Blues at a Basement Crossroads

Exit Nishi-Ogikubo Station through the North Exit, turn left, and continue past the police box along the busy Fushimi-dori shopping street, and an incongruous red torii comes into view. Pass through it, walking a little farther beyond the small Fushimi Inari Shrine, and a colorful signboard in the shape of a bluesman points to Hobo-ya in the basement of a building on the right. It is a dining bar where the blues has been played for over three decades. It is a bar, but it is also somewhere you can sit down to a substantial meal. These days it is open from lunchtime. Yet at certain moments Hobo-ya seems like a place that cannot quite be explained by any of those labels. Music, cooking, drinks, conversation, and the kinds of human connections characteristic of Nishiogi slowly intersect in this small underground space.

The owner and cook is Yoshiko, known to everyone as Sue (Suu-san in Japanese). She came to Tokyo from Iwate when she was young, encountered the blues, worked in the music world, traveled overseas alone, and worked in restaurants before building a place of her own in Nishiogi. That long story, and her emotional connection to the blues, still runs beneath the atmosphere of the shop. With first-time customers, she explains the menu, the history of the place, and the blues and other music. She chats easily with regulars. Sometimes she gently connects customers sitting near one another. Even people who enter a little apprehensively because they have heard it is a blues bar soon understand that this is not a place only for people with specialized musical knowledge. It is a place where they can eat, drink, and talk.

Hobo-ya is certainly a blues bar. Objects connected to the blues and the complex history of the American South are scattered through the room, while the background music ranges from prewar blues to more recent blues and other music shaped by the blues. The menu includes dishes evocative of the American South, such as gumbo, jambalaya, and sauteed catfish, alongside Japanese yoshoku favorites such as omurice and curry. That coexistence is also part of Hobo-ya. Rather than pushing an esoteric musical taste onto customers, the shop offers an entry point into the blues while welcoming people who want to eat, drink, talk, and perhaps go home feeling just a little better.

The story behind all this begins with Sue's own life. For her, the blues was never merely a hobby or a cool musical style. When she came to Tokyo as a young woman, poor and lonely but determined to live on her own terms, the blues 'came down' to her. It was also a discovery that hardship, poverty, and weakness did not have to be hidden. They could be sung. And in her case, they were belted out in a reverberating soulful voice that didn’t seem to belong to her petite frame.

When the blues ‘came down’

Sue is from Kitakami in Iwate Prefecture. She loved music from childhood. “In junior high I was obsessed with rock,” she said, “and when you ask who I liked, a lot of them were musicians from the sixties and seventies. The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Cream—all kinds of people. They were all rock musicians influenced by the blues. So I thought, ‘Oh, I see! There’s this music called blues!’ and I tried listening to some of it too. Robert Johnson, Skip James, people like that. But the blues didn’t click with me at all. I was like, what is this? I thought the people doing the covers sounded way cooler.”

At first, then, the blues she reached by way of rock did not move her very much. If anything, the rock musicians covering blues songs sounded cooler. That changed in 1980, when she left Iwate for Tokyo at the age of eighteen.

At the time, Sue was in serious conflict with her family, especially her father. “I came to Tokyo from Iwate when I was eighteen,” she said. “It was 1980. I had actually wanted to go to university—to Sophia University, where James works now (laughs). But my father was the kind of person who thought, ‘A woman should get a job locally after high school. There’s no need to go to university.’ We fought about it for a long time. Finally I said, ‘All right, then I won’t take any help from you at all. I’ll go to Tokyo by myself.’ So I came to Tokyo almost as if I were running away from home. I worked during the day and went to a design vocational school at night.”

