Discovering japan/ kato's rebellion/ investigating the hostess trade/ larry encounters an ardent fan/ snake-handling is not an inherited skill/ sunrise like a nosebleed

the pacific is a big ocean, especially when you're stuck on a plane full of sleep-deprived roadhogs beginning the last fe­vered week of their two year marathon. How long have we been in the air from Auckland to Tokyo? Ten hours? Twelve hours? Long enough to get on a flight in New York, go to Ireland, do a jig, and get back to New York. Too long. I have been reading this week's Time magazine cover story about the emergence of the Pacific Rim as the future of global commerce, culture, and civilization. (On the flight from Australia to New Zealand last week we were treated to Rising Sun, in which Sean Connery outwits the unscrupulous Japanese businessmen who are taking over the world. Stage manager Tim Buckley cried, "This isn't in-flight entertainment. It's a pre-Tokyo instructional video!")

At dinnertime all the Zoo people are herded out of the plane at the Narita airport like dispeptic bison and steered through Japanese cus­toms. There is confusion, arguments with the passport officials, chang­ing of lanes and direction. As U2 pass through the processing and head toward their waiting cars flashbulbs pop, TV cameras hum, and scream­ing Asian kids run around them like moons in orbit yelling, "Adam.

Adam!"

On the long ride to Tokyo everyone is jet-lagged and shell-shocked and the landscape—initially as mundane as any suburban ring road turns surreal. The first strange sight is the magic castle tower of Japa­nese Disneyland, but it's once we start negotiating the on-ramps, offramps and elevated highways of downtown Tokyo that things become completely dislocated. See, the science fiction film Blade Runner is not a

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Projection of the future, it is a documentary about Tokyo today. I live in New York City, my office is in a skyscraper overlooking Times Square —I should not be shook by a big neon-lit urban center. But driving exhausted through Tokyo, I feel like Jethro Bodine on Krypton. There seem to be buildings made of Lego next to structures made of tinfoil next to gigantic, shining sushi knives. And whenever we come to a place in the highway where we can see any sort of horizon, the black silouettes in the distance have blinking red-lit roofs, like Christmas decorations. Like, come to think of it, the Zoo TV stage.

Electric signs cover whole sides of skyscrapers; they seem to go upward forever, blinking and swirling the whole way. In this culture we are illiterate; the symbols and slogans flashing on and off are meaning­less shapes to us. The buildings our cars slip between are not just enormous, they are packed together. Instead of celebrating height, as the freestanding towers of Manhattan or Chicago do, they exude density. In New York the skyscrapers have enough space between them that their effect is to make you say, "Wow, are they big!" In Tokyo the jam-packed buildings make you say, "Wow, am I small!"

As we circle down a highway ramp toward our hotel Bono points out a building that looks like a concrete beehive. Each egg-shaped bump, he says, is a little sleeping pod with a porthole. Japanese businessmen rent them as places to crash in the city, when they work too late to make the journey home. They are like the cabins on a submarine. They are like the sleep "coffins" in William Gibson's Neuromancer. Remember the wild side of Gibson's Tokyo is called Night City, a hot-wired version of Nighttown.

Eventually we arrive at a Four Seasons Hotel in a Japanese garden and collect our room keys. Everyone who wants to go out is to meet up in the hospitality suite in an hour. I get to my room, drop my suitcase, and head to the can. I am impressed to discover a toilet worthy of Darth Vader in a small water closet off the bathroom. It has an armrest on which are knobs, buttons, and gauges with Japanese labels. The only English instruction is hanging on the wall: "Important—do not try to operate this automatic toilet without first being seated." (It is hung where you would not normally see it unless seated already.) Well, that convinces me not to put my butt anywhere near that toilet seat until I figure out what this contraption can do. What if there's an enema button? Or a suction switch? I lift the seat, lean forward cautiously and

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—ready to jump back if something explodes—hit the nearest knob. A stream of water shoots out of the bowl and squirts me in the eye. I have found the "bidet" option. I clean up and go to meet the others. Four of my fellow travelers admit to having done exactly the same thing. Perhaps our Japanese hosts are watching us through one-way mirrors, laughing.

While people gather in the hospitality room the TV is switched to CNN—the one constant in all our travels—and the news summary adds to the general feeling of psychic overload. The little kidnapped girl Winona Ryder was searching for has been found dead. The peace movement in Northern Ireland may have been derailed by the killing of a group of Catholics in Belfast. Princess Diana, distraught at her harass­ment by the gossip press, tearfully announces she is stepping down from public life. The Serb shelling of a Sarajevo market results in heavy casualties. President Clinton is being assailed by American Muslims for meeting with Salman Rushdie. Michael Jackson, responding to a plea from his mother, says he will return to the U.S. to fight the charges being leveled against him. The neo-Nazis who bombed the homes of the Turks in Germany have been sentenced to life in prison. And the builders of the Channel Tunnel that will connect Britain to Europe have officially handed over the keys to the operators. Paul McGuinness ar­rives with the news that U2's "Lemon" is number one on the dance charts. It doesn't seem like such a big deal.

Everyone is tired. Everyone's nerves are on edge. Everyone wants to cram as much as possible into the last week of the tour. Tonight the Zoo Zeitgeist is zeroing in on a fish market/restaurant in Kabuki-cho that Regine Moylett's brother—who lives in Tokyo—recommended. Our Japanese guides and drivers do not think it is a good idea, that is a bad part of town, but Bono insists and off everyone goes, with a carload of twitchy local "guides" following behind. They have been provided by the concert promoter, and U2 are sure they are not here to serve the band as much as to control them.

Rolling though Tokyo, Bono says quietly, "The strangest thing has happened. I really miss my dog. That's never happened to me before. You know, on a long tour you do hear people saying they miss their pets. I never have. But last night I started really missing my dog. It's very odd." He stares for a long time out the car window and then says, distracted but dead serious, " 'Cause I don't have a dog."

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