Worse Than Coleslaw

The pillows are a Japanese rock band whose sound is usually compared to that of the Pixies but without all the Spanglish and jokes about fucking. I was first exposed to their music, like most Americans, by watching Fooly Cooly (FLCL), which is an absurdist Bildungsroman Japanese cartoon about weapons-grade Gibson guitars being pulled out of transdimensional portals in people’s skulls and on whose soundtrack the music of the pillows is featured prominently to great effect.

So the pillows are a good band, and “Hybrid Rainbow” is perhaps their masterpiece, a song that I would say almost justifies humanity’s existence despite centuries of war and hatred and every kind of depravity imaginable. I can recall being nineteen years old, a recent high school graduate, watching FLCL for the first time just a couple of weeks before I headed off to college and my first real taste of the great unknown and thinking, man, it would be awesome to see these guys play live.

Imagine my surprise, then, that my arrival in Japan, already a fulfillment of my wildest outdated high school fantasies, coincided with the release of a new pillows album and a tour (codenamed the “Pied Piper Tour,” which I can’t turn into anything symbolic no matter how hard I try) to support said album. The pillows were playing in Sendai, the capital of Miyagi prefecture, easily within the range of a driven individual such as myself. Phone calls were made. Tickets were purchased. Travel arrangements were made. The thought rang clear in my mind: “I might get to see ‘Hybrid Rainbow’ performed live.” If that happened, I’d have another item to check off on my list of things I needed to do before I died.

The concert was to start at six o’clock on a Sunday evening in late September. The plan called for me to take the train to Sendai on Saturday morning—this was before I knew about the wonders of highway buses, which are cheaper and faster than trains when going between big cities—and stay with a friend of mine from back home who also does the teaching thing in Marumori, a small mountain town about an hour away from Sendai that feels a lot like what South Park would feel like if it was a real place and in Japan. We would check out Sendai on Sunday morning, and then hit up the concert, which started at six. Since it was a Sunday, I needed to be back in my own place for work the next morning, so I got a ticket for the 8:15 Shinkansen (bullet train) back to Morioka in time to catch the last train to my little podunk farming town. I figured the concert wouldn’t last much longer than two hours, if it even lasted that long, so not a huge loss. It was a perfect plan that failed in a spectacular(ly unspectacular) fashion.

The first stages of the plan went smoothly enough. I made it to Sendai without any problems, and Saturday night passed pleasantly, with much Melon Fanta consumed while complaining about the Japanese public school system and playing videogames. Sunday passed quickly as we explored the shopping arcade that Sendai is famous for, and soon enough it was time for our concert preparations to commence. We met up with another group of Americans, college exchange students or teachers all, and loitered in Sendai Station for a while swapping anecdotes and blocking pedestrian traffic. At about 5:30 I asked everyone assembled if maybe we shouldn’t head to the venue since the concert was going to start in a half hour.

“Doors open at six,” one among us said. “The concert doesn’t actually start till seven.” This was a serious problem.

My friend James, who had handled logistics, had misread (or not bothered to read) the kanji on the ticket, believing it to say “Starts – 6:00, Ends – 7:00” when it actually said “Doors open – 6:00, Concert Begins – 7:00.” Oddly enough, being illiterate does indeed suck as much as the public service announcements on teevee say that it does; that extra hour was kind of a big deal, upon which my entire plan for the evening hinged. In America it would only have taken me about 30 seconds to say “Well, I guess I’m calling in sick tomorrow” and enjoy the concert with no worries a’tall, but in Japan taking an unexpected day off from your job—even your stupid job where you spend the great majority of your time reading novels and and can’t even communicate with 90% of your coworkers—is a big deal that requires an excellent excuse and documentation. So that meant I had a ticket for an 8:20 train and a ticket for a 7:00 concert, which are good things to have by themselves but not such great things to have at the same time.

I was not very talkative as we made out way to the venue and stood waiting in line for the doors to open. Even when the show started I kept vacillating between “To hell with it, I’m just going to stay and figure out what to do afterward,” and “Well, I guess I’ll just try to enjoy the hour that I have.” This process preoccupied me, but I tried to enjoy the show as best I could. The pillows put on a good show, although I was mostly interested in hearing them play a handful of songs that I knew from FLCL, which was older material that they were less inclined to dip into. I was not pleased.

About 30 minutes in, during a pause between songs, someone in the audience shouted ”Hybrid Rainbow!“ and I held my breath.

The lead singer chuckled. “Too fast,” he said, in English. “Too early.”

Fuck, I thought, they’re saving it for the encore or something.

The band played a couple more songs that I was not familiar with and which were hard to enjoy given the circumstances, and during another pause someone else shouted, “Hybrid Rainbow!” At this point I had maybe 15 minutes to get to my train, enough time for maybe one more song before I absolutely had to leave.

“Too fast. Too early,” the lead singer said again. The members of the band began whispering among themselves.

