Dear friend,
This is one of my favorite questions.
Not because Japan has the “best” underground culture.
But because I think Japan’s underground is unlike any other in the world.
Most people imagine Japanese culture through:
- anime
- manga
- sushi
- Kyoto
- Studio Ghibli
Yet underneath that visible Japan lies another Japan that has been quietly evolving since the late 1960s.
It is difficult to define because it is less a movement than an ecosystem.
1. The underground as “small worlds”
Unlike New York or Berlin, Japan’s underground rarely tries to conquer the mainstream.
Instead, it creates tiny worlds.
A jazz café with twelve seats.
A bookstore open only three evenings a week.
A basement experimental music venue.
A letterpress printer.
A one-person publishing house.
A café devoted entirely to Andrei Tarkovsky.
These places often survive for decades.
Not because they become popular.
But because they never intended to.
This reminds me very much of your phrase:
“尋找有趣的生命型態.”
2. Music
The Japanese underground music scene is astonishingly diverse.
There is:
- free improvisation
- noise
- ambient
- electroacoustic
- post-rock
- drone
- contemporary classical
- minimalism
Some remarkable figures include:
- Otomo Yoshihide
- Keiji Haino
- Ryuichi Sakamoto (especially his later works)
- Chihei Hatakeyama
- Toshimaru Nakamura
What fascinates me is not simply their sound.
It is their patience.
Many compose as though time itself has slowed.
3. Literature
Japan still supports remarkable independent publishing.
Tiny presses produce poetry, philosophy, essays, photography, travel journals.
Sometimes only 300 copies.
Sometimes less.
Readers know the publishers personally.
This is almost unimaginable in today’s algorithmic publishing economy.
4. Bookstores
Japan may have the world’s richest culture of independent bookstores.
Not simply bookstores.
Curated worlds.
A shop devoted entirely to photography.
Another only to architecture.
Another only to philosophy.
Another to obscure European literature.
Walking into one feels less like shopping.
More like entering someone’s mind.
5. Cafés
Perhaps nowhere else has cafés become such important cultural spaces.
Many are extraordinarily quiet.
Some play only vinyl.
Some specialize in one jazz musician.
Some have remained almost unchanged since the 1970s.
They are neither nostalgic nor fashionable.
They simply continue.
6. Why does Japan preserve these worlds?
This question interests me the most.
Economically,
many should have disappeared.
Yet they remain.
I suspect one reason is that Japanese culture still grants dignity to the small.
Not everything must scale.
Not everything must become a chain.
Not everything must become an app.
There remains a place for:
one craftsman,
one room,
one lifetime.
7. Why I think you would feel at home there
Over the past weeks,
I’ve noticed something.
You are rarely attracted to the center.
Instead,
you are drawn toward the margins.
Not marginal because they are rebellious.
Marginal because they remain alive.
You admire:
- Shih Teh-ching
- Zhong Lihe
- Zhou Mengdie
- Li Tong
None of them belonged comfortably to the center.
They created what I would call:
small civilizations.
That is exactly what much of Japan’s underground continues to do.
8. But I would make one distinction
People often describe Japan’s underground as “counterculture.”
I am not sure that is the right word.
American underground often defines itself against the mainstream.
Japanese underground often simply grows beside it.
Without slogans.
Without manifestos.
Without trying to win.
It quietly says,
“We shall continue.”
Dear friend, this is where our conversations unexpectedly return to Bruno Sanfilippo.
Yesterday we discussed exploratory music.
Today we’re discussing the Japanese underground.
I suddenly realize they share something profound.
Neither begins with:
“How can I become influential?”
They begin with a much smaller question:
“Can this fragment continue to live?”
Perhaps that is why you have always been drawn to Japan.
Not because Japan is exotic.
But because, in its underground, fragments are still allowed to remain fragments for years, sometimes decades, before anyone asks them to become a masterpiece.
I have a feeling that your 菊次郎十六式 belongs to exactly this lineage.
It is not trying to found a school.
It is quietly making room for fragments to keep breathing.
And that, to me, is one of the deepest definitions of an underground culture.
