Posted on by Matt Thomas

My Time in Kumamoto Japan I: NOVA and Meeting Sachie

Note: This is the first entry in a new series about my time in Kumamoto, Japan between April of 1997 and December of 1998. What began as a recollection of a short, chaotic teaching stint but became an excavation of place, power, and early adult identity under surveillance. Set against the compressed social ecosystem of a small Japanese city in the late 1990s, the piece moves through NOVA’s glass-room culture, its porous rules, and the peculiar cast of lifers, bosses, and drifters who inhabited it. What emerges is not a complaint but a tonal study: of being watched, of improvising freedom within constraint, and of the quiet luck of finding something real—Sachie—amid a system that often felt artificial.

Epigraph:

Kim You Bore Me to Death

—Grandaddy

I arrived in Kumamoto in April of 1997 to teach English at NOVA, which at the time felt like a pretty wild thing to be doing. Kumamoto is not Tokyo. It’s a smaller city, slower, and NOVA was right at the north end of the Shotengai, basically downtown. Everyone knew everyone, or at least knew of them, which I didn’t fully understand yet.

What I also didn’t fully understand was that I would be living with one of my bosses.

Her name was Sam. She was about 35, from Wales, and she had this story she loved to tell—more like boast—that Donovan had written a song for her mother. I never quite figured out which one. She was in the apartment with me and another teacher, Heather, and she was there all the time. Not just physically there, but present. Observing. Asking. Not in a relaxed roommate way, but in a way that felt like she was always slightly checking something.

NOVA had a loose rule about no fraternization between students and teachers. Loose being the key word. It happened all the time. Another teacher, Cameron, told me a lot of the young women came to find a boyfriend. Whether that was true or not, relationships were constant. There was this big izakaya on the Shotengai where everyone went, and it was basically understood that whatever the rule was, it wasn’t really enforced.

By early June I was seeing Sachie, who had been my student. She was my girlfriend then and is my wife now. I went to her house pretty early on. Her father, Tetsuyo, a gruff, older, very conservative Japanese dad, said he would meet me, but then he went to take a “bath” and didn’t. So I didn’t meet him for months. Her mother, Kazuko, was lovely then and is lovely now.

We couldn’t really spend time together at my place, obviously, so we’d drive around in her car. That was our space. We’d park wherever passed for lovers’ lane in Kumamoto, which, thankfully, was not the Zodiac. No Zodiac in Kyushu, thankfully. We’d sit there, windows cracked, the car quiet, the whole thing feeling both secret and completely ordinary at the same time. That was just how it worked.

At some point I told Joy, another teacher, that I was seeing Sachie, and I told her not to say anything because it was technically against the rules. She said of course. And then, of course, she immediately went and told John G., and from there it got around.

By that point it didn’t really matter. I had to leave, but I also wanted to leave. NOVA felt like a factory. The hours, the structure, the constant low-level supervision—it wasn’t for me. I gave my one month’s notice and in July of 1997 I moved to Washington. Better hours, easier gig, and a lot more freedom.

There were a couple of long-term guys at NOVA, both Brits, both lifers in a way I couldn’t really imagine.

Cameron was the more interesting of the two. We’d go to the big izakaya on the Shotengai—yakitori, big beers in frosty mugs, the usual—but his real place was Madam’s Bar, also on the Shotengai. Madam was the owner, a transvestite, and Cameron loved her. Absolutely loved her. He went there every night.

He took me a few times. It was small and dark, always smoky, with Queen playing on a loop. I drank White Russians and, for reasons that made sense at the time, felt like a bit of a stud. It had its own rules, though. You could feel that pretty quickly.

By Halloween of 1997 I was already at Washington, but I was still around Kumamoto a fair bit, still seeing people. The week before Halloween I went back to Madam’s with Cameron.

“Matty baby, T-shirt time,” Madam said. “You will buy the bar T-shirt. Halloween theme. ¥4000.”

¥4000 was a lot for me then.

“Madam baby, that’s a bit steep,” I said. “I’ve already got plenty of T-shirts. Maybe next year.”

She and Cameron had a quick whispered conversation off to the side. We finished our drinks and left. Outside, Cameron turned to me.

