Late-Night Body Temperatures and Shinjuku Contours: The Place of Jazz in the 1970s, 1965-1979

Late-Night Body Temperatures and Shinjuku Contours: The Place of Jazz in the 1970s, 1965-1979

A section of the magazine captures an evening of writers enjoying a drink with jazz near Shokuhan Dori, where the Shinjuku Pit Inn, established in 1965-1966, served as the nucleus of Shinjuku's transformation into a "place to listen" city in the late 1960s and 1970s, attracting the forefront of modern and free music. The jazz cafes submerged in loud records and the live music and drinking live house culture overlapped, and words rolled at the same height as the clink of glasses on the rim. The surrounding Shokuan-dori Avenue, the northern artery of this multicultural intersection, was opened in the mid-1970s with the opening of an underground passageway, which further enhanced the nighttime traffic. The atmosphere of the era in which jazz stores sprang up in various parts of Tokyo is precipitated in even a single line of proper nouns, including the shakiness of the store names that can be seen in the text. In the margins of the pages, reverberations of sound and memories of t
he city overlap. In Shin-Okubo, a zainichi community grew up in the late 1960s, and the nightlife in the Shokuan-dori neighborhood was mixed with the language and food smells of other places. The stores of the same era, though in different locations, such as the long-established BODY&SOUL established in 1974 in Minami-Aoyama, connect the dots in Tokyo and shape the city of ears, Tokyo. The conversation in the work continues to sway in that network, as if in chorus with the aftermath of the performance.