Seven flight hours away from tropical Singapore on a rainy autumn day in Tokyo in 2016, I meet 29-year-old Italian Eva and her 32-year-old German boyfriend Tobi. We scheduled an interview for Monday night at Mellow Bar in Sangenjaya, the first station on the Den-en-toshi Express line from Shibuya to Tokyo’s South-Western outskirts. With Shibuya as one of the centres of Tokyo’s youth culture and easily accessible, Sangenjaya is an affordable and, therefore, popular neighbourhood with the younger generation. Navigating my way through the somewhat shabby alleyways to Mellow Bar, I pass packed tiny izakaya (Japanese drinking spots), filled with laughter and the typical smell of nihonshu (Japanese fermented rice wine) and yakitori (chicken skewers). Around every corner another assemblage of sparely lit snack bars appears with elderly male customers in sleazy suits having a smoke outside and inspecting me out of the corner of the eye. In the midst of this chaotic labyrinth, Google Maps finally locates the old seven-storey building that is my destination. Having arrived on the upper floor, an entirely different world opens up in front of my eyes.

Eva and Tobi, the couple I am going to meet here from 7 pm, are frequent customers of this place. An unusual setting for Tokyo bars, it is furnished with a bulk of low wooden armchairs and decorated in all sorts of colourful fabrics, which give the bar a homey feeling. The room’s asset are the huge windows, spanning one side of the bar and reaching from top to the floor, providing a full view of Sangenjaya station area and its busy traffic scene. The actual joker, though unluckily out of question on this rainy autumn day, is the wooden terrace, which boasts similar great views from its plain, second-hand style rooftop as Tokyo’s many fancy cocktail bars do.

I sit down with Eva first and we enjoy the unrestricted view of the station area for a while. Although the Italian woman speaks German with barely any accent and seems comfortable in the language as if it is her own mother tongue, we somewhat implicitly agree to do the interview in English – maybe because we are both so used to speaking English when meeting non-Japanese people in Tokyo.