Posted on Sunday, 10/30/22.

Some of the interns went to the main Halloween celebrations last night in 渋谷. I joined them around 20:00, which was a little silly as the train takes about an hour, and the last one back to 厚木 is around 23:30. Ultimately the experience was fun: easily describable. Many people in varying stages of intoxication (though lessened by the ban on open alcohol consumption in the immediate area) and elaborate costume dress. The famous scramble was divided into major through-ways with empty triangles between a central path in which cops circulated, some with megaphones and some, presumably feeling slighted, with small plastic cones by which to amplify their voice. They instructed everyone to keep moving, but as everyone wished to stay in the central area, this led to long looping orbits. Various livestreamers walked by, confiding into their phones lofted on telescoping sticks. Every time I thought I had seen the longest telescoping stick, another longer one appeared, floating above the greasepainted faces.

Midway through the night another intern texted us about Seoul, though at that point the seriousness was unclear, and no one spoke about it much. We strayed from some of the densest parts, though the streets around 渋谷 are not as narrow as some in Japan. We spoke more about the train incident the previous year, and noted that there were not so many joker costumes was one would expect, and that most aimed for other depictions: Leto, or Nicholson, rather than Ledger. It is a strange fact that by now more than five strangers over the past few years have told me to my face that I look like Heath Ledger. Though I assume more sickly. Sometimes I ask them if I look doomed. People don’t know how to respond to this.

I dragged some of the interns down a minor street that I like to walk in 渋谷, and which curves up past SPBS (previous post) toward 代々木. We stopped short of this to relax in a very hip microbrewery sort of place, with familiar but in Japan rare accoutrements of these sorts of places. Sour IPAs fermented with macerated fruit. Hazy beers. Colors of beer between incredibly light and stouts. Some of the French interns and I ordered one small strange beer a piece, and sipped while taking in the crowd, which was by the style of the place and the location about half foreign.

I count the number of skinny effeminate white men with long hair and dark clothing that I see on the trains, in bars, moving from place to place. There are so many of them. What exactly is going on, and how does it connect to the 大東亜共栄圏？ There are at least five other subtypes of foreigners here, but I leave their demarcation to another margin.

On Friday I ended up in 下北 again, sitting in a ten-seat cozy forest-themed bar next to a white man with a mustache around my age who was something like seven or eight deep, and evidently miserable and broken about his time in Japan (then four years, and set to end in December, like me). An acquaintance of his, another American (ethnically Japanese) served as an intermediately intoxicated interlocutor, but seemed relatively glazed and distant, explaining things by their effects, not their meaning, like a YouTube compilation. He calmly recounted a common patron of the bar who openly stated his preference for insulting and hitting on women. He explained the bars in the area which were known to be havens for demonstrably more terrible people. The friend was some middle employee (again my age) for the Japanese branch of Tony Roma’s, he explained. The patrons then were all pleasant, a group of Japanese twenty-somethings, and us three Americans. The bartender, again about our age (Japanese), who knew both of the others quite well, and who was set to DJ somewhere in 神奈川県 the next night, tried to remain positive in light of the mustached man’s depression. The mustached 25-year old rang a small bell to summon a round of Jameson shots (though the bartender chose for herself some lemon-flavored Barcardi). She wore some sort of anonymous anime outfit for Halloween, though had explained early that it was a Halloween only sort of thing. The music she played One example I remember: “All Inclusive” by Pool Boy and Cyril Hahn. was long, low, chill, and generally analgesic. I try and imagine her being a DJ. I know there are tropes of cities and age groups in which everyone is a DJ, or claims to be, though I have not until now met someone who stated they were a DJ, and I felt nothing but enthusiasm. Bars make me sad. The friend of the white man, who is too sad to speak, and whose eyes have entered into his phone, bemoans drinking culture in Japan, and sips a violently green mixture of orange juice and blue curacao. The white man says sadder things that I wont recount here, and eventually leaves, having said before that he lives nearby. I leave before 22:30.

I think I might try to go to the countryside for a while on a weekend, or in the first week of December. I am trying to understand the shape of these few months, which have the feeling of an elaborate folding structure, which has only now begun to reassert its shape, collapsing cleverly.