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

Free yourself

Underlying the continuing club boom in Tokyo are shifting cultural attitudes among the young, an accompaniment to the prolonged recessional economics in Japan. Related in part to their disillusionment with the ascetic life of familial obligations and arduous employment, young people are working less, living off their parents at home longer, having a family later, and determined to become part of a global leisure culture by spending a good part of their highly disposable income on clubs and fashion. In a strongly group-based society, dance clubs have become an important means for Japanese people to start to express themselves individually, notes Yoko Ichikawa of Space Lab Yellow. What you wear and how you dance count in a club. "Many Japanese people once preferred karaoke to clubbing," she says, citing the now-declining group sing-along industry in which companies oncc entertained. In the 1990s, Ichikawa used to hang out at Gold in Tokyo's Shibaura neighborhood, but Gold and its competitors used to he considered very eccentric and were definitely "not for everyone," she recalls. "The same small group of people was everywhere."

That has changed. Now nightclubs provide a vibrant forum in which Japanese people can expand their global horizons and express, or at least discover, their unique personalities. What was once a niche-oriented, underground club scene financed by small-scale independent investors is today a rapidly growing corporate domain, a lucrative empire being built on a synthesis of music, fashion, international product branding and multinational record sales. In Tokyo, the party's only just begun.

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28 YEAR-OLD SABI Takahashi, who earned a degree in advertising from New York University, became head producer of Shibuya's Womb nightclub in March of 2000. He quickly rose to the top of his trade, generating big business with what he calls a "total" club concept.

Takahashi met his Womb co-producer, Takeo Yatabe, in New York in the late 1990s. Yatabe was studying for a business degree at Baruch College, but found the time after-hours to join Takahashi in staging multimedia parties at Twilo, which at the time was New York's biggest and hippest nightclub.

While working as an intern with the Hokuhodo Advertising Agency--the second largest in Japan--during his final year at NYU, Takahashi came up with the idea of using club culture to promote leading edge Japanese fashion and technology brands, including Sony, Issey Miyake and Final Home. He successfully promoted this club marketing concept at Twilo during the 1999 New York Spring Fashion Collection, and went on to become the first Japanese producer of regular nights at the Manhattan club.

In New York, Takahashi also became a de facto agent for state-of-the-art Phazon sound systems. He negotiated the installation of a Phazon system at Womb, and was then approached by Womb management to run its nightly operations.

In three short years, Takahashi and Yatabe have not only turned Womb into the one of the most popular dance clubs in Tokyo, but they have also established a new ground zero for youth culture marketing. Targeting pichimasu (between mass and underground) culture, the Womb producers developed a marketing consultancy--Form, Inc--which is attracting the giants of corporate Japan by giving them access to a cutting-edge market demographic: urban youth.