A young Latino man in Los Angeles teams up with a Japanese restaurateur to try to bring karaoke to America.

However much I had screwed up to get to this point, I knew I couldn’t go home until I found a job. I made my way slowly on foot from downtown Santa Monica, where I lived on 7th and Broadway in a tiny rent controlled studio that cost $225 a month, which was as cheap as it sounds, even in 1987. I knew from experience to hit up a restaurant manager after the lunch rush but before the kitchen prep for dinner. I was grim, hung over and desperate as I hoofed it south on Main Street and then onto the Venice Boardwalk with the afternoon sun beating down. They weren’t hiring at the giant Pioneer Boulangerie; not at Rose Cafe, or Figtree’s, or the Sidewalk Cafe, nor at the more upscale Hal’s and 72 Market Street. Not even any openings at Jodi Maroni’s Italian Sausage Kingdom on the beach, where I had to ask even though I suspected the tips would be minimal.

Then at the Windward traffic circle, near the end of my journey, the noren curtains in Hama Sushi’s door drifted lightly apart in the afternoon sea breeze. Poking my head in, I found a young Japanese woman seated at the counter, folding pink napkins into magical Bird of Paradise flowers, deftly slipping a pair of disposable chopsticks into the center of each one. Emiko, lanky and forthright, offered me a cup of tea while I waited for the owner Toshi. I watched her as she prepared it, her ponytail kissing the back of her neck as she poured loose green tea into a small bamboo basket and ran a stream of hot water through it into a thick ceramic cup without a handle.

“What’s the white stuff in the tea?” I asked.

“It’s popcorn. Brown rice popcorn. We call tea ‘cha.’ This is genmaicha. Brown rice tea.”

Just like that, I had learned my first new word of Japanese. The tea tasted mildly bitter, with a slightly gritty mouthfeel. The pleasant aroma was rich from the brown rice, and as I inhaled deeply, my hangover eased a little and I thought about the crazy 24 hours I had just been through.

The madness had started the previous night at a Hollywood party. It was at a friend of a friend’s subleased pool house off Roscomare in the hills of Bel Air where I parked my dented Ford pickup at the bottom end of a long line of Saabs and BMWs. I was game for a good time, even if I often felt a step behind others in my social circle; I was a kid with a mixed up heritage that didn't fit what most people expected in Southern California from a guy with my last name. My dad left a tiny village in the Spanish Basque Pyrenees to find work herding sheep in Lancaster. That meant he was technically a Latino migrant farm worker, but he wasn’t Mexican, which confused a lot of people about him and about me. If people didn’t know who or what I was, neither did I. I was together enough to get into Harvard. But my adolescent rebellion had kicked in late, and I left campus without a diploma, needing a single additional credit to graduate, as though I set out on purpose to make things difficult for myself.

Whisky was a good way to ease the inner turmoil, at least for the duration of a party, and after a couple paper cupfuls over ice, I was feeling mellow beside the bar when I ran into an actor I knew. This guy had recently played a chiseled necromancer in my ex-roommate’s student horror film. I thought I was friendly with him, but tonight he had mischief in mind. He and his girlfriend ripped up my t-shirt and poured a drink over my head.

Shaken and ashamed by the cruel prank, I stomped out of the party, swelling with rage, my wet shirt growing cold as I hiked back downhill to my pickup. I peeled out in a wheel spinning U-turn, cursing, banging the wheel and flooring the gas pedal as I hit Sunset. Red and blue lights flashed, closing in behind me. When I pulled over and stepped out of the truck, disheveled and reeking of booze, my heart raced. In the blur of events, I listened to the cops rattle off what I had done wrong, and I watched helplessly as the tow truck arrived. At least the jail was relatively clean for my overnight stay, and despite my fears, nobody hassled or threatened me.

Now, sipping the green tea as the sun slashed through Hama Sushi’s head-high windows, I knew I needed a job--this job--to raise the money to free my truck from impound and start paying off the fines. I stood up when the owner, Toshi, arrived. He had the posture of a warrior, with broad shoulders and thick wrists, and a soft, slow, deliberate voice. I tried not to let him know he was my last hope, and he sounded very serious as he told me, “I don’t need a waiter right now.” My heart fell, but then Emiko spoke a few quiet words to him, and Toshi continued, “I do need a busboy. Tonight.”

