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 is a night of drinking with jazz near Shokuhan Dori. 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.

As for the store name notation Body and Soul that appears in the book, it is possible that it was written at the time or that my memory is shaky. The long-established Body and Soul in Tokyo was established in 1974 and was located in Minami-Aoyama for a long time before moving to Shibuya, where it was one of the leading clubs in Japan, attracting musicians from Japan and abroad. 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 the bustle of live music clubs and bars. These are the times when the name of a restaurant becomes a bookmark in the memory of the city as it is.

The stage supreme symbolized by the pit-in, the concentrated listening of jazz cafes, and the stores where one can savor the sounds along with the drinks. Inhaling the night air of Shokuan Dori, the words of literary figures mingled with the lingering sounds, echoing the urban sentiment of 1970s Tokyo.