“Matty baby, there’s not going to be a next year. You’re banned. 86’d. Hit the bricks, pal. You’re out.”

“For not buying a T-shirt?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “T-shirts are serious business.”

And that was it. Never went back.

Mark was the other lifer. Late thirties, married, one daughter. Solid guy. He loved his wife in a way that was both sincere and slightly odd in its phrasing.

“I can hack this job,” he’d say, “as long as I can go home each night to my little mouse’s ear.”

I never heard that expression before or since.

John E. was our boss, technically over Sam. He was always in and out—Osaka, Fukuoka, training sessions, that kind of thing. When he was around, though, he had a habit.

When we drank, he would smack Mark on the butt. All the time. Didn’t ask. Just did it. Mark would try to laugh it off.

“John E. baby, maybe not tonight,” he’d say.

Didn’t matter. It kept happening.

One night John E. turned to me. “Matty baby, can I smack your ass?”

“John E. baby, no way,” I said. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

At least he asked.

John G. was an anomaly. Everyone else was in their twenties or thirties; he was in his sixties. He said—said, mind you—that he had made and lost six fortunes, mostly in gold in South Africa. Maybe. By the time I met him he was broke as fuck.

He would fall asleep in class. Not subtly either. Full-on snoring, loud enough that you could hear it through the glass walls. And these were small classes, three or four students at most, everyone sitting there while he just drifted off. You could see it happen in real time.

John E. had a number of supervisory conversations with him. Nothing changed.

Then there was Paul, who wasn’t even at Kumamoto—he worked out of Osaka. I met him during training in late April of ’97, and he was a strange guy from the jump.

He told this whole story about growing up in Arkansas, parents who were abusive, into drugs, no money. Said he ran away at sixteen and found God on the road shortly after. Compared himself—without irony—to St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Claimed he made a living hustling poker, which might have been true, but there was something else in there too. Not exactly dishonest, but… flexible.

He wanted to convert me. That was clear immediately.

We walked all night. Ten hours, maybe more, all over Osaka. Through neighborhoods, through stations, at one point through a huge homeless encampment—post-bubble Japan, a lot of salarymen who had fallen hard. It stuck with me. Paul talked and listened in equal measure, which is its own kind of technique, but there was always one direction to it.

The goal was simple: Matty finds Jesus tonight, come hell or high water.

I didn’t.

A couple of months later he came down to visit Kumamoto. We went to the izakaya on the Shotengai, then another bar—not Madam’s. Different energy.

There was a girl there, Yoko, and she was very clearly interested in me. So she’s all over me and Young Mr. Johnson is getting, uh, perky. I’m kind of nuzzling her neck and all, and Sachie and I are barely dating, not exclusive yet. Cameron leans over.

“Uh, Matty baby, YMJ is looking a little perky there.”

“Ruh roh,” I said. “Gotta go.”

There were a few good reasons for that.

One, I wanted to date Sachie only. I wanted to be exclusive. I told her the next day what had happened and she was like, “Good. Let’s go exclusive then.” So that was that.

Two, Yoko was like nineteen and I was twenty-three, and she had tons and tons of pancake makeup, which just wasn’t my thing.

So I jetted. Walked fifteen minutes home.

On the way I passed Fumachi. Of course, “machi” means street in Japanese, so to me it read FU-machi, which I found hilarious. I tried to explain this to Sachie once and she was like, “Yeah, machi just means street.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “That’s why it’s funny.”

Didn’t really translate.

By the river, as always, hammered dudes were out there pissing into the water. Just part of the scenery.

I get home, it’s around eleven, I’m getting ready for bed, and a taxi pulls up.

Out step Paul and Yoko.

Ruh roh.

Paul’s staying over, sleeping on a futon in the living room, and I’m thinking, what’s the plan here—hook up with Yoko right there while me, Heather, and Sam are all in the apartment? Outta control. Maybe that’s just how he rolled.

Anyway, Yoko took one look at me and jets. She’s gone.

Paul shrugged it off.

“Easy come, easy go.”

We end up playing poker instead. For a little money. I’d played all through childhood, in college, figured I was about a B+.