Bartending was my father’s ticket out of the sheep camps. He currently ran the bar at the Gage Bowling Alley in Huntington Park; a snug little place with Merle Haggard on the jukebox and twinkling shot glass lights in the kidney shaped ceiling soffit. Following his example, by that time, I had plenty of experience both in front of customers and in the back of the house, which was the kitchen. That’s why whenever I needed money, I started knocking on restaurant doors.

I swallowed hard. Part of me wanted to say no to such a menial position. I took a look at Emiko. Maybe she expected me to refuse as well, even though she had apparently encouraged Toshi to help me. But then again, I had woken up that morning with my face pressed into the rubber-wrapped concrete bench in the West Los Angeles jail.

“What time do you want me here?”

The minute I arrived back at the restaurant later that afternoon, I was bombarded with a constant stream of new information and skills to pick up. For instance, how to eat sanma, which is a pungent little fish called mackerel pike. That’s just one of the things I learned when I shyly joined the hearty staff meal at Hama and snuck glances at fierce sushi chef Ted for guidance on how to dissect the whole grilled fish. First you break off the head and put it aside. You won’t be messing with that. With the head gone, use your chopsticks to tweeze open the belly and splay out the fish atop your bowl of rice. Carefully separate the tail from the body so that you can use it to lift off the spine in one piece and set it aside with the head. Now you’re at a decision point. Depending on your level of tolerance, you can either flick off what’s left of the mackerel’s digestive system or leave it. Either way, you’ll be tasting it, because that’s the source of all that umami flavor. Now, lift your bowl of rice to your chin and start shoveling bites of fish and rice straight into your mouth.

I caught Emiko looking at me with respect for passing my first test. After the meal, she beckoned to me to help her finish folding the napkins. Then I donned the Hama uniform: puffy pink parachute pants with gathered ankles and an elastic waist. I was ready for action when the first customers entered the restaurant, and the staff shouted a traditional Japanese greeting in unison at the top of their lungs: “Irasshaimase!” Soon every table was full, and I never stopped moving. 

With its hip location and pounding music, I learned Hama was a mixing place for film people, Japanese execs and South Bay coke dealers. Venice had a rough edge. Customers could buy rounds of Asahi for the men assembling the sushi. It was my job to pour out five glasses from a large beer and join the toast with fervor.

After three nights, I was exhausted but exhilarated. The smell of warm soy sauce emanated from my pores as I rode the bus to Bruffy’s Tow, where I proudly counted out a pile of ones, fives, and tens to get my pickup out of impound. I had made enough cash to get back on my feet, and I had my chance to turn in my pink parachute pants and leave Hama behind. 

But something stopped me from walking out. The restaurant had become a kind of cozy family, something missing in my social circles at the time. It wasn’t easy, but the harder I worked, the more I was respected. I decided to stay put. Soon I began to realize something about my new Japanese friends. The extra work and hazing were part of an old tradition of apprenticeship. When I marveled at the hardship the younger sushi chefs suffered, Hama’s owner Toshi told me, “Sure. They’re Japanese.” I heard that explanation again and again, as if it answered so much. The other expression I heard was, “The nail that stands up is the one that gets hammered down.” The group cohesion meant everyone played their part with respect and humor that was gentle though sometimes loud and laced with Japanese profanities. I understood this was one form of equality, very different from American egalitarianism.

Behind the scenes, the rhythms of the kitchen never faltered. Before the restaurant opened each night, the sushi rice had to be steaming hot, marinated with sweet vinegar and tossed in a giant bamboo basket. The tamago delicately flipped over a flame in its square pan. The fish broke down. The porters Rafael and Nido, squat indigenous Mexicans, chopped mountains of lettuce and ran the tempura fryers, singing back and forth in strangely high-pitched Nahuatl. They’re the reason I started telling people that whatever ethnic food you eat in Los Angeles, it’s all Mexican food in the end.

Staff meals grounded us before the furious onslaught of customers. The stuff Toshi served was never on the public menu. It was Japanese comfort food. Curry from a dried brick of sauce. Tonkatsu. Gindara, also called butterfish, was a revelation. I had never tasted it before, and I instantly craved its tender, translucent flesh. And for a different treat, one of the chefs would hit up a Korean market for a pile of marinated short rib strips. Those always went fast, chopsticks flying across uplifted bowls of rice.

