Mad Men Playlist:
Sukiyaki — Kyu Sakamato
In “Flight 1”, Don totally negs this Japanese lady in the restaurant after he has to break it off with Mohawk Airlines (this is the episode where Pete’s dad dies in the AA crash). She’s into him, and usually when Don suffers a work setback, he likes to make it up in personal lady time, but he says “Not tonight” and bravely soldiers on.
Anyways, this song “Sukiyaki” is what’s delightfully playing over this exchange. The original title of the song translates to “I look up when I walk”, which the singer does so his tears won’t fall.
Making the whole thing just that more Weiner-loves-his-details-esque? Sakamato died in a plane crash.
• footnote - by Natasha Simons
YES. I almost had a fit when I saw this episode because of that. Although it makes me so angry (in an unsurprised, lolamerica kind of way) that this song, while very popular in the United States, was renamed Sukiyaki to make it easier for American consumption. HEY GUYS, it’s Japanese! Do you know what ELSE is Japanese? Beef.
It’s also significant because this song is pretty much the first Japanese thing (besides geisha, which is a whole other story) that American people really liked after the war. This awkward postwar relationship is something that comes up again and again in the series, whether through Roger’s memories of the war, or Cooper’s unabated predilection for orientalist ornamentation. In this episode the Mohawk rep that Don is sent to breka up with brings it up again, comparing Sterling Cooper’s behavior to that of the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, saying that it’s fitting he took him to a Japanese restaurant to do it.
In other news I like to sing this song while cleaning my room.
And again. For reals.
今のところは、しばらくの間はアメリカに住んでいてもかまわないと思っているのでアメリカでの仕事を探しますが、それでいいとしても日本に帰りたいという気持ちは中々納められないのです。春休みでも・・・と思っていたら、やっぱりそれは卒業論文に夢中でないとならないし、そんなお金を持っているわけもないし。
ただ、この、遊びに行きたいという気持ちは初めてで、このこの前は「行きたい」と思ったらつまり「住みたい」ということだったのです。でけど遊びに行ったってどこで何をすればいいか全然分かりません。この前行ったら、毎日の生活をを送っていただけです。
(via letsboxthestars)
Okay I know that this is in NO WAY the point of this post but I miss having vending machines that would sell me green tea that wasn’t flavored as anything other than green tea, and that didn’t have twenty pounds of sugar in every bottle. ALSO JAPAN
からだ巡り茶ToT
have we talked about how Miss Hanako and I are the same person?
[…]I don’t know if I like this man or hate him. After sitting for awhile, I decide to go back to the café. “I’m going to leave now. I’ll come again soon.” As I speak, Nomura picks up a small knife and flings it at me. The small blade sticks in the tatami. I gasp. So he still has this disgusting habit. When we lived together at Seta, he threw a knife at me several times. I can’t move, knowing that if I stand up, he’ll grab me by the legs and push me down. […]
Nighttime.
Just as I begin to drunkenly sing for the customers, Nomura comes into the café. I stop singing. It’s not my turn to serve the customers, but I know that he has no money. I feel a bitterness in my chest.
Sourly playing the mouth harp, Katsumi brings him sake. My legs feel week. I call Katsumi to the back room and tell her that Nomura knows me and doesn’t have any money. She understands and goes back. I leave the back door just as I am[…]
I take my time returning to the cafe and find that Nomura is still there. He is drinking sake and eating fried rice with a peaceful expression. I think I would sacrifice anything for him. Nomura leaves at about ten p.m.
Feeling that I am about to sink into the ground, I realize that there is no such thing as love.
[translated by Elizabeth Hanson]
‘In all the world, I know only one woman. No woman, but my wife, moves me as a woman. And my wife regards me as the only man for her. From this point of view, we should be the happiest of couples.’
I cannot remember clearly why it was that he took the trouble of telling me this. But I do remember that his manner at the time was serious, and that he was calm. What struck me then as being odd was his last remark: ‘…we should be the happiest of couples.’ Why ‘should be’? Why did he not say, ‘We are the happiest of couples’?
“[When men lost their jobs in the] Japanese recession, […]some had lost their families as well. One particularly poignant case[…] is a man, aged, it would appear, in his early fifties, whom I met near Temple 7 in April 2000. From his clean white pilgrim’s clothes, new bamboo hat, and staff, I could tell that he had not been on the pilgrimage long. Indeed, he was wearing shoes more suited to an office than to a fourteen-hundred-kilometer walk, had no guidebook, and was unsure whether he was on the right path. The story he told me was that he had lost his job and thus spent more and more time at home, where he had begun to get into recurrent arguments with his wife, so that the marriage began to fall apart. He had walked out in the middle of one such argument and gone to stay with his daughter, but she had given him short shrift, telling him that if he wanted to rescue his marriage he needed to sort himself out first. Feeling he was the primary cause of his marital discord, he wanted to do something that would demonstrate his repentance and improve his state of being. Having seen a television program about the henro and heard that people did it was a way of improving themselves, he had come on impulse to Shikoku, arriving the day before and going straight to Temple 1, where he stayed overnight and purchased his pilgrim’s “uniform.” Now he was, as he put it, coming face-to-face wit himself and his problems and was trying to work out a new way forward by getting rid of his internal anger and, through his, finding a way to repair his marriage.
His initial departure was, in other words, impulsive rather than planned[…] (indeed, his shoes were so inappropriate for walking any distance that he knew he had to get better footwear as soon as possible) and that spontaneity, especially in reaction to personal circumstance, may also be a factor leading people along the henro path. It was brought about because of despair and personal misfortune coupled with the desire for repentance[…] and the wish to reform his life so that he could make a new beginning by returning, renewed, to his wife.”
