Eastern Exploration

Going out in Fukuoka

Between the tourist literature that promoted the city as a getaway town and what we’d seen with our own eyes in the red-light district, it was pretty clear that Fukuoka was a good place for nightlife. The Let’s Go had a few ideas, and one sounded particularly interesting: Club Q’s. This place was set up to host 1,000 people at a shot and played a different kind of electronic music on every night of the week, from hard house to trance to hip-hop/reggae to para-para and “black music.” (Para-para, as Anja informed me, is a really fast sort of Japanese techno.) We happened to be in town for the “black music” night, which was a mysterious sort of label for music of any kind, but we figured it was probably just a geeky Harvard travel-writer’s way of describing dark/goth music. (Which would be absolutely perfect for Anja.) We set out to find the place, hopping on the subway for a couple stops to get to the shopping district, where we’d previously explored the huge underground mall. (Yeah, the one with enough fur to clothe every African on the savannah.) Our directions were very simple: “Three minutes’ walk north of [the shopping mall].” We were hoping that we were being given simple directions because the place was impossible to miss. We were wrong. We figured out north, took a walk, and found nothing remotely like a 1,000-person dance club. Thankfully there were a number of young party people out on the streets, and Anja’s Goth Lolita outfit won us instant popularity with a passel of girls who were on their way to karaoke. They did their very best to give us directions with what little English they had, and what guesses they could make about the location of our elusive Club Q’s, and we left them satisfied with the knowledge that we could at least meet up with them later and hear them sing to each other in Japanese. After canvassing the area a second time and extending our search in a few directions, and asking for directions from several sets of club kids who had never heard of Club Q’s, we finally ran into a couple of friendly young guys in big poofy jackets and baseball caps who told us that it had closed some time ago. Well, consider that mystery solved. Got any recommendations? we asked. Where are you going? Turns out they were headed to a reggae party, and were happy to bring us along. A brief walk found us in front of the club, where these guys were given a warm welcome by a third of the crowd chilling outside. Upstairs we paid a $12.50 cover that included a drink, and joined a light crowd in a smallish smoky room listening to a DJ spin funky hip-hoppish reggae. That was around midnight. The lineup scrawled (in English!) on a whiteboard listed music playing til 6am, and sure enough, the crowd didn’t really arrive until about 1:30. That was when they had the main event: three consecutive hip-hop dance shows by local troupes, followed by a freestyling competition. The performers were spirited amateurs, and they were great fun to watch. We had to drag ourselves away after a few hours, in order to get some sleep.

posted by Noah Flower @ 1:20 PM