Nighties in "The Nag"
Doug Breté
There was a period when Nagoya's international community was small enough that you knew, more or less, everybody. I am not going to romanticize it, but it sure was a fun time to be in "The NAG" as we called it back then.
The "gaijin" scene was close — extremely close.
No bitching please - that is EXACTLY how we referred to ourselves.
People showed up at the same places three or four times a week — if not more.
A visa acceptance became an event. Someone visiting from America with extra deodorant hit the English Teacher Telegraph like lightning.
Nagoya was mostly three floors high — unless you count the Nagoya International Center — the Instagram of its time. The NIC towered above Nagoya, which had not yet sprawled high or very wide. It was where you found a job, an apartment, a wealthy student who would pay you bubble gold for an hour of your "Engrish."
What had been a sparse huddle of foreigners began to grow in the 90s and early 2000s. The rare out of the blue "sighting" of another foreigner slowly turned into "Hey — what's happening tonight?"
You knew everyone's name. Where they lived. Where they worked.
Who they were sleeping with.
It was almost incestuous.
On second thought...
It was.
People fell into each other's lives because there wasn't much else to fall into. You made friends fast. Relationships often became close, yet difficult to categorize.
That was part of it that made it so... rare.
What wasn't part of it: smartphones, social media, the slow dispersal of everyone into their own "content" feed. That came later. For a while it was just people in a bar, and the bar was small.
English-language theater has been part of the Nagoya international community since the seventies. Real productions, committed people, a tradition of dedication to performance.
But what those productions rarely depicted was the life being lived offstage — what it actually felt like to be foreign in Japan at a specific moment, in this specific city, in a specific place.
That particular interior has gone mostly unexamined.
Which brings us to Aya Kawakami, founder and director of Theatre Iridescence. Aya noticed the same thing about Nagoya during the 90s that Shakespeare saw in Messina where he set his play "Much Ado About Nothing."
She recognized the gossip, loyalty and cliques — the people falling in and out of love with each other.
She noticed that a town where everyone knows everyone generates its own "weather."
She saw a similarity with Shakespeare's soldiers coming back from battle looking for somewhere to belong. In Aya's Nagoya, it was the language barrier, the low-grade navigation of being a fish slightly out of water — and then going somewhere to just be around people who felt more or less the same.
So she set her upcoming production of Much Ado About Nothing in a late-90s Nagoya expat bar.
And the fit is exact.
The play is set right at that moment — before everything sped up, before the community broadened and fragmented simultaneously, before the intimacy that came from genuine proximity got replaced by something hard to describe. Just something… else.
Aya calls it a love letter to the community she's known most of her life — its beauty, its scars, its faults. During scene changes, she's projecting real photographs from that period. People who were there. Some still here, some not. Most of them ghosts to many. Most of them friends to me.
The production runs for three days at Chikusa Playhouse, six performances, starting June 19th.
Tickets are still available.
If you were in Nagoya in the nineties, you'll recognize it.
If you weren't, this is a rare chance to get a seat with a view.
The Details
Much Ado About Nothing
A Theatre Iridescence Production
Venue:
Chikusa Playhouse
Nagoya City Chikusa Cultural Mini Theater
Dates:
Friday, June 19–Sunday, June 21, 2026
Showtimes:
Friday, June 19 — 18:30
Saturday, June 20 — 11:00 / 17:00
Sunday, June 21 — 11:00 / 16:00
Price:
General admission — ¥3,000
Students — ¥2,500
Student ID required at entry
Address:
3-6-10 Chikusa,
Chikusa-ku, Nagoya
Tickets:
https://peatix.com/event/4888982
Theatre Iridescence Website
Access
By Subway:
Take the Sakuradori Line to Fukiage Station.
Use Exit 7.
The venue is about 2 minutes on foot.
Alternative Route:
Take the Higashiyama Line or Sakuradori Line to Imaike Station.
Use Exit 9.
The venue is about 11 minutes on foot.
Nagoya Buzz
MAP
Further Reading
Nagoya Buzz
Nagoya Buzz
Doug Breté
Leave a Comment