There’s a song that found me recently—a somewhat obscure track by a ’90s Japanese rock band called Fishmans. The song, Night Cruising, sounds like Pavement and The Specials decided to play jangle pop on a whim inside some impossibly cool Tokyo record store late at night. It slides easily—bright and melancholic—and it’s become an earworm. I’ve had it on repeat during many late nights editing my photos of Japan.
I love the feeling it gives me: like being a teenager with your best friends, wandering narrow, tipsy, neon-lit Tokyo alleyways at 1 a.m., not knowing exactly where you are but knowing—somehow—that everything’s going to be alright.
Even the music video for Night Cruising is calming, all colorful early-2000s light projections. The only other song that gives me a similar sense of nocturnal melancholia is “Friday Night, Saturday Morning” by The Specials.
It’s raining. You’re on top of the world—Shibuya Sky—big, beautiful lights twinkling, millions of people crossing below. Then you escape down into the twisting, cyberpunk-esque maze of subway entrances and wet streets beneath—an urban canopy of clear umbrellas stretching as far as the eye can see. The smell of smoking izakayas. Getting lost in Golden Gai’s narrow alleyways, in bars where tourists sing Oasis covers at the top of their lungs—off-key, merry—and everyone’s laughing through it.
