Death in Vegas, "Girls"

As I begin this post I’m gathered together with my family on a Saturday morning, seated four across on a bullet train hurtling from Tokyo to Osaka at 160 miles per hour. They call the bullet trains shinkansen. It’s a bit on the nose, yes, to choose a song from the Lost in Translation soundtrack while you’re traveling in Japan. But these other, rejected nominees were just as obvious—at least for a traveler of my age and rock sensibilities:

• “Tokyo” (Apple Music, Spotify) by the Thompson Twins. I loved this song in eighth grade. Played it the other day, don’t love it anymore. Next.

• The Cure’s “Kyoto Song” (Apple Music, Spotify). Getting closer, but a bit minor-key for this mood.

• “To the East” (Apple Music, Spotify) by Electrelane. Not far off my vibe on this trip and a close runner-up to Death in Vegas.

• “Big in Japan” (Apple Music, Spotify) by Alphaville. An ’80s classic, this one, but I’m not big in Japan.

• “Turning Japanese” (Apple Music, Spotify) is far and away my favorite song on this theme, but when it last played on the car radio my kids wondered out loud if it was racist. I told them to take a break from the Gen Z thought-policing and just rock out a little. Later on I went and read some more about the song and, yeah: it probably is a bit racist. Let’s just say it’s a product of its time and leave it there.

A song by a Japanese artist might have worked, but other than Shonen Knife, which I’ve already done (see “Burning Farm”), I don’t have a deep bench here. I get that I need to diversify the portfolio. I can say I love Pizzicato Five’s cover of “The Girl from Ipanema” (YouTube), but that song is more about Brazil than Japan. Beyond that, the 5, 6, 7, 8’s jump to mind. They’re the all-girl house band playing in the nightclub in Kill Bill: Volume 1, just before the climactic katana battle. I bought a 5, 6, 7, 8’s record in Cleveland last April, and I like it a lot. They lean garage rock where Shonen Knife leans Ramones, and the results are about as rewarding. I just don’t have a song of theirs that makes sense to deploy here.

Contrast “Girls” by Death in Vegas (Apple Music, Spotify), which feels like the best fit for my state of mind on a trip this ambitious. The late-stage shoegaze sound is somehow both delicate and dense: the music overloads the senses, but at the same time all you want is to bask in its warmth. You know, like Japan. “Girls” is the song that rightly plays in Lost in Translation while Bill Murray’s character is riding in from Narita just after dark, taking in the city lights through the car window and rubbing his eyes in an equal-parts combination of exhaustion and disbelief.

Exhaustion and disbelief are just what you get in and from Japan, at least in the first few days. We’re thirteen hours ahead of EDT right now, and the jet lag moves on you from nowhere, like a ninja. At any moment, in any setting—taxicab, hotel lobby, dinner—your eyelids may come crashing down like broken garage doors, which in turn provokes The Unignorable City to bore in, around, under, and through them. Then there’s the flipside proposition, where you’re wide awake at 4 AM. Four days in and we’re still fighting uphill. Right now it’s 5:10 PM on Saturday, and we’re due to leave shortly to see a Japanese major league baseball game: Chunichi Dragons at Hanshin Tigers in what we’re told is Japan’s most hallowed shrine to baseball, Koshein Stadium, just west of Osaka. But another of these waves of fatigue just washed over me, and I could as easily shut it all down and sleep through until morning.

Add to the jet lag that we have no foothold in the language beyond konnichiwa, arigato, and, of all things, mugiwara—this last turn of phrase meaning Straw Hat, a nickname of Florian’s fave anime character—and Japan started out a bit daunting. The kids were especially sensitive about not speaking the language or knowing the commercial customs. Papa: you were SUPPOSED TO put the yen in the LEATHER TRAY, and so on. I think they’re too mindful of the Ugly American stereotype and inclined to overcorrect for it. I’ve tried to assure them: Japanese-American relations won’t be defined into the future by how deftly an Abruzzi consummated the purchase of an iced green tea at Lawson’s.¹ They seem to have taken this to heart and lately are engaging more self-sufficiently with waiters, counter clerks, and cab drivers.

