TOKYO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

A Japanese woman's voice comes over the Tokyo Airport P.A. System, she speaks in Jutted, phonetic, English, "Flight two-fifty-two to Los Angeres has been derayed due to overfow of traffic on tarmac."

"Fuck."

Johnny Vincent grabs his wrinkled dark blue suit jacket from on the seat next to him.

Johnny slips into his coat as he leave's the rough upholstery of his folding waiting chair for the tight red drum of the nearest bar stool.

“Take American?” Johnny hands a ten dollar bill to a clean cut Japanese bartender who moves with an automotive efficiency, taking Johnny's money with one hand as he lays down a napkin and a brown bottle with a blue label and it's brand spelled out in bold, green, Japanese kanji.

As Johnny tips the beer back into his mouth he look's up at a set of six television screens lined along the top of the bar. He pan's his head from right to left looking for something to distract himself.

CNN? Next.

Al Jazeria, Next.

A Japanese drama about some Asian pretty-boys running a coffee shop? Next.

Japanese News? Johnny didn't care about his own country's news, why the hell would he care about another's.

CNN, again? Next

The left-most television had an American baseball game playing on it. A Japanese Baseball player in a Dodger's uniform walks up to a pitcher's mound as the game's announcer tries to not butcher the pronunciation of his name. As the camera moves in for a quick close up of the pitcher's face, Johnny felt one of those “Wait a second,” moments in the back of his head. Johnny had seen this face somewhere, and considering that he had just spent three day's in Japan, recognizing him must have meant he was able to stick out pretty well.

Johnny downs the rest of his beer as he keeps his eyes on the left most television. He figures that there's nothing better to do then watch the game and try to remember where he had seen this Japanese player's face before. So he takes another drink because he's not hammered enough to enjoy baseball.

Yet.

Pitch one, the ball whips clean around the box, he might as well have been throwing at a Yankee-shaped statue. Ball one.

Pitch two, no more carnival game, show-off bullshit this time, seventy-six mile per hour bullet, right under the swing. Strike one.

Pitch three.

Crack.

Roar.

Johnny take's a drink of his second beer as the Yankee clears the bases for his team's second run of the inning.

The game goes to a commercial and Johnny loses sight of the television as looks to his left, and that's when it finally clicks. The terminal wall across from the bar has a giant picture of that same Japanese baseball player holding the same bottle of Japanese beer Johnny is drinking now.

This wasn't the only place Johnny had seen this player though, he then remembered seeing this same player painted in the side of an office building, at about a two-thousand to one scale, roaring in mid-throw as he hurled a meteor with a tail of fire at a picture of planet earth, which had been turned to have north America facing him with a giant Yankee's symbol carved into it's terrain.

When Johnny turns back from the wall to the bar again, he sees a large beige ball sitting at the corner of his eye. A giant Texan, Johnny knew he was Texan from the matching beige ten gallon hat on on the mans head. He had a metal skull bollo-tie, not cow, human. He takes his hat off and places it on the bar next to him revealing a white wave of hair over his happy red face, he looks like a bizzarro version of Santa Clause.

“いただきました、アジアと彼のサングラスを失ったテキサスの違いは？”

Johnny had never heard Japanese spoken with a Texan accent before.

“何も!” The Texan erupts into laughter at his own joke, and the robotic Japanese bartender joins him.

“Ha ha, very good sir, what can I get you?”

Johnny didn't remember the Japanese bartender using any of his, either well rehearsed or just plain fluent, English with him.

“Magarita!” The Texan yells as he slams his hand on the bar like a gavel.

Johnny finishes his firs beer as the Japanese Bartender begins to mix the cocktail.

“You look like you're a bit too young to be here for business, and that means you're definitely too young to be here for pleasure, so tell me, what brings you 'cross the ocean?”

Johnny turns to the first living American he has seen in two days.

“Family, kind of, my Uncle got killed and someone needed to claim the body. My Dad didn't want to do this, and I'm the "self-employed" sibling so the job just kind of fell down to me. I had to come all the way here just to tell them to go ahead and burn the body.”

“Oh, Well I'm very sorry for your loss son,” the Texan reaches over to grab his drink as soon as it's placed on the napkin in front of him.

“Don't be, I didn't really know him that well,” Johnny says as he cracks open his second beer. “Besides, he was a heroin smuggler, he started in Vietnam and then tried to expand into Japan, then he met the Yakuza,” Johnny put's two fingers to his head “and that was it.”

“The heroine game, you don't say?”

“Yeah I know right?” Johnny hands a folded up cloth label to his new friend. “They found this on him, apparently it's the label from the stuff he was moving in Shinjuku.”

The Texan looks down at the cloth label and sees a pink anthropomorphic stuffed teddy-bear with giant blue eyes holding his hand's up with a triumphant rainbow leaping from palm to palm.