At the end of that first night, before I had my truck back, Emiko had offered to pick me up the next day in a gesture of comradeship. She showed up in a red Galaxie 500 convertible, wearing vintage sunglasses, cowboy boots and looking very Rockabilly. Except for the Hello Kitty bobblehead next to the magnetic John the Baptist statue on the dash. After I liberated my pickup truck, the rides continued. Conversations flowed naturally. But I was thrown off seeing her in other contexts. Talking to Toshi and the sushi chefs in Japanese, sometimes her voice seemed to take on a singsong rhythm in a much higher pitch. I held back, confused about which was the real Emiko, the winking badass who believed in me when she was given no reason to, or the dutiful young woman who kept her head down.

When I got a promotion to waiter, it was not only a boost to my self esteem--I was making more money, too. Then I moved up to the sushi counter, backing Hama’s fish cutters by serving drinks and hot items from the kitchen. Toshi and his brother Masa, at the number one station close to the door, found it hilarious, watching an Ivy League guy scurry around with an armload of hot plates. I learned to nod and mutter a few words in Japanese as Toshi, softly teasing me in his quiet voice, showed me off to his buddies just in from Tokyo. They’d make Hama their first stop on the way from the airport, often accompanied by Singapore Airlines flight attendants, idolized by the sushi chefs. Rumor was, the form-fitting SIA uniform only came in one idealized slender size.

That’s how I met Nakayama. He was different--louder, more effusive. He wore his hair longer and had it mildly permed, which I learned could have marked him as part of a criminal subculture. He sat at the bar with Frank, a chirpy young Japanese-American guy. When Toshi introduced me as his Ivy League waiter, Frank said something in Japanese to Nakayama, and they both laughed. It didn’t bother me too much. I was used to it by then. But a few minutes later I went to Emiko at the cash register for a translation. “He said he’s in the Ivy League, too. But you join his version by getting a hand job on the terrace at the Ivy on Robertson.” 

Weekends, Toshi decided to open his parking lot for beachgoers at 10 or 20 bucks a spot. He offered to split the proceeds with me if I ran it. Some days we parked 40 or 50 cars. After being down and out and broke for so long, it was great to have wads of cash in the pocket of my pink parachute pants.

On Toshi’s birthday, the after work party converged in his office. In one corner of the office, Toshi had a projection television somehow hooked up to a microphone. Toshi sat back, shoulders stolid, drinking sake. As the video played images of rural Japan, Ted, one of the younger and surliest sushi chefs, began to sing along with the music. My jaw dropped as my gruff coworker, seldom without a cigarette dangling from his curled lip, seemed to transform into someone new. I didn’t know what the lyrics meant, but the song was a sweet ballad. Ted turned out to be a trained singer who could bring you to tears.

Emiko explained that we were listening to “karaoke.” In my head, I still pronounce the word as Emiko first taught it to me in Japanese that night: CADA-OKAY. As I soon learned, karaoke seemed like a purely Japanese cultural quirk, somehow in the background, like the stack of manga books next to the men’s toilet, the excessive cigarette smoking, or the expectations of submissive behavior from Emiko and the other women. At that point, karaoke had no footprint in the United States, and I felt like I was looking right through a window into another world.

I knew inevitably my turn would come to stand in front of the microphone. Showing I could be a good sport by participating could prove to Toshi I was a team player. But this was my Achilles’ heel; I couldn’t sing a note. I had to think of an easy number that didn’t rely on pitch or rhythm.

When the time came, I was determined to be ready. After a couple of those wistful enki style tunes, I stood up and grabbed the microphone. I had planned to choose the song most like talking I could find: Frank Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night. I knew most of the words, which was a good thing, because the chyron lyrics on the video were in Japanese. I belted out the song, trampling on the tune, scatting when I couldn’t think of the lyrics, certain I ruined the whole session. But everybody burst into raucous applause. Toshi was beaming. “Angel, you’re becoming more Japanese every day,” he said.

I couldn’t read the strange expression in his eye at that moment, but the next day as I arrived for work, Emiko pulled me aside. “Toshi’s been waiting for you. He wants to see you in his office.”

Here was one way to think of the relationship between Japan and America in the late 1980s. Japanese business and culture were rushing to the U.S. with the forcefulness of Godzilla rising out of the Pacific. Sony, Toyota and Honda had grabbed market share from US companies. Within the previous decade, sushi had really arrived, causing a sensation. Everyone was into uni, of all things. The strangest and most seemingly unappetizing flavors can suddenly turn into a sexy object of obsession. On the other hand, this show of engineering and cultural strength fostered a slew of books, articles, and lectures about the coming Japanese dominance of the world.