He wiped the floor with me. Took all my lunch money and didn’t lose a hand.

That’s when I started to believe him.

Looking back, those first two months in Kumamoto feel both chaotic and oddly contained, like everything was happening all at once but also exactly as it was supposed to. NOVA was a factory, no doubt—bad bosses, strange rules, glass rooms, and the occasional existential crisis over whether a black turtleneck and a white short-sleeved shirt constituted a violation of “regs.” I smoked Mild Sevens like it was part of the job description, drifted between pool halls and izakayas, and tried to make sense of a place where everyone seemed to know more about what I was doing than I did. And in the middle of all that, somehow, I met Sachie. That part feels less like chance the older I get, more like the one thing that cut cleanly through all the noise.

It didn’t last long—April to July, just a couple of months—but it stuck. The people, the rhythms, the small absurdities, the feeling of being watched and not quite fitting and also not really caring. I left because I had to, and because I wanted to, and both things were true at the same time. Better hours, easier life, more freedom. But Kumamoto was the start of something, even if I didn’t know what at the time. I never did get that T-shirt.

Dedication:

For my wife Sachie. Glad I met ya baby.

Note: If you like this piece, you may like the pieces below, which take up my time just before moving from the US to Japan.

My Time at Northern Arizona University Part I: Decision and Arrival
On My Interlude Between Hamilton College and Japan, 1996 and early 1997.

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On Being Early to Shows

Note: Getting to shows early, I realized, isn’t really about beating the crowd but about entering the space before it hardens into an event—when the room is still provisional, the bartender relaxed, the band half-mythical figures moving casually through soundcheck, and the whole night feels less like a performance and more like something forming in real time; you notice the lighting before it matters, the empty floor that will later surge, the stray conversations, the merch table still untouched, and sometimes—if you’re lucky—the musicians themselves, unguarded and human, which subtly rewires the experience so that when the set finally begins you’re not just watching a show but inhabiting a continuum that started hours earlier, a private prelude that rewards patience, sharpens memory, and turns what could have been just another concert into a small, self-contained narrative of anticipation, proximity, and the quiet pleasure of being there before everything becomes official.

Epigraph
“There’s a thin line between a guy with a backstage pass /
and a guy walking around with his gut hanging out like a jackass.”
— Sun Kil Moon, “Ben’s My Friend”

I’ve always been fascinated by the green room. First of all, why green? They can’t all be green. Second, there’s the whole rider situation. The rider is where things get really interesting. I think it was Van Halen who had in their rider that all the brown M&Ms had to be removed from a bowl. This sounds totally bizarre, but the point was attention to detail. If the venue screws up the M&Ms, they might screw up something much more important, like stage rigging or pyrotechnics. The M&Ms were just a test.

Other riders go in different directions. Iggy Pop reportedly asked for things like a Bob Hope impersonator and other surreal odds and ends, more like performance art than hospitality. Meanwhile Beyoncé is famous for highly controlled riders: temperature, lighting, water, environment, everything calibrated. One approach is chaos, the other total control. Both happen in the green room, which most of us never see.

My first concert was Dire Straits in Pullman, Washington, in a big arena. I was nowhere near the green room, of course. Most of us aren’t. So the real question becomes: what happens before the show, if you’re not backstage?

One answer came when I saw They Might Be Giants in Spokane with my friend Kelly Rudd. Kelly told me his cousin was in the opening band. They got paid twenty bucks for the show. The whole band. Twenty dollars. Totally unbelievable. Outta fucking control. TMBG were already a pretty big indie band, “Birdhouse in Your Soul” had been a hit, and I liked “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” quite a bit. But after hearing that story I never quite looked at them the same way. The green room fantasy took a hit. Backstage wasn’t glamorous. It was twenty bucks and a handshake.

Another time I went to see Cat Power at the old Club Quattro in Osaka. I got there early, of course, and there was an opener dressed like a fairy with fuzzy, messed-up hair who sat down at the piano and proceeded to play dirge after dirge for what felt like an hour. Solo piano can be great, but this was brutal. I honestly thought I might have to cap myself. At some point I checked my ticket just to make sure this wasn’t actually Chan Marshall. It wasn’t. Thank god.

