San Francisco Frontiers - From bath to fish market: DJs play to revive Japan neighbourhoods

The Tokyo bathhouse is one of many traditional businesses in Japan threatened by urban development and demographic decline, but the students want to showcase its value by transforming it into a pop-up club.

Their collective, Login.jp, moves from shoot to shoot across the archipelago: from a dye workshop and a tofu store to a rice field and a rural train.

They have so far posted around thirty YouTube videos, "digitally archiving" small businesses by transforming everyday scenes through the ambient tracks of a DJ.

The two founders of the collective say they developed a special sensitivity to this heritage because of their backgrounds: Jun Kim is of Korean origin and Rihito Mizoguchi lived in the United States for many years.

"Sometimes when you're too close to something, it becomes normalised to you, and your appreciation for that thing tends to dwindle," 21-year-old Kim told AFP.

"We kind of wanted to re-highlight and bring those experiences to people who are living amongst these businesses and cultures on a day-to-day basis."

Through their project called The Shoten ("small shop"), they also hope to use music to reconnect young people with the local community.

Rihito, 20, explained that being teenagers during the Covid pandemic -- when most nightclubs were closed -- shaped their musical culture.

Once everything opened up again, he and his friends were looking for experiences purely focused on music, he said, and were not drawn to club culture which he sees "as more of a party base".

- Beyond Mount Fuji -

The collective posted their first video on YouTube in early 2025, shot in a fish market in Tokyo's Akabane district, known for its retro shopping arcades.

To find a business willing to let them film, they had to bang on the doors of around 30 or 40 shops, said Kim.

"Each neighbourhood has its own distinct community, and how they do things in that area, (so you have to) take time to speak with the owners, and learn about... the culture around what they do," he added.

Kim said the project was about getting "underneath that superficial layer of Japan" and going beyond "Tokyo Tower, Mount Fuji".

Headphones on, 28-year-old DJ Zendo nods his head to the music at the bath -- or sento -- in Tokyo's Sumida ward, home to a number of traditional old downtown neighbourhoods.

Bathers relax in the water, and soak up the sounds.

"In a typical club, you drink alcohol and chat with your friends, but here taking a bath puts you in a state where you really focus on the music," he said after his set.

"It's a completely new approach."

– Disappearing buildings –

Bathhouse owner Katsuhito Okubo admits he was wary at first.

"A lot of people just want to hold events here," but "as we talked, I felt they were really trying to understand our living space".

Okubo, 32, took over the Denki-yu bath, which has been in his family for four generations, after learning it was under threat of demolition.

"Many buildings disappear almost overnight and become vacant lots, and then we neighbours find ourselves asking each other: 'What used to be here again?'"

He believes the sento is one of the few spaces where people learn "kyozai", the act of "coexisting and tolerating one another's presence" without necessarily exchanging a word.

"There are customers who have been coming here forever. It's a generation that lived without social media, these elderly people teach us the art of being together."

The Login.jp collective says it wants to help the public discover the stories of small businesses like Okubo's -- and it seems they're making an impact.

One clip filmed in a neighbourhood stationery shop has been viewed more than 2 million times.

Afterwards, the owner said they'd "had a bunch of new customers come in... just to look around and hear his stories", Kim said.

"For sure, we are making some sort of impact... that's maybe not direct sales, but just kind of gathering people to appreciate these spaces a little bit more."

T.Martin--SFF