When I got to the office, Toshi was sitting at his desk with Nakayama, his globe-trotting executive friend. “Angel, what do you think of karaoke?” 

“I think it’s fun,” I answered. “It’s funky and very Japanese.”

“But do you think it could be a hit in America?”

My mind raced. Thinking about it as an entrepreneurial play, this made a lot of sense. I nodded and tried to explain my logic and thought process about Sony and Godzilla and uni, and concluded by saying, “Yes, I think it could be a hit.” Toshi and Nakayama both broke into smiles.

Toshi took a deep breath and then spoke with a formal tone. “Nakayama-san and I are starting a company. To bring karaoke to the United States. And we want you to be a part of it.”

“Why me?” I asked.

“Because when I saw you sing, I suddenly understood how karaoke can work in America. In Japan, everybody studies music in school. When they sing the song, they feel it’s important to do it correctly. But you just jumped in and had fun. You didn’t care if you sucked. That’s the way it has to be in America!”

They offered me a generous share of their start-up. Five percent ownership, health insurance and a salary that meant I could stop working in the restaurant and get some normal nights of sleep again. I tried to match their formality as I looked at each of them and nodded in turn, making it as close to a bow as I could without being silly. “Thank you very much for your trust. I think I would like to join you guys.”

As I turned to head to the restaurant for my shift, I had one last thought. I looked back at Toshi and said, “Can I still do the parking on the weekends?” He agreed. This hedged my bets, giving me pocket money in case the karaoke went nowhere.

I discovered that Frank, Nakayama’s obnoxious associate I had met earlier, would also be joining the karaoke company. Frank had a chip on his shoulder. Growing up as a semi professional skateboarder in Gardena, he was half American, leaving him always trying to prove he was authentically Japanese with his macho posturing. Seeing through his act, I could relate to that predicament of being stuck between two cultures. He would start with 7% of the shares, technically making him my boss.

Over the next few days, more big challenges came into focus. In order to succeed, Toshi and Nakayama would have to create a vertical empire. First they had to import the equipment. The makers of Japanese video karaoke systems had settled on the futuristic 12 inch laserdisc format, with specialized players and controllers to search out and select individual tracks. And while there were hundreds of discs of light Japanese pop standards, there were almost no American hits. Our company would have to license the music rights and record the backing tracks. We would need to make dozens of cheesy music videos, with insipid visuals that wouldn’t distract from the singer as the lyrics scrolled at the bottom of the screen.

And most of all, we would have to get Americans to try this very foreign pastime. It was antithetical to the American way of hanging out, where dropping your dignified hip and cool facade could be a huge no-no, as had happened to me during that fateful party at the start of this adventure. Naturally that’s where I came in.

When I told Emiko the news, she was happy for me. To celebrate, I made dinner for her at my studio apartment. Capellini with clams, sprinkled with spicy cod roe, a nod to both our roots, which made her enjoyment of the meal all the more gratifying to me.

“I owe it all to you,” I told her. “You were the one who told Toshi to hire me.”

She giggled. “I just thought you were cute.” We were sitting on the couch, our legs touching. Our fingers intertwined, and then we were kissing. Later that night, my arm around her, I couldn’t help but think the future looked bright. If only I knew how daunting the task in store would be.

I started with low hanging fruit by trying to convince the familiar Westside bars where I had been making my drinking and partying rounds to invest in a karaoke system. I decided to start with an establishment called Fat City, because its burly, long-haired musician-turned-owner Caleb had recently splashed out a ton of money to install a vintage carved bar from New Orleans, and he might have more dough burning a hole in his pocket. But even trying to explain the concept to the guy was difficult. “Singing in public? And nobody’s making you do that, right? Did you lose a bet?”

To show him what he was missing, I lugged the boxes of equipment into his cavernous bar, which smells of last night’s beer. I brought Toshi’s old three bulb projection TV, top of the line Sony from 10 years before. It weighed a ton and was very awkward when its fold-out screen was extended. Another small monitor for the singer. The video disc player, amplifier, speakers. Then I wired everything together, and miracle of miracles, it worked like it was supposed to. 

Once I turned the system on, I had to explain that we had only three discs of American music--60 songs, the newest of which was about 10 years old. And of course, there was the problem of performance. My trick with “Strangers in the Night” might have impressed Toshi, but the feeling it gave a fellow American was less than an epiphany. “Dude, you suck,” Caleb laughed. “Is this for real?”

