Mastering the art of deep listening in Japan
In the warm glow of the country’s jazz cafés, a subculture of vinyl aficionados is cultivating the kind of shared sensory experiences that our noisy world has forgotten.
On a Saturday afternoon, we navigated the narrow streets of Shimokitazawa, a trendy Tokyo neighborhood, in search of something we’d only seen on Instagram. Shoppers hunted for vintage T-shirts, women tested lipstick shades in storefront windows, and the smell of lunch-counter curries wafted through the air. We were looking for a sign.
When we finally spotted the unassuming placard, we climbed a narrow stairwell to a windowless door. A gentle knock and we stepped into an intimate oasis, a wood-paneled room decorated with beaded curtains and a painting of jazz harpist Alice Coltrane. Seated couples faced two enormous speakers with prayerful attention. A turntable spun. The bell-like chime of a vibraphone, the reedy huff of a saxophone, and the delicate patter of drums radiated through the room. The only other sounds were the tinkle of cups and an occasional whisper.
A smiling woman seated us, offering a menu that came with instructions: “We ask that you speak in a low voice in our store.”
We were at Masako, a jazz kissa, or café, where music isn’t just in the background: Listening to records is the featured event. Hundreds of kissas are scattered across Japan, and Masako is a quintessential example. Founded in 1953, it once hosted Charles Mingus and Mal Waldron during their tours of Japan. Current owner Moeko Hayashi took over the space in 2020 after inheriting the record and art collections of the café’s late founder and namesake, Masako Okuda. Hayashi had discovered the café as a teenager in the 1980s, drawn by its loud jazz and stacks of manga comics. She assumed kissas were foreign at first. “I thought Japan was copying that,” she said.
Jazz kissas are a purely Japanese invention. Originating in the late 1920s, and popular throughout the ’60s and ’70s, they went into decline as home audio systems became more accessible. But the past decade has seen a surge of interest in the jazz cafés from young record collectors and audiophiles. In an age when music is a digital utility piped in through earbuds, visiting kissas has become popular among music fans in Japan and something of a pilgrimage for Westerners like me—all of us looking for a chance to experience listening as an act of veneration, appreciation, and fellowship.
I first discovered kissas through an Instagram account, @jazz_kissa, which has become the most influential interpreter of a subculture that’s largely unknown, even to many Japanese. With the aid of Google Translate, I befriended its creator, 66-year-old Katsumasa Kusunose, a former magazine editor who has visited more than 400 kissas and become the leading authority on these establishments.
Originally from Shikoku island, Kusunose dropped out of university in Tokyo to spend his days at Mozu, a kissa founded in 1955. “The best jazz café experience isn’t about going once and feeling something,” he said. “It’s about going every day for a week, or months, or even years and getting to know the place.” Mozu’s owner, Yuko Sugano, became Kusunose’s mentor. “I went there until she passed away, so I attended her funeral and visited her grave,” he said.
With Kusunose as our guide, photographer Tim Davis and I visited two dozen kissas, from venerable spots in Tokyo, to Thee Coffee, a next-generation kissa located in a remote village north of Kyoto that roasts its own coffee and spins avant-garde jazz. We encountered, in the back streets and alleys of Japan, an entirely different way of listening, complete with its own customs and layers of history.
At Masako, Hayashi performed the kissa master’s traditional ritual of selecting records. She does this from noon to 10 p.m., six days a week—for a crowd weaned on cell phones and TikTok. On a typical day, she said, “a sense of unity arises,” even when no one is talking.
As we became engrossed in the music (Nublues by vibraphonist Joel Ross), every note seemed italicized by our collective attention, a quasi-monastic focus usually reserved for meditation retreats. That “sense of unity” has some scientific basis: Research shows that listening to music together creates measurable synchronization in brain waves, which correlates with social bonding.
Kissa culture grew out of shared fandom. The first café, Blackbird, opened in 1929 near the University of Tokyo, inspired by the American jazz that had only recently arrived on cruise ships anchored off port cities like Yokohama. The Japanese government banned American culture during World War II, but jazz resurfaced after the war ended, when U.S. servicemen stationed on air bases near Tokyo in the 1950s brought records over from the States.