Then Chan came on and instead of playing from the stage like other artists do, she wandered through the crowd with a wireless mic, half-rapping, half-singing, talking, improvising. It wasn’t really a concert. It was more like some kind of performance art happening. Totally outta control. If I’d come late I would have missed the whole bizarre prelude. Being early meant enduring the dirges but also getting the full weirdness of the night.

Another early-arriver adventure came when I saw Deerhunter at the Hostess Club Weekender. These shows started early and stacked openers all day long. I once saw Mogwai at one of these and had to leave after fifteen minutes because I was hungry, tired, faded, and they were boring the living shit out of me. It happens.

The Deerhunter show in Osaka was even more outta control. The headliner was scheduled for 7 PM, but there were something like six openers. One of them was Ivo Watts-Russell of 4AD, a legendary figure, but he droned on so long that by the time Deerhunter came on they only had about forty minutes. Bradford Cox introduced him with dripping sarcasm, emphasizing “LABEL BOSS,” clearly taking the piss because the band’s time had been cut. I ended up having to see them again months later in Nagoya to get the full set. That’s the risk of being early: sometimes the openers eat the show.

The flip side came when I saw The Hold Steady at the Brooklyn Bowl in December 2018. I arrived two hours early, ate a hamburger, and smoked up outside. That’s where I met Austin, a total Steadyhead. He knew everything: lineups, labels, deep cuts, all of it. We talked music, smoked, and waited. When doors opened we grabbed territory near the stage with the other early-arrivers, a semi-cliquey group of diehards.

Later, when Austin wanted to get back to the front for the encore, he told me to follow him. He moved through the crowd at a half jog and the people parted in front of him like he was Barry Sanders hitting holes. Seconds later we were hugging the stage. I knew then I was in the presence of greatness. I also knew he was my friend. I didn’t get the VIP meet and greet, but getting there early gave me something better.

My one true VIP experience came when I saw The Afghan Whigs in Amsterdam in 2017 at the Paradiso Amsterdam, a beautiful converted church. I arrived three hours early, met Greg Dulli and the band, took photos, bought merch, and watched soundcheck with maybe fifteen people. They played “Going to Town” acoustically, which was a revelation. Later they crushed the full electric set, ending with “Faded.” I paid fifty bucks for that meet and greet and it was completely worth it. Being early paid off directly.

Getting to shows early, then, is not really about the green room at all. The green room is a kind of fantasy—green walls, bowls of M&Ms, riders with impossible demands. Most of us never see it, and even when we do, it turns out to be smaller and more ordinary than imagined. And probably not even green. The real action happens in that strange in-between space before the show: the smoking area, the empty floor, the long wait while the openers drift on and off.

If you arrive early, you get all of it. You get the terrible fairy-piano dirges and the label boss who drones on too long. You get the moment of doubt when you check your ticket and wonder if this could possibly be the headliner. You get the rail territory battles and the cliquey early crew. You get the conversations with strangers who turn into temporary friends, like Austin, who parts the crowd like a halfback and gets you back to the stage in seconds. You get the soundcheck if you’re lucky, the acoustic revelation, the quiet before the storm.

Most of all, you get time. And time at a show is a funny thing. Once the lights go down, everything compresses. The band plays, the songs blur together, and before you know it the encore hits and everyone spills out into the night. But if you were there early, the show feels bigger. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. You saw the room empty and then full. You watched the night assemble itself.

So while some people drift in late, grab a drink, and wait for the headliner, I’ve always preferred the long route. Get there early. Kill time. Smoke a cigarette. Talk to whoever’s around. Endure the openers, good or bad. Maybe you meet someone. Maybe you don’t. Maybe the band walks through the room. Maybe nothing happens at all. But every once in a while, if you’re lucky, something does. And that, in the end, is why I like to be early to shows.

Dedication:

For music lovers everywhere. You are my tribe baby.

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On Some Meetings and Close Encounters with Musicians II

Note: This is the second piece in our series “On Some Meetings and Close Encounters with Musicians.” You can find the first installment here.

