Japanese club life is in its' infancy

I really love Japan, and I love a really good club. But I’m having a hard time making the two mix. Granted my experience of Japans club life is that of a “tourist” and I haven’t had a chance to thoroughly investigate it, but by my experience so far, Japanese people don’t like to dance.

The few clubs we’ve been to here have all played only western music. No japanese hip-hop, no japanese pop, no japanese nothing. The clubs in themselves are actually very good, they pay attention to detail in decorating, the sound systems are good, the lighting is good. The DJs are much better than in Sweden. Take this clip from Club Atom in Shibuya as example.

You couldn’t get that kind of music in southern Sweden at all.

What bugs me about the club life here though is that they add chairs and tables everywhere, making the dance floor as small as possible.

Japanese people (I think) are used to bars and pubs, those are everywhere, they have a lot of bars and pubs. But they’re not used to dancing and partying in a western way, they’re not used to a dance floor. So to sort of mix the idea of a club and a bar, they put chairs and tables everywhere inside the club.

Don’t get me wrong, a nice club has places to sit and rest for 5-10 minutes, but you don’t go to a club to sit down.

I say that Japanese club life is in it’s infancy because I think the whole concept is rather new to Japan. I think they need to start playing some Japanese music and ditch the chairs to make people dance!

This video is from the club we went to last night. Club Muse, it was a really cool place and super nice, the bottom floor played the kind of music you hear the first 10 seconds, the last 20 seconds are what made it kind of weird, they had a lot of that stuff and sort of 90s music and several years old American hip hop.

Another thing about clubs here are that they are pretty hard to find and have sort of anonymous entrances. This was the entrance to Muse:

I can’t really decide if the anonymous entrance is good or bad though, anonymous entrance = less tourists. And maybe the really good clubs don’t have a sign at all, which makes it impossible to find without connections. That would explain some things.