After that, I developed such a fear of the next sales call I hired my friend Martha, an actress who had fronted a rock band in college, to belt out a few standards. Martha went with me a few times. But I lost her when she got a regular gig as a haughty Romulan on a Star Trek show.

People still didn’t get it. Barely anyone I encountered had even heard of karaoke--never mind actually doing it. I tried to explain what it was to my cousin on the way to Mammoth for our regular ski trip. He lived in Orange County, sold insurance, and he could not understand or begin to pronounce karaoke. But that trip did give me the idea to pitch Toshi that karaoke might be a good apres-ski activity. With the hope of underwriting some mountain time, I offered to take a unit up to Mammoth. He approved the trip with one condition: I had to bring Frank. We barely spoke in the car on the way up. But when we hit the slopes he turned out to be a speed demon. He was happy to show me up and we kept up a close competition.

In our rare moments off the slopes, we did a few demos together at local bars with the usual result of blank stares until I spotted a neon sign for what must be the only sushi bar in Mammoth. We ordered a couple beers and gently proposed to the owner to set up our system. Mic in hand, I was about to launch into “Strangers in the Night” when out of the corner of my eye I saw Frank knocking back sake with the owner. Before I knew it, we were all up on stage braying out “Space Oddity” and “Dancing Queen,” an unexpected moment of bonding and laughing with Frank--karaoke at its best.

That was the first sale I made. But back in our Venice office, Frank acted like he had accomplished it all by himself, and the story stuck. That stung, but Emiko clued me in: “It’s the Japanese way. The senior guy always gets all the credit.”

It also stung that for all our efforts to spread karaoke to new customers, we had only managed to close the deal with a Japanese-owned business. We had to find a way to penetrate the American market before our sales budget ran dry. I decided that since the few discs we did have were heavy in country tunes, I would make the next trip to Texas to the honky tonk bars outside Dallas. I arrived at the airport with all of my huge boxes, only to learn my ticket had a two bag limit. But I was learning some tricks from Toshi, and I tipped the baggage clerk outside $50 to bend the rules for me.

When I showed up at Billy Bob’s in Fort Worth, the largest country music venue in the state, I got the usual blank stare, only this time peering out from under the sound guy’s Stetson hat. After spitting a stream of Skoal juice into a styrofoam cup, he showed me where to plug in directly into their million dollar sound system. A loud buzz and a high-wattage sizzle rattled the empty club. I had blown a fuse in their soundboard. The old pro soundman investigated our equipment. “You gotta be kidding me. This shit isn’t even UL listed. You’re lucky you didn’t burn the place down.”  

That’s when I learned that none of our Japanese imports were listed or inspected by Underwriters Labs, which is the “UL” symbol on electrical appliances. That means our equipment would never be insurable. As an owner of the company, I could be liable for negligence if anything ever happened. The honky tonk manager who was waiting for my demo drifted away back to his office, and the sound guy cracked his knuckles, cowboy eyes narrowing even more as I packed up my boxes as quickly as possible and slunk out of there.

My Japanese wasn’t good enough to explain all this to Nakayama when we debriefed, or he wasn’t listening. What did get his attention was when we all went to Las Vegas to the Consumer Electronics Show. All the biggies were there: Apple, IBM, SEGA, Compaq. Outside the car stereo division, a custom hearse with a 10,000 watt sound system literally made the concrete shake. In the adult entertainment section, Russ Meyer signed autographs with his Supervixens. Everyone was trying to find their digital piece of the future.

Then, turning a corner, Frank, Toshi, Nakayama and I suddenly stopped in our tracks. There, to our horror, we saw a sleek karaoke machine made by Pioneer that did everything ours did, all the equipment compacted and constructed together in one box, compared to at least three boxes for our system, all for a lower price. 

The competition was coming for us right around the bend. Still, Pioneer’s equipment was in its infancy, barely more than a prototype, and we had a running start. We could plant a flag before Pioneer or anyone else had any boots on the ground. Besides, I was getting more emotionally invested in this particular world than I had ever expected. Once Toshi and Nakayama started paying for my Japanese lessons, I was halfway to becoming a sarariman, a Japanese “salaryman.” I bought white Brooks Brothers shirts and had a tailor convert them to short sleeves, which I would wear along with a stiff Brooks tie that never draped.

