Cletus' First Collegiate Dictionary of Japanese Chin Music
fureeta
They are the happily unrepresented faction of Japanese usually in their mid-twenties working part time jobs and enjoying life. To the untrained eye one might erroneously define them as hippies. However there’s something entirely more edgy and interesting about these fureeta than can be found under the skin of most modern Phish lovers. They abhor the salaryman work-till-you-drop corporate devotion that their parents and most of their peers embrace. They lack the overwhelming designer label obsession that has made Japan famous but can still appreciate a good pair of Gucci jeans.
They may live in Ebisu, but unlike the investment banker next door, their rent isn’t six-thousand dollars a month. It’s more like two-hundred dollars a month with a bath one hundred meters up the street and available at three bucks a pop.
They may work for a three-month stretch as a foreign jazz ensemble tour coordinator, one day living in lavish hotels and sipping gin and tonics next to Tito Puentes, only to pack up the next day and live on a small uninhabited island off the southern coast of Okinawa. When they arrive on this island, they may find that it is actually inhabited – by a small naked man who lives in a series of circus tents given to him by local fishermen and drug traffickers.
They may have visited over eighty countries by the age of twenty-six simply by working to travel. They may have spent two nights at the North Pole and lost a pinky toe. They may have reverse-mugged a mugger in NYC who called them a Jap but was unaware that this Jap actually was a black belt in karate.
While the swankster hip of Tokyo are off sniffing cocaine and popping pills in the bathrooms of Roppongi nightclubs, the fureeta are sitting on tatami mats in well-lived-in eighteen-square-meter rooms, smoking weed imported from Thailand and listening to reggae. They are the simple-living, good-music-sex-and-travel-craving chunk of Tokyo that nobody ever hears from because they don’t care if they’re heard or not. They aren’t preaching one thing and living another. They aren’t preaching. They’re just living.