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.

Pasar 3: Showtime

The appointed hour had come.  The accordion was found collecting dust at Pasar had been repaired, the cafe had been set up for business, we'd sent off our documents to apply for our work visa, and most importantly, the flag was finished.

Design by Jenn Thomas of Jenn Thomas from Jenn Thomas/Jenn Thomas, featuring Jenn Thomas

Modelled by Jenn Thomas

Under the full moon, Jenn and I set up our instruments on one of the three empty stages.  We'd spent the day rehearsing and dragging wooden furniture back and forth across the yard, finally determining the arrangement best suited to polite appreciation and/or dancing on tables.  By 7:00, nobody had turned up.  We started on the beers that we'd brought to share with our hosts.  By 7:30, the starting time for our concert, we were still alone and on our second beer.

Eventually, our audience arrived: a dozen or so married women from the neighborhood, bearing snacks and bottles of wine.  Fortunately, that didn't stop them from taking advantage of the Pasar Moon kitchen, which turned out curries and one delicious pizza after another.  Jenn and I took the stage for our first duo concert.  Under the circumstances, our old band's name, Raku 3, seemed inappropriate, so we went by Jenn's stage name, Jenny Dreadful.  It felt good to be performing again; after all, we'd carted our instruments around the previous 1,000 miles, so we might as well get some use out of them.

The show, sadly, was lackluster.  This was our first time performing in nearly a year, and though we'd spent the past few months jamming by the roadside, we weren't quite as polished as we would usually like.  The audience was pretty different from our usual crowd of friends appreciative old drunken bachelors, too, having turned up more to hang out with one another than to see us.  Still, we gave it our best go, and the contributions to our nagezen basket (literally, "thrown money") were generous, except for the person who gave us a wedge of cheese.  Despite the protests of Aki, who was oddly absent from this event except while we were playing, we deposited all of our takings right into Pasar's donation box.  He told us about how Pasar is meant to be a space to support artists and musicians, and that the usual policy was to comp all non-WWOOFing artists their room and board.  The money was ours, he insisted, not the venue's.  When he left to get a cigarette, we dropped the cash into the box; after all, we had just found a job, and places like Pasar need support themselves.

When all of the pizza had been eaten and our donations had been counted, Natsu stood before her friends and patrons to explain the bill situation.  From this year, she said, Pasar would not set any prices for its food or drinks, but would instead rely wholly on Love Donations.  Whatever the customer was moved to pay for what they received, that would be what they should pay.  If ever there is a customer who can't afford a dime, then their meal should be eaten with clear conscience.  "Japanese people are very bad at this because they're so shy," she had told us earlier, "but this is important to our idea of Pasar Moon."  They listened patiently, receptively (despite Aki's doubts) as she spoke, and when she finished, they all contributed heartily to the box.  More beer was opened in celebration, and we retired to our room to pack up our instruments.

As I flipped the lightswitch, I caught a glimpse of something dark and thin scuttle out from behind Jenn's pillow.  My heart sank, as I knew instinctively what it was.  I calmly put down the ukulele, told Jenn to step back, and screamed my little heart out: "Mukade!"

Attention, current or future mortal enemies: if you could just skip ahead to the picture of a ducky, that would be great.  See you there!

Centipedes are my greatest fear in the world, and are my persistent theological proof that we are not living in the best of all possible worlds (additional proofs involve the non-existence of a Spider-man or -men).  On the rare occasions in which I've encountered them, I've turned into a squealing, useless bag of slop (more than usual, even).  Fortunately, in this case, Natsu-san heard my cry and ran to the rescue with a cup of hot water and a set of tongs.  She plucked the foot-long, writhing black nightmare up and dropped it into the water, where it danced about in fury before falling into a very convincing faux-death.  As far as I know, it still lives at Pasar, feigning death and waiting for me to return.  She told me then that there had been several mukade spotted that day, one of them having stung Aki on the leg mere hours before.  Perhaps it had something to do with the full moon, she suggested.  Maybe they just didn't like the show.

We took what was left of our beers into the living room, leaving the party to collect our thoughts.  Jenn rubbed my back and reassured me that that was probably the last centipede anywhere in the whole world, and that there was no chance of another one living under my pillow and waiting until we fell asleep to lay eggs in my eyeballs.  Natsu came to find us before too long, and saw me in a daze.