A third complication has been the heat: highs of 37 centigrade up and down the country, pretty much every day. We spent a blistering Thursday morning walking in Tokyo’s Tsukiji Outdoor Market, in narrow alleyways along the food stalls, where street chefs—God bless them—were ladling out hot stews over rice, searing skewers of wagyu beef on oiled skillets. You’d linger in front of open storefronts pumping shafts of cool air out into the sidewalk, then hurry past the open corrugated hoses jutting out from the closed buildings to channel heat out and away from their paying customers inside. Certain members of our group handled this heat-on-heat situation better than others, and this led to a grim reckoning over lunch.

We’ve since settled on a strategy of splitting the days in two: push forward into the cities in the morning, toggle back to the hotel after lunch, hose down, power nap, then rally to go out again after sundown. This program solves just a little for the jet lag and affords us some respite from the murderous temps of the late afternoon.

So, some stuff to overcome, for sure. But we’re overcoming it. Kate and I were able to sleep in until 8:00 this (now Sunday) morning, and our hotel here in Osaka has a laundry room—meaning we can sweat through several outfits per day, if we need to. There’s a fair amount of cultural/ natural experience awaiting us up the road in Kyoto, and though I’ve elsewhere represented that I’m not generally inclined to spirituality (see “The Whole of the Moon”), I’m allowing myself the prospect of being awed by and reverent of beautiful things.

And writing, too, can be helpful. When you’re assigning so much of your RAM all day long to problem-solving—Why won’t my phone draw cellular data? How does this train ticket machine work? Can we get ourselves and our luggage from the station to the hotel without dissolving on the asphalt?—you can drift away from the habits and practices of travel that are most important and useful. You can, in a word, begin to griswold.

And that’s where Substack comes to the rescue. I’m locked in on posting this week: not inclined to break a streak of 80 Mondays and counting. So I may as well make restorative use of my time at the keyboard. Right here right now that means taking the opportunity to reflect and reset. Because for all the sense of displacement and cultural and circadian unease; the high stakes of we’re likely only coming here once so we can’t blow it; getting lost, tired, hungry, sticky, and stinky; and feeling now the first pangs of a reawakening plantar fasciitis in your left heel—oh, God, and there goes the right one, too—for all this a million delights await you, big and small, if you can only push through the discomfort and confusion. Some examples:

• The toilet lid flipping up enthusiastically when you round the corner into a bathroom stall.

• A man on the street cooking a king crab leg with an acetylene torch.

• Another man riding the Metro in a polo shirt with the words Tom & Jerry embroidered in script where you’d ordinarily find the polo player, or an alligator.

• An otter café, which is just what it sounds.

And I swear to God, yesterday at McDonald’s I saw succotash on the sides menu. So many of these details and experiences, each of them a glistening stone chip in the Mosaic of Japan 2024, could skate right by you, if you’re too bound up in yourself to notice them. Oof: I don’t mean to be serving up warmed-over Ferris Bueller wisdom.² My project is bigger than that: it’s about identifying and applying particular strategies, toward sucking all the marrow out of the splintered bone of international travel.

Here’s one I hinted at earlier: Embrace the displacement. You don’t know where you’re going, what you’re doing, or how to do it. At all times a big, flashing red-LED sign hangs over your head blinking FOREIGNER! AMERICAN! But get over yourself already. Have you seen the lights of Shibuya? Of Dotonbori Street in Osaka? Your flashing CULTURAL KLUTZ! signs are barely visible by comparison. No one is looking at you, and if they are, they’re looking to help.

On Wednesday night in Tokyo we had teppanyaki, up by Akihabara Electric City. Teppanyaki consists of fresh cuts of beef served raw for you to cook on a gas-fired grill in the middle of your table. I’d previewed this experience with one of the aforementioned wagyu skewers at Tsukiji earlier in the day. Had to have more beef. The teppanyaki adventure was a typical first-few-days experience in that for lack of any expressed preference or input from the others, I selected the restaurant, dialed it up on Google Maps, then proved utterly incapable of finding it. We hit on a second teppanyaki joint a few hundred yards from where the first one was supposed to be. All right, fine: let’s do that.

