Beauty and Truth

If the American vice of choice is overeating, the Japanese vice is smoking. Smoking is still permitted in most public places. All restaurants have smoking sections. The locker rooms of sento bathhouses are always full of smoke. By contrast, eating or even drinking in non-designated places is frowned upon. The Sogo department store’s basement food stands are full of treats but there’s nowhere to eat them. They wrap your orders in several layers of plastic with the clear expectation that you will bring them home or at least elsewhere. Something as messy as a “food court” is unthinkable in Japan; many older people still cannot get their heads around “fast food.” My friend Nagao often discusses a former protégé of his, a friend’s son who became an academic and spent some time teaching in the U.S. Among the unsavory habits that marked him as no longer quite Japanese was his habit of carrying a drink with a plastic lid and straw everywhere he went, which he would sip periodically. Nagao compared him to a baby sucking a bottle.

Eating is treated with moderation and discretion in Japan; there are times and places for it. Though most Japanese rarely exercise, they stay slim by eating only at appointed times, by refraining from eating before they’re hungry and after they’re full (and by smoking). Slimness is a token of physical beauty in Japan, and their obsession with beauty far exceeds our own. Food itself is not fit for consumption unless it is beautiful, and everyone from the sushi chef down to the housewife preparing her kids’ bento boxes slaves over the food to make it beautiful. Good-looking people fare better in Japan. It would be unthinkable in Japan to sue an employer for discrimination based on appearance, not only because the society is so much less litigious but because the advantages of good looks are considered natural. Even the foreigners who visit (at least those who get on well) tend to be good-looking foreigners. Ugly and overweight people are openly and commonly stigmatized. When I told people I was swimming with a particular female professor, they teased me about the prospect of having to see her in a swimsuit. A story recently appeared in the newspaper regarding the subway cars. Japanese subways have all-female cars (marked with pink arrows on the platform) to prevent groping, yet some (presumably older and less attractive) women have been protesting the arrangement, as they claim the younger and prettier girls on the all-female cars taunt them by saying that no one would want to grope them anyway.

A cynic would say that beauty is skin deep in Japan, though a more neutral spin would suggest that the Japanese are more inclined than Americans to read character from outward signs. In Japan, people look their parts. Young women wear flowery skirts and tight black leggings; salarymen wear blue suits. There are no jean days or Hawaiian shirt days at the office; the government recently had to start a public service campaign just to get men to wear short sleeve dress shirts (to save energy on air conditioning). Most Japanese men would not be caught walking down the street in t-shirts, shorts, and sandals. (I felt like a pariah doing so, and expanded my wardrobe shortly after arriving so I could wear something presentable each day.) Beauty is like grace in Japan, which is why the Disney movies are so popular. As my former student Elyse Vigiletti discussed in her thesis, beauty is virtue in the world of Disney, even for supposedly “feisty” heroines like Ariel, Belle, and Jasmine.

In the U.S., we push inward for signs of character, confident that there is virtue behind ugliness and fearful that there is vice behind beauty. America is the land of film noir, where the upright citizen might always be the moral reprobate and vice versa. Thus our “tyranny of intimacy” (Sennett), and our tabloid obsession with the peccadilloes of successful and outwardly virtuous public figures. In Japan, the inner self is less violable, and the outward self is what is put on for the show of character. So obesity is profane in Japan, whereas in the U.S. obesity is just more padding for a possibly virtuous core. Conversely, in the U.S. bad teeth is a vice, while in Japan bad teeth are common (again, largely due to smoking). While Japanese facial expression is stoic, in the U.S. we are expected to smile; we emit and gauge character and virtue less through clothing and grooming, still less through physical attractiveness, than through facial expression, which is considered a window on the soul. Japanese young people who hang out at international bars in Osaka and Kyoto are relieved to be able to wear jeans and t-shirts; they are less aware of another sort of tyranny of smiling and laughing that takes hold in these places.

