Saturday was clear and hot, until it rained like hell and started steaming, and the agenda was for nothing but renting a car, doing some driving, and listening to American country music played by unironic Japanese men. And some women. If you don’t know what bluegrass is, this post is unlikely to change your life. […]
music
Woodman Instruments, Ochanomizu
Heavens. Just wandering around looking for a restaurant, I saw a little green sign with a guitar. It turned out that if you go into the nondescript little office building, the second floor is half taken up with one of the best guitar stores I’ve been to in Japan. Mostly acoustic…aside from the steels (lap, […]
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Rocky Top, Ginza
Japan is a strange and wonderful place. Hidden subcultures about – usually these only peek out for a moment when some intrepid foreign journalist comes to town and writes a story about a colorful character in one of them. You read it, you think it’s interesting, and you forget about it. I started playing music […]
Rock Inn, Shinjuku
The latest in a continuing but rare series of posts (this is the second one, isn’t it?) about guitar stores. Rock Inn has a few stores around Shinjuku, with the main two right across from each other in the alleys of 3-chome behind Mitsukoshi (I say this to remind myself for next time). They have […]
Body and Soul, Minami Aoyama
Not strictly food. In fact, not very food at all. In fact, the food looks kinda crappy. But they have food, and plenty of drinks, and this is a nice thing in a tiny basement jazz club in out-of-the way Aoyama. Out-of-the-way means out-of-the-way. They have a big neon sign, but due to the vagaries […]