Voices at the Well, The Backstory of Shinjuku - 1990s to 2000s

Voices at the Well, The Backstory of Shinjuku - 1990s to 2000s

When I think back to those days in Kabukicho, the first thing that comes to mind is the murmur of well-well meetings. People would gather at street corners at night and gossip would spread with the smoke of cigarettes. I would sit in the circle, listening carefully, and sometimes exchanging voices, listening to stories that would never appear on the surface. The phrase "statute of limitations is up, so expose them" was the watchword, and snippets of who paid whom, which hosts were connected to which organizations behind the scenes, or how the yakuza and police were changing, spilled out in laughter and shouts of outrage.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, people around me who had lost their full-time jobs began to drift into night work. My friends who entered the sex industry poured their earnings into the entertainment business and proudly told me, "This is the proof of my existence," as they watched the champagne towers rise night after night. However, many of them later disappeared, driven by debt. My fellow hosts also went to backroom casinos, dreaming of a quick turnaround, and found themselves mired in debt and being collected by the yakuza. As I listened to these stories, I could feel the fear that lay behind the laughter.

Furthermore, although the Yakuza had disappeared from the scene due to the tightening of the Violence Against Women Act, the city had not become safer. Instead, the Chinese mafia and black touts gained momentum, and the chaos became rather thick. Residents blurted out, "It used to make more sense," and while I nodded my head in agreement, I was aware that order was indeed breaking down.

The conversation at the well was a mixture of exaggeration and falsehood. But I felt that these fragments of voices reflected the truth of the city. There was evidence of our lives that would never appear in the newspapers. Laughing confessions, regretful recollections, and shrugs, "It's the statute of limitations," all told the backstory of the Kabukicho district.

And even now, looking back, the murmur of those voices still lingers in my ears. For me, the well-wishers' meetings were not mere gossip, but a living record of the people who lived through the times, their body heat etched into the fabric of the town.