#SONG BAR IN TOKYO PATCH#

A place where ubiquitous salarymen and Shimokitazawa hipsters and Harajuku girls sit slurping soba stool to stool where ancient temples and centuries-old onigiri stalls coexist alongside hedgehog cafés, sky-high skyscrapers, and lights that never seem to stop flashing, like Times Square on steroids. Tokyo is a confederacy of contradictions. Jimmie Tokita and His Mountain Playboys, in front of the Tennessee club in Tokyo in the 1960s. “I’m very happy,” Natsuco Grace tells me, dancing done, as she stands by my side and cradles my elbow in her hand. But in this basement bar in Tokyo, somehow, I feel closer than I’ve ever been. Throughout it all, the hits keep rotating, beamed out from speakers in every corner: “There’s a Girl in Texas” by Trace Adkins, “Stars Over Texas” by Tracy Lawrence.

Another asks me what I think of the Chicks singer Natalie Maines speaking out against the 2003 U.S. One woman tells me she loves Miranda Lambert and that she's seen Luke Bryan in concert in North Carolina and Oklahoma.

Other guests sit and pick at chicken-fried steak and Texas-shaped waffles, or palm Michelob Ultras sweating through their paper shirts. The city’s top line-dancer and the founder of Dancin’ Texas, she leads crowd members through boot-stomping steps. Natsuco Grace deposits me at the bar, and I swivel to face the room. Takeshi and Natsuco Grace's love for Texas has not gone unrequited: In 2011, they were made honorary Texans by then-Governor Rick Perry. Even the wood that panels the walls is from Texas, sourced from an abandoned barn in Denton County and shipped 6,400 miles across the ocean. Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, I’ll live and die in Texas. Cow Country-Watch Your Step! screams another. In 2005, the couple opened Little Texas in a former ramen restaurant and filled it with bull horns, posters, postcards, and Texas-themed paraphernalia that they picked up from their travels. Not 15,” Natsuco Grace says twice, making a “5” and a “0” with her hands. Together, the duo estimate they’ve been to Texas more than 50 times. Her husband, Takeshi Yoshino, has himself been traveling to Texas every year for the past 26 years they return annually to buy barbecue sauce in bulk and to shop for the boots, belt buckles, and big hats that make up much of of their wardrobe. She fell hard for it all: the customs, the drawl, the dining, the country, the country music. Natsuco Grace first went to the Lone Star State decades ago to practice her horseback-riding skills. But Texas, says Natsuco Grace Yoshino, Texas is where the magic is. Some of the decor inside Little Texas in Meguro, Tokyo. “We’ve been waiting for you,” she cries, before drawing me into her arms and squeezing me tight. A woman in a pink western shirt and cowboy boots approaches, takes my hands in hers, and cranes back her head, as if drinking in a long-lost relative. A slim man dressed head to toe in dark denim swings through my line of sight, tipping his 10-gallon hat in acknowledgement of disrupting my reverie. Glasses clink down on the wooden bar, and Strait sings on. His voice, smooth as rivers of syrup, floats down and around me, pooling at my feet.

#SONG BAR IN TOKYO PATCH#

There he is on the ceiling, smiling down from a poster, there he is on a $1 bill, sheathed in plastic, pinned on the back of the bar next to a Texas A&M Forest Service patch and a bumper sticker for Fort Worth’s Martin House Brewing Company. George Strait wasn’t supposed to be in Japan, but when I push open the door to a bar called Little Texas on a cool Tokyo night, the so-called King of Country is here: hand on his hip, hand on his wide-brimmed white hat, a crooked smile tilted to the left, like a puppeteer pulled the strings unevenly.

Song bar in tokyo