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I don't know it just seems very Japanese to me. People in a club all facing the same way. Waiting for instructions.

This is just my feeling, but being in a Japanese club is pretty much the same thing as being in a high school disco again. You don't want to just let loose, you can't: no one, obviously including you, really knows how to dance, and everyone is looking at every minute movement of everyone else - instantly latching onto any tiny occurrence to avoid the frank fact that you are in a dancehall and aren't dancing. Oh, shit, look, look, he just talked to her; hey, oh my god, check out that dude's clothes - oh ha ha, etc.

You have to be immune to embarrassment, or mind-boggled, fucked-up on some kind of drugs to dance here. So, unless you're in either of those categories, you're stuck with pretending to be ultra-cool. Pretending to be some kind of dance deity, who doesn't dance because it would sully your excellence to do so in the company of these spackers.

It is, in all senses, projection: loading all your own shortcomings onto innocent bystanders and unconnected third parties. You become so self-conscious, you can't even lift a drink to your mouth without purposefully planning how you're going to do it beforehand. You project your complete attempt at being the shit-hottest person in the club - gimmie-five slap and grasping casual acquaintances like they were war buddies you went through life-and-death with, twisting your shoulders back and forth to the music in between shouting mundane conversation about have you seen so and so into someone's ear, and nudging the tip of your tongue out between your lips and slightly shaking your head in a "no no no" gesture like you're really feeling this beat when you have nothing else to do - not realizing your projection just makes you look shit. Not shit-hot. Everyone else doing the same thing has noticed so, and is talking about you: oh, look, look...

In the European parties I've been to, 90% of the clubbers are in those exempt categories mentioned above. By drugs brains are clubbed into jibbering wrecks, while bodies jiggle away; or it's people who are just totally incognizant of a sense of shame. That's fine, that's how it should be I suppose. They both dance, they both let loose.

Whenever I go to a Japanese party though, and let me emphasize whenever I go and not Japanese party, the demographic seems to be turned on its head. 10% are raving crazy people, or raving crazy people; and 90% are sad wall flowers projecting prissy ubermensch aura. In their own Japanese way.

I'm a sad wall-flower. And a poser, and a charade.

I do do it in my own way though.

I won't say "but at least I own up to it", because I think everyone who puts on the aires knows inside that they are crap, and so, in a way, own up to it. But, I am prepared to flog myself publicly on this blog post. Why do I do that? (not why do I flog myself publicly, although, come to think of it, it may have a connection... Anyway...)

As mentioned before there's a definite ego defense mechanism at play here - or several. Projection, isolation (see this blog), and perhaps regression too. Psychoanalytical exploration isn't what I'd like to do though, for one I don't know how, and for two, if anyone actually reads this, they wouldn't appreciate it as much as realtalk.

The realtalk reasons for why I, and loads of others like me, do it is... well, it's easier than talking a chance. Easier than letting loose. Or we're just wankers. But, giving us the benefit of the doubt, mainly fear of letting loose. And still... no, that doesn't yet feel like the whole story though does it. It is something more than just stage-fright, although this is a huge factor; I think on reflection our frustration at the social norm of clubbing being what young adults and cool dudes do is the deeper reason.

We have to get into a little psychobabble now, and mention "reaction" defenses: taking up the opposing view to the latent one, the one domestic, in you. We hate clubs, and clubbers, yet being put inside a club, we decide to out-club the clubbers. We don all their anti-mainstream manerisms, and turn them into an anti-dance weapon, an anti-anti-mainstream death ray, then launch it back at the funky club going clubbers in an ultimate strike of too-cool-for-school ennui, and nightlife high ground snobbery.

If we don't like clubs, why go. Well there it is, but it's the done thing isn't it - like those ski-type wrap around sunglasses in Western society: every fucker has a pair, and every fucker wears them. We just go with the flow. Because if we didn't, those of us who have a mild dislike for clubs would be stuck with dinner parties, and the theatre. Minus those near and dear to us. And then what's the point. So we pretend to be up for the club 110%, over compensating for how not up for the club we are, and go and have a horrible time. Laughing at people who have the balls to dance, just pissing away all our money on pretentious liquor in void-filling chain-drinking, and making shit conversation that goes nowhere, right down the earhole of someone we barely know.

Imagine that in a second language, and you have club night in Japan. For me.