Guts and Glory in Tokyo’s Golden Gai
Guts and Glory in Tokyo’s Golden Gai
Last time I moved to Tokyo I landed in a sterile apartment with stark white walls, white floors, and white molded furniture. A runner curtain around the bed completed the mental institution effect. But, thanks to a byzantine bureaucracy loophole, rent was almost free, and I was a short bike ride from the labyrinth of tiny nomiya bars of Shinjuku Golden Gai, where I spent most of my nights drinking solo, but never alone. I’d emerge from the rabbit hole at blue-o-clock with my head pounding, liver aching, and eyeballs feeling like they were about to fall out after sitting in a steady-hanging haze of cheap cigarette smoke.
The dram shop denizens included chanson singers, unreconstructed radicals, famous photographers, blotto band leaders, cynical seen-it-all editors, theater troubadours, coquettish crossdressers, and others still holding on to the spirit of the 70s. I kept bottles on call at a few favorite places and played the role of the peanut-popping conehead foreigner that could keep your secret safe. My drink of choice was mugi-jôchû (distilled barley liquor), but some nights called for the house special Kanparon – a mix of shôchû, Campari, and oolong tea that’s better and stronger than it sounds and is well-suited to tapping out the tunes of Asakawa Maki and Yamasaki Hako.
For Golden Gai regulars, the done way to drink is hashigo-zake – literally “ladder liquor.” Bar-hopping but so much more, hashigo-zake is stumbling out a course from nook to cranny and carrying on a hundred conversations with a dozen not-quite-strangers until morning. Since most of the bars prefer familiar faces, sometimes a conversation partner will drag you along to the next spot on his list, so I didn’t hesitate when Narita, one of the other regulars at my favorite place, suggested we move along to the next bottle.
We ended up at the umpteenth narrow counter as the bar’s mama, a 1980s “pink film” (you figure it out) star poured drinks for patrons too far gone to leer very hard. Turns out Narita was a pink industry veteran too – as a student he got involved with some leftist revolutionaries that blew up a police station on Christmas Eve 1971 and ended up doing hard time. His permanent record left him all but unemployable save for as a sex film set gaffer.
Just as Narita wrapped up the tale of his turn from politics to porn, the proprietress proudly produced a present delivered by a regular recently returned from the deep north. It was squid ink shôchû, which smelled strongly of cephalopod, which, significantly, is associated with the scent of semen in Japan.
“Bottoms up boys! Take a taste of what I put up with for so many years,” the mama cackled. “But I’m happy how things turned out – now you men are paying me for the privilege of drinking this spermy stuff.” The taste was as advertised. Thankfully, though its rude to turn down a drink in Japan, there’s nothing in the social code about keeping it down.