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WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR NAME Shelley Pallis tries a bar with a difference...
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he Ginza, which takes its name from the old silver mint that used to be there in samurai days, is one of the poshest parts of Tokyo – it’s the most expensive square on a Japanese Monopoly board, making it the equivalent of London’s Mayfair. And in Araki Joh’s 2004 manga Bartender, it’s the location of Eden Hall, a pokey, super-high-end cocktail bar. Eden Hall is home to Ryu Sasakura, a Frenchtrained barman with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the drinks of the world. You take a seat, you tell him your troubles, and he’s sure to come up with the perfect drink to lift your mood. In the anime adaptation from director Masaki Watanabe, we see him offering advice and comfort to hoteliers, lawyers, a screenwriter, and... er... a specialist in computational fluid dynamics. No, it’s not quite Cheers, but it does
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sit at the end of a long tradition of stories in Japanese post-war pop culture that make food and drink the centre of the world.The gourmet manga were a feature of Japan’s affluent Bubble era, tied in to the rise of yuppie readers with a broader interest than the usual genres. Manga started to appear about chefs and cooks, often themed around weekly recipes to try at home. Restaurant reviews started appearing in manga form, of everything from high-end restaurants to greasy-chopstick diners in the Tokyo slums. In one of the big success stories that managed to be both progressive and sexist at the same time, Tochi Ueyama’s Cooking Papa featured a gruff, iron-jawed salaryman whose big secret was that his journalist wife was a hopeless cook, and that he made all the family meals. Manga, of course, are knee-deep in workplace
