Few cities have as much to offer as Tokyo does in the performing arts. It has Japan's own great stage traditions: Kabuki, No, Bunraku puppet drama, music, and dance. An astonishing variety of music, classical and popular, can be found here in large and small venues. Tokyo also has modern theater -- in somewhat limited choices, to be sure, unless you can follow dialogue in Japanese, but Western repertory companies can always find receptive audiences here for plays in English.
Japan has yet to develop any real strength of its own in ballet and has only just begun to devote serious resources to opera, but for that reason touring companies like the Metropolitan, the Bolshoi, Sadler's Wells, and the Bayerische Staatsoper find Tokyo a very compelling venue -- as well they might, when even seats at ¥30,000 or more sell out far in advance.
Film presents a much broader range of possibilities than it did in the past. Visitors can find all the latest horror and Oscar flicks, but there is also more sophisticated fare as well.
There are five major districts in Tokyo that have an extensive nightlife and have places that make foreigners welcome. The kinds of entertainment will not vary much from one to another; the tone, style, and prices will.
Akasaka nightlife concentrates mainly on two streets, Ta-machi-dori and Hitotsugi-dori, and the small alleys connecting them. The area has several cabarets and nightclubs, and a wide range of wine bars, coffee shops, late-night restaurants, pubs, and "snacks" -- counter bars that will serve (and charge you for) small portions of food with your drinks, whether you order them or not.
Ginza is probably the city's most well-known entertainment district, and one of the most -- if not the most -- expensive in the world. It does have affordable restaurants and pubs, but its reputation rests on the exclusive hostess clubs where only the highest of high rollers on corporate expense accounts can take their clients.
Roppongi draws a largely foreign crowd and is the part of Tokyo where Westerners are most likely to feel at home, though the area's reputation as a haunt of the rich and beautiful has taken a battering recently as petty crime and general unpleasantness dog Roppongi's once-flourishing nightlife. It's best for barhopping.
Shibuya, less expensive than Roppongi and not as raunchy as Shinjuku, attracts mainly students and young professionals to its many nomiya (inexpensive bars). There's something a bit provincial about it, in that respect, and there are few places where you can count on communicating in English.
Shinjuku's Kabuki-cho is the city's wildest nightlife venue. The options range from the marginally respectable down to the merely sleazy. Bars (straight, gay, cross-dress, S&M), nightclubs, cabarets, discos, hole-in-the-wall pubs, love-by-the-hour hotels: Kabuki-cho has it all. If you're a woman unescorted, you probably want to stay out of Kabuki-cho after 9 PM.
