People are known to break their sleep at 3, and then go to New York New York. There’s no place where the promise is stronger. You sit there, drunk off your face, and every night you’re guaranteed to be chatting with some beautiful girl. And you get drunker and drunker, and you can barely see, and this beautiful girl has gone somewhere.
When I first stepped in the doors, I heard “Johnny B Goode,” and an hour later I heard it again, and then again the next time I returned. And so I began to make some enquiries, and it turned out they’d been playing the same CD on repeat for 6 years. It’s such an awkward, incongruent mix, “California Dreamin’,” “Walk On By,” “Tennessee Waltz,” “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” and the one where the words go, “Listen to the rhythm of the falling rain, Telling me…,” and another song about “writing love letters in the sand.” I wondered if the CD continued even when the bar is closed. While later traveling on the unpopulated back side of Ishigaki island, in a cafe on the cliffs high above the ocean, I was sitting, eating curry chicken, at some cafe in the middle of nowhere, on the cliffs above the ocean, and I heard the same CD playing. By the justification that a one-hour Japanese lesson in Tokyo would have cost me about 4 beers, I spent night after night in New York New York drinking beer and speaking Japanese to the bartenders and regular customers. And some nights, I stayed too late, and 3 AM approached, and what else could I do but stay, and wait for the girls to come.
Once, I found myself in the empty bar at 4 in the morning. I wrote the short poem:
Time doesn’t change,
And the seasons stay the same,
But the girls that come,
Might come only once.

In Japan’s weakest economic prefecture, Miyako’s economy is said to be the poorest of the Okinawan islands big enough to be counted. It’s the best of the worst, the worst of the best — the greatest paradise east of Eden. Drunks sleeping on the streets. The smell of piss wafting upwards from the gutter. Clothing stores remind me of K-Mart from 20 years ago. And all around this island is the most beautiful ocean you could imagine. Shades of blue, you never knew there were so many. The economy seems to break down into a maximum of four or five sectors — construction, alcohol, rental equipment (cars, bicycles, diving goods), sugarcane, and Awamori (the island alcohol). This island, Miyako, has three smaller islands off its coast — huge, long bridges connect the islands — a car travels across a bridge once every 20 minutes. Why they build a bridge to islands with no people, and scarcely any economy no one can guess.
The reason there’s so many bars, I guess, is because the island has this mad drinking tradition. It’s called the “o-tori.” They have a kind of alcohol here called Awamori — it’s made by distilling a kind of Thailand rice — percentages range from the watery 10% to the strongman’s 60%. According to the custom, when someone calls an o-tori, he fills a small glass up, then makes a speech, downs the glass, and then fills the glass for everyone around the table, one by one. If the glass moves to the right, it’s said to be good for the fisherman. If the glass moves to the left, it’s good for the farmer. Once the glass goes around, the initial speaker makes another speech. Then, the glass moves to the next person. The next person, then, does a speech, and the pattern is repeated. But routinely, there’s 5 or 6 rounds — I mean, you get to make 5 or 6 speeches — so if there’s six people drinking, you hear 30 speeches. It’s like a shots session that lasts for several hours. All kinds of heart-to-heart communication opens up. An o-tori can be called at any time. And once it’s called, that’s it, game over, you’re going to get messed up, and every night that’s what happens. Because of this drinking tradition, I guess the children have no future.
Anyway, loads of venues are needed to accomodate this samurai-style drinking. So, there’s loads of what they call “snack-bars,” in which young ladies pour the drinks and light the cigarettes. But, of course, these young ladies aren’t local girls, cause this place is too small — they’d too easily wind up chatting up their father’s friends or old school teachers. So it is that hostesses can’t operate in their own locality. So, loads of girls are imported from other parts of Japan. They come down here, work the bars at night, and go scuba diving by day. The snack bars all close at 3 in the morning.
And then New York New York is the place to go.