“Whether we sell another CD or not is beside the point,” Mr Kobayashi says from across the table in his local soba restaurant. He pauses, then explains what being in business has come to mean for him. “My wife and I often talk about whether to open the shop again tomorrow,” he continues, “but we always do. It’s about being there for people, to offer advice.”
The word he uses is sōdan (相談), a term that translates as ‘advice’ yet also carries an air of counsel. He explains that the value of being in business, trading in what he loves, is the range of human connection it has brought and still brings into his life. A shop with a door and an address is not only a space for holding and moving stock; it becomes a place where people come together. “If I hadn’t opened yesterday, I wouldn’t be sitting here with you,” he says, offering an instance of the serendipity that has become familiar to him.
Mr Kobayashi’s shop sits directly beneath the Yamanote Line, in one of the passages running under the tracks between Okachimachi Ekimae-dōri and Ameyokochō, referred to as the gādo-shita (ガード下), literally ‘beneath the girders’. Approaching from either side, you hear Shōwa Era music filling the passage—a gentle triplet sway of trembled vocals over a slow, rocking beat. The sound comes in generous supply from Mr Kobayashi and the speakers outside his shop, Rhythm (リズム, Rizumu).
Kobayashi founded Rhythm in 1969, age 32. As a teenager, he had imagined becoming a singer, though he set that aside and joined his father’s food company after university. Nearing 30, he and a friend planned to start a company of their own, but his business partner’s sudden death from leukaemia halted those plans and left Kobayashi adrift in a period of uncertainty.
When he needed it most, his late friend’s words returned to him, offering direction—“Are you going to live off your parents forever?” His passion for song had never been far beneath the surface, and among the paths that had opened and closed, he chose to follow music. Its form — a record shop. Across decades of shifting formats, from 8-track tapes to cassettes and then CDs, he kept his focus on a single genre: enka. It held a firm place in Japanese popular music when the shop was founded, and that sound is what drew me to Rhythm two years ago, drifting across the gādo-shita.
Enka (演歌), whose characters mean performance (演) and song (歌), is sometimes described as “Japan’s folk music”, a label that feels misplaced. If a comparison is needed, I have always thought it closer to soul music. The term began with political performance songs used in Meiji-era activism (1869–1912). Over the following century—through Westernisation, war, and occupation—the genre developed into a distinct sound: melodies drawn from traditional scales set against Western I–IV–V progressions and arranged around a three-piece rhythm section. At the periphery of that foundation are its decorative colours—shamisen and koto, Spanish-guitar touches, soft strings, and occasional big-band brass. Vocals remain mixed to the front, keeping the music song-driven, while later Roland synths introduced an electronic current beneath its themes of love, heartbreak, towns, and cities.
“When I felt a song was good, I would blast it outside at full volume,” Mr Kobayashi says of his trademark habit of playing records out loud. “Before the track even finished, people would come in asking, ‘Give me the one that’s playing now.’ Those songs always sold.” It reflects his authentic approach to curation—a philosophy in which he has only sold what he has listened to, approved, and can recommend without hesitation.
Out-front plays have also been central to the shop’s sōdan practice. Over the decades, enka writers, performers, and record-label executives have come to Rhythm to gauge what reaches the public—a pulse that Mr Kobayashi seems always to have had his finger on. One instance came in 1974, when Columbia executives visited and asked him to play an unreleased track titled “Onna no Michi”, which the label was unsure about releasing. By the end of the first verse, about twenty people had gathered outside. “I stopped the eight-track and told them, ‘I can’t play it any more — they’re asking for it,’” Mr Kobayashi recalls. The executives thanked him and left. “Onna no Michi” went on to sell 3.25 million copies.
With my attention caught by the music beneath the tracks, I noticed Rhythm’s shopfront, layered with enka posters and photographs, and watched over by life-size cardboard cut-outs of singers. As I moved closer, my first look through the glass revealed a community scene much like the ones Mr Kobayashi describes. The owners were gathered with a few visitors, one of whom was strumming a nylon-string guitar. I did not want to interrupt, but unsure when I might return, I slid the door open and stepped in gingerly.
