Romansha: Let's talk about the popularity of Japanese city pop overseas.

 

As frequent readers have known all along, I used to live in Ichikawa City, Chiba Prefecture near Minami-Gyotoku Station on Tokyo Metro's Tozai Line. My neighbourhood was basically a bedroom town for all those working in the megalopolis and I was fortunate that the area around the station had plenty of restaurants, cafés, supermarkets and other establishments for a nice life for the better part of two decades. 

Asagaya（阿佐ヶ谷）is a similar area located in Suginami Ward, Tokyo. I visited there once with a small combination of teachers and students because we were invited by one of the latter to her apartment for lunch. It is also a lovely area with plenty of conveniences and before we all headed off for home, our host was nice enough to show us the local sumobeya（相撲部屋...sumo stable） and what I discovered was that at one point, there were three such establishments in the area for training sumo wrestlers. The above video by the way is under the aegis of the YouTube channel Slow Tokyo Walk so you can get an idea of what Asagaya is like. There's even a band which has the area included in its name: Asagaya Romantics（阿佐ヶ谷ロマンティクス）.

Now, the whole reason for me going seemingly tourist guide on you folks is that Rocket Brown sent a tweet out late last night or early this morning about a middle-aged couple who run a music bar in Asagaya called Romansha（浪漫社）. About four months ago, they put out a YouTube video addressing their surprise and interest in how Japanese City Pop has been grabbing a certain segment of overseas fans over the past few years, with some of those fans even visiting Romansha and making requests. One question that they try to answer is where the name "City Pop" comes from, and there has been some controversy about this. 

By their own admission, the English subtitles aren't the best but I'm still appreciative about them all the same. Frankly speaking, their opinions on City Pop came across as more down-to-earth and warmer than that NHK "Asaichi"（あさイチ）City Pop segment that I'd seen back on Monday, but that doesn't really surprise me. What was also nice was that they did put out a welcome mat for anyone who might want to visit Romansha someday including video of the place outside and inside. For someone like me who's never been all that adventurous about taking a poke into some unknown drinking establishment on his own, it's nice to see, and certainly since it seems as if Japan is finally opening up, if I ever do get a chance to get back to Tokyo, I would be willing to visit and spend an hour or two drinking and listening and maybe even chatting. 

But sad to say that I have to change the tense for that last sentence into the past since I read on their Twitter account that Romansha closed up shop on December 30th last year. If I've gotten that wrong, please correct me quickly. It just seemed a bit odd that they didn't mention anything about closing down in the video so close to the supposed ending date. Romansha also has an Instagram account. To finish off, the couple are also a ukulele duo known as Hetarere（ヘタレレ）.