Elvis Presley played over 1,600 concerts in his lifetime. Every single one of them was in North America. He never sang a note in Britain, or Germany, or Australia, or Japan. Fans in those countries bought his records by the million and waited their entire lives for a ticket that never went on sale, and then he died at 42 without ever meeting a single one of them.
So here is something that will get you. If you go to a park in Tokyo on a Sunday afternoon, you will find a circle of men dancing to Elvis Presley. They have been doing it every week for over thirty years.
First, why he never came. The blame sits almost entirely with his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, who controlled every decision in Elvis’s career and turned down enormous offers to take him overseas. Parker had a secret. He was an illegal immigrant with no passport, and if he left America he might never have been let back in. So Elvis stayed. His fans abroad got records, films, and photographs, and that was all they were ever going to get.
But the records were enough. Rock and roll reached Japan around 1955, and Japanese teenagers heard Elvis the same way everyone else did — crackling out of a radio, sounding like nothing they had ever heard before. They gave the style their own name, “rokabiri.” Pop music eventually pushed it aside, as pop music always does. The look never went away.
Elvis Fans Dancing In Tokyo
Which brings us to Yoyogi Park. Walk toward the Harajuku entrance on a Sunday afternoon, and you will hear “Jailhouse Rock” coming out of a portable speaker. Standing around it are Japanese men, many of them now in their fifties and sixties, in leather jackets and pointed boots, with pompadours so tall they take daily maintenance and a serious amount of styling product. Their jackets are often embroidered with Japanese kanji stitched next to American designs. Between songs, they pull combs out of their pockets and put any stray hair back where it belongs.
And they can genuinely dance. This is not people messing about — the routines are rehearsed and choreographed, performed in formation with spins timed to land together. The best-known crews have their names stitched across their backs, The Strangers and The Lebels, and they arrive with speakers and deck chairs and stay all day. Elvis is the centerpiece, though Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry get a turn too.
Elvis Fans – Rockabilly dancers in Yoyogi Park, Tokyo, Japan
Even the authorities like them. Local police reportedly view the dancers as a good thing for that corner of the park, because their steady weekly presence keeps real trouble from settling there — and because they always clean up after themselves before going home. It isn’t a closed club either. Teenagers who have just discovered the music turn up and dance beside men old enough to remember when Elvis was still alive.
So think about what that actually means. A man from Tupelo, Mississippi was never allowed to visit Japan, because of a secret his manager kept from him until after he was dead. He never saw a Japanese audience. He never knew they were out there. And nearly fifty years after he was buried, men who were never alive to see him perform still put on his clothes, do their hair like his, carry his songs out into a public park, and dance. He never got to go to them. So they keep showing up for him.