Life in Tokyo, however, was difficult. “There was no money coming from my parents, so I had to cover both living expenses and school fees out of what I earned working during the day. I was pretty poor (laughs). Embarrassingly poor. I lived in a shabby apartment in Asagaya with no bath, a shared entrance, and a shared toilet. I had to cut food costs too, so I often went to a bakery and bought the crusts from loaves of bread. They came packed in big plastic bags and cost about twenty yen at the time. People probably bought them to feed wild birds or crucian carp, but I pretended I was buying feed and ate them myself (laughs). That’s how much I had to cut things down just to live.”

In the middle of that life, she heard a record by a blues musician. What he was singing about was poverty itself. “That was when the blues came down to me. I heard a song by a blues musician. His blues was about poverty: ‘Every day I have no food and no earnings. And I’ve got five children. Even the rats in the kitchen make fun of me.’ When I heard that, I thought, you’re allowed to make a song out of something like that? And that song really reached me at the time. I felt somehow saved by it. If you’re allowed to sing about that, maybe I can let some of this out too—the hard life I’m living, all these things, what’s inside me. So I tried humming it to myself. And somehow I felt a little lighter. I thought, so this is the blues.”

“I heard it on a record in that shabby apartment in Asagaya. It was Sleepy John Estes, a blind bluesman. He was blind and really poor, and a lot of his songs were about poverty. I didn’t have anything, but that music was my salvation, or the most important thing inside me. So that was the one thing I spent whatever money I could on.”

In a room where she had almost nothing, she made sure she could at least listen to records. For Sue, the blues was never simply a concept for a shop. It was music that told her that, even in a hard life, she could bring what was inside her out into the open.

That is why the blues playing at Hobo-ya is not simply background music. What lies behind the shop is not so much a power to turn poverty, loneliness, and frustration into something beautiful as a power to hold those things as they are and still make it possible for people to share the same room.

Asagaya, music workplaces, and work learned through the body

In the 1980s, there were places in Asagaya where one could listen to the blues. “The place I often went to was called Gangster. It was on the second floor way down at the end of Asagaya Ichibangai. It was a narrow place, like an eel’s bed, and they had live music too. I went there all the time. It’s gone now, but the man who used to run it has a blues place in Fukushima today.”

Later, Sue also got a job at the music magazine company she had long admired. The story of her hiring captures both her youth and the directness of her feeling for music. “At the end of the interview, the person said, ‘If you love music that much, try expressing it with your body.’ It wasn’t a theater audition, so I had no idea what to do when someone told me to express it with my body. But there was an acoustic guitar there, so I borrowed it and sang one song, trembling with nerves. And then it was decided. It was decided right there. They said, ‘All right, we’ll go with you.’”

Her connection to music continued after her work at the magazine. One particularly important experience was singing as a member of a Japanese band at U.S. military bases. “Inside a U.S. military base, it’s America even though you’re in Japan. Once you go through the gate, it might as well be California. And the audiences inside those gates were incredibly severe—or maybe just incredibly honest. If you gave a bad performance, it wasn’t just booing. Bottles and ashtrays could really come flying. But when the performance was good, the cheers were incredible—completely genuine, enormous cheers. Americans are very clear about yes or no. They don’t give you sympathy applause the way Japanese people might. So those reactions became my measuring stick.”

There were five forty-five-minute sets in a single night. To answer requests, the band had to drill hundreds of songs into themselves. When someone requested a song she could not sing, she also learned techniques for getting through the moment, such as handing the microphone to the customer who had requested it. “If I gave a bad performance, that band might never get work again. When I thought about the livelihoods of the other band members too, I realized I couldn’t just hide in the bathroom by myself and cry. From then on I really fought to make it work. We did five forty-five-minute sets in a single night. We assembled and broke down all the stage equipment ourselves. It was really hard. We toured all over Japan, from Misawa in the north to Okinawa in the south. We were a jukebox band: people said, play this, play that, and we had to respond. You couldn’t say, ‘We can’t do it.’ So there were hundreds of songs we had to drill into ourselves. And just standing there singing wasn’t enough to win people over (laughs), so I studied cool staging and costumes too. I watched Tina Turner videos. I was always thinking, how can I make everyone happy? That was what I thought about all the time.”