Things grew confusing with Emiko. Our schedules just did not mesh. She worked most nights at Hama, and I spent a lot of my time on the road since taking on my sales role. She called me late one night. She was in trouble. She had crashed her car on a dark street in Westwood and she needed help. I pulled up in my pickup to find her crying on the curb. The front of her beautiful Galaxie was smashed and the radiator poured fluid on the street. I mistook the reason for her tears.

“Your poor car,” I told her. 

“I don’t care about the car. I’m just worried about the police.” I met her eyes, understanding. We had never discussed her immigration status, but I could see she needed to avoid trouble. I could relate to her on that front. My father had a green card, but my uncle had struggled to get his papers. I pried the fender away from the tire, hooked up my tow chain and we crept through the late night streets to drop the car outside Bill Leaf’s shop on Abbot Kinney.

The next day, I spotted Ted at the restaurant. He couldn’t hide the fact that he had a huge black eye. When he wouldn’t look at me, I put it together and then I confronted Emiko, who confessed the truth. Ted had been out with her. She let him drive her car, and of course he crashed it, because in Japan everybody drives on the left side of the road. Ted didn’t have a license, so she sent him away when she called me. My emotions were in a whirl. Whatever bond I had developed with her, it was not as though we were exclusive, or were even officially dating. I couldn’t even be mad at Ted, who must have felt some of the same draw toward Emiko. Maybe we were both tiptoeing around our feelings for her. Deep down, I knew if I pursued her too strongly, Emiko would drift away. No matter how much pain I felt, Emiko’s free spirit would choose me or not. I couldn’t do anything to change that.

It seemed to me that if I could turn the karaoke business into a success, I could really win her over, make her see me as a man who could overcome any obstacle. I threw myself even further into Japanese lessons and into the company. I told Toshi that if our equipment wasn’t going to work, we should pivot to make the software--the songs and the videos--to run on the machines. I wanted newer songs that young people would actually want to sing, choices like “Walk This Way,” “Sweet Child of Mine,” “With or Without You” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” MTV dominated the culture, and part of the thrill of doing karaoke in public was wish fulfillment that as you sang, you would become part of a music video. 

Each side of a 12 inch laserdisc could hold 10 songs. Knowing I had 20 tracks to fill, over an hour of video, I had to find inspiration. Then I read a list of great concept LPs of the 70s. I decided that instead of making 20 unrelated clips of background video, I would tell a single story.

Here’s how to make the perfect karaoke background video. Match the action vaguely to the sentiment of the song, keeping the association loose. My version: A skateboarding bad guy convinces a former ama (a female pearl diver), who is in town to help her uncle in his sushi bar, to help him look for the package of contraband he was forced to toss overboard while attempting to smuggle it ashore. And don’t forget to find a place to have rising steam suddenly surround your characters, a big Japanese karaoke video motif. 

I considered it a victory when Emiko agreed to play the diver. She suggested the loyal boat captain, played by me, warm the diver after her frigid underwater searches by pouring a continuous stream of steaming water (sexy steam: check!) over her neck and shoulders. As a private bonus, the only way to see this whole story would be to sing all 20 songs in order, which would basically never happen. This would be my hidden masterpiece. A karaoke concept album.

Alas, video production on that scale turned out to be more complex than our small team could handle. In those days before digital video or even HDTV, the reigning format was three-fourths inch tape, with bulky cameras, recording decks and online tape-to-tape editing systems. The newer Betacam was smaller and higher quality, but at that point still exotic and high-end. I made the rounds of my filmmaker friends, but the prices they quoted for shooting and editing totalled several times what Toshi wanted to spend.

We drew up plans for a dedicated karaoke nightclub to be featured on the brand new 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica. But I knew from dealing with that city’s legendary rent control board that we would be stepping into a bureaucratic nightmare. I let Frank take the lead on that one. He fancied himself a multicultural club empresario like Rick in “Casablanca.” But we stalled out after rounds of plans and lease negotiations and liquor license applications. 

Stymied on all fronts, I came up with my boldest idea yet: a karaoke television game show. I wrote it all out in a pitch document. Singers would audition for a series of famous judges, climb the ranks, until only a few were left in the final suspenseful round.

Toshi called me into his office and leveled a stare at me. “Angel, all your big ideas will put us on the map. But we can’t do it ourselves. I’m sending you to Tokyo to meet Nakayama’s backers at Hitachi. Face to face. You have to be our secret weapon.” With our window closing before the inevitable competitors would unleash their resources, I had to convince them to fund our vision for the American market.

