This a peculiar Japanese issue. It’s an obsession of sorts. But it gets weirder. My buddy in Tokyo, Moro Takahashi, was telling me a couple of days ago that Japanese teenage boys will literally lock themselves in their rooms with a guitar for three months to completely learn a song like Led Zepplin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ And they learn the songs note perfect. But the dichotomy is that the time they devoted to learning one song — could have been applied to actually learning how to play the guitar. In their case — they really don’t learn how to play the guitar at all — they just learn how to play a song on the guitar. It seems a bit weird from an evolutionary standpoint. In three months you could have had more applied knowledge than just one song.