"Are you in shock?" she asked.  I nodded limply, and explained that I would probably be unable to sleep that night or any other night.  She nodded back solemnly. "OK, let's get drunk.  Do you drink tequila?"  

We spent the next hour or so trading recipes for tequila shots and discussing our lives.  What we spoke of I won't reveal here, suffice to say how stricken I was for the first time at the appropriateness of their names ("Natsu" meaning "summer," "Aki" meaning "autumn"; Natsu is in her thirties, Aki in his fifties).  If there were any other mukade that night, I didn't notice; Natsu's home remedy was extremely effective.

The Haps

Hey!  How's it going, Internet?  Been awhile, huh?  Boy, I can't believe it's been a month since we rapped last, huh?  Seems like almost yesterday.  Well, let's see what all I can catch you up on...

The JLPT has come and gone without too much fanfare.  I think it went a bit better this time, but we won't know until February; the test's grading process is a very time-intensive, highly subjective one that requires many weeks of careful consideration.  WEEK ONE: RUN SCANTRON SHEET THROUGH COMPUTER.  WEEKS TWO THROUGH EIGHT: COFFEE BREAK.

The holidays have been as full of workplace-mandated merriment as ever. The Christmas party was last Friday, and again I was passed up for the role of Santa Claus. Instead, I was given the part I've played a dozen times before as Two-Term President Emeritus of the Truman State University RPG Club: Elf. When I was tasked with getting "Santa Claus" to the door past the horde of children when our part of the pageant was over, I realized that Santa keeps elves around for more reasons than simply making toys; there were moments were, had I not intervened, children would have trampled each other into a festive red paste just to touch the hem of Santa's coat. I was convinced we weren't going to make it out alive for at least a minute or two.  And what would the holidays be without a good healthy fear of death?

Additionally, I've introduced the wonders of Hanukkah to a new generation of bored 8-year-olds, though it took a bit of doing: I had gotten as far as, "Hannukah is a Jewish holiday" before hands shot up.  "What's 'Jewish?'" asked Wesley (stupid nicknames, remember?).  "Juice?" Kyle asked.  "Chewing gum?" guessed Justin. After I calmed everyone down, I explained: "Jewish means 'Yudayajin.'"  I so dislike using Japanese in the classroom, but this was a case that couldn't really be handled with pantomime.  I patted myself on the back for bothering to look up the word before and dispensing with this matter effectively so we could move on.

Wesley rose his hand again.  With surprising fluency, he asked, "How do you say Yudayajin in Japanese?"  Oy.

Our band, Raku 3, has been taking off lately, in a manner of speaking.  We've been playing about one concert a month at local dives, all free shows (though we do pass around a hat when we remember to), all pretty well attended.  There exists a bootleg CD of one of our shows, and come the new year we were considering recording an actual album.  Readers of this blog, you all have a standing invitation to any and all future shows, though for now they'll all be in the Osaka area.  Please enjoy these photos of the kind of horrible places in Osaka's ghetto where we play (+50 points to indie cred!)

 

Raku Three, the venue's proprietor, and four of our fans (well, three and one old guy who wanted to be in the photo.)

 Other than all that, we're just gearing up for our travel plans this Christmas!  We were going to take advantage of our strategic geographic placement to make a move on Australia, take in some sun and some much-needed ambient English.  Sadly, though they look pretty close together over on this side of the globe, it turns out it's still a 10-hour flight to Sydney, and thus, it costs about as much as it would to just fly to the States.  Fine, we decided, we'd go wherever we could fly to for cheap from here...Thailand!  Vietnam!  Taiwan!  The Philippines!...are all out of our price range.  Taking the ferry to Okinawa, our next plan, got as far as reading about the area, reserving accommodations, and buying ticke--SERIOUSLY, THAT MUCH?  The latest plan, then, is to take the ferry to South Korea, which we'll attempt to do up right for the holidays.

Expect something hilarious about Christmas in Japan sometime later this week (though really, at this point in our third year here, anything hilarious about life in Japan is starting to wear a bit).  This is H-Bomb and Jenny Dreadful, signing off!

Roof Off-Tearing

From the Raku Three's concert last Saturday night. Our audience, though small, was enthusiastic, and I think we played better than we ever had before. Apologies for the feedback in the second and third numbers; we couldn't get the mike quite right again after our guest vocalist finished her songs. Enjoy!