Early kissas served a practical purpose: Few jazz artists toured Japan until the 1960s, and imported LPs were prohibitively expensive. Owners curated collections and became educators—senseis—introducing jazz to a new generation. The kissa renaissance went into high gear after Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ “Moanin’” became an unlikely hit (followed by Blakey’s celebrated tour of Japan in January 1961). The cafés sprouted nationwide, more than 800. Novelist Haruki Murakami famously wrote his first three novels while operating his own bar, Peter Cat, from 1974 to 1981.
Traditional kissas showcase 1950s and ’60s jazz; others toggle between old and modern, mixing in Brazilian, French chanson, even tango. Café Lion was established in 1926 for listening to classical music. Instead of spinning single tracks, as DJs do, most kissa owners play entire sides of LPs. Some we met with spoke of kūki o yomu—“reading the air” or discerning the vibe. “I look at the customer’s face first,” said Shoichi Suzuki, the owner of Genius, in Tokyo, who cued up a record by saxophonist Benny Golson during our visit.
Masahiro Goto, a jazz critic who opened the sleekly designed Eagle in 1967, leaves nothing to chance. He maintains handwritten notebooks with precise song orders drawn from sequences of four related records. “Japanese comics have four panels ... don’t they?” he said. “I understand the structure of a story.” He even published a methodology book called Jazz Music Selection Guide: Secrets to Listening to a 4-Album Set. “This didn’t sell at all,” he laughed.
No two kissas are alike, each an expression of its owner’s personality. Jazz in Rokudenashi, in Kyoto, is a cavelike bar with a punk aesthetic, where drummer Naohisa Yokota plays Thelonious Monk while customers chat over cigarettes and whisky. Downbeat, founded in Yokohama in 1956 and now run by 40-year-old Shuhei Yoshihisa, is a virtual museum wallpapered in yellowing pages from Downbeat magazine. Miyoko Hayashi (no relation to Masako’s Moeko) opened Jazz Spot Candy in Chiba City, just outside Tokyo, to venerate her favorite artists, like Keith Jarrett and John Coltrane.
Kissa owners are sometimes called otaku—geeks with obsessive interests. Alongside jazz cafés are ongaku (music) kissas devoted to rock, classical, or Brazilian genres. In Tokyo a bar called Slow Hand plays only Eric Clapton’s output from 1968 to 1972.
What they all share is a cultural understanding gleaned from the elders of the kissa scene, masters who established the rituals that define the experience today. The most important was Hozumi Nakadaira, a photographer who founded Dig in Tokyo in 1961. Dig became legendary for establishing a strict no-talking rule. Nakadaira played records at high volume as customers bowed their heads like monks. He even dimmed the lights and darkened windows with tape to encourage maximum concentration. So strange was the atmosphere that Tokyo police grew suspicious. “They’d bring light meters and say, ‘It’s below the required level,’ ” recalled Suzuki, who served as Nakadaira’s understudy and record selector at Dig in the 1960s. The police asked him if customers were sleeping. “No, they’re listening,” he said. “Look at their feet moving.”
When we visited Genius, the kissa Suzuki opened in 1970, the spry 84-year-old recalled the arrival of Coltrane’s 1965 album A Love Supreme in Japan. He was the first to play it at Dig: “The customers didn’t move at all. We even brought out extra chairs.”
(Two months after our visit, Suzuki passed away. “His son was glad you interviewed him one last time,” Kusunose later told me.)
Dig’s fans started their own cafés—Garo, Disk, Bird, Jazz Street 56—and distinguished themselves with sophisticated sound systems. Others, like Yoshida Masahiro, built custom equipment. At Eigakan, his roughly 50-year-old kissa in an alley in Tokyo’s Bunkyo City, Masahiro showed off wood horn speakers that he designed and cut from Japanese ash. The ornate, steampunk-like inventions loomed over his hobbit-size café, enveloping customers in Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s sonorous saxophone. Looking like a tinker in spectacles and suspenders, Masahiro, 79, gave us a close-up look at his handmade amplifier, the vacuum tubes glowing behind the counter. He has likened listening to jazz in a kissa to “a religious experience.”
