirit they have for it, but it often looks like something too disconnected from the interests of young people and the vicissitudes of the changing economy to survive for much longer. A kissaten (old-style cafe) owner in Nagasaki who shared stories and gave me an umbrella (apparently his practice); a jazz bar owner in Sasebo who stays open so as "not to disappoint patrons who might show up", even though he doesn't really get enough business to justify it due to the waning of interest in jazz in Japan. Their low popularity also means they don't charge high prices.
It's a huge contrast with the anonymous, impersonal service you get in big cities and chain stores; a similar anonymity you get all over the world wherever poorly-paid workers don't have a stake in the businesses they work for. The difference is a profit motive versus simply enjoying a practice or being a place for community. Both get shoehorned into the concept of a "business", but they're worlds apart. And in a climate of increasing rents, individualistic places tend to die out, barring the occasional dagashi vendor that manages to reignite community interest in its offerings.
Yes. A seldom discussed aspect of this is the ability to open a business in a residential area.
Many of these small self-owned shop are the first floor of a house or building, and more often than not the owner lives upstairs, so it's less of an issue to keep it open with low frequentation as they're no paying extra rent or suffering hours of transit to get there.
That also tremendously helps with the community aspect and customers putting a face on the shop and staff as they'll meet them in their daily life as well.
I lived in Tokyo and it was years ago, so I don't know if I'm describing the current situation. It was very common to see largish buildings in residential areas which would have some barely functioning retail shop on the ground floor. Some elderly relative of the building owner would maintain the shop, and would have practically nothing to do since the shop got almost no business. I heard the whole motivation for this setup was that the building owner got a significant tax break for keeping the shop open. Income from the shop was not considered.
That's not a bad thing though. It allows for the opportunity to keep it going at worst, at best, maybe they can try new things or hold on until it does become profitable.
Either way, it works out to help keep the environment welcoming through culture conservation.
yeah, I like the vibe of these shops too but maybe there’s a bit of japan fetishization for a kind of commerce that anywhere else wouldn’t make sense to have.
One of the reasons for the Japanese economy’s stagnation over the last 20+ years is a lot of government spending on things that are not contributing to a healthy economy. I’m thinking about huge infrastructure projects but I’m sure this extends too many other aspects of how the economy is run.
The book "Dogs and Demons: Tales From the Dark Side of Modern Japan" by Alex Kerr covers this well. It's over 20 years old but not much has really changed. The Japanese government is still engaging in major capital misallocation through unnecessary infrastructure projects, and they allow insolvent companies to continue operating.
That at least has some economic justification; Tokyo-Sapporo is one of the busiest air routes in the world, and more trains means free slots at chronically congested Haneda.
Wasteful Big Infrastructure would more be doubling down on the seawalls that did not work in 2011 in Tohoku; in some cases those seawalls actively made things worse.
Japan is changing very rapidly due to its demographic transition.
It is close to 50 years after the fall of fertility rate below replacement in Japan; so soon there will be increasing numbers of elders that not only do not have grandchildren, but don't have children either.
I have a weird interest in houses around my city that clearly used to have businesses in them when people didn't travel as far all the time. Some operate as cofffee shops, small specialty retail, or services like therapists/accountants. But others are fully homes now, just with a front room area that was aimed at having customers and sometimes a residence in the back or above. They feel like little markers of another time.
You may have heard (I read it somewhere) that replacing the aging shop-owners with a new, younger generation is often met with a loss of customers.
Maybe it was regarding a sushi restaurant that I saw this about? The young'en had to apprentice for some time for the customers to get used to the new face before the owner could hand over the reigns. Maybe you need the old customers to age-out, new customers to age-in, ha ha.
Someway along past the end of Isezaki Mall in Yokohama, there is a old Video game arcade full of 90s Street fighter machines, and also some custom ones running some arcane emulator software, full or 1000s of even more arcane titles from Japanese video game history, run by one ageing proprietor.
To be fair, this same phenomenon has been ongoing in the USA for a long time as well. How many candy shops and soda fountains are left, apart from a handful in coastal tourist towns? How many "neighborhood institutions" close every year in cities across North America?
I'm curious why you say interest in Jazz is waning. I went to the Tower Records in Shibuya and saw a live jazz performance a few months back, and it was magical. That's anecdotal, but I would love to know if tastes are shifting truly and why.
My experience is that jazz is still popular but jazz bars and kissaten and were smoky places where middle aged men went to drink coffee or whiskey. Young Japanese were not interested as they had a kind of old uncool image.
