Late-Night Body Temperatures and Shinjuku's Contours: A Place Called Jazz in the 1970s

Late-Night Body Temperatures and Shinjuku's Contours: A Place Called Jazz in the 1970s

The scene in the magazine is a night of drinking with jazz near Shokuhan Dori. It is important to note that the location is Shinjuku. The Shinjuku Pit Inn, which opened between 1965 and 1966, became a base for absorbing the modern and avant-garde in Japan, and from the late 1960s through the 1970s, Shinjuku was an urban laboratory where sounds and people swirled. The interior of the store was designed to prioritize music, with seating lined up in front of the stage. The space, later called Tokyo's Village Vanguard, was a magnetic field where conversations swayed in time with the reverberations of the music.

At the same time, jazz cafes spread throughout Japan as places to listen to music, reaching their peak in the 1970s. On the one hand, there was the purity of listening to the loud playback of records, and on the other hand, there was the nurturing of a live music club culture where one could immerse oneself in live music along with sake. Shinjuku nights were a place where these two contexts overlapped.

The store name notation Body and Soul that appears in the magazine may be a result of the way it was written at the time, or of memory lapses. The long-established Body and Soul in Tokyo was founded in 1974 and was located in Minami-Aoyama for a long time before moving to Shibuya, where it was a base for musicians from Japan and abroad to gather as a representative club in Japan. Since it was not located near Shokuhan-dori, it is reasonable to assume that the text refers to a different club or a change in the name of the club. In any case, the context is consistent with the fact that jazz clubs with drinks were established in various parts of Tokyo.

Shokuan Dori itself was an artery that characterized the living area on the north side of Shinjuku in the 1970s. A zainichi community began to form in the Shin-Okubo area in the late 1960s, and in the 1970s, Shokuan Dori became a hub for traffic, including financial institutions. Even before the later transformation of Shin-Okubo into a Korean town, there were already signs of a nightlife district where multiculturalism intersected. The jazz music that one could listen to while sipping a glass near this street corresponded to these urban changes.

To expand the historical background just one step further, Shinjuku in the mid-1970s became a subcenter of the city, and the development of pedestrian spaces further expanded the flow of people. The opening in 1975 of an underground connecting passageway around the station and the increased circulation of the city, including nighttime comings and goings, encouraged live music clubs and bars to flourish. These are the times when a store name written in the corner of a page becomes a bookmark in the memory of the city as it is.

In short, the conversation rolling along at the same level as the rim of the glass that this passage conveys is the very cultural history of the places to listen that Shinjuku fostered in the 60s and 70s. The stage was the supreme place symbolized by the pit-in, the intensive listening at jazz cafes, and the places where one could savor the sound with sake. Inhaling the night air of Shokuan Dori, the words of literary figures mingled with the reverberations of sound, echoing the urban sentiment of 1970s Tokyo.