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

After running a monthly party at Twilo, Takahashi was approached by the management of Womb, which was struggling to find a visionary concept of its own. "They were attracting about 150 people a night at that point," Takahashi recalls. "Now over 1,000 people are coming to the club on Fridays and Saturdays." The reason for the shift, says co-producer Takeo Yatabe, is that "we made a culture out of the club scene."

This culture embodies not only a night out dancing, but a complete urban lifestyle, including everything from what people drink, wear, listen to, think and shampoo their hair with in the morning. The concept was arguably first given life by the London club Ministry of Sound, which today refers to its club concept as a "dance brand." Its interests range from nightclubs--including its recently opened venue in Bangkok--to record production, magazines and festivals. In 2001, 3i, Europe's leading venture capitalist, invested 24 million pounds in this "dance brand."

In Japan, Takahashi has been able to sell this brand concept to Calvin Klein, Nike, Sony, liquor and cigarette companies, and others. These interests form a conspicuous presence in the club scene by sponsoring special promotions, getting their logos on all club publicity, or providing exclusive brands of beer and vodka. As a result, Takahashi has been able to spend more money on big name DJs, better lighting, promotion, decor and so on. This has been important in ensuring that Japan's fastidious, demanding and impatient youth generation are willing to buy into the culture and concepts.

Under the name Form, Takahashi and Yatabe have leveraged off Womb to expand into a "cool consultancy." In the parlance of Naomi Klein, author of the bible on corporate branding, No Logo, they are "cool hunters" who are giving corporate Japan direct access to a murky underground inhabited by a highly sought-after market demographic that could deliver explosive growth. Cluberria's Ishihara predicts that the Tokyo club industry will double its growth in the very near future.

Liquor and cigarette companies initially started to push their products to Japan's club generation about give years ago, when new legislation banned them from advertising to people under 20. Since you have to be over 20 to legally enter a club in Japan, clubs become the perfect forum for legitimate advertising to young people. (Advertisers know, of course, that many people under 20 are habitual clubbers who can easily get into the venues). Ishihara calls it a "closed world," a guaranteed market of self-selected consumers. Indeed, the rapid rise of tobacco sponsorship in clubs and bars since the 1990s globally has been well documented. Corporate sponsorship started conspicuously in Japan in 1996, notes Ishihara, when Grammy award-winning producer and DJ Little Louis Vega received an unprecedented [yen] 3 million from Gordon's Gin to spin his magic in a Tokyo club.

Though corporate sponsorship has long been a part of Europe's more established club scene, many European clubs are now actually moving in on Tokyo to grab a slice of the city's lucrative dance market. Recently, veteran London super-club Slinky took over an existing six-level venue called Cube in Tokyo's Tamachi district for three months, touting an international DJ lineup and the prerequisite high-profile sponsorship from a major cigarette brand.