There's a clip just like this one that was always used as B-roll footage when Japan was in the news every day at the end of the 80s. Sunset palette, city traffic, and those really boxy vans are really all I remember of it. It symbolized Japan's rise in the world, although I was still too young to make the connection between my beloved Nintendo and the nation of Japan - the economic juggernaut, the world power, the orderly society and the O.G. peaceful rise.
Still, there's something that that image triggers for me. For a native Japanese, it'd probably trigger nostalgia, if anything, for that brief moment when Japan sat at the top of the world. For me, well, it's almost nostalgic but never could be. How could I look back fondly on a time and place where I never lived?
That sense is probably why I loved Shenmue, an old Dreamcast game with a cult following that was known for its ahead-of-its-time open world more than the story, fighting or controls. Even though it hasn't aged well at all, at the time it felt like an incredibly realistic, explorable re-creation of a 1980s Tokyo suburb. Shenmue allowed me to visit this imagined place from the B-roll and see what it would have been like.
That sensation is also why I count Crazy Ken Band among my guilty pleasures. The song below, like most of Crazy Ken's, is itself an exercise in nostalgia: for summers past, for old Detroit muscle cars, for an older rock-n-roll sound, for youth, and always for an alternate-reality sort of Americana pinpointed to the sailor-filled port city of Yokosuka, where American influence has been heavy since the war. It may not be for the bubble heyday, but Crazy Ken acts the same in remembering an older Japan, mixing details real and imagined for a very specific feel.
The feeling is even why I love Sushiyama, a Dallas sushi restaurant that doesn't try to chase the chic, modern, date-friendly decor that so many American sushi joints go for. While the place is actually a tacky pseudo-Japanese mockup of a cozy izakaya, when I'm there I willingly buy into it and feel a little bit temporarily transported.
Between all the images of the country I've consumed over my lifetime, I think I've sort of created a false memory for myself that looks back fondly on a Japan gone by.
The Japanese have a word for nostalgia: natsukashii. But to put it as simply 'nostalgia' in English is a poor translation. In Japanese the word has a more specific, nuanced meaning that leans toward the emotions stirred up by recalling times past - which can be collectively shared, thanks to Japanese uniformity in experience.
Let me put it this way: if you say "that's so nostalgic" in English, someone could ask you for more detail. "Nostalgic for what?" you may be asked. But say it in Japanese - natsukashii desu ne - and the response will be more like "I know what you mean."
Oddly enough, this dude took a camcorder (VHS!) to Tokyo at the end of the 80s. For people who know the city, it's easy to recognize East Shinjuku in the video. It's amazing how little the area has changed in 20 or 30 years. So if Tokyo in 1987 was very nearly the same as it was in 2007, maybe my memories of the area at Japan's peak, false though they are, aren't so inaccurate.