Japanese need not worry so much about smiling because in Japan the mouth is relatively inviolate; it is relegated to the private self. Most Japanese (especially women) cover their mouths with their hands whenever they are forced to speak while chewing and often whenever they laugh. The Japanese keep their mouths to themselves and manage others’ impressions of them in other ways that can be prepared at home. Kissing is rare and tongue kissing unheard of except among the closest intimates; single friends have told me how Japanese girls who are perfectly willing to dirty dance in nightclubs and exchange massages in love hotels will draw the line at kissing. For Americans the ritual of exchanging saliva is homologous with our striving for a meeting of minds and souls. The Japanese are perfectly happy with the outward contact of their beautiful bodies.

Btw, if anyone is still reading this, and if it is not clear from the confused tense and sense of place above, I might mention that I been home for several days now. So as far as the blog goes this is a "wrap" or, as C. W. McCall famously put it, "We gone, bye bye!"

Mosburger

Readers of my previous post are probably wondering how we got on the subject of catch phrases from 70s TV shows while sitting in that restaurant in Kyoto. The triggering event was when Daniel said something ridiculous, and Amy responded, “What you talkin’ ‘bout?” I added, “Willis,” and it went from there.

Cut to several evenings later, when I launched into an equally pointless dinnertime spiel at the Mosburger in Tokushima. We had rode our bicycles from the university to the beach and then to the Mosburger. The Tokushima Mosburger is on what they call the “bypass” road, the sort of sprawling artery that is killing off Japanese downtowns as it did in the U.S. decades ago (the decline of Japanese cities is also often blamed, like all of the country’s woes, on the low birth rate). The bypass road has sidewalks and tunnels through overpasses for bikes, making it by U.S. standards hardly a bypass road at all. But the speed of the traffic, the girth of the road’s three lanes in each direction, the relative infrequency of traffic signals and absence of pedestrians make the road uninviting for bikes as well.

Anyway, we made our way there, and I launched into another yet another dinnertime discourse. This time the triggering event was the arrival of the Fanta melon sodas that we all ordered with all our meals at the Mosburger (we dined at Mosburger in three cities). Along with Coke and Canada Dry ginger ale, melon soda is ubiquitous in Japanese fast food settings, whereas some standard U.S. pops (such as Diet Coke) are quite rare. As we sipped the dayglo green elixir (from real glasses, I might add), the children once again insisted that it was identical in both taste and color (though characteristically less sweet) to the apple soda they’d enjoyed at Ed Debevic’s in Chicago. This led to a discussion of the people with whom we’d recently dined at Ed Debevic’s (Joe and Liz Mason), our family history at Ed Debevic’s (our first wiseguy waiter there said “I’ll speak slowly then” when we told him we were from Michigan), my own first visit to Ed Debevic’s (with my cousin while attending the blues festival in 1985), my cousin’s mispronunciation of “Debevic,” my cousin’s habit of mispronouncing words and names he’s only encountered in print, Amy’s father’s same habit, etc.

Something else I spoke about at dinner was the sento at the beach. I had been saving that story for dinner but it was preempted by the melon soda discussion. The sento was easily the most impressive of the four I visited in Tokushima. It had a great many spacious baths of varying temperatures, two hot rooms, long banks of well-equipped showers, and a natural hot spring set among beautiful blue stones. I showered and went into one of the hot rooms, and there was a huge vat of chunky white powder in the middle of the floor, which of course I proceeded to taste and discovered to be salt. A smallish, older, rugged-looking gentleman entered the room and started vigorously rubbing the salt all over his body, so I did the same. Once we were both thoroughly cured I squinted at him through one stinging eye (I’d rubbed the salt on my face too) with a coy look as if to ask, “What now?” He rinsed himself by a spout in the corner, and I did the same. Then he left the hot room and took a more thorough shower, and I followed him. He went in the cold pool, I went in the cold pool … I just figured I’d follow him everywhere. (“Then he called the police,” Amy guessed. “And you called the police,” Charlie added.) Eventually I lost him, and cleaned up and left the sento, pleased to find that, like all the best sentos, it had a machine outside with little glass bottles of whole milk and sweetened coffee milk. The next morning my skin felt smooth as silk.

