Wanna Take You to a Snack Bar

The City That Sleeps on the Subway.

While we waited for our Chinese visas to process, we went to go see a performance by our old friend and bandmate, Satino Satio.  Since we'd left town and Raku 3 was no more, he had since formed a new band with another friend of ours, and since they were unfortunately unable to join us at the Pasar Music Festival (our next stop), we were thrilled at the chance to see Sa-chan in action.

Sa-chan is one of our oldest friends in Japan.  He's an excellent guitarist, the most ripped vegan I've ever met, and a stone classic Japanese hippie (our favorite kind of person!).  We met him through a couple of vegan friends of ours -- he happened to run a vegan cafe, and he was just so darn charming that we kept going back, week after week.  One day, out of the blue, he sent us a text message saying that he wanted to perform a show with the two of us; I hadn't performed a thing since band class in 7th grade, but having fooled around a little on the ukulele, we took him up on his offer.  We called ourselves Raku 3, after Sa-chan's (ultimately doomed) cafe, and playing with Raku 3 opened the door to countless unforgettable experiences.  Sa-chan took us to places in Osaka that we would never have found (let alone visited) as a couple of clueless honkies, and he introduced us to dozens of people who had lived fascinating lives.  In short, Sa-chan is probably the main reason we have such strong ties to Japan.

"Where is your performance?" we asked him via Facebook.

"I don't know yet, I haven't been there.  Just meet me at the south entrance of Daimaru Department Store at 6:50 and we'll go together."

We had no idea what to expect from this turn of events.  Sa-chan had taken us to perform at numerous venues throughout Osaka, and all of these fell into two distinct categories: hippie cafes, featuring all the standard accoutrements (incense, organic Fair Trade coffee, handmade jewelry, drum circles); or dive bars packed with day laborers drinking cheap beer.  Daimaru, on the other hand, is right in the middle of one of Osaka's more upscale shopping districts, flanked by Louis Vuitton and Coach stores that seem to contain very little merchandise in a shockingly large space (which, as in the rest of Japan, is prohibitively expensive in Osaka).  What strange new experience were we in for?

We turned up outside Daimaru at 6:55 (early for us, really), where we shared a warm reunion with Sa-chan.  His companion, the owner of the venue ("manajaa," he corrected us with a laugh) led us through Shinsaibashi's warren of side streets and alleys while Sa-chan caught us up on his life.  It seems he had decided to leave his current job, the fifth or sixth job he's had since we've known him; apparently the boss wouldn't stop pressuring him to eat meat despite his strict vegan diet (it should be mentioned that this was a job working as a chef at a barbecue restaurant).

Before we knew it, we were outside one of Shinsaibashi's thousand identical buildings, strung up in neon signs advertising food, drink, karaoke, and other services unknowable to the illiterate foreigner.  We chained up our bikes and followed the party into a tiny room on the third floor.  It was decorated like a reasonably cheap hotel room but windowless, airless.  We were greeted by a scarecrow-thin woman with a great deal of plastic surgery and the make-up and clothes of a much younger woman.  "Please, come in!" she beckoned to us in a cigarettey voice.  An enormous cockroach scuttled up the wall and behind a came-with-the-frame painting.  After some initial introductions, the hostess and another woman called Mama began to pour glasses of whiskey from a variety of expensive-looking bottles while the boss ("manajaa," he insisted with a laugh once again) sat and traded unintelligible jibes with the women.  There were no other customers yet.

"Oh my god," Jenn whispered to me, smiling, eyes agog, "this is a snack.  We're in a snack."

