There’s a cherished brand of city-strolling in Tokyo. I’m not talking about the Tokyo Walker magazine variety of weekend consumer trails that lead you on a curated tour of the city’s newest select shops and trendy dining options. Nor the retiree’s version either — best represented by the magazine Sanpo no Tatsujin (roughly, “Strollmeisters”), which takes a more historical-tourist approach, revisiting dead artists’ former residences and prowling grounds, hunting down venerable soba shops that are renowned less for their food and more for the wonder of their continued existence. Nor do I mean a kind of flaneurship for dandies. To “burabura” means to wander aimlessly and take in the sights, on a path usually not decided on in advance.

In prewar Tokyo, the term “burabura” was almost exclusively associated with the pleasure and shopping quarter of Ginza — to the point of spawning the phrase “ginbura.” Ginza anxiously tried to emulate the languid café life of Paris boulevards and the urgent rhythms of booming New York. Intellectuals and writers gathered in replicas of European coffee shops called kissaten and enjoyed “ginbura” rambling up and down the long, straight gridded streets. The neighborhood today remains one of the few areas in the city that resembles the geometry of Paris and New York. Even after the war, right through to the 1960s, Ginza and nearby Shinbashi were still predicated on a foreign conception of leisure. Ishii Teruo’s film Sexy Line, for example, with its swaggering Nouvelle Vague camerawork, faithfully captures that urban rogue spirit. The film tracks the hardboiled detective’s capers as he weaves in and out of cafés and underground bars, hurtles down warrens of narrow alleys, all closely matched to the swing and flourish of a jazz soundtrack.

Since the Ginza culture found little precedence in local Japanese history, and the flowering of café “culture” ended up leaving European veneers all over their city. Ginza denizens refashioned the atmosphere of the neighborhood to reflect a foreign image without much regard to what was there before. They nad free license to carve out new pleasure quarters, especially after the native versions (like the Yoshiwara red light district in the east of the city) were leveled after the war — both physically and morally.

Rebuilding was a heady time for Tokyo, especially in the run-up to the 1964 Olympics, but intellectuals were worried whether there was any meaning being created at all in the slapdash layout of the re-planned city. The pace of the renewal was disorienting; while it all looked “cinematic” in the movies, you sometimes couldn’t tell if the current state of the city was getting closer to completion or getting demolished once again.
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