Roman Adrian Cybriwsky, Roppongi Crossing: The Demise of a Tokyo Nightclub District and the Reshaping of a Global City, University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA, 2011, 328 pages, $24.95 paper, ISBN 9780820338323.

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Based on six years of ethnographic work by the author when he was living and working in Tokyo, Roppongi Crossing explores the shifting socialities and rhythms of streetlife in one of the city’s most vibrant and notorious nightlife and entertainment districts. Though not as easily characterised as a red light district as its near-neighbour Kabukicho, the district boasts a range of sexual entertainment (hostess bars in particular, but also striptease clubs and “love hotels”) and has long been understood as a site of diverse cultural and social encounter given the presence of several foreign embassies as well as large numbers of expatriats working in nearby financial districts. Cybriwsky identifies himself at the outset as one of the many foreigners who have made this district home, and uses this informed-outsider perspective to draw conclusions about the changing nature of Roppongi as it has become increasingly subject to “international” influences. The book closes with the “old” Roppongi having apparently disappeared: the “new” Roppongi whose emergence Cybriwsky charts is one that he identifies as a testing ground for a new vision of global Tokyo, a city in which “government, police and corporate construction interests” seek “to define and control the directions and pace of Japan’s internationalization” (page 3). The nightclub zone is apparently receding, giving way to the “neoliberal lifestyles and landscapes” (page 261) more usually associated with the neighbouring Roppongi Hills and the branded lifestyle communities promoted by the Mori Building Company which have done so much to alter the social topography of this part of central Tokyo.

Though Roppongi Crossing at times reads as an atheoretical travelogue, or even autobiography, in which Cybriwsky drifts in and out of the district’s restaurants, hostess bars, and pachinko arcades and documents their denizens, it is nevertheless a worthy addition to the literature on world cities. In some respects it recounts a story that is (over)familiar: a vibrant and somewhat gritty part of a city gets scrubbed clean, polished up, and resold through processes of corporate gentrification which trade on the “lively” and cosmopolitan reputation of the district, yet inevitably efface particular forms of difference lest middle class investors and renters are scared away by stories of criminality in what has often been described one of Tokyo’s “most lawless zones” (page 172).  Cybriwsky thus draws parallels with the revanchist politics described so acidly by the late Neil Smith (1996) in Manhattan under Giuliani: replace Times Square with Roppongi, and Giuliani with Ishihara (governor of Tokyo from 1999 to 2012) and the story more or less holds.  What is perhaps different in Roppongi is the context of ethnic and cultural mixity that allowed for the creation of place myths in which the district’s crimes became depicted as problems caused by the “wrong kind” of immigration and the wrong kind of immigrant: rather than any blame for rising levels of street crime and drug dealing being attributed to the long-established Yakuza gangs, it is “African” street workers, East Europeans, and Russians, who have become described in the Japanese media as the “shady foreigners” (page 172) who have created a sleazy area of vice and danger.

Though occasionally prone to hyperbole or cliché (“Only in Japan!”), Cybriwsky is adept at describing the incremental cataloguing of street crime, violence, and vice used to justify the processes of sanitation and urban improvement that have ushered in the new, gentrified Roppongi: much space is devoted to the repercussions of the widely-publicised murder of English hostess worker Lucie Blackman in 2000 by Joji Obara (who was finally found guilty of her abduction, dismemberment, and the disposal of her body only subsequent to the publication of Cybriwsky’s book in 2011). We also hear of Iraqi sword attacks (page 151), gang rapes perpetrated by “twisted” student gangs (page 169), and the corruption of celebrated Sumo wrestlers caught in a spiral of gambling and drug debts racked up in the streets of Roppongi (page 154). Such cases allow Cybriwsky to consider the complex interplay between the urban politics of real estate and the (racialised) notions of fear and anxiety that continue to circulate in the revitalized Roppongi. Though his modus operandi is that of the plucky streetwise flâneur, fuelled by “honest beer”, he devotes considerable energy to mapping out the “growth coalition” of developers and local state officials who are seeking to erase the old Roppongi by exploiting place myths built upon stories of body horror as well more banal and mundane instances of touting, dealing, and hustling.

At times, this focus on crime, sex, and political chicanery gives the impression that Cybriwsky is trying to “lift the lid” and reveal the “real” Roppongi. But Cybriwsky is wise to any allegation that he is being overly prurient or salacious, and tells us that he has no interest in the Yakuza gangsters, or in the “kinky” forms of sex work that go on in Roppongi. Yet despite this, he seemingly takes delight in describing the “gangsterish” characters whom he encounters leaving underground casinos early in the morning, or their girlfriends (“molls, half the age of their male companions, appointed in designer labels with beauty-shop hair and, it seems, puppy-dog devotion”, page 111). And he is equally happy to make generalisations about the distinction between respectable hostess bars and strip bars offering a “fresh stock of dancers from Romania” (page 119) because he has “personal knowledge” about human trafficking and knows not “to patronize places like that” (page 120). So while we get some thick description of the lives of hostess workers, and details of the rituals of soapland venues where male clients are washed down by naked women before receiving oral sex, Cybriwsky shies away from the sectors of the sex industry that he regards as most problematic, leaving him unable to say anything particularly profound about the ways that ethnicity, gender, and age entwine to create conditions in Tokyo which empower some sex workers, but not others. This is disappointing given the continuing dearth of English language works documenting the contemporary geographies of sex work in Tokyo, and the continuing fixation with the seemingly more palatable hostess scene (see Allison, 1994; Norma, 2011).

But where the book really disappoints is that, despite being part of a book series on “Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation”, its conclusions consist of a series of authorial ruminations about whether the “new” Roppongi is preferable to the “old” Roppongi. While Cybriwsky is ambivalent about the old, his condemnation of the new is clear:

“it’s the same gentrified urban landscape that has been imposed on us all in New York and Moscow and London, taking away from the uniqueness and authenticity that made the place special” (page 260).

Here there is a nostalgia for the Roppongi Cybriwski first encountered, and a mourning of the fact that there appears to be “less and less Japan in Japan, particularly so in Tokyo” (page 16). But nowhere is there any critical scrutiny of the shifting contours of Japanese national identity and the ways these might prop up particular gender, ethnic, and sexual norms, just reflection on the loss of a particular vernacular streetscape and some vague assertions about the rise of a “new poor” who will not benefit from the new Roppongi. Clearly this is a book in the tradition of street ethnography, but some evidence about the changing extent of poverty in Tokyo would have added considerably: likewise very little is said about wages, rental costs, or household budgets. The discussion of gender relations is also limited: beyond the aforementioned hostesses, very few women are afforded a voice in this text, and many appear as dupes whose place in Roppongi is entirely shaped by the whims and desires of men. This is a shame, as this book provides some rich and thick description of the changes at the heart of a world city, devoting valuable attention to the materiality of the urban landscape in a manner often lacking in some more theorized accounts.

References

Allison A (1994) Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Norma C (2011) “Prostitution and the 1960s' origins of corporate entertaining in Japan” Women”s Studies International Forum 34 (6) 509-519.

Smith N (1996) The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. New York: Routledge.