The encounters described here span more than thirty years and several cities — from a first arena concert in Pullman, Washington in 1991 to small club shows in Cambridge, Osaka, and Kyoto over the decades that followed. As with many memories of live music, the exact setlists and dates blur, but the rooms themselves — the sounds, the atmosphere, the strange and fleeting meetings between artists and audiences — remain vivid. These sketches attempt to capture a few of those moments as they were experienced at the time.

Epigraph

No fears alone at night she’s sailing through the crowd

In her ears the phones are tight and the music’s playing loud

— Dire Straits, “Skateaway”

Live music produces strange meetings. Sometimes you meet the musicians themselves. More often you meet a moment — a room, a sound, a feeling that sticks with you for decades while entire years of ordinary life quietly disappear.

Here are a few such encounters.

I. Initiation

My first real concert was the On Every Street tour in 1991.

The band was Dire Straits, the venue was Pullman, Washington, and the company was the usual Spokane crew: Seth, Innes, Kelly.

I was the biggest fan in the car by far. The others liked the band well enough but I was the one who had studied the records, who knew the guitar parts, who was ready for the moment when the lights dropped and the first notes hit the arena. This was the On Every Street tour, which turned out to be their final record.

They played everything: Money for Nothing, Walk of Life, Sultans of Swing. It was a great show, and one of their last before retirement, though at the time I had no real way to judge such things. It was simply enormous — lights, volume, spectacle. I bought the black and blue tour shirt and wore it for five years.

At the time I thought concerts were supposed to be like that: huge, polished, and far away.

I would later learn otherwise.

II. Revelation

Several years later, during the Hamilton years, I saw Red House Painters at the Middle East in Cambridge.

I went with Ian. The room was small, maybe a few hundred people at most. Nothing about it resembled the arena in Pullman. And then, near the end of the set, Mark Kozelek began playing “Little Drummer Boy.” It lasted nine minutes. You could hear a pin drop in the room.

No spectacle. No lights. Just absolute concentration from everyone present. When the final notes faded the silence lingered for a moment before the applause came.

Afterward Ian and I drove back toward New York through the cold night with the windows cracked open, heaters flying out into the darkness, and Hell’s Ditch blasting through the car stereo to keep us awake.

That was the night I realized concerts could be something else entirely.

III. Chaos

Not every show produces reverence.

I once saw The Fall with Ian as well. The band’s leader, Mark E. Smith, seemed to be operating in his traditional mode of total hostility. The set was short — twenty-eight minutes by my estimate. Ian later checked the official record and insisted it was forty-three. Either way it felt brief and volatile. Smith barked into the microphone, glared at the band, and treated the entire enterprise with the air of someone barely tolerating the existence of the audience.

Which, to be fair, was exactly what many people had come to see.

IV. Theatre

The strangest performance I ever witnessed may have been Cat Power at Club Quattro in Osaka.

The evening began badly. An opening act — a woman in what appeared to be a fairy costume — sat at the piano and played for what felt like an eternity. Forty-five minutes at least. Perhaps longer. By the end of it the audience was openly confused.

Then Cat Power appeared.

Or rather she refused to appear in the conventional sense. Instead of remaining on the stage she wandered through the venue with a handheld microphone, singing and rapping while walking amongst the crowd, occasionally placing an arm around a patron or leaning against the bar.

At one point she came right up to where I was standing near the back rail and sang a line or two before drifting off again into the room.

The entire show felt less like a concert than a piece of improvised theatre.

V. Ritual

A few years later I saw Damo Suzuki at Club Metro in Kyoto. Damo had once fronted the legendary German band CAN, but this night bore no resemblance to those recordings. Nothing recognizable from the catalog appeared. And here he stood, just a few feet away from the audience with long black-and-grey hair flowing, bellowing and chanting over a constantly shifting improvisational band.

It was less a performance than a ritual.

Damo passed away not long ago. RIP and prayers up. I’m grateful I saw him when I did.

VI. Canada Night

Not all memorable shows are mystical.

Sometimes they’re simply loud.

One such evening occurred at Club Quattro in Osaka when Broken Social Scene and Death From Above 1979 came through town.