But back to the Mosburger. Amy wanted a beach ball, and I wanted a “Hamburger is My Life” plate, but they don’t sell stuff like that at the Mosburger. First, you have to buy a “set-o,” or set meal (a term that in Japan encompasses everything from the standard, burger/fries/pop fast-food combo to the 10,000 yen kaiseki banquet). Then you get a scratch card and if you’re lucky (which is not often) you win a beach ball. I had the same problem on an earlier, solo trip to the Tokushima Mosburger in trying to acquire a little Mosburger guy figure. My usual strategy of smiling, offering money, and standing there hopefully until they offered me one did not work. At the moment, on eBay, there are a couple of little Mosburger phone strap figures shaped like burgers and hot dogs but no beach balls as yet.

Things went downhill from there: after leaving the Mosburger we tried to visit the nearby entertainment complex (billiards, ping pong, karaoke, etc.). I lamely tried to ascertain how much it cost to purchase “ka-dos” (entrance cards) and to stay by the “owah” (hour), and not only was I unsuccessful but Charlie stormed off, claiming I was racist. We made our way home and watched a movie to bond, “I Am Legend,” another flimsy-scripted action thriller that fulfills a great thought experiment (deadly zombies overrunning Manhattan, everything else dead but a few wily species and Will Smith) much more effectively than the original “Omega Man.”

Amy retired to bed, and the kids to their computers. They’ve been staying up all night. I don’t know which is worse, the Japanese or U.S. childrearing system. Japanese kids are occupied with some activity every moment of their lives. A friend of mine at Shikoku U. says it reminds him of Plato’s Republic, where kids are stripped from their parents and raised collectively. They end up with many talents but none they have chosen. American kids are relatively idle and free to choose their diversions and typically move through a series of half-hearted projects. Both end up in cyberspace.

Sunday in Kyoto

I’m not sure why I chose to bring this particular family to Kyoto, which surpasses San Francisco in the subtlety of its expectations for travelers. Parading U.S. junior high school students before 400 year old temples and trying to turn them on to Tokugawa era art while they discuss the latest “Smosh” videos on YouTube is truly an exercise in futility.

We stayed at the Grand Prince Hotel about eight kilometers north of central Kyoto. It was built in the mid-80s but had the look and feel of an American luxury hotel from the 1950s or 1960s; an over-the-top assertion of economic hegemony, however brief and illusory. It was donut shaped with three hundred rooms and half a dozen restaurants. This was a “Western-style” hotel, meaning that you could wear your shoes in your room and stand up in the shower. There was a Christian wedding in the lower lobby Sunday morning with three Japanese beauties singing hymns like nightingales. I could not discern if we were expected to walk on the left or the right in the lobby. We got a good price from hotels.com and then got bumped up to what seemed to be a business suite. For 28000 yen a night we got two bedrooms, each with two queen-sized beds, as well as two huge common rooms: one with sofas, the other with a meeting/dining table that seated twelve. The place seemed to measure about 1500 square feet. There was a kitchenette, three TVs, and three bathrooms, two of which had bathtubs, showers, and bidets. This was not the first time I’d been bumped up to a suite; it happened when I first arrived at the airport in Osaka. My sense is that hotels here are so desperate to fill rooms at the moment that they are practically giving away suites to families. It is a weird benefit of traveling in depressed times. Rooms that used to be filled with visiting Western businessmen paying fealty to the Asian Tiger are now filled with schleps like us. Everyone looks at you with chips on their shoulders that they have to beg for your tourism.

