The Karuizawa rap ー軽井沢ラップー

My wife walked ahead of me, pushing our two-year old son in his pram.  I held onto her shoulder as we wandered around, looking for somewhere to rest and eat.  Our legs and minds were weary, as if we had been travelling hard for days.  All around us, people shuffled slowly about in twos, threes or fours.  Everyone seemed lost and weary, like prisoners who had abandoned all hope.  Just then some loud music boomed out from the speaker system.  There was an electronic drumbeat like a machine gun and a rapper started spitting out terrible lyrics, full of swearing, hatred and promises to kill.  We were in an open-air shopping centre in Karuizawa, and it was a bright, sunny day.

There is something strange about the music played at shopping centres in Japan.  I have noticed before that they often play fast, angry hip-hop.  The lyrics are rarely appropriate for a happy family outing.  “I f****** killed that b**** then I shot a copPop!  Pop!  Pop!”

I used to think that the person who chose the music just happened to like hip-hop and couldn’t understand the inappropriate English lyrics.  But in that shopping centre in Karuizawa I realised that they were doing it on purpose.  We were looking for a specific restaurant – a branch of a Hawaiian style burger chain.  We knew it was there somewhere but couldn’t find it.  There were a few maps in the shopping centre, but they were not clearly marked.  None of the maps showed where you were.  It seemed like they preferred people to be lost.  That way, shoppers would walk round and round looking for something, and pass many shops they wouldn’t otherwise have gone to.  In the same way, I thought, perhaps they are playing fast, violent music with threatening lyrics because they want people to be stressed out.  To relieve their stress they might run into a shop and buy something.  That’s the theory of retail therapy.  Buying something gives you a momentary feeling of control and calm.

We eventually found the burger store.  It was the first day of our trip to Karuizawa – the first family vacation for myself, my wife and our two-year old son.  With one blind adult, one wild toddler and one more adult (with an egg allergy), it was quite difficult at times.  At the hotel buffet meals, my wife had to run around to get food for three people (no eggs), and we had to wolf it down before my son got tired and started screaming.

But we had a good time.  The hotel had a large, heated family bath we enjoyed together.  And we found an amazing roast chicken restaurant called Kastanie.  It was the tastiest meal I’ve had in a long time.  The weather was good and we played with a ball in the park.  The best thing for my son was the pair of room slippers in the hotel.  He found a mini pair just for him and marched around the room happily, taking them off and putting them on again.

Hopefully, this was the first vacation of many together.  I can already picture our next trip, wandering around a shopping centre in Osaka, searching for a speciality restaurant that makes okonomiyaki without eggs, all the while listening to violent rap.

Vocabulary:

weary - tired

to shuffle – to walk slowly and clumsily

to boom out – for a sound to be made loudly and powerfully

open-air – without a roof

an outing – a trip; an excursion

to happen to (like) – to (like) by chance

stressed out – to be anxious, tired and irritable because of too much pressure

retail therapy – the idea of relieving stress or anxiety by buying something

to wolf something down – to eat something very quickly