The balance between listening and socializing sparked debate in Tokyo’s kissa scene. Nakadaira opened a sister kissa, Dug, in 1967 to allow for talking. By then, some kissas served as meeting spots for university students, many of whom opposed the American war in Vietnam. Protesters viewed Black jazz artists as civil rights avatars. Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” became famous in Japan. “Jazz was directly linked to political movements. They were one and the same,” said Tadafumi Kumashiro, owner of Yamatoya, which opened in Kyoto in 1970. “That’s why students came, because they wanted to drink and talk.”
On a bright day in Tokyo, filmmaker Nick Dwyer—who has spent a decade documenting kissas for a forthcoming film series called A Century in Sound—took us to Silencio, a neighborhood kissa so tiny that talking would be conspicuous. The nonbinary proprietor, Ara, sized us up and put on a rare 1967 album by Brazilian singers Caetano Veloso and Gal Costa. Two feathery voices singing in Portuguese over plucked nylon strings floated from mid-century JBL speakers, too beautiful to dare speak over. We caught each other’s surprised glances and experienced what the Japanese call tori hada—chicken skin.
There is a peculiar magic to experiencing music in a kissa, an atmospheric attention that imbues a piano solo with imminence and surprise, like watching fireworks together. A 2022 study in the journal Brain Sciences described the phenomenon as “musical synchrony,” suggesting that collective listening “decreases the experience of self-other distinction, and can relate to a sense of communal identity.”
Academic language can’t quite capture what happens in the room, which is why Westerners are showing up in increasing numbers. Dwyer has become an ambassador for English speakers interested in sampling the scene, showing around high-profile visitors like former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern and filmmaker Roman Coppola. Musician André 3000 held a listening party for his 2023 flute record at Callas Tokyo, a café operated by violin luthier Isao Izutsu.
Kusunose, our guide, first began hearing from Instagram followers outside Japan in 2017, starting with a Los Angeles hi-fi enthusiast. When his social media following spiked to 20,000, he began publishing picture books of the kissas he visited. Last year, he published his largest documentary project: a hardcover coffee-table book called Jazz Kissa.
A Brief Guide to Great Kissas
Step back in time at Yamatoya, which has cozy Shōwa-era-style interiors, floor-to-ceiling shelves of vinyl records, and coffee brewed with fresh spring water.
Eagle, Tokyo
At Eagle, talking is prohibited until 6 p.m., at which point founder Masahiro Goto allows light conversation inside his sleek, 59-year-old wood-trimmed lounge.
Downbeat, Yokohama
Downbeat is split between a smoky back bar and a listening room with mammoth movie-theater speakers blasting everything from bebop to contemporary jazz at high volume.
Kissa Kissa, Brooklyn, New York
The first traditional jazz kissa in the U.S. has an upscale vibe with more than 5,000 LPs and a menu of inventive cocktails incorporating flavors like yuzu, shiso, and pandan.
Shibuya Hi-Fi, Seattle, Washington
Patrons remove their shoes at this neighborhood lounge and sink into plush seating for an experience the founders call a “mental reset” from streaming-music algorithms.
Learning to Listen in Japan
Kissa-inspired listening bars have sprung up across the United States and Europe, though the intimacy of a Japanese kissa can be difficult to translate, especially where collective listening and public quietude are harder to achieve. In L.A., Gold Line advertises itself as a record bar with high-end speakers and vinyl, but a typical Friday finds roaring crowds and thumping music like at any nightclub. All Blues, in New York, serves $20 cocktails and encourages reservations for its listening room, where DJs play records through audiophile speakers. An online music community called In Sheep’s Clothing Hi-Fi promises curated hi-fi listening experiences at pop-up events in L.A.
