Food and Drink

Just like so many other small bars/eateries in Japan, the lantern outside indicates the basic but almost always decent food that awaits within — not to mention the refreshing taste of modestly-priced and equally unpretentious alcohol.

And this one, specialising in yakitori, has been around since 1985, with its 73-year-old owner spending most of his many working hours here, patiently grilling skewered chicken.

While his wife of 43 years happily waits on.

And the cat, not so happily, just watches.

Tokyo has no shortage of fancy, modern delis, and the city’s numerous department stores are packed with them too. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t any room for their older, more traditional cousins, because there is — at least for now, anyway.

Wonderfully dated shops that offer the same weighed out portions, except there isn’t a digital scale in sight. No digital anything in fact.

Drinking in his favoured bar in Tokyo’s poorest neighbourhood, this old man may not have seen better days — or at least not any for a long time. But, like all of us, he has seen younger ones.

Japanese food is much praised both at home and abroad — a tribute that most of the time is very much warranted too. But good food needs equally good people preparing it, and doing so can clearly be hard work, particularly so in decidedly less than ideal surroundings.

Japan may well have suffered several decades of economic stagnation, but Tokyo is still a city very much in flux, with buildings both big and small going up and down at an almost dizzying pace. A transformation generally done in the name of progress, but which at the same time often destroys a good deal of the city’s character — even its soul if one is inclined to get a little sentimental about such things.

The wonderfully archaic Tsukiji fish market will soon move to new premises, and Kabukicho, the capital’s famous red light district, is steadily undergoing massive changes — with far more dramatic ones already being put forward in the run-up to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. A ‘clean-up’ that some fear will also include Golden Gai, potentially depriving the city of another of its icons, not to mention a link to the past.

But that’s not to say that other old, practically untouched pockets of Tokyo don’t exit, because they do. Like this fabulously dated sweet shop for example. A business that with a bit of luck will live on for as long as its owner does, although the chances of it going on to outlive him are sadly next to none.

Big nights out are a daily option in Tokyo. As are benders of truly epic proportions. The only problem, however, is that there’s almost always a price to pay, and sometimes a hefty one.