Memories, melancholy and all that jazz

When James Catchpole and I meet in Jazz Eagle, a basement cafe in central Tokyo's Yotsuya neighborhood, our conversation is squashed within seconds.

As a New Yorker and a Northern Irishman, perhaps we are preternaturally loud for such contemplative surroundings. But the barman explains that it's merely the cafe's policy: no conversation before 6 p.m. Any customers arriving before then are, in theory, here for the solitude and the music.

It’s still only 5:30 p.m. and zero conversation isn’t conducive to a first meeting, so Catchpole and I spend the next 30 minutes whispering in hushed tones. We break for the odd sip of beer or handful of nuts while a turntable churns out saxophone riffs, throbbing bass chords and drumsticks dancing atop the symbols.

This drowns out much of the whispering, but I do hear Catchpole explain this much:

"If I was to describe what I'm doing with these places, it’s documenting them."

As far as jazz scenes go, Japan’s is pretty singular. Growing organically in the wake of World War II, as American pop culture bled increasingly into the Japanese mainstream, cafes and bars where people could listen to imported jazz records became a fad for city dwellers.

In the 1960s, legends of the genre — from Art Blakey to Ray Brown — performed in Japan and were treated like heroes. For Black musicians, this stood in stark contrast to their native United States, where segregation and racial discrimination were part of the quotidian condition of their existences. This naturally made jazz a countercultural music, which dovetailed with the student upheavals and anti-government protests of Tokyo at that time.

Japan’s jazz scene hit an apex in the 1970s, when Tokyo’s downtown neighborhoods were awash in jazz “kissa,” short for the Japanese word for cafe, “kissaten.” There were more than 250 in the capital alone — even Haruki Murakami owned one called Peter Cat in Kokubunji.

A writer, broadcaster, DJ and podcast host, who has written for The Japan Times on occasion, Catchpole has been exploring Japan’s jazz scene for more than two decades. His documenting began in earnest in 2007 when he established Tokyo Jazz Site, a guide to and directory of the jazz bars, clubs and cafes still in business in the greater Tokyo area.

“It’s my life’s project in a way,” he says. “Some people dive deep into the world of washoku (Japanese cuisine), others martial arts, or cosplay or anime. For me, it's Japanese jazz joints.”

It wasn’t until some years later that his jazz project started to take on a different dimension, crystallizing a clearer vision of how to encapsulate these places for posterity.

That’s when Philip Arneill, a Belfast-born photographer and educator who spent 20 years in Japan before returning to Northern Ireland, entered the fray.

Arneill and Catchpole had already crossed paths, most significantly while the former was exhibiting photo portraits of U.K. jazz dancers in Japan around 2011. Then in 2014, Arneill was sitting in Hello Dolly, an antique jazz bar in Kyoto’s Pontocho district, when he was struck by an idea: Maybe I should start shooting some of these places.

Knowing that Catchpole was a fellow jazz enthusiast and already had a digest site with information on Japan’s jazz kissa, Arneill arranged to meet him at Jazz Blues Soul (JBS) in Shibuya. Inside the wood-paneled bar, walls stacked high with dusty LPs, the two set in motion plans for a photo project — Tokyo Jazz Joints.

Things officially commenced a few months later at Pithecanthropus Erectus, a small bar in Tokyo’s Kamata neighborhood.

It was closed when they arrived, so Catchpole and Arneill went for a drink to kill some time. They both had the feeling that if Pithecanthropus hadn’t been open when they returned later in the evening, the project would have ended before it started. They knew it would be labor-intensive, they would be paying for everything out of their own pockets, and both had jobs and livelihoods that would invariably get in the way.

“But it really just gathered momentum from there,” Arneill says. “The whole point of the project was to preserve these places.”

Over the next three years, they visited more than 160 jazz kissa across the country, each with its own distinct flavor and sepia-tinged lore. There was a bar that once served drinks to the famous saxophonist Sonny Rollins, another whose owner had a series of old contact sheets from photos he’d taken at John Coltrane’s only concert in Japan in 1966, and another in the depths of Tohoku called Ray Brown after the double bassist who’d attended the owner’s wedding.

Though Arneill was the photographer on the project, he insists it was an entirely collaborative effort. Catchpole would join him on lengthy sojourns into the hinterlands, organize trip timetables and call bars to check if they were open or still in business — never a guarantee in an industry of octogenarian proprietors who’ve spent the past five decades clouded in cigarette smoke. This allowed his “partner in jazz” to focus on the photos, and Arneill wanted to make sure they were as organic as possible.

“None of the photos were staged, and I didn’t use a tripod or any flash, because we wanted to keep it quite close to what you’re experiencing as a customer,” he says.

Most owners were happy to be photographed themselves, Arneill adds, with one notable exception — the owner of a place in Tokyo who said he’d rather not be photographed because “it would take a little bit of his soul away.”

Arneill and Catchpole had long harbored ideas of turning Tokyo Jazz Joints into a photobook, especially after listeners of their podcast — established in 2020 and also called Tokyo Jazz Joints — encouraged them to do so.

In March last year, Arneill sent out around 20 proposals, receiving a positive reply from German photobook publisher Kehrer Verlag six months later. Kehrer Verlag had one condition though: the book would have to be co-funded. So to cover their side of the publishing costs, Arneill and Catchpole launched a Kickstarter that gained 601 backers pledging more than €60,000 (¥8.7 million) combined.

“The advantage of a Kickstarter is that rather than raising money to make a book, we’re raising money by selling the book,” Arneill says. “We’re hopeful that by the start of May we’re able to send the books out to all the people who have helped support the campaign ... we never imagined that it would be quite so successful.”

Copies of “Tokyo Jazz Joints” — which will include color photos of around 120 kissa alongside an essay from both contributors — will be available after all the Kickstarter copies have been delivered. Then Kehrer Verlag retains worldwide distribution rights for future print runs.

Much like the joints themselves, the book will serve as a time capsule. Musical tastes have changed, while struggling to make ends meet as a jazz cafe proprietor holds little allure for job seekers. As such the number of kissa continues on its downward trajectory: Tokyo has lost 100 or so over the past half century — around two every year — and some included in the project have since played their final track.

“There’s a sense of melancholy at these places, in and of themselves,” Arneill says. “But the goal wasn’t to visit every single place. It was to try and capture as many as possible before they disappear.”

Catchpole has more of a completist attitude, using the word "obsessive" on several occasions to describe his Japan jazz journey. But while he wants to visit every kissa in the country, and is making good headway with the endeavor, he hasn’t lost sight of why he started all this in the first place.

“Japan and Japanese history taught me much about impermanence,” he says. “Every moment spent in (a jazz joint) is indeed tinged with a slight bit of sadness that it could be gone soon. But that's also what makes the moment so wonderful.”