A critical piece of the kissa experience, though, is cultural: Japanese social codes cede individual expression to collective good. On the other hand, Masako’s Hayashi told me, tourists often understand kissa history and protocol better than many Japanese because they learned about it online and want to experience the real thing. I could relate.
At Tónlist, a bright Tokyo dinerette, patrons can enjoy contemporary jazz with a side of Icelandic-style hot dogs (tónlist is Icelandic for “music”). But it’s not just food that owner Yuya Uno, 49, a car designer by day, hopes people come for—he wants his kissa to emphasize “how fantastic good sound is.” When Uno played vibraphonist Sasha Berliner through vintage Tannoy speakers, the music was breathtakingly clear—among the finest we heard in Japan.
When I praised his speakers, Uno smiled and said the best sound system in Japan actually belongs to a kissa called Basie, located in the postindustrial city of Ichinoseki, four hours north of Tokyo. Jazz legend Count Basie, who inspired the kissa’s name, gave the owner, Shoji “Swifty” Sugawara, his nickname, and visited the kissa in 1980. Drummer Elvin Jones and his band played the club every New Year’s for a decade.
Basie has been closed since the pandemic, but Sugawara, 83 and retired, agreed to open for National Geographic. The occasion was so rare that Uno asked to join our pilgrimage, which included Kusunose and superfan Michikazu “Mitch” Yanagawa, whose shaven head and bearded chin gave him the appearance of a monk.
Our entourage of otaku entered Sugawara’s spacious, wood-paneled club on a rainy day. The place was lined with thousands of records and decorated with signed photographs from Elvin Jones and Freddie Hubbard. A row of benches faced two speakers, each the size of a refrigerator, custom-made by Sugawara in the 1970s.
Sugawara welcomed us sporting an elegant suit and sunglasses, hair coiffed in a 1950s style. With an impish smile, he said that he wears shades indoors because he’s “shy.” A former big band drummer, Sugawara spent the ’60s skipping classes at Waseda University to hang out at kissas, including Dig. In 1970, he returned home and converted an old storehouse that belonged to his family into a kissa, experimenting with hi-fi and building his record collection.
It was in this very room that his obsession began. Sitting on tatami mats as a teenager, he wired two speakers to a record player and listened to The Five Pennies, the 1959 duet album by Danny Kaye and Louis Armstrong. “That was the most intense experience,” he said. “Danny’s voice came from one side, and Satchmo’s from the other, with a girl’s voice in between. I thought, ‘Stereo is amazing!’ ”
Resolutely old-school, Sugawara still uses a fax machine, situated behind a large round table where he holds court like a Japanese version of Tony Soprano. Under a low lamp, Sugawara was surrounded by his younger disciples, including Taichi Sato, a Tokyo audio expert who wore a homemade T-shirt featuring the electronic components inside Sugawara’s speakers.
After drinks, our host motioned us to the benches facing his speakers and retreated to a hidden booth. He cued up Four and More, Miles Davis’s live album. When “So What” came on, it was explosively loud—as realistic and clear as the concert must have sounded at Lincoln Center in 1964. Tony Williams’s drums crashed into the room. Davis’s trumpet leaped from the speakers like a virtual hologram on an invisible stage. Sato rocked gently, drawing on his cigarette. Sugawara smiled from afar.
Listening together, we formed an impromptu fellowship, the music dissolving language and cultural barriers. This was what we came for, the essence of the kissa experience. “I was really happy to see Sugawara-san still plays such powerful songs,” said Uno, for whom Basie is like a sacred temple. “I cried with emotion and joy.”
These aren’t just listening rooms. They’re sanctuaries where music becomes communion, where strangers become temporary family, where the simple act of sitting together in silence creates something larger than ourselves.
Before leaving Japan, we returned to Masako one last time. Hayashi greeted us like friends. Customers occupied the same seats, facing the enormous speakers with the same prayerful attention. We found our spot in the back and bowed our heads to listen to the music, “Blue Nile” by Alice Coltrane.
Tori hada. Chicken skin.
