Big Night Out

(Big Danger in Little Osaka #7, 2008)

In Osaka the trains stop running at about midnight, so if you want a night out then you have to make the call: do I go home for a relatively early sleep, or do I stay out until the first train at 5am? There’s no middle ground (unless you want to drop an extortionate amount of money on a taxi home). One Friday, myself and some of my fellow teachers decided to stay out all night in Osaka to see what would happen.

The night started off fairly quietly with a few drinks at a local bar. The Australian in our group, trying to pick up Japanese girls as usual, found competition in a pair of older, balding Americans. “These guys don’t even speak Japanese!” he hissed to me at one point, after one of them barged in on a conversation he was having with a girl. It turned out that these guys, who for some reason latched on to our group after we left the bar, were in Japan for one night and were hitting the town with one purpose in mind: to root Japanese girls. I watched with morbid curiosity as they sleazed on to every girl we encountered, even if they were with a boyfriend. “Oh, you two are sisters?” one of them said to a pair of girls we met on the train. “Perfect, haha.” The girls politely excused themselves from the train at the next stop. “Get away while you still can!” I yelled after them. At one point the sleazier of the two Americans, with a rather smug air, announced that “the fucking Australian guy was pissed that we don’t speak Japanese! Well, I’ve had dozens of Japanese girlfriends, and they didn’t speak any English either!”  Check. Mate.

We managed to shake these sleazemeisters and headed to a Japanese live hip-hop venue, where we had to drop over three grand just to get in (or about forty New Zealand dollars – but it sounds much more impressive in Yen). It was hard to appreciate what the MCs were doing, since I had no idea what they were rapping about (the mean streets of Fuse, perhaps?), so it was not really worth the massive cover charge. However, I’ll never forget seeing a large Japanese gangsta on stage, yelling out phrases like ‘resupekuto!’ and ‘biggu-apusu’!

With the hip-hop proving unsatisfying and several hours until the first train, there was only one thing for it: karaoke. I was excited to finally be doing karaoke in its home country, but the private room we rented was pretty much the same as you’d find in Vivace or any other karaoke bar in New Zealand. Still, that didn’t stop us from doing throat-shredding renditions of all the karaoke classics, with a surprising amount of soul given the late hour. When our time ran out we stumbled wearily outside, where it was already light, and made our way to our respective trains. At 6am I lurched my way into bed, vowing not to do that again for a while. (Update: I went and did it again the next weekend. Shit.)