When people talk about Tokyo’s cultural scene, they often use words like “creative,” “sophisticated,” and “unique.” They’re not wrong. But those words alone explain very little.
Tokyo’s cultural energy does not come from a place that is “healthy” in the textbook sense. It is not supported by especially generous public funding, nor by a high social status for artists, nor by a system where freedom of expression is fully guaranteed. As a cultural ecosystem, it is full of flaws.
And yet—or rather, because of that—Tokyo’s culture remains strangely alive. A gallery that suddenly appears on the fifth floor of a shabby multi-tenant building. A club hidden in the basement of a quiet residential neighborhood. Parties that happen only briefly and leave almost no trace online. These are not temporary trends. They persist for years, even decades, often with almost exactly the same rough texture.
Where does that persistence come from?
To understand it, we have to look not just at what kind of city Tokyo is, but at the kind of history it stands on.
After 1945, Japan went through dramatic change. The zaibatsu were dismantled, land was reformed, and a new constitution was introduced. The power structures that had dominated the country were, at least officially, broken apart by the occupation.
But the dismantling was never complete.
The zaibatsu survived in altered form as corporate groups. In politics, prewar family lineages continued to reproduce themselves through inheritance. The bureaucratic apparatus remained largely intact, and local social hierarchies did not fundamentally disappear. In other words, Japan did not so much destroy the old order as place a new exterior on top of it.
This half-finished dismantling created a peculiar gray zone.
Outwardly, democracy. In practice, connections and inherited networks. Officially, a flat system; unofficially, hierarchy still functions. No one points to it too loudly, but everyone more or less knows it is there. This structure runs not only through the economy, but deeply through culture as well.
In *Capitalist Realism*, Mark Fisher described a condition in which a system that should no longer be functioning continues to survive because people feel there is no alternative—a kind of ghostly persistence, or hauntology. Japan’s postwar structure is remarkably close to this. The dynamics of the prewar and wartime eras are supposed to be over, officially speaking, and yet they linger throughout society like ghosts.
And that ghost is unmistakably present in the atmosphere of Tokyo’s underground scenes too.
The word “nepotism” is usually used in a negative sense. Political corruption. Economic stagnation. Unequal opportunity. In fact, societies with strong nepotistic structures are often said to struggle with economic development, and there is no shortage of examples around the world.
Japan is a peculiar case here as well. Nepotism certainly existed, but it was also dismantled just enough to allow economic growth. It was not fully destroyed, but it was not fully preserved either. That subtle incompleteness is the key.
The same dynamic operates in the cultural sphere.
Tokyo’s underground often functions through “people who know people.” Information about spaces and events tends to circulate in semi-closed forms. Sometimes, new people can only enter through an introduction, or by showing up repeatedly and gradually becoming recognized.
From the outside, this can look exclusionary and closed. And it is, to some extent. It can be difficult for newcomers to enter, and internal social dynamics undeniably play a role.
But at the same time, these closed networks are also part of what has protected Tokyo’s underground.
Commercial capital has a harder time entering. Major media has a harder time packaging it. Administrative oversight does not always reach it easily. This invisibility is a byproduct of nepotistic network structures, and as a result, it has functioned as a kind of safety net—shielding scenes from being fully absorbed by capital or institutional power.
Protected, and at the same time closed.
It is precisely this contradiction, held without resolution, that gives Tokyo’s underground its distinctive texture.
Think of Berlin. In the 1990s, after the fall of the Wall, former East Berlin was full of vacant buildings and ruins. Artists and clubbers moved in, and an underground scene emerged unlike almost anything else in the world. Techno, experimental music, street art. Berlin at that moment was pure rough space—gaps not yet reached by capital.
But from the 2010s onward, those gaps were rapidly filled in by gentrification. Rents rose, clubs closed, and former ruins turned into luxury apartments.
Prague, Lisbon, Tbilisi. Similar cycles have repeated in cities all over the world. Roughness is usually temporary. Eventually, it gets absorbed by capital. That is the pattern we see in many places.
Tokyo does not quite follow that pattern.
Of course, Tokyo has gentrification too. There are neighborhoods erased by redevelopment, and spaces forced to relocate because of rising rents. But even so, Tokyo’s underground has remained raw for a surprisingly long time.
