Ultramagnetic MC’s – Gig poster – Café oto, Japan – Available to buy here – Copy: James Pollard

For a venue traditionally known as an eaterie, Café oto has built quite the storied musical history over time. Records show that the establishment had originally opened on January 15th 1890 as Asa Chan’s Tea & Flans, a cheap-and-cheerful beverage and dessert shop that supplemented its main business by hosting shamisen nights at weekends, for local performers desperate for a place to meet and jam. 

It first found notoriety as the location for the infamous 1929 Valentine’s Day Nakagawa Mascara Massacre, when an accident involving a candle, a stack of flammable facepaint and a pile of broken shamisens resulted in the building almost burning down and, more tragically, contributed to the untimely death of famed instrumentalist Nakima Nakagawa. It then remained a burnt-out shell until after the conclusion of the Second World War, when it was bought by a local businessman and rebranded as Choki Saito’s Beer & Potatoes. It favoured a less than popular menu consisting solely of Asahi beer and chips but found success by hosting more popular acoustic music gigs at weekends. It survived until the late 1960’s, when an accident involving fermenting potatoes resulted in another fire sweeping through and gutting the building.

It stayed as a charred remnant of Japan’s Postwar Miracle until the mid-1970s, when disco rose to prominence and new owners jumped on the neon-fringed bandwagon. It became Sakura Ito’s Cinzano Disco and spent three years as Japan’s only 24/7 discotheque, until the illuminated dancefloor eventually overheated and melted to the sound of The Trammp’s Disco Inferno on New Year’s Eve in 1977, seriously hurting most of the members of the club’s resident dance troupe, The Kimono Blossom Kickers. 

It was bought again in 1979 and reopened as Café Roboto, where, for the next ten years, it became the hangout of choice for a new breed of youth: the video gamer. It housed a number of cutting edge arcade consoles by day, and at weekends hosted club nights, attracting up-and-coming DJs to support the club’s resident “disc-bot,” DJ Kiroku, the world’s first animatronic robot club host. Unfortunately, errors in the DJ Kiroku’s code saw him malfunction and go on a mini-killing spree at midnight on New Year’s Eve 1989, only stopping when he was eventually cornered and thrown into the Kyobashi river by revellers (witnesses claim he drowned to the sounds of Technotronic’s Pump Up the Jam). It proved a lucky escape for the young Australian DJ Rob Dougan, who was the last support act before the carnage started. When the robot uprising began, Dougan understandably disappeared into the city as quickly as possible. However, he’d started the evening by stealing the first three letters from the club’s neon sign as a prank and adorned his stage set-up with them. As he hightailed it at midnight, he took the ROB with him; thus, the club was promptly renamed.

The new decade was supposed to herald in a new era of live music at the establishment. New owners moved quickly, desperate to try and turn around the bad fortune of how the previous decade had ended. Being fans of US hip-hop, they booked a number of expensive but high-profile acts to play throughout January, starting with the New York-based group 3rd Bass. Unfortunately, the American trio all came down with food poisoning on the day of the show (somewhat ironically, after eating bad French Toast, left over at the venue from the week before). Undeterred, the owners persisted, by using what funds they had left on the installation of a new sound system and the construction of a new stage, to be erected in time for the venue’s next scheduled gig featuring the Ultramagnetic MCs. Unfortunately, during the hurried planning, a crumb from a dorayaki pancake had fallen into the contractor’s typewriter and onto the full stop key typebar, meaning that no decimal point had been added to the dimensions of the stage design. It wasn’t until the afternoon of Saturday the 13th that the horrified club owners realised that the workmen had built a stage that was 244cm (about 8’) high, instead of 24.4cm, leaving only about 40cm between the stage and the venue ceiling. Due to the fact that the Ultramagnetic MCs were not willing to perform whilst lying on their stomachs, the gig was cancelled at the last minute. With no money left, the venue again shuttered its operations the next day - one day shy of its centenary anniversary.