Alex Halberstadt

Arriving in Japan from the United States is like being turned upside down. This condition lasts for much of the first week. When I visited in November, the time difference between Tokyo and New York was 14 hours. "The floating world" is a term for the pleasure-addled urban culture of Edo-period Japan, but it's also an apt description for the twilit and not-entirely-unpleasant weirdness of first arriving in Tokyo. Everything seems slightly unreal.

I'd come to Japan for several reasons, one of which was simply to spend more time in what for me is the most enjoyable place on the planet. Another was to explore the country's distinctive listening spaces, which I've been thinking and occasionally writing about over the past few years. During that time, listening bars and cafés from Boulder to Sydney have been popping up like mushrooms after a rainstorm, and for many of these new venues, Japan's jazz kissas (or kissaten in the Japanese plural) are both the model and spiritual mothership.

Mostly I like spending time looking at art, especially in the early mornings when the galleries are empty. Lately, I've been watching art handlers hanging a roughly 100'-long tapestry depicting some manner of planetary jetsam—or maybe they are aquatic plants—by Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga. And I make regular trips to a small theater to watch mesmerizing footage of Orchard Street in working-class lower Manhattan, shot in 1955 by veteran filmmaker Ken Jacobs. Captured on warm, saturated 16mm film, the long-gone people on the screen appear as vividly alive as the museumgoers around me.

My favorite-ever thing at the museum, though, is a life-sized kitchen. Austrian architect Grete Lihotzky designed it for a Frankfurt housing complex in 1927.

The hobby that will become "high-end audio" is still called plain old "audio." The top marginal tax rate is 91%, the US boasts more income equality than present-day socialist Sweden, and most of the country's top earners are not panic-room wealthy but merely rich. The prices of hi-fi gear reflect this: Two of the finest power amplifiers you can buy—the McIntosh MC-60 and the Marantz Model 2 (both monophonic, of course)—retail for $198. That's about $2266 in today's dollars, and while certainly not cheap, these products are accessible to a far larger group of hi-fi enthusiasts than "the best" of today (including from McIntosh itself).

That old expression "men love with their eyes" applies to listening, too. Enabled by the advent of a second channel, the fanning out of musicians across a soundstage fills the room and gives the eyes—and not only the ears—something to do. And I happen to enjoy the soundstage. It may be an utterly artificial delight, but who doesn't love hearing a tambourine coming from 10' to the left of the left speaker? So when I came across an article in which someone likened mono to listening to music through a hole in a wall, the metaphor made sense. Why would anyone want their music congealed in a blob directly in front of them when they could hear it separated out in space?

As always, though, it turns out that things aren't quite so simple...