Shopping for Jazz in Japan: A Photo Essay

Aaron Gilbreath
5 min readJan 6, 2020

It’s nice to visit a country that appreciates vintage music that America largely neglects, and to find so many killer old albums still in print.

Disc Union jazz basement store, Shibuya, Tokyo 2014. Photo by author

Japan is one of the largest consumers of jazz in the world. Jazz plays everywhere from department stores to kimono stores, and albums long out-of-print remain in print there, often carefully remastered and pressed on thick, quality vinyl. Collectors…

Aaron Gilbreath

Essayist, Journalist, Burritoist. Longreads Editor. Writing: Harper’s, NYT, Slate, Paris Review, VQR, Oxford American, Kenyon Review. 3 nonfiction books.