We got a fine night’s sleep in our suite Saturday night and started off Sunday at the Nijo castle, where Tokugawa kept his Kyoto digs to meet with regional warlords. I tried to read Charles and Daniel the guidebook patter about the significance of the painted screens and ceilings but they were far more fascinated by the “No Scribbling” signs. These were meant to admonish visitors against sketching the interiors (presumably as it would hold up foot traffic), but at first we took them as warnings against graffiti, thus leading to an endless series of jokes (“Does that mean you’re allowed to write neatly?” “Write ‘OK’ after it,” etc.). We proceeded to Kiyomizu-dera despite signs of bad weather, and when the rain came down torrentially the children insisted on gallivanting around without umbrellas. It was wonderful to watch them flail about in the rain while Amy and I huddled with the other tourists under the temple’s hanging roofs. But Charlie got a rash afterward from the chafing of his wet denim shorts and was soon miserable, so we had to head back to the hotel.

The hotel restaurants were way too pricey for us so we made our way to the humble business district down the street, with a list of local eateries kindly provided to us by the concierge. My Michigan friend Dave Finzel claims that everyone has one superpower and that mine is choosing restaurants, so I want it on record that I chose the restaurant at which we dined Sunday night on the name alone—“Indofasia”—and it was heavenly (the name, and the food). In retrospect it was probably only short for “India of Asia” (it was an Asian fusion place that leaned toward Indian) but for me it conjured “Fantasia” (an edible fantasy of color), “aphasia” (food so good it leaves you speechless), and maybe even “euthanasia” (once you eat here you can die in peace). There was some resistance, but having made dietary concessions ever since these other people’s arrival (we ate at the Japanese fast food chain Mosburger our first night in Kyoto) I stuck to my guns on this one. Charlie decided to bow out, went back to the hotel and had his own dream dinner: he dined in Ritz crackers and Toppo chocolate pretzels and played Toon Town on the computer. Meanwhile back at Indofasia, Amy and I had our usual debate about whether we were ordering too much food or too little. I admitted that my tendency to order too much food was attributable not only to family history but to mortality fears. (“This is not your last meal.” “Yes, but it is my last meal at this restaurant.”) Eventually we ordered a Thai kabob for Daniel while Amy and I shared the banana chicken, chana masala, curry of the day, some Nan bread, and a kiwi lassi (they forgot my Nepalese soup, which Amy reminded me of later after we left and which, miraculously, did not keep me up all night).

Having my loved ones here to open up to after such a long stretch of having practically no one to talk to in English has driven me to a bit of delirium. My children only recently pointed out to me the habit I developed before their arrival of saying ridiculous things to waiters, taxi drivers, etc., when I know very well that I am speaking to myself. As my colleague at Shikoku, Mark Fennelly, says, you do a lot of living inside your own head here, which can be unhealthy. For awhile I considered carrying around a volleyball with a face drawn on it, though Amy suggested I might just converse with my own hand. It’s when my hand itself starts speaking to me in Japanese and I begin choking it at the wrist as it screams “Dame! Dame!” that I will know I’m in trouble.

Anyway, at some point during our meal at Indofasia I launched into a lengthy analysis of catchphrases from 1970s TV entertainment and commercials. I was aided by the food’s anesthetic effects and by the fact that Charlie was not on hand to bang his head on the table as he usually does when I start into one of these things. I turned it into a guessing game: regarding my favorite commercial catchphrase Amy guessed “Where’s the beef?” which was a decade off. The correct answer was a tie between “Try it, you’ll like it” and “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing,” both of course from Alka-Seltzer ads. As for TV entertainment, Amy guessed my favorite catchphrase was Vinnie Barbarino’s “up your nose with a rubber hose,” again wrong. The correct answer was, “Woooo-wee!” as exclaimed by Junior on “That’s My Mama.” After building up a great deal of suspense I finally revealed this by rather loudly demonstrating Junior’s, “Woooo-wee! I got news, I got news!” while doing the obligatory pimp roll across the floor of Indofasia. I described Junior as having been “played by the same guy who played Isaac on ‘The Love Boat,’” whose name I couldn’t recall at the moment. For the record it was Ted Lange, and this is all entirely germane because Lange also played a prominent role in the early 1970s R&B concert film Wattstax, which is pretty popular in Japan: translated editions of NYC magazines like waxpoetics and 212 Mag have helped turn Japan on to current and past black street culture.

