Standing tall

Standing a round at the tachinomiya

I will never forget my companion's squeal when a cockroach jumped from her lapel to her collar while we were standing in a little tachinomiya. That is the most vivid image the word (which can be translated as "stand-up drinking place") brings to mind, but it is not the only one, by far. Tachinomiya run the gamut from grubby to pristine, seedy to swank. What they all have in common is tables without seats, low priced alcohol, and light food.

How exactly they got started is hard to say. The tachinomiya and her sister, the izakaya, appeared around the beginning of the Edo period. During that era a number of projects, such as the rebuilding of Edo castle, in what is now Tokyo, or the reconstruction after the huge fire that destroyed two thirds of that city, brought many laborers into the capital. Makeshift shops, sometimes without seating, were thrown up to answer their need for food and drink.

Sake was unusually expensive at that time. Moving the capital from Kyoto to Edo meant that commodities like sake and soy sauce had to be shipped from breweries in the west until local producers could establish themselves. Customers naturally wanted to sample a little at the liquor store before buying a quantity to take home. Setting up a few tables may have been a way to get customers to spend a little more time and money while giving the shop a friendlier, more sociable atmosphere. One chain of liquor stores claims to be the origin of both tachinomia and izakaya because they had the idea of offering grilled tofu along with the sake they served at their shop near Edo castle during its reconstruction.

We can imagine how tachinomiya were born out of circumstance and economic pressure. The more interesting question is why they have persisted, and not only that. The last decade has seen a tachinomiya revival in Tokyo. New, sparkling clean, nicely appointed shops, purveying drinks and snacks, and lacking only chairs have been opened downtown. They even attract young women. Two major brewing companies have added a new twist by bringing tachinomiya to the people. During the warmer months, just outside of Hankyu railway station in Osaka, tachinomiya are set up to serve beer, snacks and juice, and packed away every night.

Trying to discover the basic attraction took me back a decade in time. My first years in Osaka, I lived above a rundown, old shopping street just on the outskirts of downtown. It was the kind of place where your neighbors are mostly grey-haired and everyone knows each other's business. There is a little, hole-inthe- wall tachinomiya there that I passed by nearly every day, but never ventured inside of. Now, when I passed under the noren (a kind of cloth awning that hangs down covering the top third of the doorways to most eating and drinking places in Japan), I found a truly classic tachimomiya. It is a tiny space, crammed with the minimal accoutrements, but clean as a whistle. Surrounded by packing crates, four upended beer cases made the base of a table.

The barman is what his counterparts in the Western world used to be: part psychologist, part philosopher, and an all-round good listener despite my broken Japanese. What surprised me was that, even after eleven years, he remembered me. The customers who dropped in joined in the conversation just as easily as he. Here there were no enquiries as to my Japanese ability, no garbled attempts at English. Everyone dove straight in, using his native dialect.

Maybe that is the magic. Tachinomiya have come a long way since the seventeenth century, and evolved into many different forms, but no matter what the trappings, or lack thereof, they provide an oasis of informality in Japanese society, where every- one is fair game for idle conversation.

Text & photos: Alan Wiren