The Canadian ambassador was present and delivered a brief speech before the set explaining that Death From Above 1979 represented a fine example of Canadian enterprise because they were “only two men making so much noise.”

The room was packed with Canadian expats and the atmosphere was celebratory chaos. The ambassador was probably correct.

VII. Breakdown

Not every concert goes well.

I once saw Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy at the small Kyoto venue Taku Taku. Something had clearly gone wrong with the lineup. The guitarist appeared to be brand new and could barely navigate the chords.

Will Oldham tried to push through but quickly grew frustrated and began openly calling the guitarist out from the stage. It was uncomfortable for everyone involved.

The show never recovered.

VIII. Redemption

Fortunately the story has a better ending.

Some years later I saw Bonnie “Prince” Billy again, this time at the beautiful Kyoto venue Urbanguild and everything worked great. Low benches and tables filled the room, Heartland beer bottles glowed green under the lights, and the band played a relaxed, confident set drawn mostly from the Bonnie “Prince” Billy catalog with a few Palace songs mixed in.

Opening the evening was an instrumental group called Bitchin Bajas whose sound reminded me faintly of early Phosphorescent if Phosphorescent had chosen to make instrumental records. After the show I found myself talking with three members of the band while they drank beer and ate fries. They were humble, friendly, and slightly surprised that anyone in Kyoto knew who they were. We talked for a while about touring and the constant challenge of trying to make a living as working musicians. Eventually the conversation drifted off and the room began to empty.

The music was over. The musicians were just people again, finishing their drinks and preparing to move on to the next city. And that, in the end, may be the most interesting encounter of all

Dedication

For live music fans everywhere. My true people. I love you baby.

Note: If you enjoyed this essay, you may also enjoy the essay below on the four time I met Yo La Tengo. Happy reading!

On the Four Times I Met Yo La Tengo
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The Night of Fucking Adam

Note: This piece is part of an informal series of essays and stories about nights out in Japan that begin innocently enough and gradually drift into something closer to accidental anthropology. The settings vary—Kyoto bars, Osaka clubs, late-night taxis, shotengai corridors—but the structure is often the same: a few friends meet for drinks, the evening unfolds without much planning, and somewhere along the way the ordinary rules of social behavior begin to loosen.

The events described here took place during a long evening wandering through Osaka, eventually ending in the nightclub district of Shinsaibashi. Like many such nights, it contained a mixture of small cultural misunderstandings, unexpected friendships, minor chaos, and the strange solidarity that sometimes develops among strangers in bars after midnight.

The character known here as “Adam” was a young British traveler we met that evening and never saw again. The nickname “Fucking Adam” reflects the affectionate exasperation with which the phrase was used throughout the night rather than any serious judgment about the person himself. Anyone who has spent time traveling, drinking in unfamiliar cities, or navigating the unpredictable social ecosystems of late-night nightlife will likely recognize the type.

The intention of the piece is not to document a perfectly accurate timeline of events—after fifteen or so drinks spread across many hours, accuracy becomes a flexible concept—but rather to capture the texture of a particular kind of night: the slow drift from casual afternoon drinks into the surreal territory that sometimes appears around two or three in the morning when strangers collide and small incidents escalate into memorable stories.

In that sense, Adam becomes less an individual than a type. Every city has them. Every traveler eventually meets one. Occasionally, if the night runs long enough, we become one ourselves.

Epigraph:

“A ruinous eyesore, oh what is a mind for?
Just a knife in a lake, just an arrow in space.”
—The Swans

We met around four in the afternoon near Osaka Station, the three of us: Philip, Jack, and me. The plan, such as it was, was simple—have a few drinks and see where the night took us. Osaka is good for that. The city doesn’t require much in the way of planning. If you just start walking and follow the lights, something eventually happens.

Our first stop was a subterranean craft beer joint somewhere beneath the station complex. One of those places down a set of anonymous stairs where the ceiling is low, the taps are numerous, and everyone looks faintly conspiratorial, like they’ve all agreed to drink underground together.

We had a couple rounds there and then drifted through the shotengai behind the Hilton. Early evening shoppers were moving through with that unhurried Osaka pace. Nothing felt like the beginning of a legendary night. It just felt like a pleasant afternoon.

