A Yakatabune Tour of Tokyo

Earlier this year Drake’s headed to Tokyo to visit our friends at BEAMS F, to put our new collaboration together — a celebration of what makes both Japanese and British menswear so special — through its paces.

To do this, Beams had planned a little treat for us: an trip on a yakatabune, a traditional Japanese pleasure boat, the kind you see making their way up and down Tokyo’s rivers. Low ceilinged and lined with tatami mats and red lanterns, it’s a slightly decadent way to navigate the city, but a good one.

And so we all met up early one evening, along the banks of the Sumida River. The cherry blossom was just starting to flourish throughout the city, the last of the light catching the trees before night fell over Tokyo.

Drake’s and Beams have known each other for a long time. The relationship goes back to the 1980s, and there has always been a particular affinity between our two companies. BEAMS has spent 50 years developing its own interpretation of British and American clothing that has always been distinctly Japanese in its execution. Drake’s, in turn, has long looked to Japan, both for the way clothes are worn and for the seriousness with which traditional menswear is studied and reinterpreted there.

And so this collaboration was the perfect way to bring those two ways of looking at clothes together, and why not celebrate on a boat, looking at the beautiful vistas of Tokyo bobbing through the window, eating plates of sashimi and tempura, followed by a steaming sukiyaki hot pot, sake and beers. The sort of evening that starts out with everyone sitting rather properly and ends, arms around each other, singing Hey Jude by The Beatles on karaoke.

For a 50th anniversary, it seemed like a pretty good way to spend an evening.