Tokyo is a global food city with tens of thousands of Chinese, Korean, European and other ‘ethnic’ eateries. It also may be unique among large global cities in the extent to which ‘ethnic’ eateries are owned by resident nationals rather than migrants. Low-levels of migration for decades have meant that small-scale Japanese entrepreneurs (often rural-to-urban migrants from other parts of Japan) filled an emerging niche for ‘foreign’ cuisines in the city. This is most evident in the long-standing Chinese restaurant sector, one of the most common genres of restaurant in urban Japan. Nishi-Ogikubo, like most Tokyo neighbourhoods, has several long-standing ‘neighbourhood Chinese’ (machi chuka) restaurants run by aging Japanese owners. These are not intercultural meeting spaces in our sense, with Japanese owners serving familiar localized Chinese (chuka ryouri) dishes that most Japanese patrons now regard as nostalgic rather than exotic (Farrer, 2018).
More recently in Nishi-Ogikubo, we see new ethnic restaurants owned by Japanese nationals who have travelled to foreign countries or who learned to prepare these foods in other restaurants in Japan. These include an Uzbek wine bar, a Mexican, Singaporean, and a South Indian restaurant, and there are several pricier French and Italian restaurants run by chefs with professional training in Europe. These are places of everyday culinary diversity for cosmopolitan Tokyoites, but they involve negligible social diversity, since the owners and nearly all customers are Japanese. Nonetheless, the presence of such diverse eateries has facilitated the entry of migrant-owned businesses into the neighbourhood. For example, in one dense commercial district near the main commuter railway station in Nishi-Ogikubo, the success of a Thai cuisine eatery, run by young Japanese, encouraged migrants to set up businesses in the same narrow pedestrian alleyway. The realtor who managed the property also spoke positively of these migrant tenants. There are now Greek, Bangladeshi, Chinese and Korean eateries, all run by migrants from these respective countries, representing a visible concentration of migrant businesses in a neighbourhood where migrants are not ordinarily highly visible. A migrant from China also runs the Okinawan restaurant on the alleyway (see Farrer, 2019). Much as in London, these are welcoming spaces for patrons from any backgrounds. The interactions between the largely Japanese customers and migrant proprietors is part of the atmosphere consumed in these spaces. As in the case of some Asian eateries in the USA, migrant proprietors may use their distinctive physical presence and appearance to represent these spaces as both ‘exotic’ and authentic (Hirose & Pih, 2011).
Except for a British pub that opened in 2019, no other businesses in Nishi-Ogikubo are ‘ethnic eateries’ in which it would be common to find a large group of migrants of one ethnicity on a particular evening. Central Tokyo has only a few neighbourhoods with a concentration of migrants great enough to support restaurants catering specifically to the tastes of patrons from their own community (and Japanese are the majority of customers even in most of these). This includes, for example, Chinese restaurants frequented by new Chinese migrants in the ‘New Chinatown’ of Ikebukuro (see Coates, 2020). In West Tokyo, with its relatively small and dispersed migrant populations, nearly all migrant eateries are oriented towards the dominant Japanese community. This means the owners must adapt to the requirement of the majority, including speaking fluent Japanese. As Kharel (2016) quotes a Nepali restaurant owner in Tokyo:
Here, without speaking Japanese you cannot join a Japanese nomikai (drinking party), and without joining a nomikai you can’t make good Japanese friends, and without making good Japanese friends, you can’t succeed in business in Japan (Kharel, 2016, p. 189).
As this quote shows, drinking (and socializing over drinks) is an important requirement of the Japanese food service, and many owners, regardless of their own cultural background, see it as a necessity. In Nishi-Ogikubo, Babu, a restaurant owner from Bangladesh, described the necessity of drinking with customers in his small eatery. He also sees drinking as a way of bonding with the customers and creating a community of regulars. The opening hours for his eatery are 6 p.m. to 3 a.m., Babu explained, and the most popular time is the hour after midnight when the bar hoppers drop by for a late-night curry and a beer. Many are curious to try the gin from Bangladesh or wine from India. There are many customers drinking alone, including women. ‘People get to know each other and become friends. Some couples have met here and got married,’ he said. Regulars, including retirees living in the neighborhood, also chat with Babu, usually about their own recent activities.
As Babu’s case shows, community norms of interaction shape sociability in migrant-run spaces. In the small independent izakaya (Japanese taverns) that dominate the area around the commuter train station, customers gather primarily in the evening for food and drinks. Although the migrant-owned eateries on this street offer a taste and imagery of exotic locales, they operate in much the same fashion as the small neighbouring Japanese izakaya. Friendly conversation between the manager and the customers, and usually between customers at the bar, is expected (Molasky, 2014; Taniguchi, 2017), creating a type of ‘intercultural third place’ in which Japanese customers interact with the migrant staff, though almost entirely in Japanese and according to Japanese cultural norms. This is thus more of a performance of cultural accommodation and hospitality on the part of the migrant owner, rather than a shift in behaviour on both sides. Relationships between managers and customers can be quite intimate, however. As one Chinese bar manager explained, she has also organized trips to Taiwan together with her regular customers, a common pattern in the small bars and eateries in the area, including those run by migrants. Her bar is a lively site of joking and flirtations, especially among the younger customers, but also conversations about more serious topics such as international affairs. Regulars include Japanese white-collar employees, foreign English teachers, younger people working in the food and beverage sector and a few students.