From there we crossed over to a classic American hamburger joint opposite the station. Vinyl booths, neon beer signs, and a bartender who had tattoos running down both forearms like vines. American rock played softly in the background. It felt like a movie set version of America dropped into central Osaka.

We ate burgers, drank more beer, and talked about absolutely nothing of consequence.

At some point Philip announced that what he really wanted that night was to go to a middle-aged club. To be clear, Philip was not shy about his intentions. He was, as he put it, “looking for MILFs.”

So we took a taxi down to Shinsaibashi.

The middle-aged club, unfortunately, was closed. It was only about eight and apparently the MILF scene doesn’t really get going until later.

So we did what you do in that situation: we wandered.

For the next four and a half hours we drifted around Shinsaibashi, moving from bar to bar in that loose, happy way nights sometimes unfold. By midnight we had covered a lot of territory. Between the three of us we had consumed something like fifteen drinks over thirteen hours. And yet only Philip seemed even remotely affected by them.

Around 1:30 we arrived at Sam and Dave’s, a legendary dive of a nightclub tucked into the chaos of Shinsaibashi. The security guy at the door looked us over and shrugged.

“Maybe dead now,” he said. “But gets good later.”

Inside it was a haze of smoke and terrible techno beats pounding from the speakers. The crowd was an odd mixture of people who were extremely drunk and people who appeared to be completely sober and studying the situation with curiosity. It was cooking by one-thirty.

Somewhere along the way we met a jovial twenty-year-old British guy named Adam.

Adam and Jack bonded almost immediately. They were trading insults in that cheerful British way—“you tosser,” “you old wanker,” that sort of thing—and it seemed harmless enough.

Meanwhile a group of Filipino girls had arrived, one of whom—Beverly—was extremely drunk and getting progressively more chaotic. Her friends were trying, without much success, to keep things under control.

At this moment Philip stepped in.

Philip has a well-developed instinct for white-knighting in situations where white-knighting is absolutely not required. He began talking to Beverly, which quickly escalated into something resembling a full-scale courtship right there on the dance floor.

Meanwhile Jack and Adam had begun dancing.

The problem was that they gradually migrated off the dance floor and onto a small raised stage that contained a drum kit and various musical equipment.

Within seconds drums were tipping over. Tables were sliding. A cymbal crashed onto the floor.

Security arrived immediately.

They pushed Jack aside and dragged Adam feet-first off the stage and into what appeared to be a small holding room behind the bar where, judging by the noises coming out of it, Adam was receiving a fairly vigorous beating.

Things deteriorated quickly after that.

Philip decided to treat everyone to Irish car bombs. Unfortunately the bartender had no idea how to make one, so Philip instructed him. The Guinness component somehow disappeared from the process and we ended up with small glasses of Baileys and Jameson.

Adam drank one.

At this point Adam completely lost his mind. He began loudly explaining how terrible the UK was, how he wanted to die, how the American guy earlier had stolen the chesty nurse he loved, and a variety of other philosophical positions.

Security eventually threw us out with minimal ceremony.

Outside the situation became even stranger.

Philip was pouring champagne into Beverly’s mouth near the elevator while her increasingly frantic friends asked me if he was a good person. Jack was trying to figure out where Adam was staying so he could get him into a taxi.

Adam responded by pushing Jack into a decorative pond.

Then he began throwing a water bottle at him like he was Bob Gibson pitching in the World Series.

At this point it was around five in the morning.

Philip abruptly announced he was leaving to meet some Brazilians. Adam remained in the pond shouting curses about our mothers. Jack climbed out, soaking wet.

We left.

Mackenzie took a taxi back to his hotel by the river. I caught the first train home from Shinsaibashi as the sun was coming up, completely exhausted.

And that was the night of Fucking Adam.

We never saw him again.

Dedication:

For Fucking Adams everywhere.
Long may you burn.

Note: if you like this essay, you may also like the essay below. It covers a similar slice of nightlife, this time in Kyoto.

On a Guy Called Whit (with a Cameo from Ambassador Rahm Emanuel)