IN EVERY way but one, the tenth-floor suite of the Capitol Tokyu in central Tokyo is just another room in a rather old-fashioned hotel. The view from the window is uninspiring, the decor out-of-date and in a few months the place will have been bulldozed. But never in its 43-year history has the suite been in such demand.

It is booked throughout August — when reservations opened two months ago, they were snapped up within 15 minutes. The lucky few are paying 100,000 yen (£500) a night — not for the room but for its association with the four young men who stayed here 40 years ago: the Beatles.

Shoji Danjo, a 51-year-old designer, is one of those. Last night, with his wife and grown-up son, he went on a tour of the spots that the Beatles favoured during their three days of concerts in 1966. “For 40 years I have been a fan of the Beatles,” says Mr Danjo, who lives a ten-minute drive away. “For such an experience, Y100,000 is cheap.”

Japan is in the grip of a full-blown 1960s revival. There has been a blossoming of Sixties soundalike bands, formed by salarymen of Mr Danjo’s generation — known in Japanese as oyaji, “old geezers”. For decades they were the least glamorous of Japanese social tribes, derided for their wretched dress sense, bad haircuts and drone-like commitment to work.

Now, in a society that is running out of young people, oyaji are bringing about a revolution in popular culture. “After we joined companies, there was no time to express our personality,” says Masakazu Kikuchi, known as Mario, who leads a group called the Old Tokyo Ventures, a tribute to the original American instrumental band the Ventures. “Now we’ve got more time on our hands and our generation has returned, as leaders of consumption and culture.”

No one knows how many such ensembles there are, but when Sony Music sponsored a contest last year entitled Cultural Festival for the Sought-After Oyaji Bands, it received 322 applications for 27 places.

“It’s difficult to make new friends when you get older,” says “Zunchabe” Hiraki, whose nickname is a complicated anagram of “Benchaazu”, the Japanese pronunciation of the word “Ventures”. “Before joining an oyaji band, a lot of us were just waiting for death. Now retirement is something I’m really looking forward to.”

The 1960s were a time of dramatic change in Japan. For many the epochal event was the Beatles sell-out concerts at the Budokan. But for Mario and Zunchabe it came a year earlier, when the Ventures gave the most famous of their Tokyo concerts.

It was also a period of violent leftwing demonstrations and riots — a new book, Walks in the Burning Tokyo of the 1960s, guides readers around the flashpoints of that turbulent era.

But then, almost overnight it seemed, the babyboomers abandoned the barricades and set about making Japan a rich country. Their old haunts — the Tokyo nightlife areas of Shinjuku and Shibuya — have been taken over by a new and very different generation. But the balance of power is shifting.

There are 24.5 million Japanese younger than 20, but 34.5 million baby-boomers in their fifties and sixties. This year Tokyo Graffiti, an exhibition of Sixties nostalgia, opened in the Tokyu department store in Shibuya, an area almost oppressively youthful and trendy. Its agenda was explicit: to claim the city back from the young.

LONG PLAYERS

A museum dedicated to John Lennon was opened in Saitama on October 9, 2000, the 60th anniversary of his birth

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