I had some fun nights in Tokyo; my second night Daisuke had booked an Arabian theme restaurant for dinner with friends, but when we turned up the restaurant had “disappeared” and there was a Kyoto-themed Japanese izaakaya in its place!
So we just ate there instead.
In fact we didn’t have much luck with restaurants in general. I had wanted to take Daisuke out to “Le Cocon”, a French restaurant in an angular cave in Shibuya (below) but it too had closed…sigh…
But we did have two great nights. One of them was spent on the Tokyo Bay Summer cruise, watching the city’s surprisingly pretty harbor lit up with its ferris wheels and bridges and floating neon Chinese restaurants and giant robots, and the “yukata girls” dancing hip hop moves on a kitschy stage, between Summer kimono fashion shows to a wildly inebriated and up-for-it crowd.
The other night was spent, of course, in the gayberhood of Nichome, drifting from bars where white dudes in underwear brought you drinks, to the crowded streets where Brazilian boys stood laughing and flirting on streetcorners, and crowds drifted around from Advocates to Dragon to the parties going on around the district. We had elected to go to “Arch”, a smoky, poky club holding a “Masquerade party” where the DJ for the night was – amazingly – former Japanese pop queen Suzuki Ami, once a million-selling J-pop superstar and now apparently a techno DJ (!!!) in small gay clubs.
Ami had come out at about the same time as Ayumi Hamasaki and the two were often considered rivals for the title of Japan’s new pop queen. But it all fell apart when Suzuki’s dad deciced to sue her record company – it emerged in court she had been receiving a paltry 0.44% royalty rate from her sales. Despite winning the case, she lost the war. Having broken one of the Japanese entertainment industry’s unwritten rules – you never, ever sue – Suzuki was effectively blacklisted and her career ran to a decade-long standstill, only broken with a recent, not entirely successful comeback attempt, a surprisingly odd collaboration with indie-rock-funk band Buffalo Daughter (bel0w) and her new DJ career.
The club was packed to the gills, with drag queens dressed like extravagant Marie Antoinettes and masked gogo boys thrusting on poles, but it was so smoky and so claustophobically crowded (it was almost impossible to dance) and the warm-up musaic was sooooo cheesy-gay-bad, that we left just as the star – Suzuki Ami – was being ushered into the crowd by security to cheers and whistles.
I heard afterwards from my friend Ryu who stayed that she DJed techno records with real passion in her eyes and did a pretty good job – she has gone up in my estimation!
In the milling crowd outside I met a friend with his new friend – Filipino fashion blogger Bryanboy. A mini-celebrity meeting to end the night!
