NEXT TO ME OR NOTHING

KYOTO
1978 - PRESENT

Rokudenashi translates to "good for nothing," a word that once described the students of 1960s Japan who drifted through university smoking and playing records instead of studying. Naohisa Yokota, a drummer, opened this jazz kissa in 1978 and has been spinning records there since. A short walk from Gion-Shijo station, following a sign up a narrow staircase, is a small room that seats a handful of people, where customers lean into cigarettes and each other. Jazz pressed close in a place where the record is the event and any conversation happens around it. The music is the point, and so is the proximity. Decades on, it remains a hole-in-the-wall by design: the kind of place that collapses the distance between everyone in it.