Oath, Bonobo and Koara are three of Tokyo's best small venues that specialise in electronic music. Oath is a popular haunt for touring international DJs. In the warmer months the crowd often spills outside, where the music is still audible, to smoke and chat. Inside it has a padded red ceiling, stone walls and velvet curtains that are drawn once daylight approaches. All drinks are 500 yen (just over €4), making it an appealing option for locals and tourists on a budget.Koara sits at the bottom of a tiled stairway on a quiet street in Shibuya's Jinnan area. There's a bar with concrete walls and dim lighting that leads into a darkened dance floor. It's equipped with a Urei mixer, McIntosh amps and EAW speakers that reach towards the ceiling. On the night I visited, a crew of local DJs were playing house and techno until 5 AM. The sound was booming yet crisp. A few people milled about on the dance floor, while others sat at the bar smoking and sipping whiskey.Bonobo is located in a 55-year-old building—old by Tokyo standards. The dance floor can fit 50 or 60 people at a stretch. Its curved white walls, now stained a yellowish brown after years of cigarette smoke, give the feeling of being inside a cave. Behind the DJ booth stand a pair of towering Altec speakers that look out over the dance floor like two solemn security guards. There's only one window, and it's tiny, like a porthole in a ship. "Most clubs have black walls in a square room," says Bonobo's owner, Koichi Sei. "I wanted lots of curves and white walls. I wanted something different."Earlier this year I caught DJ Sprinkles at Bonobo. It felt like a privilege to see Thaemlitz play in such an intimate environment. Her deep, evocative and heartfelt house tunes created a wonderful atmosphere on the dance floor. That night, Sei wasn't just keeping an ear tuned to the sound—he was carefully adjusting the air conditioning and the lights as well. Bonobo was packed when I arrived, and it stayed that way into the early hours. At one point during the night I spotted Sei and he walked over. "Too small," he said with a smile, gesturing towards the dance floor before disappearing into the crowd.Sei, who opened Bonobo around 12 years ago, is a friendly man who's prone to letting out bursts of laughter after finishing a sentence. He lived in New York from 1989 through 1999, and later in that period he was a regular at The Loft. He says David Mancuso's party was his main inspiration for opening a venue of his own when he returned to Japan. The former owner of the space that houses Bonobo was a speaker builder who had constructed a soundproof area. "He was getting old, and looking for someone to do something with the space, so I stepped in," Sei says. "I didn't know much about audio at the time, but I remember how the music sounded at The Loft, and I wanted something as special as that. And as time went on, I really started getting into the sound quality side of things."A fire at Bonobo six years ago left Sei with some insurance money. He put it towards opening a small restaurant and a chill-out space on the building's first floor. "I want to recreate the feeling of a house party," Sei says. "In Tokyo we don't have space to have house parties in our actual homes, because they are so small. So Bonobo exists as a place where we can create that house party atmosphere." The music is generally geared towards house and techno, though Sei tells me a four-piece jazz band recently squeezed in for a live show, and there are also occasional performances by noise and hardcore bands.Sei says his focus is on quality sound, not volume. "This way people can keep partying," he says. "But for this to work, for people to want to stay, the soundsystem needs to be high quality, so we can talk, we can dance, but get no complaints from the neighbours."Thaemlitz says many small venues in Tokyo operate with their bass bins turned off for much of the night. This kind of situation is the legacy of thelaws. "When the police come around, it is typical to turn the bass down so that the sound is not so danceable and thumping," says Thaemlitz, who has written extensively about thelaws. "I think a lot of people didn't even notice. The spaces are small enough that things still sound OK. But the soundsystems are not running as they were designed. And this is in part due torestrictions on dancing, and not wanting to cause noise that might make the cops want to come in and check for dancing. But the main impact has to be the venue owners and staff working under the constant threat of legal problems. It's a horrible stress, and really not healthy."The changes to thelaws decriminalized certain grey areas of the country's club scene, but what this means for Tokyo's small bars and music cafés remains unclear. A café that plays classical music, like the Lion, does not require a special license, as it falls under the category of venues that offer music for patrons to appreciate and enjoy. In legal terms, the line is drawn when a venue expects patrons to "actively seek pleasure"—such as through the act of dancing—which requires the venue to be licensed."That line is very blurry," says the lawyer Takahiro Saito. "A bar with a nice soundsystem can fall under either category, and the new law still doesn't make that line very clear." As Takahiro explains, the concept of "actively seeking pleasure" is ambiguous. The result is that many small venues remain in legal limbo. "The venues that were actively rallying for a revision of the law were mainly big venues, so in turn the revision doesn't necessarily take into consideration what's best for the small venues," says Takahiro. "What sort of aftereffects the law revision will have on the small venues will depend on whether or not the small venues will take action and actively shape the scene."