Again and again in Sue's story, music appears as something that cannot be captured by simply saying she 'liked' it. Music was salvation, work, and a place where she trained herself. At times it also made her wonder, 'Wasn't music supposed to be about enjoying sound? So why did it feel like this?' After all these different experiences, she left Japan for a time and headed to India.

India, survival, and returning to Japan

Around the age of twenty-eight, Sue traveled alone to India. It was her first trip overseas. People around her tried to stop her: a woman traveling alone, and choosing India for her first trip abroad, was surely a bad idea. But she thought that if she could make it through the place that seemed most difficult, perhaps nothing afterward would frighten her.

The journey really was difficult. She contracted malaria, collapsed by the roadside, and was helped by a Japanese nurse. The coincidence that the woman lived in Nishiogi became, for Sue, one of those connections that continued to matter later in life. “The person who helped me then turned out to be a Japanese woman, someone in the medical field who worked as a nurse. Because she did all kinds of things for me, I’m alive now. If she hadn’t found me, I would have died there by the roadside in India. I asked, ‘Where do you live?’ and she said, ‘Nishiogi.’ I was living in Asagaya, so I thought, really?”

The experience in India also changed how Sue saw her life. “So many things happened. It was almost amazing that I made it back alive. But one thing I understood very clearly was how fortunate I had been in the country where I lived. And the things I had worried about before suddenly seemed so small. Just being alive is already something. Everyone who is alive has all kinds of problems, but first I thought I should be grateful that I’m here and alive.”

After returning to Japan, she worked to save money for a trip to the American South. But severely overworked, she collapsed one day on the steps at Asagaya Station, injured her cervical spine, and spent about a year unable to do much while going through hospitalization, treatment, and rehabilitation. The money she had saved disappeared. Later, a woman who had looked after Sue in Asagaya lost her own shop completely in a fire and decided to open a new place in Nishiogi. Sue went to help. That was the beginning of her connection to Nishiogi.

The basement shop put together by regulars

That first shop occupied a large basement space near the South Exit of Nishi-Ogikubo Station. High operating costs meant it did not last long, but it had attracted many regulars. When Sue saw how lonely they looked after hearing that the shop would close, she began for the first time to imagine the possibility of running a place herself. “All the regulars who gathered there looked so lonely. They said, ‘Where are we supposed to go now? There’s no other place like this.’ Seeing how sad they looked, I thought for the first time: wait, how much money does it take to open a shop? How do you do it? Until then, I’d never even thought of running a place myself.”

When she visited real estate agents, she discovered that opening a shop required large sums for deposits and other costs. She thought it was impossible. Then someone told her about a space that could hardly be called a rental property. It became the present Hobo-ya. “One real estate guy said, ‘Look, I can hardly call it a property, but there’s this space. The landlord doesn’t want to rent it to anyone, so it’s been sitting there untouched for five years. I know the landlord pretty well. Do you want to look?’ Looking was free, so I said I wanted to see it. I came here with the real estate guy. This was the place.”

The present Hobo-ya had apparently once been an animation studio. Desks and papers had been abandoned inside, and there was no equipment that would allow it to function as a restaurant. It was simply a neglected box. But the landlord said she would rent it cheaply if Sue cleaned it up. Then the regulars went into action. “It was in terrible shape. Now it looks like a shop, but back then it was just a box. There was nothing you could use for food service. The landlord said something like, ‘If you’ll clean this place up, I’ll rent it to you. For you, I’ll keep the deposit low.’”

The making of the bar was less a solo act of entrepreneurship than a collective project built from the skills of the former regulars and whatever they could bring from home. “Everyone did different kinds of work. There was someone who did stage sets for a theater troupe, so he was good at carpentry. There was a young guy working part-time as a painter. Someone else did plumbing-related work. The idea that maybe we could do this without spending much money got everyone really excited—and it wasn’t even me driving it. Before I knew it, someone was saying, ‘All right, I’ll help clean first.’ Little by little it started looking like a real business. In the end, people were saying, ‘We have a rice cooker we don’t use—take it,’ or ‘Use these dishes.’”

