Photobook - Tokyo Jazz Joints - Japanese Edition

Tokyo Jazz Joints is a photographic record of one of Japan's cultural institutions: the jazz kissa (ジャズ喫茶), the listening café where enthusiasts sit over a coffee or a drink and give themselves to jazz played on carefully kept equipment, mostly from vinyl. This is the Japanese edition of a book first published in Germany in 2023.

The photographs are the work of Belfast-born documentary photographer Philip Arneill, who over years of living in Japan was drawn to these rooms. In 2015, with the American broadcaster and writer James Catchpole, founder of the Tokyo Jazz Site directory, he set out to document them before they disappeared. What began in Tokyo has since reached from Hokkaido to Okinawa, and the project has now photographed more than 260 of these places, among them Eagle and Pithecanthropus Erectus in Tokyo, Basie in Iwate, Jazz Spot Yamatoya in Kyoto and Down Beat in Yokohama.

These are vanishing spaces. Rising rents, changing tastes and ageing owners have already closed a number of the rooms in these pages, which is much of the reason the project exists, to hold something of them before they are gone. The images were often made in very low light and in rooms barely larger than a cupboard, and they carry the particular atmosphere of each place: its records, its worn chairs, its walls of sleeves and bottles.

First issued by the German publisher Kehrer Verlag in 2023, the book was widely acclaimed, went to a third printing and reached more than sixty countries, and Arneill's work from the project was shown at the Rencontres d'Arles photography festival in 2024. It now returns in a Japanese edition, published by Seigensha of Kyoto, as a softcover of 176 pages with its own original specification.

Please note: The introductory text is in Japanese only.

• Photographer: Philip Arneill, with James Catchpole
• Publisher: Seigensha, Kyoto
• Language: Japanese
• Format: softcover, 165 × 198 × 15 mm, 400 g
• Pages: 176
• ISBN: 978-4-86831-005-1

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Seigensha (青幻舎) is a Kyoto art-book publisher established in 1995, working across art, painting, photography, design, architecture and craft, with a catalogue of more than 900 titles.