Philadelphia

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Amber and I were walking around the first night the boat was in Kobe looking for a bar with some English speakers.  We found a Nigerian man in a jazz bar with a rep for attracting expatriats, but it was loud and hard to hear and kinda boring and I didn’t want to bother the guy the whole night, so we left.  A little way down the street we found a place called Philadelphia, written in cursive red with black background.  I thought, “Oh!  Maybe someone from Philadelphia started this place!  Maybe they’ll be there!”  So we went in.

 

A smaller Japanese man and a Japanese girl who both worked there greeted us.  She was cute and wore thick black-rimmed glasses, and I couldn’t tell for sure, but I don’t think they even had lenses at all.  We said we were just looking around, and wanted to know if anything fun was going on here tonight in particular, but they said no, not really, it was just a bar.  I noticed that the girl spoke quite good English though.  We left.  We walked around for a while and didn’t find much better.  So we decided to go back.

 

I asked the girl who worked there if I could talk to her, because I wanted to learn about Japan, and I wanted to interview her for my project about happiness in countries around the world.  She sounded cool with it, but when I asked her what the happiest she’d been in the past year was, she said she didn’t know, because she’d had a really bad year.  She ended up just not answering.  I guess she had a really bad year.  I felt bad about asking.  I told her I hoped this year would be better.

 

We went (Amber and I) to sit at the bar.  There was a middle-aged Japanese guy sitting there who spoke almost no English at all, and the smaller worker was there too.  I forget where the girl was, but she wasn’t there for a bit.  I tried to pantomime to them what was happening with Semester at Sea.  The smaller one got the idea of me being on a boat, but he made a rowing motion.  I told him no, no rowing, but he didn’t understand what I was trying to say.  Eventually I broke out my BlackBerry and showed him a picture.  His eyes widened and he said, “OOOHH!!”  Then I made the rowing motion and he had a good laugh.

 

After a while, the middle-aged guy told the girl (her name was Dani) that he wanted to buy a drink for Amber and I.  We said we don’t really drink, so we were trying to say no politely through Dani, but right about then, three other SAS’ers showed up.  She said that he wanted to buy a drink for all of us, so Dani and the guy made some drinks for everyone except me.  Amber created her own drink, and I think everyone else really just had beer or a shot.

 

I was trying still to talk to Dani a bit about growing up, about school, about college, etc.  Her father was half-Brazilian and she had spent a good portion of her life there, though she went to all of high school in Japan.  She had already graduated college, and she said her English was as good as it was because she’d been in New Zealand for a while at some point.  I asked her to ask the two Japanese guys the happiest they’d been that year.  The smaller one said when this bar opened.  The middle-aged one said something about a woman, or a girlfriend.

 

But now more SAS’ers showed up.  Some of them were belligerent.  I would be in the middle of a sentence and they’d force my shoulder back and put their head in front of mine and say, “I need [x] amount of [y] alcohol.”  It was really annoying, and I found it kind of embarrassing.  Not really for me, but for Semester at Sea and for Americans.  I should say that there was a group of people playing a card game at a table in the back of the bar.  It was really really pretty, all themed black, red, with white and gold touches, and had a sort of table-game/casino theme on the side opposite the bar.  I took some pictures because it was so nicely decorated.

 

Some more SAS’ers walked in.  It turned out that the bar that had advertised itself to SAS was upstairs, and it was jam packed and apparently sort of sucked, so people were leaving and sometimes found their way into Philadelphia.  There were about twelve of us by 11:00PM or so.  Dani said to me that – according to the man at the bar – we could have anything we wanted for free for the rest of the night, but we had to serve ourselves and do the work behind the bar.  Everyone was taking a picture, and I broke the news to them, and they celebrated.  I died a little bit inside.  We were also told not to invite anymore friends (people trickled in sooner or later without our invitation though). 

 

It turned out the middle-aged guy sitting there was the owner of the bar.  He kept telling me to get behind the bar, by pointing and saying it in Japanese which Dani would translate (“He says to come back here!”), and he’d slap me at the base of my back a couple times.  I didn’t really mind, though it was a little silly.  The weirdest part about it all was that I never drank in my life and I was now expected to work a bar.

 

Anyway, after a while, I realized that it was impossible to talk to Dani anymore, or to meaningfully communicate or learn from anyone in the bar from Japan.  Everyone else was talking and drinking and having a good time.  I was not having a good time anymore.  Amber noticed.  I told her I was going to run back to the ship, and she said she was going to stay.

 

ALLEGEDLY, according to people who were very wasted until very late in the morning and have incredibly unreliable memories, the bar and the owner had some connections to Yakuza.  Apparently some Yakuza members came in later in the night with grocery bags full of money, and there was a tiny bit of a scare with the Yakuza boss who came in with them.  But this is coming from drunk SAS’ers.  We make things up when we’re sober, so I have no reason to really believe that much of this happened.