So I packed up my white shirts and my stiff tie for a whirlwind trip of a few days that my whole future seemed to hinge on. All I had heard about Tokyo was true. The bathroom in my hotel room was so tiny, the toilet was in the shower. Everything was minimal and refined. The best cup of coffee I ever had was the five ounce portion served in delicate porcelain alongside my Japanese breakfast at the New Otani Hotel. On the Sunday before my big meeting, my translator took me to Ueno Park. There for the first time, as the famed cherry blossoms rained down, I saw karaoke in the wild, as Japanese families and groups of friends brought portable machines to sing atop blankets. I stood enthralled, surrounded by singers, as the blossoms fell like snow. This was the moment where it all came together.

On our way to the Hitachi Factory School, the taxi driver wore white gloves. And of course, he drove on the left side of the road. Arriving at Hitachi, I saw the executive team I was to meet doing their morning calisthenics. Naturally, I joined in. The engineers all wore khaki golf jackets over their white shirts and ties. After the exercise, we sat down in the conference room overlooking the manicured factory grounds. Propelled by adrenaline, I achieved a momentary near-fluency in Japanese as I emptied my briefcase of all my carefully prepared documents and went over all our plans. My self-confidence was suddenly off the charts.

Over a formal 10-course kaiseki dinner in a special wooden structure on the Hitachi campus, they said yes to everything: the higher production budget, the game show and a very low laser mastering fee. I was ecstatic. 

Back home in Los Angeles, I showed up at the staff’s usual gathering place, which was Ted’s apartment, eager to try out all the Japanese I had picked up in Tokyo. I half expected to find Emiko there, but she was nowhere to be seen. Instead, another waitress, Mayumi, joked about whether the trip made me realize I liked Japanese girls. “Not Japanese girls. Japanese girl.” Ted and the other sushi men, realizing I could no longer hide my feelings for Emiko, laughed at my predicament.

After my trip, Emiko wasn’t calling me back. Weeks later, when she finally did call me, it was to say her car was ready at Bill Leaf Automotive and needed  help picking it up. I met her on the sidewalk. There was her convertible, freshly painted, radiantly red in the sun. Emiko wore lipstick to match, her eyes hidden behind her RayBans. She was holding the invoice. “Look, Angel. Do you want the car? You can have it if you pay the repair bill.”

I was there when she got the estimate, and I knew the amount was much less than the car was worth.

“I thought you loved the car.”

“I’m not going to need it anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because my father saw a picture of me driving it, and he got mad.”

I reached for her, but she pulled away. “Do you want the car, or not?”

I was stunned. I couldn’t think of anything to say. “Your parents didn’t know about the car? And they don’t know about me, either?”

“You know I like you, Emiko.”

She took off her glasses, and I could see she was crying. 

“I know. I like you, too. That’s why…” She stopped herself. But it was too late.

“That’s why we can’t give this a chance? Because we like each other?”

“Because you’re not Japanese.”

A rush of feelings went through me as Emiko and I went through the motions of paperwork that meant nothing to me but to stall for time with her and sort out my feelings. Anger, despair, tenderness. Emiko had come prepared with the car’s title in her purse. As she pulled it out and signed it, she kept up a flow of nervous conversation. Only now she was speaking in that high-pitched singsong voice that made her so unrecognizable to me. When she directed it my way, that’s what hurt me the most.

I paid Mr. Leaf for the repairs. Outside on the street once more, I hugged Emiko. She slid out of my grasp before I was ready and turned to walk back to the restaurant. I wanted to rush toward her and liberate her from whatever made her feel she had to obey some unseen command, but I also knew it was not my place. Instead, I walked to the car that, in my mind, captured so much of her spirit and verve.  Giving the Hello Kitty bobblehead a nudge, I started the Galaxie for the first time and headed out, trailed by the clean burble of its dual exhaust.

Back at the office, things weren’t going so well, either. Plans kept falling through. Gradually I found myself with more down time, and in an idle moment I started going through my briefcase, just to keep myself busy. Under a handful of shriveled cherry blossom petals from Ueno Park, I found the business manual on negotiating with Japanese executives I had purchased before my trip to Tokyo. I had been too busy to read it before, but now I flipped through it with growing shock and realization. The first chapter described how no righteous sarariman would ever tell you “no” to your face. You would only find out later through inaction, euphemism and finally deduction of the true answer on your part. I realized that’s what was happening to me with all my victories from Tokyo. Nothing was coming of the ideas I pushed. One by one, the karaoke projects I worked so hard to push ahead for Toshi were falling by the wayside. 

