The night is still young: Tokyo's club scene pulses with recession-beating energy - Industry Overview - Cover Story

Japan, Inc., May, 2003 by Stuart Braun

Cover Story

IT'S 5 AM ON A Saturday morning and up to 1,000 people are continuing to dance ecstatically inside the sprawling concrete bunker in Shibuya, Central Tokyo. This is Womb, a four-level, subterranean super-club where big name, highly paid foreign DJs whip an electric crowd of 20- to 35-year-old students, workers, musicians, actors, models, fashionista and other brazenly beautiful people into a rhythmic frenzy under the biggest mirror ball in the country. The scene is about music, about dancing, about expression and letting go of workweek inhibitions. It's also the scene of a rapidly expanding, brand-based market niche.

Womb and the plethora of dance clubs that have risen from the ashes of Japan's crippling economic recession are the sites of a fertile new market, incubators for a potentially huge marketing demographic. People who go to clubs tend to be young, single, have good jobs (it costs up to [yen] 6,000 just to get into a Tokyo club) and spend a lot more money on clothes, cosmetics, alcohol, cigarettes and electronics than mom or dad would dream of doing. For every new club forming part of the conspicuous nightlife boom that has swept Tokyo in the last decade, there is another sponsor. Another corporation willing to spend big money to have its name associated with the cause celebre of club culture: freedom.

Tokyo's nightclub industry has undergone staggering growth since its birth a little more than 10 years ago amid the wreckage of Japan's burst economic bubble. At the time, the city had only two or three dedicated dance clubs and was still a town ruled by karaoke. But today, Tokyo is the Asian hub of the inter national club scene. Takashi Ishihara, CEO of Cluberria, a Tokyo club culture Web site (www.otaiweb.com/top/hp/clubberia.htm), says the expansion of the club industry has been exponential over the last two or three years. In Shibuya ward alone, up to 20 nightclubs have opened in that brief time span, including a lot of smaller bar/DJ venues that are forming the grassroots of the scene. Meanwhile, the opening of the 3,000-capacity Ageha "super-club" in Shin Kiba last December drove clubland's inevitable spread to the suburbs. One-off club nights at other far-flung venues like Chiba's 10,000-capacity Makuhari Messe, Odaiba's Differ Ariake and Zepp Tokyo predate this trend.

Popular foreign DJs can earn [yen] 5-10 million for a night in a packed Tokyo club. Even at the smaller clubs, DJs who were getting $1,000 a night 10 years ago are now demanding and getting five or six times that amount. That compares very favorably with major European cities, including London, still considered ground zero of the worldwide clubbing scene. Hard statistics are hazy due to the underground and clandestine nature of an industry long associated with drug use, illegal opening hours and sketchy safety standards (witness the stampede in an after-hours Chicago dance club in mid-February that killed 21 people and the inferno days later at a Rhode Island nightspot that left 99 dead.) still, it is generally acknowledged that a DJ playing a London super club such as the Ministry of Sound will have a pay scale that peaks at around 10-15,000 pounds (about [yen] 1.9-2.8 million) for a few hours in the DJ booth.

At Womb, the cost to put on the 2003 Countdown Party, featuring big name American and Swedish DJs Richie Hawtin and Sven Vath, was over [yen] 10 billion, according to Sabi Takahashi, the club's head producer. Cluberria's Ishihara says the market in Japan will continue to grow, while American clubs, which have started to slump in recent years due to restrictions and police crackdowns, are not as likely to sustain the big paychecks.

Club Inc.

Tokyo's rise to prominence as a second home for the DJ jet set was confirmed when AgeHa, now probably Tokyo's biggest club, opened with great fanfare and a lineup of world-class DJ talent last Christmas. AgeHa is the beachhead of a new club concept in Tokyo modeled on the synergy between corporate marketing and underground culture. Owned by Yasuhide Uno, the young, progressive, technology-savvy chairman of Usen, Japan's biggest digital radio network, AgeHa was created as a means to dictate music trends and to garner actual radio content from music played in the club. "This is exactly the sort of deal that we always hoped we would make as our company went forward," says a Usen source. "Uno has already built what he describes as the fastest fiber Net access cable network in Japan, and he has major record labels, including Sony and Avex, firmly locked in as content providers. "The whole idea behind Usen was to provide content, so we knew that we had to make deals with the leading creative influences in Japan." The Usen service includes 440 channels of music and WebTV. "Taken together," the source adds, "this brings us closer to providing the total service we were looking for when we became the very center of youth culture."

This New Year's, AgeHa featured New York house maestro Danny Teraglia, one of the world's most coveted DJs, in what Ishihara claims was a major coup (and undoubtedly a very expensive one).