In this way, the prototype of the present Hobo-ya took shape. It was a blues place from the beginning, but it was not a closed world where only blues specialists gathered. “The first venue near the South Exit belonged to her, but she entrusted the concept to me. The place she had run in Asagaya was a Japanese-style izakaya. But for the new one—the place where she said, ‘I want to do it here’—she left the concept to me. So that one near the South Exit was a blues place too. Some of the customers who gathered there loved the blues, but most of them came because they liked the atmosphere of the place.”

Working her way into the kitchen

Hobo-ya is a blues bar, but it is also a place for cooking. While Sue was doing music work, she also took restaurant jobs during periods when music work was scarce. Most of those jobs were in kitchens. Her most important experience was at a dining bar in Harajuku, where she worked for six and a half years. It was not a world where a woman could easily enter the kitchen.

“While I was doing music work, there were periods without much work, so I also worked part-time in restaurants. Most of it was kitchen work. I learned all kinds of things about cooking in those places. The longest was a dining bar in Harajuku, where I worked for six and a half years. It was a pretty serious, strict place. At first they told me women couldn’t work in the kitchen, but I pushed my way in. I said, ‘I don’t want to work on the floor. I want to work in the kitchen.’ The kitchen chief said, ‘We don’t let women into the kitchen.’ So I said, ‘Then I don’t want to work here.’ He said, ‘All right, then do the dishes.’ Dishwashing is a real kitchen job too. So day after day, I just did dishes.”

Sue did not see the dishwashing station as mere drudgery. “But dishwashing is actually a great position,” she said. “You can see the entire kitchen and understand what everyone is doing. An order comes in: you see where the ingredients come from, how they cut them, how they plate the dish, which dressing they use. You can see all kinds of things. I thought, what a great position this is. I had a very positive feeling about dishwashing.”

Eventually she was given a chance to make the staff meal, and later she was entrusted with making the otoshi, the small starter served to customers. “One time they didn’t have enough people to make the staff meal, and the chief said, ‘Try taking care of the staff meal today.’ I said I would. It was the first time they let me do something besides dishes, and apparently everyone liked it. The next chance didn’t come until much later. It was the shop’s otoshi. That’s the face of the place, right? They asked if I wanted to try making it. Customers liked the otoshi I made. So the chief was more or less forced to say, all right, maybe I’ll give you a little credit. But it took a really long time even to get that far.”

That experience connects directly to the blues spirit that animates Hobo-ya, turning a marginal position of dishwashing station into a place of study. Sue did not learn cooking systematically at a school. She learned it on the job, while working, watching, and carrying her frustrations with her.

As mother and owner

When Sue started the shop, she says, she was not thinking very much about marriage or having children. “When I started the shop, I couldn’t think about anything except the bar. It had everyone’s feelings in it, so I couldn’t let it fail. I felt as if all those feelings were sitting on my shoulders. I was desperate. I had no thought at all of someday getting married or having a child. I just had to protect the business and keep it going.”

Later, however, Sue married and had a child. Raising a child while continuing to run a nighttime business was not easy. For a time she took a daytime job so that her child could attend nursery school, and that experience eventually contributed to her starting lunch service at the bar. After her divorce, she continued the daily work of raising her son as a single mother while keeping Hobo-ya running. “From there I was raising a child as a single mother and running the business. I really struggled. The work is at night, and a child’s life is during the day, right? You have to get him up in the morning and send him to school. You have to feed him. But by the time he came home from school, I was already gone because I had prep work at the restaurant. In other words, he was a latchkey child. So I did my best not to make him feel lonely. I think both my son and I worked hard.”