The menu was daunting. We had no idea what cuts to order, or how many. Page after page of beef measured out in grams and priced in yen. Too many calculations and conversions to get to the answers we needed on portion size and what was a reasonable spend. We ultimately ordered probably 30% less wagyu than we should have, due to my party’s abiding sensitivity about appearing to be piggish Americans. The meat arrived with tongs and scissors. I started cutting it into strips, and the waiter surged back into view to correct me: COOK FIRST! CUT SECOND! But now we had scissors coated with raw meat-goo.

What followed was a circus of beef flung in all directions, occasionally landing on the grill and our plates, but often as not on the table, or even our laps. The kids took note of the orderly methods applied at neighboring tables. These other customers handled their tongs, scissors, and chopsticks with poise and grace. They were deft managers of their table space, too, arranging their plates and bowls neatly around the cooktop. The juxtaposition made our chaotic meat orgy all the more ridiculous. But despite all this, the food was delicious, and I will declare that our involvement in the cooking most certainly did not diminish the teppanyaki experience. Oh, my God, that wagyu beef: beautifully marbled and perfectly tender, however—and whenever—you slice it.

Strategy # 2: Let the small stuff go. I mentioned earlier that we had plans to go to a baseball game. We’re on the far side of that now. Despite my best efforts cracking the whip, we got a disagreeably late start on the train ride out to Hanshin and ended up boarding an exceedingly local train to the stadium that, as far as I could tell, made stops in Vladivostok and South Korea. It was ominous that not one identifiable Hanshin fan boarded this train with us—and as it putzed along and time bled off the clock, it became increasingly clear why that was the case.

For the entirety of the ride I had steam coming out of my ears: but for the fucking around of certain unnamed persons—I won’t say their names, but there were three of them—we might have made it to the ballpark before first pitch, or at least shortly after. As it turned out, we wouldn’t arrive until the bottom of the third inning. I stomped off the platform at Koshien Station, beelined to the first available stadium gate, and was of course diverted by the ticket-taker there to another gate hundreds of yards away. Off I went halfway around the stadium, sputtering and cursing. When we finally stepped through the concourse into the stadium, we saw this:

There were drummers and trumpeters, massive flags, three conductors posted along the outfield wall working in coordinated fashion to lead cheers for the 40,000-strong Hanshin supporters to follow. A card-carrying member of the Tigers fan club gave us a pack of scallop and soy-flavored pretzels. One of his colleagues handed me a glossy folded leaflet. Google Translate showed that each player in the lineup had his own unique song for fans to sing when he was at the plate. The leaflet wrote out the lyrics for these songs—it was essentially a cribsheet for rookie fans in the right-field bleachers. Kate and the kids went down for food and came back with a pair of hollowed-out plastic bats for us to bang together in time with the drummers below.

I have never been to a sporting event with more serious—and joyful—fan involvement than this Hanshin Tigers game. The actual baseball was … okay. I was at first impressed that Hanshin’s pitcher threw 125 pitches through 7.2 innings, but when you consider that few of those offerings exceeded 80 miles per hour, you have to figure MLB hitters would have knocked him out of the game pretty quickly. But the stadium experience? Unbelievable, and something I’ll remember long after I’ve forgotten our delayed arrival. (It turns out the seats in Hanshin Koshien aren’t built for Abruzzi-sized fans, and as such I don’t think my back would have held up over a full nine innings anyway.)

A third essential practice is to live in the moment. The other day Florian and I were on the bus to Toyosu Fish Market, and my phone rang. Someone—my father-in-law, I think, though he was long gone from the chat before I answered—had started a FaceTime call with my parents and uncle and me. I picked up, swiveled my phone around, and showed my family the view outside the bus window. Wild to think I could share the sights of East Tokyo with loved ones 6500 miles away, in real time. Wild to think, too, that they were seeing more of the city than my kid on the bus seat right in front of me, who was playing a video game on his phone. I whacked him (gently) on the side of the head and told him to look out the window.

