The Bells of Booya

Thoughts about Shibuya's transformation, from 1993 to today.

Shibuya, 1993. The first jumbo display wouldn’t go in until 1999. Same spot today.

Once upon a time, Shibuya was my favorite neighborhood in all of Tokyo. I still enjoy visiting, but things have changed a lot since I first started going there in the mid-Nineties. The construction of a series of massive office towers over the course of the 2010s transformed the skyline, and plunging birth rates decimated the ranks of the young demographic that traditionally shopped and played here. Today you’re more likely to see a middle-aged office worker (or tourist) in Shibuya Scramble than a teenager.

This is on my mind because of a great thread on the topic of Shibuya’s transformation by Mulboyne on Twitter. But it’s also on my mind because this week marks the 30th anniversary of a show that perfectly captured the zeitgeist of early-Nineties Tokyo: Pokeberu ga narananakute, which is something like Why Won’t My Pager Beep? It aired from early July through late September of 1993, and showcased a torrid love affair between a married salaryman and an “office lady” thirty years his junior. (Holy power harassment, Batman!) The show was the brainchild of one Yasushi Akimoto, who would later go on to create the AKB48 idol-singer megafranchise.

To conceal their liaisons from family and colleagues, the protagonists communicated via “pocket bells,” which is what the Japanese called pocket pagers. If you’re of a certain age (ahem) you’ll undoubtedly remember the things. They were about the size of a deck of cards, and each had its own phone number. But you couldn’t talk on them. This was before even “dumb” cellphones became commonplace. If someone called your pager, it would beep or vibrate and show their number so you could call them back on a landline. Over the years pagers grew more elaborate, with added features, but in 1993 simply displaying a phone number felt state of the art.

The holy trinity of women’s accessories circa ‘93: lipstick, calling cards, and pager.

Why Won’t My Pager Beep? coincided with a drop in the price of pager subscriptions in Japan, to the level that nearly anyone, even cash-starved teens, could afford them. The combo of the show and availability caused interest in pagers outside of typical demographics (doctors, CEOs) to explode. Before long young women had taken over as the gadget’s heaviest users. And biggest hackers! Aided by a pecularity of the Japanese language in which numbers can be pronounced phonetically, women transformed pagers into makeshift texting devices. A new numerical argot emerged to facilitate communication on those tiny LCD screens:

3341 (sa-mi-shi-i), “I’m lonely.”

1052167 (do-ko-ni-i-ru-no), “Where are you?”

428 (Shi-bu-ya).

Of course, Shi-bu-ya. Always. Girls were Japan’s tech trailblazers, and Shibuya was their mecca. In the Nineties, Center Street (renamed “Basketball Street” in 2011 in an unsuccessful attempt to change its image) was the backbone of Japan’s youth culture. It was filthy and smelled of spilled beer and tears and the overflowing garbage cans of convenience stores and fast-food joints, but it was alive, pulsing with unpredictable energies that spun off one fad after the other. It was home to the cool and the uncool, scammers and victims, fashionistas and runaways, led by the kogals and ganguro. These hyperstylized teens created the 21st century a little ahead of time, decking out their gear in Sanrio swag, swappping selfies, carrying virtual pets, and texting emoji years before any of this took off abroad. Patrick Macias (of the highly recommended Tokyoscope newsletter) and Izumi Evers visually documented the scene in their equally recommended Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno.

I lived here when it was first happening, from the fall of 1993 through the summer of 1994. I was on a university exchange program between my alma mater the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Keio University. I lived near Kamata Station and the campus was in Tamachi, neither of which were anywhere near Shibuya, but my friends and I inevitably found ourselves there most afternoons. While the kogals texted on their pagers and PHS phones, we were gripped by a digital addiction of our own: Cyber Sled, a futuristic head-to-head tank battle that rewarded the winner of a match with a free play for the next. After tiring of the comeptition in the local arcades we’d search for wilder contenders in The Booya (as we called Shibuya — Shinjuku being The Juke, Ikebukuro being The Buke, etc., etc.)

Shibuya’s rise as an epicenter for youth culture wasn’t an accident. It was designed that way from the get-go. The Tokyu department store chain built the famed 109 Tower and Seibu built Parco Shibuya in the Seventies specifically to attract young consumers and turn the area into a fashion district. It worked. But despite the new trends and cultures created there, the authorities grew ambivalent, bordering on hostile, to the young women of Shibuya in particular, portraying them as delinquents and even on occasion predators. Now the powers that be are remaking this section of the city again, into something friendlier for older folks, and that looks to be working as well. There’s still energy here today, but everything feels shinier, cleaner, safer, more predictable. Perhaps this is why I see so many tourists visiting with young children, something that would have been very unusual in the Nineties.

Clean and safe is good. And times change. But I miss the low-slung, grubby Shibuya of my youth, filled with weirdos of all sorts. I miss the fifty-yen arcades and cheap izakaya and even the shifty hawkers of illicit telephone cards that would give you free calls on public phones. The cheap izakaya are still there, of course, and there is still weirdness to be found if you know where to look. But there are no more pagers or hawkers or kogals, and the arcades have, by and large, closed down. So it goes. But I’m still waiting for my rematch after our last Cyber Sled game, Alex.