Mother and son lived on different schedules. Even so, she says, they found ways to move toward each other and make time to talk. “We tried to meet halfway and figure out how to make time to see each other. When I came home late at night, my son would wake up. Then we’d make time to talk: this happened at school today, this happened at the shop. Until then he’d been taking a little nap. We kept moving toward each other like that. I worked hard because I didn’t want him to feel deprived.”

Omurice, gumbo, and black curry

At Hobo-ya, American Southern cooking and Japanese yoshoku share the same table. Ask about the most popular dishes, and Sue reviews the top items on the item. “The most popular dish has always been the omurice. I don’t know why, but it’s always been number one. Right now number two is gumbo—the chicken and shrimp gumbo. Number three, what would that be? Maybe jambalaya. And the black curry has a lot of very devoted fans.”

The black curry grew out of Sue's desire to make a curry that could only be eaten at Hobo-ya. The black color comes not from squid ink or bamboo charcoal, but from roasting. “I wondered if I could make a curry you could only eat at Hobo-ya. I went through a huge amount of trial and error, with plenty of failures, and eventually arrived at this black curry. Some places make black curry with squid ink or bamboo charcoal, but ours gets its black color from roasting. I slowly roast the flour and curry powder in oil over low heat, and stop just before it burns. It’s like making caramel—you bring out that roasted aroma. So it really takes a lot of time and work. There are all kinds of black curries now, but thirty years ago I think it was unusual.”

Unapologetically creating her own interpretations of Southern dishes such as gumbo and jambalaya, Sue has worked out Hobo-ya's own flavors by drawing on cookbooks and on dishes she has actually eaten. What matters to Sue is not reproducing an 'authentic' copy of the US originals, but creating food that makes sense as something served in her own restaurant. “I have lots of cookbooks on Southern American cooking. But I don’t copy everything. It might say to do it this way, but I think for myself: maybe this would be better done another way. I’m Japanese, and I’m serving it here, so maybe this part should be adjusted so it suits Japanese tastes. I kept changing things with that in mind.”

“With gumbo, there isn’t one single correct gumbo. Every household has its gumbo, every restaurant has its gumbo. There isn’t one that’s correct. Everyone thinks, ‘The gumbo at my place is the best.’ So I thought, all right, what should Hobo-ya’s gumbo be? I went through all kinds of trial and error.”

The objects and decorations inside the shop are likewise filled with Sue's feeling for the American South and the blues. Things she struggled to collect when she was young, gifts from friends, and works by a painter who helped when the shop was being built have accumulated over a long period to create the landscape of Hobo-ya.

A blues bar, but not only for blues fans

Hobo-ya is a blues bar, but Sue does not expect customers to know much about the blues. What matters to her is that people who know nothing about it might gradually become interested through the food or the atmosphere. “It isn’t like that at all. Blues is one of the pillars of our shop: drinks, food, blues. But there are actually fewer people who are interested in the blues.”

“There just isn’t much demand for blues in the first place—globally, in Japan, even in Tokyo. But without the blues, rock, jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, and ultimately even what people call J-pop in Japan wouldn’t have been born. It’s the source of it all. It’s something important, because without it none of those things would have been born. There are blues maniacs, of course, but there are also plenty of people who don’t know the blues at all, aren’t interested in it, or aren’t even interested in music. They just come because the food is good, or because they like the atmosphere. That’s fine. Anything can be the starting point.”

That stance distinguishes Hobo-ya from a more closed, specialist music bar. The aim is not to create a place where only people who already know the music can feel comfortable, but one where people who do not know it are also welcome. “The blues bars I used to like going to were often full of hardcore people who already knew everything. If you didn’t know the music, it was hard to go in. You’d walk in, and people would look at you as if to say, ‘You came here without even knowing that?’ That way it never spreads. It can’t become a place where people who don’t know can come to learn. I thought, that’s no good. If I ever run a shop, I want people who don’t know to come in first. Absolutely no forcing it on people.”

