I Wanna Feel You From the Inside...

In any bar featured in Get Hiroshima’s tourist map or a major guidebook, you’ll sometimes knock bottles with a traveler who’s only recently lapped up half the booze in Cambodia or the wastes of inner China and finds that Japan “isn’t Asian enough.” I never know exactly what this means. Too little tuberculosis? Not enough poultry being butchered in the aisles of the shinkansen? Or maybe they’ve made the mistake of visiting a chain coffee shop.

It’s not like there’s no Japanese music. CD stores are stacked rafter-high with J-Pop, enka, noise rock, visual kei, Okinawan ballads and more. But step into almost any café belonging to a major chain and the music will be Western. The Carpenters are a huge favorite. I’d forgotten the Carpenters ever existed until I came to Japan, but that’s some ruthlessly catchy shit. It’s best to know that in advance, so you’ll be ready when it comes. You too shall one night lie in bed, gazing at the ceiling as “Rainy Days and Mondays” churns without mercy at the base of your skull, your big toes twitching in time. Hangin’ aroooouuuund, nothin’ to do but frooooowwn...

Sometimes the music is almost unbelievable, the worst gangsta rap hard on the heels of Simon and Garfunkel. One big chain, Kohikan, is a refuge for specimens of fading girlhood who’ve been cast out of hipper cafés with mismatched chairs and jazz on the turntable. The photo shows a typical Kohikan; a bright, sterile space in which everything you touch has been extruded in polished slabs from a café-making apparatus. I’d been in Japan about two months when I stopped in a Kohikan and sat next to a pair of women in their thirties, bent close over a mail-order furniture catalog. From a speaker overhead Trent Reznor sang “Closer,” urgently telling all of Kohikan’s valued customers, “I wanna fuck you like an animal.” No one else was grinning. It’s sad to be the only one who gets the joke, which raises the obvious question: why are all the songs in chain cafés in English? The sole exception that comes to mind is the rap I listened to in Café Excelsior one day, in French.

There are times when the music’s sheer oddity can blindside you. This morning I went to Hiroshima station to see off a group of students headed for Australia. When they’d left, I wandered downstairs and into Doutour, another major coffee chain. It was five a.m., there was time to kill. As I sat down, a beautiful piano arrangement of “Shendandoah” began to play. The music, combined with the time of morning, the train station mood and recent farewell, all settled over me and I was overtaken by the most ridiculous pathos. I’m sure I was humming along and looking very low, there in the little smoking section hidden away behind the main room. I caught a Japanese guy looking sideways at me, probably thinking I was a traveler succumbing to homesickness. I might have told him, “No, friend, I dwell in Hagoromocho, in a good house with seventeen windows and a deep bath.” But he was right. What’s more American than Shenandoah? We were rescued by the end of the song, which was replaced by an oboe playing the melody of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” over a little piano backing. Strange, but really pretty good. The gentle oboe. Always a pal.