Summary
Before vinyl bars became the latest trend worldwide, Japan’s kissaten were quietly leading the charge, offering serene musical escapes for a century.
If you’ve noticed more vinyl bars and listening cafes cropping up around the world, you should know that before they were cool in your neighbourhood, they were already cool in Japan. The small coffee houses known as kissaten, or specifically jazz kissa, trace their roots back to the 1920s, but blossomed into the hundreds during a postwar boom.
The concepts are deceptively simple. In essence, they are cafes where the main focus is to simply and quietly sit and listen to a specific type of music. Most kissaten serve beverages, some serve food but all make the quality of sound a priority. In A CENTURY IN SOUND, New Zealand filmmakers Nicholas O’Dwyer and Tu Neill focus on three such kissa across Tokyo.
The first of these is the Meikyoku Kissa Lion, a classic musical cafe that has been around for nearly a century and is run by Keiko Ishihara at the time of filming. Jazz Kissa Eigakan offers a contrasting atmosphere, aiming to evoke “a warm sound that doesn’t tire you out.” Then there’s Junichi Umezawa’s Bird Song Cafe, which is imbued with memories of the legendary rock kissa Blackhawk while celebrating 1970s Japanese rock.
There have been so many documentaries that examine Japan through an ‘othering’ anthropological lens. The beauty of O’Dwyer and Neill’s camera is that it is just like one of the customers in the listening cafes it depicts. It simply sits and listens to the people playing the records in these truly unique locations around Tokyo.
Rather than just being a series of talking heads, these reminiscences are cleverly interspersed by visuals from Japan’s turbulent 20th century. Through this potted history, we get a sense of the owners, their customers and where that passion for music comes from. For some it’s memories of the War, for others it’s a time of political revolution or maybe just rebelling against the mainstream bubble culture of the 80s. Yet all are united by music.
Like the spaces themselves, A CENTURY IN SOUND is not necessarily intended for a broad audience. Yet the niche audiences who do find this film will undoubtedly appreciate the comforting vibes it gives off as the various strains of classical, jazz and rock music wash over them. A wonderful cinema experience.
2024 | Japan | DIRECTOR: Nick Dwyer, Tu Neill | WRITERS: Nick Dwyer, Tu Neill | CAST: Keiko Ishihara, Mashiro Yoshida, Junichi Umezawa | DISTRIBUTOR: Melbourne International Film Festival | RUNNING TIME: 101 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 8-24 August 2024 (Melbourne International Film Festival)