Yeah, I went to one jazz club, and it was more about the whisky than the jazz. But, I hope interest does not die out completely. There is some great jazz history in Japan.
For the most part I avoid kissaten because they almost universally allow smoking. Many of them can have quite good coffee, rivaling the hipster places, with good food and nice themes. They're in a tough position because their established customer base wants to smoke, but young people for the most part won't, and won't go to places that allow it.
Most of the jazz places have the same problem. I like jazz, but refuse to go to the jazz clubs because of the smoking.
Usually these people are financially secured enough to run their stores or bars or cafés as a hobby, to have something to do and meet some people instead of just sitting at home.
I know a guy in Tokyo whose family owns a small plot of land in the 23-ku area and he leased it to some company who built an office tower on it. They get an upper-5-figure USD amount every month for rent.
The guy runs an import streetwear store just for fun, he's in the red all the time but doesn't care.
Meh. Dagashi are... not great. (And frankly the same is true of jazz). You can get nicer stuff from any 7-eleven, consistently, and whether the staff member cares is (thankfully) not really relevant. Stores that sell something people actually want can and do thrive (by charging a premium if necessary), and that includes a lot of traditions that people value because they're traditional, but when it comes to something like eating bad snacks because those were what your parents ate... meh. Let it die.
Japanese convenience stores, to me, are fascinating. I could write a whole long form piece just on convenience stores if that sounds interesting to anyone.
> it's not like 7-11 does not sell a subset of the same dagashi mentioned in the article.
I got confused by your multiple negatives here, but this doesn't invalidate the point that 7-11 generally sells better substitutes for old-style dagashi. If they also sell some (probably on the better end of) dagashi, all the more reason to not lament the decline of the dagashi shops.
Dagashi is aimed at kids, so the tastes can be a bit ..."primitive".
To me main appeal is to have a lot of choice of cheap stuff that can be bought with allowances (convenience store have better quality goods, but in smaller quantities and smaller choice). It feels a lot different to buy a small bag of stuff for 500y instead of 2 candy bars.
I don't think it will die of irrelevance, more sadly, it will come from how skewed the population is getting, and anything targeted to kids is bound to slowly atrophy and become a smaller and smaleer niche.
I like plenty of live music yeah (folk, idol pop, metal, ...). That kind of "jazz cafe" doesn't usually do live music though, so I'm a bit confused by the question.
Where I’m from, that implies nightly live jazz performances from relatively to extremely talented musicians. I have never been to Japan, so I was unaware that I probably am missing context.
While you're right that it's usually jazz kissas, the Sasebo bar[1] I mentioned had instruments for live playing - sort of like a mini-studio. Apparently some patrons might play rock there sometimes. But yes, I assume it was mostly about listening to recorded music.
The owner said that young people were leaving Sasebo for bigger cities with more work, so that was draining the vitality of the area. A common story all over Japan, as you probably know.
I've also been to jazz clubs in Japan and those are cool, but clearly a dying breed given the ages of the audience and most of the musicians. At a matinee at the historic Shinjuku Pit Inn, I think I was among the youngest members of the audience. Similar story at smaller, more intimate spots. It's just a declining trend with long-time regulars and not much new blood.
It’s interesting how many people wrongly assumed that a Japanese jazz bar (jazz kissa) with recorded music was the same as a Western smoky jazz bar with live music.
Assumption is such a weirdly human anti-pattern.
1. It’s surprising we as humans don’t walk right into a Lemmings like disaster and massacre ourselves.
2. I highly doubt that HN is more or less enlightened but I do wonder if HN is more or less likely to have dissenting, informative, fact checking voices compared to let’s say a boar hunting forum
The joy of dagashi is its playfulness, whether that be the toys or prizes they come with, the chance to win a second free snack, the colourful designs, their interactiveness and the imitation of other foods. Commenting on the taste is kind of missing the point. And 7/11 happens to sell a ton of dagashi too...
Yeah, most of these things are extremely processed low quality stuff, very high in salt/sugar and additives.
Even for the interesting snacks like dried calamari or candied kelp for instance, you'd have far better options buying from a normal supermarket.
It's a huge contrast with the anonymous, impersonal service you get in big cities and chain stores; a similar anonymity you get all over the world wherever poorly-paid workers don't have a stake in the businesses they work for. The difference is a profit motive versus simply enjoying a practice or being a place for community. Both get shoehorned into the concept of a "business", but they're worlds apart. And in a climate of increasing rents, individualistic places tend to die out, barring the occasional dagashi vendor that manages to reignite community interest in its offerings.