I turned to leave, defeated, as more banter ensued.

I was just reaching for the door to the lobby when the band seemed to reverse their previous decision and started to play “Hybrid Rainbow.”

During those four perfect minutes, I was truly, unabashedly happy. Between the beginning and the ending of that one song, I was exactly where I wanted to be in the world, doing exactly what I wanted to do, and had no reservations or regrets. Just then It did not matter that I had to leave the concert early to go catch a train so I could be on time for a job that I did not enjoy, nor did it matter that I was aimless and unmotivated, that I had so far been too lazy to create anything that felt meaningful out of my time on earth, that I was weird and awkward and unsure of my place in the world; whatever choices I had made in my life up until that point, at that moment they were all the right choices because they had led me to that venue next to the Sendai train station where I watched the pillows play “Hybrid Rainbow” in front of an enthusiastic crowd. My triumph was utter. It was transcendent.

And, like most transcendent moments, this one was not able to support itself for long under the weight of its own quality.

After the song was over there was a short period of silence, and the band started retuning their instruments and talking amongst themselves. I headed towards the door, but, feeling invincible and uninhibited in the afterglow, I turned and shouted “Linda Linda!” before finally making good my escape. I thought this was hilarious at the time, but, given how irritated I used to (and still do) get at those assholes who shout “Freebird!” at concerts by bands who are decidedly not Lynard Skynard, I at least had the decency to feel bad about it later. I stopped just long enough to make alast minute impulse purchase at the merch table in front of the venue to celebrate my newfound enthusiasm for life and love and all the rest, and then I was ready to bounce.

After hearing “Hybrid Rainbow,” the decision to try and catch my train was a much easier one, and the emotional high of that one perfect moment propelled me forward as I ran through the station, retrieved my bag from the storage locker, and hoofed it up to the Shinkansen platform. Hoisting a big backpack and carrying a demented teddy bear in one hand, I’m sure that I made a deeply troubling sight. People left my path well alone. I quickly inquired about what platform I should go to—the guy I asked was trying to convey something to me that I could not get, but he eventually pointed me in the direction I needed to go—and took the stairs up to the platform three at a time.

Panting from the run, I stood and waited, my thumbs looped under the shoulder straps of my backpack, underarms and back starting to feel maybe just a little bit moist from the weight of my load and the unfamiliar exertion, ready to slide into a Shinkansen’s spacious seat and think happy thoughts all the way to Morioka, where I’d catch another train over to my town of residence. I was about seven minutes early. It had taken me less time than I thought it would to get to where I needed to be.

I paced up and down the platform and noticed with some trepidation that there weren’t very many other people waiting for this train. My trepidation turned to panic as the time listed on my ticket came and went. I went back down to the ticket area and made an inquiry of an older gentleman in a station uniform. Unfortunately, his English was not up to snuff, and neither was my Japanese; I couldn’t even remember how to say “I do not speak Japanese” in Japanese, which is a problem that I had had before and have often had since. Finally, after what seemed like an interminable period of him repeating the same phrase I did not recognize really slowly and with different inflections and pointing to different places on the small train schedule in his hands in a coded sequence that I was not able to decipher, he motioned with his hands and said “Wait, please.” About ten minutes later, a young-ish woman dressed in civilian clothes walked up to where I was standing. After exchanging a few words with the station guy, she turned to ask me what I needed help with. I explained my situation to her again. “The train is late,” she said. “Instead please take the Shinkansen headed for Akita when it comes and get off at Morioka Station. The Akita Shinkansen is also late, but it is less late.”

It turned out that “less late” meant “still more than an hour late,” which was especially galling after spending all that time being told at teacher training that the Japanese are shuffling automatons of soulless efficiency and woe be unto he who is even one minute late for anything. I was not happy about having to waste away in Sendai Station when there was still a perfectly good pillows concert going on literally next door. Eventually my consternation gave way to anxiety over whether or not I would make it to Morioka Station in time to catch the last train out to Ho-mu. Things did work themselves out, although I had to do some sprinting once I got to Morioka Station in order to facilitate this. I was told later that the show had gone on for about another 70 minutes after I left, but that only one other song I’d have recognized was played. And on Monday morning I was able to shuffle into work at my School of Suck, tired but on time, and totally tank my lessons for that day just like normal. God was in His heaven. All was right with the world.

So in the end I guess this concertgoing experience is a good representation of my time in Japan as a whole—a bunch of stupid bullshit punctuated by fleeting moments of blinding awesome-ness, a neverending footrace between elation in lane one and despair (or at least extreme irritation) in lane two. Additionally, in some kind of ridiculous Russian doll situation, maybe that is a pretty accurate description of life in general.

Supplemental:
Ride on Shooting Star (Ganbatte-Fest ‘08, Part 3) : Photos of the events described in this entry can be viewed on my Flickr page.