Pub Vignettes #16
Episode #16: Ode to the One Man Band (Kanazawa, Japan)
BBC Radio Six washes over an all Japanese crowd, packed around a horseshoe bar-cum-kitchen in a Kanazawa backstreet, watching Futa-san do his thing. What’s with the radio? I ask the fedora-hatted guy beside me whose English would’ve been pretty serviceable four drinks ago. Futa-san, dressing a steaming plate of gyoza with one hand and pouring a pint of hazy IPA with the other, overhears me and grins gotta keep my ear in, mate. He’s got a cousin in Whitstable and a penchant for 2000s indie. Three shelves groaning with exquisite pottery ready for service - all made by his master ceramicist dad - make up the back-bar. I was never going to be a salaryman, was I? he winks, before taking a long glug of lager and skipping back over to the tiny kitchen at the side of the bar. Pots and pans spit and bubble on six raging gas burners, expertly handled by Futa-san as he sings along to Kaiser Chiefs.
CraftBeerDiveFuta’s, タウン ハイツ 里見 町 1F, 44-1 Satomicho, Kanazawa, Ishikawa 920-0998, Japan
An elderly woman looks up from her newspaper at the end of the empty wooden bar. We’re not the first tentative Westerners she’s seen inching open the door over the past half century. Nicotine stained ceiling tiles trace the pattern of generations of jazz lovers who’ve come before. Bottle of Heartland lager and a whiskey chaser, wasabi peas on the house. Not an inch of wall space unfilled by stacked vinyl and CD piles. Owner isn’t fucking around with translation apps, customer legwork required. Clumsy smalltalk running dry, we think she asks what music we like. Keith Jarrett? Slight nod. Thelonious Monk? Briefest of shrugs. Ryo Fukui? Hai! Very good! she exclaims with a hand-clap, before marching over to a jumbled shelf and deftly sliding out an original 1994 pressing of My Favorite Tune. Turntable spins, tonearm lowers, she pours herself a glass of Shochu, joining us to sit in contented silence as Fukui does his thing.
ヨーク / “York Jazz Bar”, 2 Chome-12-33 Korinbo, Kanazawa, Ishikawa 920-0961, Japan
Life stories tend not to be short. They’re longer still when relayed via Google Translate. No matter, the whiskey selection’s here for the long haul. The owner’s narrative arc, from corporate ladder climbing induced burnout to emotional rehabilitation as the proud owner of his one-man-band bar, felt indicative of countless places across the country. Why must you scale? Why always crave more? Why jeopardise losing your love for the craft? Our new pal puts on his favourite bossa nova compilation CD and fetches an oversized children’s picture atlas from a bookshelf, asking us to show him where we’re from. We pass half an hour pointing at various pages, tracking the cartography of our lives, embracing the stilted pace of realtime app translation. Some things don’t need scaling.
Mikaduki, 〒920-0918 Ishikawa, Kanazawa, Oyamamachi, 12−7 大谷古美術, Japan
Pub Vignettes is a monthly(ish) collection of impressions of the world’s more interesting drinking spots.
For those who’ve followed along for more than a decade via the now-retired Beermack site, welcome back. For those newer to this parish, welcome.
I’ve sat on that chair. LOVE bar York!