In that instant I flashed back to a time more than forty years ago—probably forty-five—when my grandfather took me to McDonald’s for lunch. I was in the shotgun seat of his Chevy Malibu, reading a book: probably The Phantom Tollbooth, because for a while there it was always The Phantom Tollbooth. Moderately irritated about his lousy company, my Grandpa Ralph nudged me with his elbow. Get your nose up out of that book, he snapped. Look out the window and see the world. Now the lawyer in me might argue the difference between casting jaded eyes over McKinley Heights for the umpteenth time and taking a moment to look out over Tokyo, Japan. But I see now the point my grandfather was making. There is so much to learn by observation—possibly more, even, than you can learn from books. And certainly more than you can learn from Pokémon Go.

None of this is to say I myself have mastered the practice of fully inhabiting a moment, when said moment calls for it. I’m writing up this story on the Osaka-bound shinkansen, after all, hanging my nose over this laptop screen while vast swathes of Honshu—fields, mountains, towns, coastline—slash by the window. And I’d do well, too, to spend less time documenting what I see with the camera and more time actually seeing it. This was easier to do in the days before smartphones, when you traveled with finite amounts of film that you had to ration out across the many shot-worthy sights and sites that populated your trip. Now, for better or for worse, it’s all too cheap and easy, and therefore too tempting, to time-lapse your stroll through the bamboo forest in Arashiyama.

We’ll keep working on this one.

A fourth rule: Be up for anything. As I push deeper into this post I have the feeling that none of these precepts is especially groundbreaking or insightful—they’re all just angles and riffs on common sense. By way of example, when your eighteen-year-old son, by now three weeks away from leaving home for college, says he wants to get up in the middle of the night and catch a cab down to the Osaka Central Fish Market to see what is described online as “a dramatic 30 minute tuna auction taking place from 4:15 AM,” common sense compels that your answer to this is YES YES YES emphatically YES. This notwithstanding that he’s asking at 7 PM the night before, when you’re already wiped from your day trip to Kyoto, those garage doors are rumbling down over your eyes, and you haven’t yet gone for dinner.

Buy in, though, and you get to see this:

There was a moment sometime last week—don’t ask me when or where, because I was tired and delirious—when we’d just stepped off a subway train and were bustling through one of the station hubs. Among a dozen people rounding the corner into our path there came a Japanese man, probably in his late fifties. He looked straight at me, made sure to catch my eye, and when he did, he smiled and waved at me. Didn’t stop, didn’t break his stride. I smiled and waved back, and he passed me by. Wondering what about me had earned this warm greeting from a stranger—and in the all-swallowing anonymity of the Tokyo transit system, for that matter—I turned around to get a better look at him, just in time to see him turn another corner and pass entirely out of view.

I got back on my own path, hustling up to catch my family, wracking my brain as to what all that was about. I had a Cleveland cap on: the neon orange cap the Guardos’ reps wore to this year’s All-Star Game. Was he a Guardians fan? This seemed rather unlikely. I was wearing a new shirt. Was he digging on my personal style? The likelihood of that was still more remote.

As I’ll never know the right answer here, I’m free to come up with my own. I like to think that Japanese man was a father, too—possibly with a son and daughter of comparable ages, or maybe his were older still, grown up and moved out years ago. I like to think he saw me trailing behind my gang, a bit worse for wear and trying to keep up, and across all barriers of language and culture and distance he pegged me as just another Joe trying something new, hanging tough in the moment, and loving his family. And the smile and wave were his way of saying You’ve got this, Brother. And it’s as good as it gets.

Yeah: that’s a good one. I think I’ll go with that.

1. Yes, there are Lawson convenient stores here. Many of them. Arguably thousands. Mister Donut, too. In some ways Japan is a sheared-off alternate timeline where a dozen defunct American brands never died.

2. Life comes at you fast. If you don’t stop and look around every once in a while, you could miss it.