A quiet bar that has operated for more than ten years in a tiny room inside a worn-down building. A small club night where almost the same people gather every week. A place with no sign at all, impossible to identify from the outside, that just stays there. Why? The closed networks mentioned earlier are one reason. But there is another, more structural one.
Because of the incomplete reckoning with the postwar period, Tokyo never fully internalized the idea of clearing everything away and rebuilding from zero at the level of systems. Old buildings may be torn down, but old dynamics remain. Beneath new surfaces, older structures continue to lie in place. This quality of being only half-updated is reflected in cultural space too.
Berlin’s roughness came from a time lag—capital had not arrived yet. Tokyo’s roughness comes from a more permanent suspension, a structural inability to fully resolve things.
That is why Tokyo’s underground does not quite end. The atmosphere of Berlin ten years ago, or Prague now, somehow keeps going in Tokyo—not as a temporary transition, but as a transition that has become strangely permanent.
This ghostly persistence is not limited to underground scenes. The same structure appears throughout Tokyo’s everyday spaces.
A standing bar in a back alley. A select shop inside a fifty-year-old mixed-use building. A shopping street that feels abandoned by time, appearing suddenly just one block off a major road. A party held in a convenience store.
In Tokyo, high-end spaces and rough spaces coexist at an almost absurd proximity. A Michelin three-star sushi counter can be five minutes on foot from an old bar with peeling walls. Right behind a national museum, there may be a tiny alternative space inside an aging building.
This coexistence was not planned. It emerged accidentally from the layering of incomplete postwar dismantling, lingering nepotistic networks, and rapid but partial modernization.
And it is precisely this accidental layering that makes Tokyo’s art and music unlike those of any other city.
Artists do not confine themselves to museums and galleries; they use small rooms in old buildings or the street itself as sites for work. Musicians do not only play large venues; they perform in basement spaces with room for twenty people, and keep doing it for years. Culture does not converge into one “correct” place. It remains dispersed across the city, layered, and capable of appearing unexpectedly.
This multiplicity of layers—“layers” really is the most fitting word—is the core of Tokyo’s culture.
At this point, you might be thinking: this is interesting, but what does it have to do with me as a traveler?
Quite a lot.
Most people who visit Tokyo experience the surface. Famous sights, well-known food, carefully maintained tourist routes. Those are valuable experiences in themselves. But on their own, they show only one face of the city.
What makes Tokyo truly interesting lies in the different layers stacked underneath that surface. And those layers are shaped by the historical and structural conditions described above.
The important thing is not which layer is supposedly the “right” one, or the more “insider” one. High-end sushi and a standing bar in a back alley, a national museum and a gallery in a worn-down building, a major festival and an underground party—all of them are equally cultural signs of this city. None is inherently above or below another.
What matters is which signs you respond to.
If you can begin to see through the city’s structure even a little—if you can sense why a place exists where it does, why an atmosphere feels the way it does, what keeps a scene in its current form—your experience of Tokyo changes dramatically in resolution.
It stops being mere sightseeing. It becomes an experience of reading the city.
Some people will want to solve this structure as a problem. Break nepotism. Make everything more open. Make systems transparent. Fair enough.
But I want to pause there.
If complete health, openness, and transparency are the goal, then Tokyo’s peculiar cultural energy would probably disappear with them. Just as Berlin has been losing the feeling of “that old Berlin” through gentrification, fully organizing this structure would likely erase the accidental qualities it produces.
That does not mean I want to simply celebrate the gray zone as it is. Closed systems have their problems. Nepotism does real harm.
But what makes Tokyo interesting is that people continue to produce culture within this disorder—sometimes unconsciously, sometimes strategically, but always with a certain flexibility. Unresolved, suspended, and still moving.
Tokyo’s culture keeps emerging not from places that have been resolved, but from places that remain unresolved.
To understand that unresolved vitality—and to find your own sense of what you love within it—that, I think, is one of the richest ways to encounter this city.
I’ve lived in Tokyo for over a decade, walking the city through a socio-cultural lens. From major museums to underground parties, I create resources for experiencing Tokyo’s layered culture through the axis of what you genuinely respond to.