BIG IN JAPAN
I worked on the Hot Pockets campaign. I worked on Snickerdoodles. I did Crown condoms; they were big in Japan. I did Ovaltine. Ovaltine was big in Japan, too. I may be wrong about that. It’s been years since I worked in advertising.
I got into Japan early, thanks to my friend Mark Schilling (more on him below). In the 1970s Japan was taking over the world, and Mark and I were on it. Hondas were suddenly everywhere. First Honda motorcycles, then Honda cars. Then came Toyota, and Toyota was no toy.
Mark and I hitchhiked to California right after college, hanging around UCLA. We slept rent-free on a flat roof in Westwood. I had an orange mummy bag and Mark had a beat-up flannel Boy Scout bag. Mark was selling Christmas trees so he could get money to leave the USA. Nothing political. Simple wanderlust.
Mark Schilling, 1977
He got an offer to teach English in Barrancabermeja, Colombia. He looked into that, and “no way” — the heat, 100 degrees almost year-round. Then Mark got an offer to teach ESL in Japan.
And he’s been in Japan ever since. Fifty years.
At UCLA there was an acid-rock band called the United States of America. I never actually heard them, but the drummer, Craig Woodson, wound up playing a couple years with my klezmer band in Cleveland. Small world.
The United States of America was big — in an off-beat, avant-garde way — in Japan. Maybe because of the name “United States of America.” They made it onto the Japanese charts. The band lasted about year.
Meanwhile, in Tokyo, Mark began writing about all-things-Japanese: sumo, Pink Lady, yakuza films. He has made a career of that. Ask around, he’s the man — the heir to Donald Richie.
After California, I returned to Ohio and got into advertising (Snickerdoodles, blah, blah) thanks to a a friend’s dad who worked at the agency. Then my dad called, so to speak, and I went into his real estate biz. You don’t hang around Cleveland unless you have a family-biz connection.
My kids are in real estate. I brainwashed them. I drilled them: “Buy a double, live in it, the tenant pays 80 percent of your mortgage, you move out, then rent both halves of the house, and buy another house. Repeat as necessary.”
I wish I had gone with Mark to Japan in 1975. I would have lasted 50 days max –not 50 years like Mark — but it would have been eye-opening, no doubt. Joan Jett. Remember her? She was big in Japan. The Ventures, too. Mark says, “Japan was like an annuity for them in their old age.” The Ventures toured Japan every year.
The Ventures are dead. And I’m not getting any younger. I should visit Japan.
. . . Done. Just bought a ticket!
—
fiction
2 comments
I’m OK with being the supporting character in a short story since main characters always have a hard time of it. But maybe I’ll wake up one day and wonder if those “fictional” fifty years were real.
Three days ago, I received my copy of the new book “Cleveland Boomer Memories” by our classmate Howard Zuckerman. Starting to read it, I Even ran across a reference to Ghoulardi, who hosted the late-night horror movie on TV. The following day, that prompted me to reminisce to my Cleveland Heights-raised cousin Alan about The United States of America. (It turned out that Alan was a big fan.) As I remember it, someone in the band heard a radio ad for a retirement community, and thought it was hilarious that old people could be talking about having fulfilling lives. They recorded a track with the radio ad overlaid with the moans and groans of old people ready to give up the ghost. Even in my teens, I thought it was a tasteless blemish on a great album. The ghoulish part of the whole thing was that the silky voice reading the ad could be recognized by anybody raised in Cleveland as Ghoulardi.
Yesterday, I found The United States of America on the recently-invented internet, but I could not find the track I remembered. Was it pulled for copyright violation or bad taste, or did I hallucinate the whole thing?
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