“Lovers in Japan / Reign of Love” by Coldplay, Tuesday, February 21, 2023

In college, one of my literature professors made the argument that people either tend to subscribe to classicism or romanticism. After taking several classes for my major with that professor, one of my classmates analyzed the aging professor based on his own claims, and that classmate said that Dr. Sylvan was a Romantic at heart repressing his romanticism with stoic classical form. And at the time that I was in college, one of the biggest records was Coldplay's Viva La Vida or Death and All of His Friends, an album that I would argue is "The Scientist" trying to experiment with romanticism and yet only being no more than 75% convincing.

DREAMING OF THE OSAKA SUN. “Lovers in Japan” is the fifth track on Viva La Vida, sharing a track with the shorter song “Reign of Love.” Coldplay’s lead singer, Chris Martin, said of the song in 2008 to Entertainment Weekly: “No one associates romance with Japan…Everyone thinks Japan is just about Hitachi and neon signs, but every time we’re there, we see these amazing sunrises. It’s very sexy.” The player-piano/harpsichord tones outlining the song give it a classical sound, though not an East-Asian sound as the title may suggest. The song feels like a romantic getaway rather than interaction with locals, in much the way that 19th century travelogue may read, evoking the backdrop of some place new and sensational, but with the familiarity of the writer's companions. For me, the song also evokes the Romantic era in how Europeans were looking to far off destinations as the economy globalized. The ultimate expression of capitalism is to travel to a place so far away and live as comfortably as accustomed to in the traveler's home country. And then there's Giacomo Puccini's Madame Butterfly, as it was described to me in my music appreciation class in college: "it's set in Japan, but there is nothing Japanese about it." Puccini's libretto cares nothing for historical or cultural accuracy. It's a misnomer in that Japan is a signifies something exotic.

SOLDIERS, YOU’VE GOT TO SOLDIER ON. However, this is not the nineteenth century, and Japan is now a popular tourist destination. I've been twice, three times if you count a layover in Tokyo Haneda, and will probably go again if I stay in Korea. I've done the Osaka/Kyoto trip twice, once with a group of friends and once with my boyfriend. It's a fairly cheap hop-over flight from Incheon or Gimhae if you shop around. A trip anywhere can be romantic if there's a nice hotel and a nice itinerary. The images of Japan capture the mind-- eating Pacific saury or seeing Irezumi tattoos at certain places, anime, Pokemon, castles, geisha--all the while witnessing starched greetings to blowsy American tourists as I exchange a wry smile with my partner to express that I am better that. I last went to Japan in February 2018 with my boyfriend. On the Korean Air flight back to Incheon, the flight attendant talked with my partner, curious about how a two men--Korean and American--could be close friends, traveling together. My boyfriend and I may look like an odd pair in Asia. There are certainly a lot of interracial straight couples. There are also a few international gay couples, but less noticeable. Thinking back on that memory, I wonder where we will go next?

Read the lyrics on Genius.