As we left the restaurant, the kind Indian manager said, “See you again,” and I did not disabuse him of that notion.

Tokyo, briefly

Amy and the boys arrived here in Japan just in time for the "rainy season." This is the term for the long period of alternate days of torrential rain and humidity so thick you feel as though you'll have to remove your clothes with a power sander. We managed a trip to Tokyo last weekend -- all expenses paid at least for me as I presented at the "Inter-Asia Cultural Typhoon" (yes that was the title) conference. People here in Tokushima had warned me to avoid the more chaotic areas but as erstwhile New Yorkers I thought we'd have no problem negotiating Tokyo. I was wrong: we spent a good deal of the weekend holding up foot traffic by standing dumbfounded before the city's many Kanji subway maps (it ends up only the Yamanote loop line stations have maps in English). Still, we got to see I good deal and the city's organized disorder was itself a miracle to behold. The crosswalks alone are worth the price of admission: in Shinjuku (the de facto city center of late) they measure about 40 feet across and not without reason, in Shibuya (think the West Village cubed) they cross each other in crazy patterns in a huge polygonal plaza, as the lights turn red all at once and everyone somehow manages to get where they're going. Watching the dance of thousands of umbrellas as this occurs is better than any Super Bowl halftime show.

The signal moments of the weekend were the displays of honesty and generosity by the people here. My eldest dropped his electronic umbilical cord (a.k.a. Nintendo DS) on the subway and bummed about it for a couple of days until we passed a lost-and-found office in one of the stations and stopped in on a "hail Mary" whim ... within minutes they located it at another station, within an hour we had it back. On another occasion Charlie was crouched on a sidewalk in Rappongi Hills nursing a blister on his foot when a strange looking young man with a severe speech impediment stopped and, in broken Engrish, provided us with bandages and some kind of miraculous numbing salve he had on hand. He insisted on us keeping the bottle of medicine and it pretty much saved our day. Our boys are slowly but surely drawing lessons from all this ... at one point Danny offered the comment, "Pretty much everything is better here, except the escalators are the same."

Kyoto Protocol

Kyoto and Osaka are only 50 kilometers apart but they have reputations as polar opposites. While Osaka is a casual and friendly mess of a city, life in Kyoto follows a regimen of manners that mystifies even fellow Japanese. I’ve been told that if someone asks you over for tea there, you have to wait for the third offer before accepting; only then do they mean it. Even restaurant workers must have written references for employment in Kyoto. Osaka cuisine consists of street food well prepared: specialties include okonomiyaki (cabbage pancakes) and takoyaki (octopus balls), the Japanese equivalents of barbecue, pizza, or cheese steaks. Kyoto, by contrast, is all haute cuisine. Deciding where to eat there is a momentous and intimidating task. As a rule I don’t like to go out too hungry when looking for a restaurant, as I tend either to jump at the first thing I see or to grow weak from hunger and fail to enjoy my meal. Having caught a last minute bus into Kyoto, however, I was famished when I arrived. After checking into my hotel I walked around Pontocho, the district of narrow streets lined with pricey, set-menu restaurants just west of the Kamogawa. I settled on Bistro Zuzu, a casual place with two young chefs and a pretty hip looking crowd. The menu evoked a Western tapas place, passing over traditional Kyoto cuisine for a diverse selection of small, cheap dishes. I was a little afraid the place would emphasize style over substance but I needn’t have worried. The beef stew with tongue of cattle was outstanding, as were the Caesar’s salad and the grilled fish and cheese spring rolls with sea urchin egg sauce. I topped it off with a rice ball stuffed with Japanese apricot that cost me all of 190 yen.

