A man in a bucket hat with a ducktail beard smokes a large cigarette of dubious legality. My own descent into the Kyoto nightscape continues at Urban Guild, the city’s leading avant-garde music space. In the 1970s, members of the Japanese Red Army, a female-led militant communist group who aimed to overthrow the monarchy, were said to have hidden out amid the swirling smoke and dark-wood walls of Zac Baran, one of Kyoto’s most famous jazz bars.

The city’s counterculture has long been brewed in the city’s music venues, locally known as ‘live houses’. But there’s another side to the place - one that’s modern, rumbustious and irreverent to the core.

The guidebooks speak of Kyoto with reverential awe: a city frozen in time, where robed monks sweep around hushed temples, and an opaque silence hangs above the perfect angles of Zen gardens. The modest Irish folk scene is just the tip of the iceberg. “And when you find one, you go for it, full throttle.” “Hobbies are huge here,” confirms my guide, Van Milton of InsideJapan. There’s even a word for it in Japanese: ikigai - the sense of motivation and life force generated by the pursuit of one’s passions. “Japanese people often believe that mastering something leads to enjoyment, both in work and in hobbies,” says fiddle and tin-whistle player Ryo Kaneko, fresh from a rousing rendition of Egan’s Polka. The genre was seized upon with aplomb by subsequent generations of Japanese musicians, who’ve taken it up with the passion, verve and skill typical of this nation of hobbyists. “A few curious Japanese joined them, and the Irish music scene was born.” “Europeans and Americans living in Kyoto started the Irish music sessions in pubs in the 1990s,” manager Hikaru Sato tells me between tunes.

Over the next couple of hours, a succession of fantastically talented Japanese musicians takes to the stage, putting the fiddle, flute, banjo and tin whistle to a series of riotous jigs, reels and slides that wouldn’t be out of place in the pubs of Dublin. My apprehension turns out to be wildly misplaced. It’s with some trepidation, then, that I settle into a corner table at Field, an Irish pub above an udon restaurant in downtown Kyoto, where the door sign advertises that classic combination of ‘draught Guinness, good Irish music, and curry bread of Noharaya’. This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).Īn Irish pub is, perhaps, not the obvious place to find yourself in the cultural heart of Japan.

The city we became amazon