At the same time, running a blues bar as a Japanese person has brought its own tensions. Especially in the early years, when many foreign and Black customers came, she sometimes encountered harsh reactions. “I’ve been told, ‘There’s no way a Japanese person can understand the blues.’ In that sense, the blues is a music whose history can’t be told without the cultural background of slavery and racial discrimination. So I sometimes feel that maybe I chose something very difficult as one of the pillars of the shop. I honestly do carry that tension.”

That story shows that the blues at Hobo-ya is not merely a way of creating atmosphere. To love and respect the blues and then decide how to handle it in a basement in Nishiogi, Japan, leaves questions that are not easily resolved. Sue's shop is not a place that has completely solved those questions. Rather, it is a place that has endured with them.

Connecting people, keeping distance

Hobo-ya is also a place where customers connect with one another. From the beginning, there was an atmosphere in which people felt that if they came here, someone would be there, and after a few visits they would start to recognize familiar faces. Sue watches each customer and sometimes seats people next to each other if she thinks they will get along—or keeps them apart if she thinks they will not. “It has changed a lot compared with the old days. But this shop really does connect people. In the old days it was like, if you came here, someone would be around. At first people don’t know each other, of course. Everyone starts as a first-time customer. But after you come a few times, it naturally starts: ‘Oh, hello,’ or ‘You were here the other day, weren’t you?’ But actually, because the people working in the shop talk with each customer, we sometimes know, maybe this person and that person would really hit it off if they sat next to each other. So we’ll deliberately say, ‘Sit here, sit here,’ and put them next to each other to create an atmosphere where they can connect naturally. We’re actually manipulating things while pretending not to. That’s what the people in the shop do.”

That phrase—'manipulating things while pretending not to'—captures something important about hospitality at Hobo-ya. Connecting people is not simply a matter of leaving everyone alone. It means watching who might enjoy talking with whom, and who might clash if placed too close together, then arranging the room so that things unfold naturally.

That atmosphere, however, has changed over the shop's thirty-three years. The COVID pandemic was especially important. Conversation and contact were restricted, fewer people drank alcohol, and fewer people stayed out drinking late. Hobo-ya also shifted more of its business toward lunch rather than nighttime service alone. “Maybe it changed with COVID. The way customers think—or really their lives themselves—changed. During that time, people couldn’t interact with each other. They couldn’t talk. And after COVID, did it come back? It hasn’t. Not like before. Customers themselves don’t come in the same way. Fewer people drink. Fewer people drink late. Even when they go out, they stop after one place. Now we close at ten, and we’re still doing the lunch service we started during COVID.”

The customers have changed too. Regulars from the early years have grown older. Some can no longer drink, some have moved far away, and some have died. “It has changed. Over thirty-three years, it has really changed. When we opened, most people were around my age, maybe ten years older or younger. But when you get to my age, people have health problems, they can’t drink anymore, they’ve retired from work, or some have died. And I’m part of that too. At the end of the year before last, I found out I had colon cancer. I was hospitalized and had surgery. It hadn’t metastasized, but I’m still being monitored.”

At the same time, Hobo-ya now sometimes welcomes families with small children at lunch. A place that is underground, invisible from the street, and perhaps looks slightly suspicious simply because it calls itself a blues bar now has a baby chair. That change too has become possible because the shop has lasted so long. “These days quite a few families with little children come for lunch. We even have a baby chair. We’re underground, you can’t see inside, and it says ‘blues,’ so people often used to think maybe this was some kind of suspicious place (laughs). It also matters that the ordinance made us non-smoking. One four-year-old girl said, ‘When I grow up, I’m gonna work here!’ (laughs). In the old days the place was just full of cigarette smoke and drunk people.”

