Chilling with the Band

Last weekend, I went to a monthly party held at the local okonomiyaki shop. It was my first chance to meet young Japanese people in my area (where most everyone is highschool age and younger, or 30+). Everyone was really nice, and I managed to keep contact with a couple of the people I met there throughout the week. One girl, who works at the shops near my station, plays in a band called Brownsugar, and she invited me to see their performance last night.

I headed to Suma Beach, near Kobe, around 3 o'clock. The venue was a beachside grill and bar, with a stage for DJ'ing and nightly live performances. When I first arrived, I was introduced to the band and several other friends of the girl who invited me. Throughout the evening I met probably 30 different people. The performances started around 5 and were pretty eclectic and...well....weird at first. However, they got better as the evening went on, and I have to say that Brownsugar was by far the best act of the night.

There were small fireworks getting set off on the beach throughout the evening, and the whole beach was pretty alive with young people. After things wound down there (which happens really early in Japan, although things start early too), I was invited to join the band and friends at an izakaya that took us well past last train. From there, we went and bought fireworks and set them off at a nearby park. It was a really fun time hanging out with them, and they were all great people. I'm not going to lie though, managing the language barrier was really really hard. Admittedly, the biggest challenge was starting/joining a conversation and showing that I could somewhat understand and communicate. I have to imagine I'm a huge pain, as conversations can sometimes slow to a crawl with me as we attempt to simplify somewhat complicated concepts enough to mutually understand each other.

In any event, I had a really good time, and it was a really wild experience. It's also totally not like anything I've ever done before.

One of the most interesting people I met throughout the evening was a Brazilian Japanese guy named Fabio. (For those who don't know, Brazil has the largest population of Japanese emmigrants of any country in the world. Over the last couple generations, there was a flow of people migrating back into Japan, the country of their parents and grandparents. As a result, Brazilians make up the 3rd largest foreign resident population in Japan, after Korea and China.) Anyway, he has been living in Japan for a while, and I would say he's probably the kind of fluent I hope to be in a year or so. However, because Japanese is his second language, and not his home country, we ended up having a LOT in common, and he was very capable of speaking my level of Japanese, so that we pretty much 100% understood each other. It was also really interesting because unlike any other foreigners I've met here, English isn't our common language, Japanese is. In that way, I almost see him as one of the most valuable friends I've met so far, as we are very close in linguistic ability, and yet forced to communicate in Japanese and not fall back on our native tongue.