Encounters in the Japanese jazz kissa: the TOKYO JAZZ JOINTS project.

Japanese jazz kissa culture originated in the eclectic coffee shops of the pre-war period and subsequently blossomed in the post-war years, rapidly becoming the epicentre of jazz listening culture in cities and towns across the country. Vital repositories of recorded jazz music and priceless audio equipment, they are spaces imbued with the individual tastes and idiosyncrasies of their owners. In their heyday of the 1960s and 70s, these predominantly male spaces were simultaneously places of education, sites for promotion of the ongoing evolution of jazz, and hubs of countercultural activity. As such, Japanese jazz kissa are unique spaces that sit at the intersection of culture, history, gender and jazz. This paper combines a series of autoethnographic vignettes combining photographic images, text and sounds from the ‘Tokyo Jazz Joints’ project, an audiovisual project curated by Belfast-born photographer Philip Arneill, and published in photobook form in June 2023, that has been documenting this unique culture since 2015 before it vanishes forever from Japan’s musical landscape. These vignettes will explicitly address each of the five conference sub-themes – gendered encounters, times of crisis, wellbeing, digital encounters, people and places – through the performative integration of image, sound and text.