Tokyo's Lost Showa-Era Nightlife Club Scene

Tokyo Weekender

07-07-2025

There was a time when people in Tokyo not only worked hard, but also partied just as hard. From the mid-1970s through the 1980s, even the asphalt streets seemed lacquered with possibility. The economy was booming, and the nights stretched endlessly, glittering with neon signs, alcohol, rhinestones and fantasy. This was a city intoxicated by its own potential. And the high — while it lasted — was electric.
List of Contents:
Tokyo's Decade of Excess
Sunday School at the Shinjuku Disco
The Rise of Host Clubs
Where Queer Tokyo Survived
Roppongi and the Rise of Bubble Glamor
Juliana's Tokyo and the Death of an Era
The Afterglow
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Flamingo Bar in Roppongi, opened 1985
Tokyo's Decade of Excess
In the 80s, nightclubs shimmered like Tokyo's answer to the Jazz Age — a playground for the newly rich, where money flowed as freely as the Dom Pérignon.
The engine behind it all was the bubble economy — a dizzying surge of real estate speculation, loose credit and inflated stock prices that made office workers and landowners rich. Land in Tokyo's Ginza cost more than in Manhattan and banks threw loans at anything with a pulse. To party in Roppongi was to believe in the illusion that the boom would never bust. That beauty could be bought. And that desire had no cost.
Sunday Disco at BIBA (c. 1984) | Obata Hitoshi/Hagamag
Sunday School at the Shinjuku Disco
It wasn't just adults filling the dance floors. By the
early 80s
, a bizarre phenomenon had taken over: daylight discos packed with junior high and high school students.
In Shinjuku's Kabukicho area, the towering Daini Toa Kaikan building became ground zero for this youthquake. Clubs, including BIBA, operated across four floors. What began as late-night dens for delinquent teens evolved following a 1982 murder involving two junior high school girls who were picked up at a Kabukicho disco and later attacked in Chiba, one of them killed. Afterwards, curfews were imposed, leading to a full-blown daytime party movement. 1984, BIBA opened at noon on Sundays. Lines of uniformed teenagers wrapped around the stairwell. The bathrooms were the only part of the building with windows, which made it easy to forget it was still daylight.
The scene led to routines such as the
Bump
, a battle-like choreography between two boys, and the
Step
, a group dance for girls. There was even the Jenka conga line to '
Can't Take My Eyes Off You
.'
The Rise of Host Clubs
Beneath Toa Kaikan's booming floors, another form of theatrical nightlife emerged: host clubs. These were male equivalents to hostess bars — young men in sharp suits, rhinestones and stage names who sold conversation, attention and illusion to women in Kabukicho.
Host clubs trace back to the late
1960s
. By the 80s, the number of these clubs had increased significantly, with roughly 50 establishments in Shinjuku alone. The format soon became highly competitive as hosts earned commissions on drink sales and attempted to climb up the rankings.
Where Queer Tokyo Survived
A few blocks from Kabukicho's neon dazzle lay another revolution — Shinjuku Ni‑chome, Tokyo's queer quarter since the
late 1940s
. After the 1956 passage of the Prostitution Prevention Law, as red-light districts were restructured, a different kind of nightlife began to flourish.
By the 80s, Ni‑chome hosted hundreds of intimate bars catering to gay men, lesbians and trans patrons. Spaces were coded — specialized for butches, femmes, bears, drag — accessible by referral and loyalty. This nightlife was defiant and political. It was as much survival as it was spectacle.
Juliana's Tokyo (c. 1995)
Roppongi and the Rise of Bubble Glamor
Meanwhile, Roppongi's nightlife turned excess into art. Discos such as Turia, King & Queen and Area catered to a new kind of elite: people who were fashion-forward, image-obsessed and flush with cash from the bubble economy.
One venue, Turia, was designed to look like a spaceship crash-landed in the area. Created by space designer Kotetsu Yamamoto and run by Layton House, the club embodied the architectural absurdity of the time. However, it ended in tragedy. On
January 5, 1988
, a massive lighting fixture fell onto the dance floor, killing three. For some, it felt like the final curtain call of the disco age. The Showa era would officially end just one year later.
Turia, Roppongi: before and after the tragic light fixture incident in 1988
Juliana's Tokyo and the Death of an Era
Even after Japan's Bubble Economy burst in 1991, triggering a decade-long financial slump and what would later be called the 'Lost Decade,' glamour didn't die overnight. The markets had crashed, property values plummeted and corporate excess began its slow unraveling. On the dance floors of Tokyo, though, denial still glittered.
That same year, Juliana's Tokyo opened in the Shibaura waterfront district. It quickly became a national sensation.
Gyaru
in skin-tight bodycon dresses danced atop glowing
otachidai
(raised pedestals), while techno throbbed and strobe lights sliced through the smoke. Office workers and college kids flooded in nightly, waving feathered
Juri-sen
fans like battle flags. The chant 'Julianers, Tokyo' became a euphoric war cry for a generation refusing to surrender to the coming recession.
Though it closed just three years later, Juliana's remains one of the most iconic nightspots in Tokyo's history. It symbolized the last gasp of Showa-era glamor — an opulent fantasy defiantly staged in the shadow of economic collapse. And when it closed, the lights didn't just go out on the dance floor. They dimmed on an era.
One of Juliana's rave-night CDs has been digitized
here
— complete with pounding beats, screaming synths and the iconic chant itself.
The Afterglow
Today, many of the old disco buildings are gone. Toa Kaikan still stands, but the music has long since stopped. Juliana's became a sports shop, then an ad agency. Turia's site is unrecognizable. Velfarre, once the jewel of Roppongi, was demolished in 2007.
The lights, however, haven't truly gone out.
City pop, which encapsulates the smooth optimism of this era, has returned with global fervor. Vintage flyers circulate online. In Shinjuku's backstreets, aging bartenders still line up worn laser discs, and some hostess clubs haven't changed their carpet since 1984. Even today, you'll find 20-somethings lining up for Juliana-themed club nights, feathered fans in hand, dancing to the ghost of a beat that refuses to die.
Tokyo hasn't forgotten. It's just dancing in other costumes now.
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