I now saw Emiko’s leaving in a new way. I should have picked up on her cues as well. I was realizing that as a non-Japanese person, I had a ceiling in this world. I realized I would be a shambling, smiling oddity in yet another world I didn’t fit in. I started to reconnect with my old friends, and when somebody’s smart and beautiful younger sister came to visit, we sparked a romance. Over time, I began to think about following her back to the East Coast, picking up my missing class at summer school, and going to New York in the fall.

Arriving at Hama Sushi on a Saturday morning, I waved sardonically at Frank, who had taken over the car parking from me, his final victory, sealed with a grudging nod of respect in my direction. 

I entered Toshi’s office. I knew my time with karaoke was done. I still may not have known where I stood in relation to my family story. But I knew I wasn’t going to learn who I was by, in Toshi’s words, “becoming more Japanese” however welcomed I had been made to feel by my restaurant family–even in moments of tough love. My respectful obsession with the culture did not wind up filling the inner void I felt. I told him I wanted to sign my shares back over to him, where they belonged. He couldn’t talk me out of it. This was his dream, after all; I had just borrowed it. After a brief silence, Toshi slid a form across the desk and I signed it. 

Post Script

Whatever they had thought of my brief moment of glory in Tokyo delivering my pitch, Hitachi never went all in. When Karaoke did end up becoming a phenomenon, it wasn’t through smaller operations like the one I had once helped front with Toshi. The major electronics firms finally crashed the party, flooding the market with their streamlined versions of the machinery and slick marketing campaigns. In the end, it was money, big tech and corporate suits who put karaoke on the map, not our little startup based in a sushi bar on the edge of the continent. All those clubs in Texas where they looked at me funny--every single honky tonk ended up featuring karaoke on weekend nights. The karaoke industry in the United States is currently valued at $1.08 billion dollars annually.

No flavor is strange in the globalized world we all live in now. Sushi clamshell boxes await us on-demand in the grab and go case in our local supermarkets. Even the glorious butterfish has been discovered by American chefs--who call it black cod and over charge for a small portion. Of course, karaoke has morphed and moved on as it entered the mainstream. The 12 inch laserdisc is long gone, replaced by a succession of digital formats. Companies large and small celebrate deals and promotions in karaoke clubs, and the ubiquitous karaoke scene is a beloved trope in movies and TV, from “My Best Friend’s Wedding” to “Ted Lasso.” 

Toshi has had one restaurant or another over the years, and he now runs a respected sushi counter on Japanese-centric Sawtelle in West Los Angeles. For a long time, he has directed an influential cooking school, condensing the wisdom of Ted’s hardcore sushi apprenticeship into digestible courses for Westerners. Toshi and I ran into each other again on the set of a television cop show where I was a writer. Our show’s season was wrapping, and according to established custom, one of our leads had ordered a special second meal as a thank you for the cast and crew. Toshi brought in his catering rig. I had loaded those very same portable sushi cases into my beat up pickup truck so long ago on many similar occasions. We exchanged a few pleasantries, smiling as we each thought about the experiences we shared so many years ago. 

By the time I had deplaned in Tokyo prepared to face a roomful of executives, I had come a long way from the shy outsider who had a drink poured over his head. I never saw Emiko again, but she was a part of my experience that I continued to cherish and from which I gained strength. By the time my karaoke journey ended, I was no longer a stranger to myself. I was on my way to gaining confidence that I could convert all my passions and obsessions into reality. Later in life, when it came time to incorporate for legal purposes, I gave my company a name that served as an ironic homage to my karaoke roots: Background Video Inc. And one last part of the experience never left me. Hand me a karaoke mic and I still know what I’m gonna sing: “And ever since that night we've been together, Lovers at first sight, in love forever…  It turned out so right for strangers in the night.”

Author’s Note: 

Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed for privacy reasons or through vagaries of memory.

Los Angeles native Angel Dean Lopez has joined the writing and producing staffs of a dozen network one-hour television shows, emphasizing projects with a message of inclusion, including BET’s Being Mary Jane, Judging Amy, New York Undercover, and Showtime’s Sleeper Cell.

For all rights inquiries, email team@trulyadventure.us.