There once was a Tokyo night empire called Ink Stick, which spawned a handful of cool jazz slash ambient slash progressive clubs around town. But this review has nothing to do with Ink Stick. It is about Shinichi Watanabe, who took over the space that the Nogizaka Ink Stick occupied. Even more than 10 years after the fact, I cannot go down those stairs and walk through that door without thinking about Ink Stick.
Watanabe-san did hang out there. He and the owner were good mates. But, then, there are few players with whom Watanabe-san did not hang as he rose through the ranks during Tokyo's disco and hostess club heyday. After the Vietnam War, Shinjuku -- not Roppongi -- was headquarters for jugheads on R&R. That's where Watanabe-san started working part-time, when he was still in high school, in a club called Harlem Pop.
Those were exciting times. Artists like James Brown toured in the slipstream created by the inflow of GIs. And that's when Watanabe-san decided to make mizu-shobai (the water trade) his life -- despite dad's attempts to fast-track him as a lawyer and his own dreams of becoming a movie director. "But, hey," Watamabe muses, "running a club is like directing a movie -- a different movie every night."