More than half the customers are regulars, though for Sue anyone who comes a second time already counts as a regular. Many people also make a special trip from outside Nishiogi. “A lot of people go out of their way to come from places outside Nishiogi. Recently we’ve had lots of people from overseas too. This isn’t a street-level shop, and it isn’t a place you just happen to walk past and enter. You really have to decide to come here. It’s underground, you can’t see inside, and people say the first time takes courage. I think, how much courage can these stairs possibly take? (laughs)”

Many women come alone as well. Encounters have grown out of that, and quite a few customers have eventually married. Hobo-ya does not market itself as a place for romance or marriage. But over a long period, those kinds of relationships have emerged naturally.“A lot. We have a lot of women who come alone. And there are lots of people who met someone here and got married. I don’t know why. And it isn’t like they’re casually fooling around. They date seriously, get married, and now their children come here. That pattern happens a lot.”

At the same time, Sue knows very well how difficult it can be to become too close to customers. Intimacy is not always an uncomplicated good. This is a public place and a business, and some distance has to remain between customers and the people who run it. She has learned that too over many years. “Becoming too friendly with customers is something you have to think about. We’ve had all kinds of problems. If you get too close, people start to take it for granted. Even among close people, there has to be courtesy. There are things you should do and things you shouldn’t do. This is a public place. It isn’t your own house, and you’re not visiting a friend’s home. So distance with customers is important, no matter how close you become.”

She happened to come to Nishiogi, and affection grew

Sue did not come to Nishiogi because she had always wanted to live there. Nor did she choose the location because she had a plan to open a shop in Nishiogi. Connections with people, with shops, and with properties overlapped, and before she knew it she had been running a shop in the neighborhood for a long time.“About Nishiogi—I wasn’t someone who came here because I absolutely wanted to live in Nishiogi. I didn’t come because I had some special love for the neighborhood. And I didn’t make the shop here because I wanted to run a place here. It just happened. But when you live somewhere for a long time, affection grows.”

That phrase, 'it just happened,' fits the way Sue narrates her life. From Iwate to Tokyo, to an apartment in Asagaya, to the blues, to India, to a basement in Nishiogi. None of those steps may have followed a plan. But in each place she survived, worked, sang, cooked, and related to people. In that process, Hobo-ya became a place.

At the end, when we asked what matters most to her in running the shop, Sue's answer was very simple. “I hope people go home feeling even just a little warmer. Everyone is out there working, going to school, living in the world. Good things happen, but plenty of difficult things happen too. Maybe a boss said something to you. Maybe you fought with your boyfriend. But you come here, maybe you eat and go home, maybe you have a drink and go home, maybe you make a friend. Whatever it is, I hope you leave feeling just a little warmer. I hope that blue feeling clears even a little. That’s all. Sometimes I’ll talk your ear off, and sometimes I sense, ‘Ah, something bad happened today,’ and deliberately leave you alone. It isn’t always best to talk about everything. I just watch people and try to sense what they need.”

The blues at Hobo-ya is not just background music. The name 'Hobo-ya' itself also carries the blues world that has fascinated Sue. In late nineteenth-century America, people who moved from place to place in search of work were called 'hobos,' and the word appears frequently in blues lyrics. Sue puts it this way, 'I was drawn to the way those people lived, and I also liked the sound of the word.' For Sue, another nuance of the word hobo is through the Japanese word hōbō, meaning 'all around or 'many places': gratitude that 'this shop was made through the help of people from all around,' and a wish that 'all kinds of people would come here from all over.' Thirty-three years ago, those associations came together in the name Hobo-ya.

Someone comes down the stairs, eats, drinks, and talks a little—or simply sits quietly. When they leave, they feel just a little warmer than when they arrived. For that reason, Sue opens the shop each day, cooks, prepares the drinks, and watches over the people. The blues she once heard in an old apartment in Asagaya are still playing in another form, underground in Nishiogi. (James Farrer and Nagiko Shitaoka, August 8, 2026)