SUPER HAPPY FUNTIME HEROINE is spelt out underneath in multicolored crayola font.

The Texan just shakes his head as he hands the label back to Johnny, “Now the Heroine trade, that's not a family business is it?”

“What? Hell no.” Johnny folds the label back into his wallet and puts it back in his pocket. “I mean, I sold some weed in high school but who doesn't these days.” Johnny takes another drink of beer.

“So is this your first time in the land of the rising sun?”

“For me? Yeah. You sound like you come here often, what brings you here?” Johnny takes a look at his watch and sees that he still has at least an hour to fill before his plane is ready.

“Special Government Construction and Security.” He say's.

“Can I even ask you what that is?”

“Tell you what, let me ask you something, when you were coming up though the coast, did you see all those giant Surface to Air Missile all along the outside of the city?”

“No, I think I would have remembered seeing missiles sticking out of the ground.”

“See that's where you're wrong,” The Texan leans over and put's a hand on Johnny's shoulder, “They're all over place. I don't know where you came from but I guarantee you drove by half a dozen on your way here.” He takes his hand off Johnny's shoulder and point's down at the bar. “The reason you didn't see them is cause our fearless leaders over in Washington hire a guy like me to come in and help-” The Texan raises his fat red fingers to make a pair of air quotes "-conceal them." Of course this is just between us red-bloods, and Ol'Hoss here.” The Texan tips his drink to the Japanese Bartender, who then returns in kind with a bow of his own. “

“See what we did was, we built a bunch fake houses all along the villages and neighborhoods and pay the locals some hush money to ignore the fact that when the reds over west decide it's time to settle the score for Nan-king, some house down the street is gonna start shitting out misses faster than a African at a Klan rally.”

“You think that would ever actually happen?” Johnny's already finished his second beer and reaches over to crack open his third as he begins to pay more and more attention to the Texan.

“Well shit, I can't figure out why hasn't it happened already, the popular opinion in my industry is that we're on borrowed time. Any historian could tell you that War's always a little late getting where it's going. This whole corner of the earth has been teetering on the edge of sanity since fifty-six. The Japs more then anyone. The Chinese and the Koreans can rattle all the sabers they want but everyone knows that you can't trust the quiet ones. Let me ask you something, how long you been here?”

“Two days, just the weekend.”

“I'm guessing that's been more then enough time to see what a wild, just flat out insane, fucking country this is. Am I right son?”

“I'm not going to lie, it's been something else.”

“Shit, you don't got to be so coy about it, everyone knows this country's got more then a few screws loose. If you ask me, it's cause of those bombs we dropped. Just look around,"

The Texan waves his hand in a semi circle around Johnny. Johnny's eyes follow the Texan's hand across rows of neon lit shops populated with a mix of uptight businessmen, orange tanned Japanese school girls with platinum blonde hair, and teenagers with mohawks and nose rings. "You see all this, this is what happens to the only culture in the history of mankind what had doomsday device used against it. Buildings, casualties, hell even the fall-out, none of that is anything compared to the kind of massive, irreversible damage that seeing those bombs did to this country's psyche.”

The Texan leans back and looks up at the row of television screens above the bar.

“Just take a look at that right there,” He points to the third television from the right, the Japanese news channel.

There is a beautiful young Japanese woman with tears riding black mascara down her face, as she slowly runs an electric razor over her skull, mowing away smooth, silky, locks of black hair from her head.

“What the hell?” Johnny keep's his eyes on the screen as he takes another drink of beer.

“Her name is Eri Subake, shes all of seventeen years old and one of the most famous girls in on the island.”

“How so?”

“She's a pop star."

"A pop star?"

"Yeah, ya see, they ain’t got real music over here, all they have here is just a bunch pretty girls dancing around lip synching computer generated horse shit about holding hands and falling in love and the pans eat it up.”

“What happened to her? Did she go crazy or something?”

“Worse,” The Texan laughs, “She got a boyfriend.”

“What happened, he broke up with her and she couldn't handle it?”

“No, see, you're approaching this with an actual line of logic in mind, and whats going on here is much more complicated then that.”

“Obviously.”

“You know how every few years back in the states those shills in the music industry take some fourteen year old girl up out of some trailer park and then dress her up in a way that no god fearing man would ever let his daughter dress, and then they throw her on a stage so she can shake her plum little ass around for young and old alike.”

“Yeah, all until the ripe old age of nineteen when the career path leads them to chose between retirement or coke-whore?”

The Texan laughs again “Exactly!” he takes another drink, “See, you and I both know that between songs those girls are going backstage, taking shots, doing a line, or what have you. And it's national fucking news to hear about whatever new athlete or actor they're fucking this week, that is if they aren't just blowing the same agent what threw em' into this craziness in the first place.”

“And that's not what goes on here?”

