3am, crossing a foot bridge in downtown Osaka while blissfully exhausted and hammered and glad to be here over anywhere else.
Honestly, there’s nothing quite like it: a sea of ever-moving patchwork-styled people flowing through open neon corridors all night long. Carry your beers freely on the sidewalk, loiter as long as you like between point A and B, and dance until past first light: the bars don’t close until the last person leaves. When you can’t stand anymore, crash in a coffin-like capsule hotel or any variety of love hotel, your sex themed from sophisticated to Santa Klaus, provided you can drunkenly convince the anonymous teller that you can speak Japanese. Somewhere in the middle of it all, stop on a bridge over black water reflecting this world back at you, and take it all in.
Now that I’m back in the States, the heaviest my nightlife gets is a small bar in northeast Ohio. I walk to the bar, I see a million people I know, a familiar bartender knows exactly what I drink, and I take in whatever the tiny brick room has to offer until 2am. Then I walk home, rosy-faced and content with my best friends in the world.
I’m not even sure the two experiences are comparable. It’s like leaping from one world to the next, with no overlap. While Osaka (and nightlife in Japan in general) is expansive and over-stimulating, rapidly cycling through as much ground and people and booze and excitement as one can possibly consume in one night, nightlife here is tiny and intense, a shot directly to the blood of years of nostalgia and interaction. Spending time with people you’ve known forever in a place you’ve spent more nights than you could possibly count inevitably gives a different experience. Not better, not worse–just different.
In that sense, it’s one adjustment I haven’t had trouble making in coming back. Sure, my social life has slowed down considerably, but what it lacks in quantity is made up for by deep roots. In Japan, there is one default conversation any gaijin has in a bar:
Random person: Where are you from?
Me: America.
Random person: Oh, I see! How do you like Japan?
Me: It’s great!
Random person: Do you like Japanese food/Can you use chopsticks/What do you think of Japanese men?
Me: Uh…
Random person: You are very cute!
Me: Thanks…
As you can imagine, it gets incredibly old, and fast. One of the first realizations that I had upon going out back in the States is that I could talk to any person in the room, and the conversation would likely be unique, and even had the possibility of being remotely interesting. It felt liberating in a way I can’t even describe.
But on some nights, I miss that pace–I miss the confusion and chaos, and even the isolation of being a clueless foreigner striding through the night blindly. Not to say Japan didn’t have its dark moments for me, but… Those nights had no rest, but rarely did they leave me restless enough to look through old photographs and wonder what it is I’m missing.
