Music, memory, Match boxes and coffee: An appreciation of Tokyo's La Scala-za Café

While rummaging through a drawer recently I came across a box of matches I’d been saving since 1987. It was from La Scala-za, a café in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, and one of the most memorable café’s in Tokyo at a time when these businesses thrived on competition to be the most individual, eccentric and creative (all the more astounding in a culture that denied this urge in the citizenry).

What made La Scala-za an experience was visible even  before you entered: vines clung to walls that looked as though they were built of stone. There was a turret, and the roof along the side street was crenellated.  There was a tall and narrow stained glass window in front that ran from the first through third floors. The effect was of a decrepit castle. 

Inside there were overdone crystal chandeliers, curiosity cabinets filled with odd knick knacks, a suit of armor standing in a stairwell, and antimacassars on the red velvet chairs. Today’s Goths would feel totally at home there, or perhaps today’s vampire fans. However, I think the intention was to capture the 19th Romantic European sense of beauty. And in fact, the decorative metalwork in front of the second floor window looks like the image on their match-box cover.  

When you consider that the place opened in 1954, only two years after the end of Japan’s occupation by the Allied Powers, in an only partially rebuilt Tokyo where, La Scala-za must have stood as a monument to a fantasy escape from the privations of post-war Japan. But that escape was only partially fueled by the architecture (and caffeine). No, what made La Scala-za so special, and what had people going there regularly was that they played Western classical music non-stop at a time when buying records must have also seemed an incredible luxury.

In fact, Scala-za published a schedule of what they would be playing in advance. A program of sorts. So if you wanted to come and hear Verdi, or Chopin (since it was not only opera, despite the name) you knew just when to show up. Though you couldn’t be guaranteed a seat, since regulars seemed to almost live there.

Students would be there hunched over books, smoking furiously and discussing important issues in art at politics. And young lovers made La Scala-za a meeting place for decorously romantic coffee dates.   I know, because my boyfriend Hiroshi took me there for the first time when we had just started going out in 1982. So finding that box of matches was a moment of romantic memories and nostalgia for Tokyo in the go-go 80s, so different a time from La Scala’s beginning.

The image on the match-box cover, a sort of 19^th Century Romeo and Juliet on the  balcony, with a dash of My Fair Lady meets Dracula, captures the recherché spirit of the place.

La Scala-za closed after a 48-year run on December 31^st,  2002, a victim of the real estate boom. People lined up outside to say goodbye. But recently, it has re-appeared in a new incarnation, though in the basement of a modern building and so without the feel of the old place.

This is the story of cities, and life. I remember going up 6th Avenue in Manhattan with my father when I was a boy and listening to him complain about how it had been ruined by all the new glass and steel buildings. Now, I can’t walk through the city without being surrounded by ghosts of people and places past.

Memories and impermanence. The evanescence of existence — the blossom falls. The beautiful sadness of things. So lets keep dancing. In this moment now — because really, that’s all there is Peggy.