“No, not here. Maybe they're too trusting, or maybe they just don't want to admit it, but these Asians, they love their pop stars. I'm talking about make-a-grown-man-cry love. See, their music companies figured out how to breed these girls to be the perfect fantasy,” The Texan looks back up at the TV, where Eri, now completely bald, continues to cry, “The perfect girl, trained from as soon as they're old enough to sing to give off just that right blend of sexy and innocent that drives a weak man wild. They got hundreds of these girls all with thousands of fans, damn near cults if you ask me. Some corporate overlord has these girls spending twenty-three hours a day answering fan mail, doing interviews, everything possible to make enough people fall in love with her that they throw money at em' for albums and posters and all that other nonsense.”

The Texan finishes his Margarita and slides the empty glass back to the bartender before he turns back to Johnny. “So you got these girls, singing to all their obsessive fans some computer generated auto-tuned bull about how shes just trying to find the right guy, and that's the key to all of this, that you,” The Texan points at Johnny, “That YOU, and only YOU, are that special guy, the only one that understands her, YOU, and no one else. Shes looking for YOU. If you just buy enough of her music and hang up enough of her posters, if you learn everything you can about her and write her enough fan mail, she'll realize that YOU are what shes looking for. Then you two are gonna run away to fucking never land together.”

“Wow, this really makes me feel like an asshole, but this whole weekend whenever I heard the radio I thought that just one chick who was really big here right now. They all sound the same.”

The Japanese bartender injects himself into the conversation, “No offense taken, they do all sound the same, and look the same. They all have same plastic surgeons, many of us can't tell them apart either.”

“You tell em' Hoss, hell they all might as well be the same. I betcha a couple years from now, when they get that cloning shit figured out, they'll just fucking print em' out. It ain't like any of the girls you see are actually singing anyway. That's what I'm trying to tell you son, they're completely batty over here. Now, that brings us to our lovely Miss Subake. See, the record companies are all about protecting their investments. What they do is they have these girls living in what basically amounts to a damn nuns convent. They got private schooling and an army of security wherever they go. It's all with one, and only one, goal,”

“And what's that?”

“Keepin her away from the dick. Like I said, the whole scam is built on the thin ice of the fantasy world that these guys have made for themselves. It all rides on the fact that shes going to fall in love with you someday, and the whole thing falls apart if they ever realize that that's not gonna happen. How is she gonna fall in love with you, when shes too busy falling in love with someone else? Now, ninety-nine percent of the time the girls can make it to twenty five, the contract ends, and they fade into a nice healthy obscurity once they are old enough for the guys to lose interest and get distracted by whatever new fourteen year old that happens to catch their fancy this season, and then the cycle is repeated. Unfortunately the teenage pop-star's, I guess you could call it a lack of foresight, is something shared by our two cultures. Every once in a while one of these girls, either cause she thinks shes clever enough to outsmart the trends or she just plain doesn't realize how fragile this whole ecosystem is, will try to sneak away to do that which teenagers are want to do. Unfortunately for the lovely Miss Subake, some passerby with a camera on his phone snapped a picture of her leaving some guy's apartment after kissing him on the cheek, he loaded it up to the internet, it caught fire, and that's all it took.” the Texan snaps his fingers, “The contract, the money, the fans, the love, all gone.”

“So how is shaving her head bald supposed to fix all that?”

The Texan's takes a deep breath “I don't know, it's probably something to do with shame and honor, and all that other bullshit these Asian's like to put a lot of stock in, it's some kind of a penance, a plea for forgiveness I guess.” The Texan stands up and grabs his hat as he reaches into his back pocket to pull out a solid gold money clip full of bills from at least a dozen different countries. He pulls a purple Japanese bill of indeterminate worth from the wad and slides it across the bar.

“All just for having a boyfriend?”

“Yep, I guess some people just want to believe the lie, but the easier someone lets themselves believe what they know is a lie, the more angry they'll be when they can't deny the truth of it anymore.”

“How do you know so much about this?" Johnny asks.

The texan stood off his stool and put his hat back on. He turns his head to Johnny, "I once met a guy who told me he could sell me one," and the Texan leaves Johnny at the bar, to watch the continuing coverage of the fall of Eri Subake.

Johnny looks down at his watch and sees that his plane will almost be ready to start boarding. He thanks the Japanese Bartender and is surprised by the smile and English pleasantry he gets as he leaves to head back to his gate.

When Johnny gets back to the gate he sees, sitting in the chair he had abandoned two hours ago, a Japanese language magazine with one of those Asian pop princesses on the cover. He opens it up and flips though a couple of pages of barley legal Asian teens in swimsuits and schoolgirl outfits before he comes to a crumpled, half ripped out, page. He sees the face of Eri Subake, crossed through with furious lines of black Sharpe and Kanji that Johnny assumes translate to whatever the Japanese equivalent of “Whore” is.