For me, Ginza and Yurakucho

For me, Ginza and Yurakucho belong to the years roughly between 1965 and 1970. That was after I entered high school, and then university. Before that, it was a place my mother would take me to—somewhere you dressed up a little to go out.

My mother had grown up as the daughter of a Western bookbinding shop in Kanda, one that specialized in foreign-language books. Born in the first year of the Shōwa era, she spent her formative teenage years in a time of upheaval. Perhaps that unusual environment—surrounded by foreign texts even in those years—shaped her tastes and character quite deeply. She spoke English with ease, enjoyed Western music and films, and was perfectly at home with Western food. Even after my father, who had worked for the GHQ, passed away, her Western-style way of living never changed.

When I was in junior high, a girl I was seeing asked me, “What kind of music do you like?” I panicked and blurted out, “J-j-jazz.” Right after saying it, I rushed to Yamano Music and bought Jimmy Smith’s album *The Cat*. I remember playing it on my mother’s record player, only for her to give a faint, amused snort and say, “Oh? That’s quite a stylish choice you’ve picked.” I had bought that EP out of sheer embarrassment, so I turned red on the spot. But after a while, she gave me some pocket money and said, “Why don’t you go to Yamano and get a different record? I’ll put this one in the jukebox at the bar.” And somehow, that’s how I ended up taking on the role of picking out EPs for the jukebox.

Looking back, the bar my mother ran at the foot of Kachidoki must have been a place frequented by people working in Ginza—musicians among them. She had worked for many years in a Ginza cabaret after my father passed away, so it made sense. Among the regulars, there was a foreigner who spoke remarkably fluent Japanese. I often overheard people calling him “Conde-san.” Only later, after I entered high school and started playing in bands at Ginza cabarets and clubs myself, did I realize that he was Raymond Conde. Our place had the bar on the first floor and our living space upstairs, so there was always jazz drifting up from below.

Not long after entering high school, I began frequenting a place called “Mama” in the Yurakucho Subaru Arcade. In a way, it felt like a natural path I was bound to take.

It really was a different time. A high school kid could walk into a jazz café straight after school, still in uniform, and no one would question it. In that smoke-filled space, I would sit for two hours and twenty minutes over a 130-yen cup of coffee, bathed in the powerful sound coming out of ALTEC speakers. At a cramped table, half-distracted by the small brown cockroaches scurrying about, I would jot down notes on the records being played, study for exams, or write down impressions of films I had seen at ATG.