Later in the evening I ended up at the Hub, a pub where union jacks cover the walls and Japanese deejays spin Britpop and punk records. I met a 35-ish Swiss guy and we got drunk and traded Japanese swine-flu paranoia horror stories. Eventually we got on the dance floor, which was crowded with a nice mix of Western and Japanese guys and girls (mostly Japanese and mostly guys) and bounced our feet and our beers to a mix that ranged from XTC and the Jam right up to the Hives, the Libertines, and the View. Amazingly, the deejay managed to cue up the Clash’s “Police on My Back” right in time for the arrival of the Japanese cops, who had presumably arrived to quell the noise spilling out to the street at all hours but got distracted posing for pictures with several of the foreign visitors.

Too tough for the tourist bus, I spent my days in Kyoto trudging between landmarks. I learned that warlords like to build temples, though I could have told you that by driving past the mega-churches on I-75 in Ohio. I imagine it is a hazard of life here that its manifest beauty goes to your head. Pretty much all of Japan’s young people want to visit America, but while Osakans fantasize about going to New York, Kyoto’s youth pine for the West coast. Among the dizzying array of youth subcultures in Japan, one that looms large in Kyoto is “kogal,” the young girls with blonde-dyed hair and artificial suntans who seem to reside in a Southern California of the mind. An exception was the Tranq Room, about the coolest place I’ve been to anywhere in Japan, where I had dinner and drinks my second evening in town. Their nama-yuba rice bowl and apple-ginger iced tea were mighty rejuvenating after dragging my ass up the Philosopher’s Trail to the Temple of the Silver Pavilion in 30-plus (Celsius) heat. The place also had a Serge Gainsbourg record cover on the wall, a faded Vincent Gallo signature on one of their vinyl sofas, an excellent sound system playing steel drum renditions of Burt Bacharach hits, and a friendly staff that flouted Kyoto’s stand-offish reputation.

On Sunday I made my way to the International Manga Museum (which ended up being more of a manga library) and eventually to Kyoto Station. I almost found myself stranded in Kyoto for another night; the first clerk I spoke to told me all remaining buses for the day were sold out. After scrambling across the station to another desk they issued me a ticket on a later bus, and I spent the interim eating free samples of pickles and bean jelly at the train station gift shop and getting a haircut. Predictably, everything is done just so at the Japanese barber shop. Don’t bother telling the barber how short you want it, he’s an artist and he’ll do it his way. For an extra 1000 yen he threw in a rigorous shampoo and a shave that included every inch of skin from my forehead down to my neckline. It was heavenly, but on the hot bus back my aftershave and hair lotion began to melt and I felt firsthand the female fear of runny makeup.

goodwill tour update

Interpretive dancing to Weezer's "The Good Life" at the Crowbar in Tokushima (photos by Taro).

Escape to Osaka

A big, international media studies conference was to take place in Tokyo this week. Several friends of mine were scheduled to attend and I figured it would be a triumphant highlight of my trip. But when the flu landed ashore here, the Japanese government imposed a battery of ill-conceived and futile restrictions on foreign travelers. Most of those from outside the country who were scheduled to attend the conference canceled, and then the conference itself was canceled outright. That night I had a dream that the little red ink pad within my signature seal case was running dry, and I was trying unsuccessfully to draw out enough ink to stamp my time card. I woke up and caught the first bus to Osaka. Ever since I arrived here people have been badgering me to visit Kyoto. They don’t know what a crass, know-nothing pleasure-seeker I am at heart. Osaka is the perfect city for me. There is very little sightseeing to be done there, only restaurants, bars, and shops winding through streets as circuitous as a yakuza’s tattoos.