The space occupies a footprint of just over 10 square metres. As is often true in Tokyo, when a business appears in a location that feels unexpected, there is usually a reason behind it. In Rhythm’s case, the unit had previously been leased by Mr Kobayashi’s father’s company and used to sell miso pickles. It explains how the shop came to sit in the orbit of Ameyokochō, known more for dried foods, pickles, pastes, and teas than for media retail. Inside, the aesthetic extends naturally from the exterior: walls lined with CDs and cassette tapes, record-label signage, photographs of the Kobayashis with artists and customers, and small pieces of memorabilia filling the remaining space.
Despite the gathering of regulars, the Kobayashis welcomed me that afternoon, asking where I was from and which artists I liked. I mentioned my recent interest in the late-50s baritone of Frank Nagai, and Mr Kobayashi pointed upwards to Nagai’s signature on the ceiling, one among many. Enka royalty have walked these halls. I chose a Frank Nagai hits collection, and Mr Kobayashi directed me to a new release by Aimi Tanaka, a singer born in 2000 whose voice sits comfortably alongside the classics.
Despite the common view of enka as a genre of the past, Mr Kobayashi follows the latest artists and supports those he believes in, at a time when the odds are against them. He is critical of current rotation systems that push a constant stream of releases, arguing that good songs vanish before listeners even register them. In such a climate, he says, neither labels, listeners, nor artists can tell which songs are genuinely strong. Churning songs out like this only makes them thinner, he believes, and if the industry backed stand-out songs over longer promotional cycles, new artists would have a better chance of being recognised.
Though he does not use the digital lexicon of platforms and feeds, his thoughts point toward a wider critique of contemporary cultural erosion. Creative works, songs included, now surface and disappear within algorithmic cycles, leaving few with the sustained attention required to become culturally legible. It is the scroll logic of disposability: culture taken in as undifferentiated units of content, flattened and detached from context. From this angle, Mr Kobayashi’s view mirrors that of a mid-century music industry wrestling with a broader cultural drift. In enka’s case, the problem lies in labels operating in a state of panic, trying to keep pace. Slowing the process down—advice he would likely give were he approached for sōdan—is, in my view too, the necessary corrective, the grain that must be gone against.
When I visited Rhythm in 2023, Tokyothéque was little more than a sketch in my notebook, but I left feeling I needed to speak with the Kobayashis again and document their work in some way. This year, during my extended stay in the shitamachi area¹, I made certain to return to Rhythm to ask whether the Kobayashis might be open to a conversation with Tokyothéque. I was pleased to find the shop open and the couple working as usual. We spoke for a while inside before Mr Kobayashi, perhaps noticing that my interest ran deeper than that of a passing reporter, offered to treat me to lunch the following afternoon.
When I arrived the next day, Mrs Kobayashi was out on an errand, so Mr Kobayashi and I sat in the shop for a while as we waited. During this time, I learned about his personal history and the shop’s story, along with a few details from his curriculum vitae: an ice hockey trophy from an earlier life as a sportsperson, a talent that had taken him to Nihon University. He had also worked as an enka producer, and even wrote and recorded a song with Mrs Kobayashi, “Sumidagawa Bojō”, meaning nostalgia for the Sumida River.
At that moment, a regular customer stepped into the shop to ask about a specific CD and joined our conversation. His main curiosity was how I had come to like enka. I had never listened to it deliberately while living in Tokyo, and only became a fan after returning to London. There is a psychological basis for this: repeated ambient exposure, slow emotional encoding, and the soft-focus lens of nostalgia often mean we recognise a music’s appeal only after leaving the place where it was part of daily life.
Enka often functions as drinking music—ballads of drowning sorrows and crying into one’s glass fill its back catalogue. I began to explain that the music had seeped into my consciousness through nights spent sampling sake in old-fashioned izakaya. At that point the regular cut in, suggesting that Mr Kobayashi close the shop and that we all go for a drink—it was past noon, after all, and the Ueno gādo-shita offers no shortage of small, cosy places to do so.
