Oh, Maggie I Should Have Known! Bubble Era Tokyo’s Aussie Haven

When I first got to Japan in the late 1980s, Australia was hot property–mainly in a literal sense for real estate investment, but also for honeymooners and koala fans. But finding anything “Australian” in Tokyo was bloody hard and homesickness particularly strong in those days, so I was deeply grateful for Maggie’s Revenge and the kangaroo awning that advertised the establishment.

Maggie’s Revenge was an Aussie-themed bar in the Roppongi nightclub district of Tokyo, which was a bit of a drag for me to get to as I was living in the northern part of the capital at the time. Sometimes, you could buy a meat pie there, and always get fish and chips, neither “delicacy” being readily available elsewhere that I knew of at that time. And there was Foster’s Lager.

Maggie was rumored to have arrived in Japan in the late 1960s or early 1970s and opened Maggie’s Revenge in 1982. She was said to have come to Japan after her boyfriend in Melbourne, a purported underworld figure, was incarcerated and she was recommended to make some space from Australia.

Some said Maggie had ties to the yakuza, and I remember plenty of shady characters in the few times I got to visit the bar, but that could have applied to just about any establishment I went to in Tokyo up until about the late 1990s. Maggie certainly took no nonsense from anyone, and I remember who typical blunt Aussie tone despite sometimes wearing a kimono suggesting a daintiness that she didn’t really have. The bar thrived in the halcyon days of bubble era Tokyo, but was noticeably less successful as the downturn hit and ’90s deepened.

My last visit was in 1993. I remember the date because a mate and I were watching a show by a woman whose name I can’t recall, but she had appeared in one of the Suntory Pekoe Tea canned tea ads that had taken the country by storm that year.

I can’t find any photos of Maggie’s Revenge and took none of my own, but YouTube has a club of a show at the club. (Listen closely and you can here the Aussie accents of speakers in the audience!)