The norms of interaction are influenced by the scale and design of urban space, in this case the dominance of micro-scale eateries. As Jacobs suggests, urban spaces on a ‘human scale’ more easily sustain community (Jacobs, 1961). In Nishi-Ogikubo many eateries are much smaller than anything commonly seen in Western cities. Many are only 13 square meters in floor area and seat a maximum of six patrons in the bar area. Others have extra seating upstairs allowing for up to 20 patrons. The small scale of West Tokyo’s migrant eateries means that communication among customers sitting along the bar is expected (Farrer, 2019, 2021).
Because of their size, small izakaya eateries in Tokyo have the feel of a private drinking space catering to regulars, which may be intimidating for migrants from other countries, particularly if they are not confident in their Japanese. Migrants generally feel more welcome, or less pressured, when entering migrant run eateries. In the spaces Farrer observed in Nishi-Ogikubo, this creates a further opportunity for intercultural contacts with Japanese customers, who remain the majority. Because these eateries are mid-priced, the migrant customers tend to be professionals (often teachers) or students, often from developed countries (rarely from the same place as the migrant restaurant owners). Migrant customers may speak Japanese or English (very rarely other languages) with Japanese customers.
For the Japanese regulars in this area, these small ethnic eateries have become a space of intercultural communication that is otherwise relatively rare for Japanese in the neighbourhood. Though it takes place in a fashion that is largely organized around familiar Japanese patterns of sociability (drinking along a bar), intercultural interactions are one attraction of these bars for Japanese hoping to practice English or otherwise interact with foreigners.
Overall, the dominant Japanese social norms and language shape the expectations of how customers interact, even within migrant-owned spaces. A partial exception to this pattern observed in this fieldwork was the new British pub in Nishi-Ogikubo. It is managed by a Japanese proprietor and her British husband, both of whom speak English and Japanese. When several English-speaking customers gather, their conversations are in English. Topics of conversation centre on shared migrant experiences or global concerns (immigrant experiences, international politics, etc). However, when Japanese patrons are the majority, which is often the case, the conversations usually switch to Japanese or a mix of the languages. Because English is a global language, and British pub culture is familiar to Japanese from film and television representations, this commercial eatery is the only one observed in this neighbourhood in which Japanese customers are able and willing to adjust to migrant practices of sociability, if only speaking a few sentences in English to the foreign patrons.
Beyond the commercial eateries around the station, the relatively low density of migrants in the neighbourhood means that interactions between Japanese residents and migrants are relatively rare for the Japanese (though commonplace and unavoidable for the migrants). There are migrants, such as the Nepali cooks interviewed by Kharel (2016), who socialize almost entirely in networks of other Nepalis, but most migrants living in Nishi-Ogikubo work in the broader Japanese economy and find themselves interacting with the Japanese majority in most everyday situations.
The patterns of intercultural exchanges over food among neighbours mirror those in the commercial eateries in terms of the dominance of Japanese norms of sociability. Most of this happens in contexts created by the Japanese majority. This can include neighbourhood events, such as festivals at schools or temples, or informal gatherings such as ‘cherry blossom viewing’ parties in the spring. Personal invitations to eat at homes are rare among non-kin in the neighbourhood. Migrants thus have few opportunities to share their own culinary culture with Japanese neighbours, except for a few organized ‘international’ festivals, such as the large annual one organized in the larger neighbouring community of Kichijoji in West Tokyo. These, however, do not involve immediate neighbours, but rather commercial vendors, and are unlikely to result in sustained social ties. One exception Farrer observed (and actually helped organize) was a neighbourhood Halloween party, involving ‘trick-or-treating’ and an informal block party among neighbours. Participation by Japanese neighbours has been sustained and enthusiastic, reaching over 200 persons every year for the past decade. This type of sharing of a foreign culture seems to have been possible, because Halloween was an American custom that neighbours were familiar with and therefore could embrace, a pattern also seen in the relatively new British pub. The hegemonic nature of Anglo-American pop culture and the English language probably plays a role in this exchange. In all these cases, the chance to speak English is an attraction for Japanese, who see foreigners as a rarity, and English as a useful skill.
In summary, the situation in West Tokyo contrasts greatly with that of the super-diverse neighbourhoods in East London. Ethnic food is part of the expected everyday diversity of life in Tokyo as global city. However, the long-term presence of ethnic food in Tokyo does not necessarily entail or require the presence of migrants, since Japanese also run ‘ethnic’ restaurants. Migrants do have an advantage in this niche, however, since they represent ‘authenticity’ through their presence (Hirose & Pih, 2011), and the numbers of migrant-run eateries are increasing. The small number of migrants in Nishi-Ogikubo and neighbouring areas means that the migrant-run eatery is one of the few places in which Japanese residents come into contact with migrants socially. If this is a take-out stand or a restaurant with many tables, the interactions may be momentary, like in London. But in the small and intimate bar-like eateries near the station, regular customers may become very familiar with the migrant managers or owners. These spaces are not just ‘cosmopolitan canopies’ to use the term of Elijah Anderson, in which people from different backgrounds interact civilly and usually distantly in central city urban spaces (Anderson, 2011), but smaller scale ‘intercultural third places’ in which people interact on very familiar terms, though only in this limited temporal and spatial context. Ties may be sustained from visit to visit, but rarely go beyond the space-time bubble of ‘drinking together’. Beyond these special spaces, the chances for migrants to share their foodways with Japanese residents also are limited, but when occasions are created, migrants typically report a positive reception, showing an interest among Japanese in social interactions based upon food, despite (or perhaps because of) their rarity.