Snack bars (スナク) enjoy a great amount of mystery in gaijin circles.  No westerner we've known has ever been into one, and no local friend of ours has confessed to going, but they're everywhere in Japanese cities big and small.  We've always been a little unclear as to their exact purpose.  Maybe they're the same as a hostess bar, where customers pay obscene hourly rates just to flirt with the waitresses?  Or are they closer to soaplands and other almost-prostitution services you can find throughout Japan?  Late, late at night on the streets of Shinsaibashi, we've seen teams of kimono-wearing ladies bid farewell to very drunk salarymen and assumed this had something to do with snack bars.  As it happens, they are closest to hostesses: the proprietors keep your glass full, keep you talking, flirt with you, then slip you the bill when it's time to go home.  The whole institution hearkens back to the geisha tradition of paying for someone to keep you company and entertain you for an evening, at least as I understand it.

This, then, was a snack bar.  Eventually more customers filed in.  Each of them looked to us first with surprise, then a weird embarrassed smile.  The ladies found some way to shove a few of the velour-lined chairs into the far corner to make room for the performers, who rifled through their sheet music and talked quietly, clearly as surprised to be in such a place as we were.  The other customers occasionally tried to make conversation with us...or rather, each of them attempted the same conversation with us in turn (where we're from, how long we've been in Japan, and so on, petering out as our Japanese eventually fails us).

Meanwhile, the proprietors continued to make jokes at one another's expense and pour glass after glass of whiskey.  Except for Scarecrow Woman, who just kept adding ice to everyone's glasses.  The customers made conversation with one another and with the hostesses; maybe they were flirting, which I'm increasingly convinced is the actual nature of snack bars.  I guess I did expect that the hostesses of snack bars would be...well, younger?  The hostesses were all at least in their fifties, heavily made up and wearing the clothes of twenty-somethings.  The "manager," too, a man at least in his sixties, kept pawing at his employees good-naturedly while they batted his hand away and berated him.  I got the feeling that this team had been going through this same schtick for the last twenty years at least.

Then it was time for the show!  Sachimisachi took the stage (or...corner of the table) and played a lovely set of jazz standards and oldies.  They even played a few of Raku 3's old songs!  By which I mean, jazz standards and oldies that Raku 3 also covered.

Sadly, the audience was less than reverent during the show.  Sachimisachi's singer, Misa, has a lovely voice, but in the absence of a mic stand, it got rather lost among the conversation.  Most of the patrons seemed more interested in talking with one another than with listening to the show.

When the band took a break between sets, Sa-chan invited us to play a song with him for old time's sake.  We tried to see what songs we still remembered, then settled on "Chocolate Jesus" by Tom Waits.  We launched into it and the crowd went silent.  This could be because Jenn has a voice so powerful that it can knock over small children, but whatever it was, the audience was extremely appreciative.

After Sachimisachi's next set began, the trouble started.  A mustache and glasses in a white shirt, at the end of the first number, loudly demanded to know when Jenn was going to sing again.  Before the applause had ended after the second song, once again he let the room know that he had a request for Jenn.  We sank into our stained, overstuffed chairs and tried to politely turn the attention back to the featured artist, but that did little to pacify Jenn's newest fan.

We did take the stage after Sachimisachi's first encore (save for us, there was precious little enthusiasm for a second one), and, naturally, we turned it out, but it was a very sheepish triumph.  Afterwards, during karaoke time, we apologized profusely to Misa for showing her up, but she wouldn't hear of it.

"Hey, we should all play together sometime, the five of us," I suggested.

"That's a great idea!" Misa said.  Sa-chan and their flutist agreed, excited.  "So when you come back to live in Osaka, we can play shows together!"

Jenn and I exchanged a look.  God, it would be so easy to do that, wouldn't it?  Just come back to Osaka, play more shows, study more Japanese, see all of our friends whenever we wanted (the ones who haven't left, anyway).  We really were happy in Osaka.  Why the hell did we leave in the first place?

We pushed the thoughts out of our minds and tried to focus on the most important things: first, that Sa-chan had once again introduced us to a facet of Japanese culture that we would never have discovered on our own...

...And second, the rising suspicion that we were most certainly going to be hit with an enormous bill for the privilege.