The best clubs in Tokyo, from WOMB to the fight to legalise dancing

Fifty years of a law against dancing.

The Businesses Affecting Public Morals Regulation Act, known as fueiho, was written in 1948. It classified any venue with dancing on a floor smaller than 66 square metres, or operating after 1am, alongside the city's adult entertainment trade, on the postwar assumption that a dancefloor was where prostitution happened. For about fifty years the rule was barely enforced. Clubs put up "No Dancing" signs as a formality and their customers ignored them.

That changed around 2011, when police began actively enforcing fueiho in Osaka, Fukuoka and then Tokyo, raiding clubs and prosecuting owners under a law written before rock and roll reached Japan. Clubs responded by hiring staff to physically stop people dancing, which is as strange to watch as it sounds.

The campaign to change the law had a name, Let's Dance, and in 2013 it delivered a petition with 155,879 signatures to Japan's National Diet, backed by a group of volunteer lawyers called Dance Lawyers. The cabinet agreed to lift the dancing ban in October 2014, a change some in the press linked to Tokyo's bid for the 2020 Olympics, and the law was formally relaxed in 2016. Clubs could now hold a permit to allow dancing past 1am, provided the room met lighting and distance-from-residential-housing conditions; Crack Magazine reported the lighting floor at above 10 lux, dim but not dark. It took a nationwide petition and a five-year court fight to arrive at that one sentence of permission.

Air and the clubs before the reform.

Two of Tokyo's most influential clubs never operated under the reformed law at all. Air opened in Daikanyama in 2001, a 500-capacity room that became one of the city's central addresses for house and techno, with Ben UFO, The Black Madonna, Daniel Avery, Kyle Hall and Marco Shuttle among the DJs who played there before it closed on New Year's Eve 2015, with no reason given beyond a short statement on its website.

ageHa opened in 2002 inside Studio Coast, a waterfront event complex in Shin-Kiba built on reclaimed industrial land, with four dance floors, an outdoor pool and a capacity that ran into the thousands on its biggest nights.

It billed itself as Japan's largest nightclub and ran for two decades before its lease expired; the farewell event, the Grand Final, was held on 30 January 2022, closing the building along with it.

The best clubs in Tokyo now.

Best techno clubs in Tokyo.

WOMB opened in the centre of Shibuya in April 2000 and has outlasted every club named above it. Four floors are built around a main room lit by what its operators call the biggest mirrorball in Asia, and the club has placed on Resident Advisor and DJ Mag's Top 100 Clubs lists for over a decade, at 67th in 2021 and 76th in 2023. WOMB Adventure, its annual indoor festival since 2008, draws close to 10,000 people across the building in one night.

Vent opened in Minami-Aoyama in 2016, the same year the fueiho reform took effect, from Global Hearts, the company behind Sound Museum Vision and Contact. It is a smaller, quieter room built around sound quality rather than spectacle, and Ken Ishii, the Sapporo-born producer known internationally as techno's face from Japan, has named it among his own favourites alongside Contact and WOMB.

Contact opened in April 2016 in a Dogenzaka basement, built as a successor to Air's role in the city, and became one of the rooms Boiler Room chose for its Tokyo broadcasts, including a 2019 session with the London project Broken English Club, the Berlin producer Rhyw and the Osaka techno artist Mars89. Sound Museum Vision, Contact's four-room sister venue nearby, closed in September 2022 after a run built on hip-hop, house and techno across a maze of connected rooms.

Boiler Room's first Tokyo broadcast, in June 2014, came before any of this: a house and disco set from Chida, alongside Force of Nature and the local crew Monkey Timers, recorded two years before dancing itself was fully legalised.

Wata Igarashi, a Tokyo techno producer who has since built an international profile on labels including Midgar and Kompakt, played a Boiler Room Tokyo broadcast in Shibuya in December 2016, the same year the reform took effect.

Where to go out in Tokyo.

Almost everything in this guide sits within walking distance of Shibuya Station, on or around Dogenzaka, the steep entertainment street of clubs, karaoke boxes and love hotels that gives the area its after-dark character.

Vent is a short taxi ride away in Minami-Aoyama, a quieter, more residential district that trades footfall for a stricter noise limit and a smaller room. Circus Tokyo, a short walk from Shibuya's main strip, was opened in October 2015 as a Tokyo outpost of Osaka's Club Circus and has built a reputation as the city's most consistent booker of drum and bass and bass music alongside house and techno, including its own New Year's Eve countdown. None of Tokyo's trains run all night, so a club night here runs until the first service resumes around 5am, or ends in a taxi.