The three staples of Osaka street cuisine are okonomiyaki (cabbage pancakes), takoyaki (balls of dough with bits of octopus), and gyoza (Chinese-style dumplings). There is plenty of okonomiyaki available in Tokushima and they are perfectly palatable, so I was under the mistaken impression that I had experienced this delicacy. Wandering the Shinsaibashi arcades Friday night I came upon a place that looked good: it was small and crowded and there was 60s-era free jazz playing, the latter a surprisingly reliable signpost of good food in Japan. I was ushered to the one empty seat at the counter and watched the chefs work their magic. Under paper-thin pancakes they pressed mounds of cabbage, eggs, kimchi, leeks, pickled ginger, powdered seaweed, even udon noodles, along with a variety of meats and fish, all topped with a sweet brown sauce and crisscrossing lines of mayonnaise. There were a dozen or so varieties of these things on the menu and the slender young gals next to me seemed determined to try every one, helplessly seduced by the chefs’ handiwork.

Later at the international bar Sam and Dave’s I drank cassis and soda (a break from umeshu) and talked to a 22-year-old Italian designer on his third trip to Osaka. Fashion here is defined by catch-all bricolage. The same kids wandering among the noisy boutiques of Amerikamura can be spied later in Shinsaibashi combing the racks of the Disney store for Mickey Mouse earphone winders and cell phone chargers. And for a tightwad like me the vintage clothing shops here measure up to those of any U.S. city. Wandering the Amerikura district I’m more convinced than ever that the medium is the message. Though the streets of Japanese cities have teemed with American popular culture for a century and a half, the frictionless flows of the Internet have allowed them to definitively triumph over us on any measure of hipness. Time Bomb Records has an exhaustive, pristine collection of girl groups, ska, bubblegum, psychobilly, and pretty much every other obscure and essential genre. Standard Books has a stunning array of works both authored and translated into Japanese: biographies of Eminem and Lee Scratch Perry, tomes on the movie Wild Style and the My Bloody Valentine record Loveless, the full runs of 212 Mag and Waxpoetics, whole shelves devoted to dog and cat photography and to album cover art, and pretty much every volume ever published by the mind-blowing German art-book house Taschen.

Osaka’s nightlife carries on without pause all weekend. Bars are open till 5 or 6 am and from there you can go to the after-hours places. You can still spy black-clad kids stumbling home in the late afternoon. I spent Friday night getting oriented at the Sam and Dave’s near my hotel in Nagahoribashi; somewhat like a Japanese Hard Rock, there are three outlets of the popular establishment in Osaka alone. Saturday I had a great burger at the ostentatiously American-themed Captain Kangaroo bar and several stouts at the Blarney Stone in Umeda. Sunday is a quiet night in Osaka; the bars are only open till 3 or 4. I finally made it to the intimate little karaoke bar Kama Sutra in Shinsaibashi (not much bigger than a karaoke room), downed four house beers and wailed through XTC’s “Mayor of Simpleton” and Olivia Newton-John’s “Have You Never Been Mellow.”

I met a lot of the city’s famously friendly natives at these places, practically all of whom had either visited the U.S. or were planning to do so (mainly Las Vegas and NYC), as well as quite a few ex-pats, mostly Australians, Brits, Irish and Yanks. Cool, young Japanese girls flock to the international bars; they can dress sexily without having anyone assume they’re hostesses or, better still, they can wear jeans. Learning that I was based in Tokushima, the natives offered patronizing quips about the Awa Odori dance (pretty much the only thing Tokushima’s known for), just as people in Detroit or Chicago start in about Bronner’s Christmas Wonderland when I tell them I’m from Saginaw. I returned to Tokushima on Monday with a sudden, stupid feeling of insecurity: do I live in a Japanese hick town? Shikoku has only been linked to Honshu by bridges for about twenty years; some Osakans were still unaware they could get here by car. After 15 years in New York and Philadelphia earlier in my life, I seem destined to spend the rest of it on the margins, even here. Having put a few days between myself and Osaka, though, Tokushima is again offering up the small pleasures I discovered when I arrived a month and a half ago, and starting to feel a little more like home.