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Nagoya, Japan’s #4 city, isn't a place you'd usually visit unless you have to. It has neither Tokyo's cutting-edge contemporary culture nor Kyoto's old temples, shrines, and history. There is a big castle there, but when you get up close to it, you realize it's a sad affair: The old castle was burned down during a World War II bombing raid, and what was built in its place is more like a museum, with elevators and linoleum floors, rather than the wooden walls and floors of the resting-places of samurais of old.
Which isn't to say there's nothing going for Nagoya. It's got various quirks that make it sort of the eccentric uncle of Japanese metropolises, and fun to visit. For example, you always hear the stereotype that Nagoya people are a bit on the miserly side, except when their daughters are getting married — then the parents abandon their usual yen-pinching habits and spend a small fortune buying furniture, audio-visual equipment, and other pricey items for the newlyweds. Moreover, they are said to hire trucks with see-through trailers so that neighbors and passersby can admire all the treasures the daughter is bringing to her new household. Nagoya folks also have their own dialect, which causes them to say "myaa" at the end of phrases, prompting Japanese from other regions to say that they sound like a bunch of cats.
Nagoya Castle, photo by Ken M
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So when I decided I would take the two-hour bullet train trip from Tokyo to Nagoya to see a gig by the band advantage Lucy, I thought it might be a fun destination, in its way. I was also curious about the place, because when I interviewed advantage Lucy a few months ago, they told me that Nagoya used to be a difficult city for a touring band to play — the audience was reserved and never went wild — but that when they last went there, things appear to have changed radically: The audience was the best of any of the cities that the band visited. I wanted to see these wild and crazy fans for myself.
Nagoya is a sister city of Los Angeles, and there's a resemblance between the two — like LA, it's a low, sprawling city, and looks built for automobile traffic. The club where advantage Lucy was playing was in a street like LA's Wilshire Blvd. — except this was a bizarre Wilshire Blvd., where around the corner from respectable businesses were massage parlors, hostess clubs, and other red-light establishments, all with giant, gaudy signs outside. In fact, the club where the band was booked, the ambitiously named Apollo Theater, appeared to be a former cabaret club. In one dark, unused corner of the club were phony chandeliers, salon tables and chairs — and, it seemed, the ghosts of hostesses and drunk salary-men past. Around a hundred fans, mostly kids in their 20s, filled up the Apollo for the gig.
advantage Lucy, photo by Ken M
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They were a good, enthusiastic crowd, but they weren't exactly the frothing-at-the-mouth advantage Lucy fanatics that I'd half-expected. After the opening band Huckleberry Finn left the stage and advantage Lucy came on, there was loud applause, and the group ran through their hits from albums like Fanfare and Station, dating back to the mid-90s. Like me, probably many in the audience weren't even aware of this pop group when these hit songs first came out, and instead discovered the band's music — packed full of bright guitar sound and featuring female vocalist Aiko's gentle, sweet singing voice — somewhere along the way, largely by coincidence.
Watching the one-hour-plus show from the back of the hall, I became more and more intoxicated by the music, until at one point I felt a strange sensation — my eyes drifting from the stage to the darkness of the audience, I felt something inside me floating far above the club, and the Nagoya street that contained it, until I was up in the sky, dancing amid the stars like a whirling dervish.
But then, in a moment, the vision disappeared. Maybe it was all the beer.
After the gig I was ready to have drinks and food with advantage Lucy at the usual after-show party, but when I asked the bassist about it, he said, "Oh, well, we're driving right back to Tokyo tonight, so there won't be a party." Oh. I'd booked a cheap hotel room so I could crash after the show and party. I watched as the band packed their equipment into a rented van ahead of the all-night drive to Tokyo, and then waved to them as their van left the curb and disappeared into the Nagoya night.
Posted September 2006
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japanfiles commented, on September 22, 2006 at 12:40 p.m.:
Really enjoyed this column, Ken.
More, please.
Arigatou!