I looked to Mr Kobayashi to see how he would respond. He waited, then offered another distilled insight: “At some point, years ago, my body simply stopped wanting alcohol, and I haven’t touched a drop since.” The regular half accepted this, paid for his CD, and walked out with a grin and a shake of the head. I share Mr Kobayashi’s sentiment, and with the shop quiet again our conversation turned to nutrition. His approach is simple: pay attention and listen when the body signals. Judging by his alert mind and able physical condition, it serves him well.
He began to explain that soba is one meal his body has never cautioned him against, just as Mrs Kobayashi returned, freeing him to take me to lunch. On a warm mid-September day, we stepped out of the shop—Mr Kobayashi in a bright yellow polo shirt and chequered trousers with striped suspenders, no jacket needed. We walked east, crossing Okachimachi Ekimae-dōri and several side streets before reaching Shōwa-dōri, the wide north–south road that runs along Ueno’s eastern flank beneath the expressway. A short walk north brought us to Sobadokoro Ichikawa (そば処いち川). Mr Kobayashi led the way and arranged our orders without delay.
By this point, we’d moved quickly onto the value of sōdan and his business philosophy, but I also wanted to hear how the shop’s surroundings had changed over the decades, given its singular location. The changes are as extensive as I might imagine, Mr Kobayashi says, as a plate of zaru soba is set down for him and a slightly less healthy tenzaru for me. Rhythm, he thinks, is likely the oldest shop in the Ueno gādo-shita. From there he has watched shops appear and disappear, and the urban fabric of Ueno morph. Looking out the window towards Shōwa-dōri, he points and explains that the stream of cars now passing by was once a train line.
Our conversation naturally moves further into the past and, almost inevitably, to the question of succession. Mr Kobayashi was born in 1937 in former Karafuto-chō (樺太庁), now Sakhalin in Russia, which was once part of Japan’s external territory. He was evacuated to Tokyo by ship in 1941, shortly after the war began, and grew up in Kita-ku, the ward bordering Taitō-ku to the north-west of where we sit in Ueno. He is 88 at the time of our discussion. The future remains uncertain, but he mentions an aspiring enka producer who has been helping at the shop recently, someone who has become a kind of grandchild figure, and suggests that I speak with her.
We finish our soba and stroll back to the shop at an easy pace, where Mr Kobayashi begins searching through his archives for something he wants to give me. While he does, Mrs Kobayashi offers me a bag of snacks and a bottle of Yakult. We chat briefly about local kissaten—I hope the follow-up to this newsletter will share her side of the story over coffee. Then Mr Kobayashi returns with a folder and draws out a black-and-white photograph: the former train line along Shōwa-dōri, captured in 1950 when he was 13.
As someone who treats follow-ups seriously and seems to dislike letting tasks drift, he then takes a flip phone from his pocket and—in a gesture of connection-making I sense he prioritises highly—puts me on the telephone to Kana, the young woman helping Rhythm with its digital communications, setting up and maintaining a website and Instagram account for the shop. She is doing what she can to carry Mr Kobayashi’s knowledge and perspective to new audiences.
The call leaves me with the sense that if, among an estimated 30 million people under 30 in Japan, a business like Rhythm can reach even one person who believes in it deeply enough, it has a chance to continue despite wider speculation about the recession of an older Japan. Still, not every Shōwa-era business may have cultivated the art of connection in the way the Kobayashis have, and much will depend on that. And beyond this lies the larger challenge for owner-operators: to keep at their work, day after day, with body and mind in good health, whether another CD is sold or not.
Mr Kobayashi notices that the song has finished and the gādo-shita is bereft of enka, so he moves quickly to cue up the next track. “Erimo Misaki”, I believe it was. I bid the couple farewell and merge back into the Ameyokochō crowd, carrying more lessons on how to live and work well than I could have expected, with the sound of enka growing distant behind me.
Until we meet in Ueno,
AJ
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Footnotes
¹ First Light: Seven Perfect Days in the Shitamachi
Links
Rhythm on Google Maps
Rhythm on Instagram
Rhythm's Homepage