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\u201cAnthony Bourdain.\u201d \u201cAnthony Bourdain Osaka Bar.\u201d \u201cAnthony Bourdain Osaka Hanshin Tigers Bar.\u201d \u201c\u30a2\u30f3\u30bd\u30cb\u30fc\u30dc\u30fc\u30c7\u30a3\u30f3\u5927\u962a\u962a\u795e\u30bf\u30a4\u30ac\u30fc\u30b9\u5c45\u9152\u5c4b.\u201d I Googled all these search terms, and no small number of variations on them, one afternoon in a coffee shop at Gimpo International Airport. Soon to catch a flight to Osaka,\u00a0my favorite city in Japan<\/a>, I\u2019d just found out that Toracy, my baseball bar of choice there, had shut down since last I visited. Searching for another Tigers-supporting watering hole, I learned that no less exacting a foreign experience-seeker than Anthony Bourdain began an episode of his travel show\u00a0No Reservations\u00a0<\/em>in one. Considerably rowdier than Toracy, from what I gathered, it somehow also turned out to be all but secret: all the Googling I could do before takeoff time produced no positive identification.<\/p>\n
Later that evening, having arrived in Osaka and needing directions to a restaurant, I turned on my phone to a notice that Bourdain had died. Sheer unexpectedness had made the death top-story notification material, but so had the high esteem in which the dead was widely held. As with the passing of every celebrity in the age of social media, seemingly all who could claim even the most tenuous connection with Bourdain stepped forward to tell their stories in tribute. Not only did I have no stories, I never even got to know the man\u2019s body of work, apart from reading here and there in his books. I always\u00a0meant\u00a0<\/em>to catch up on his writings and television programs, but never did.<\/p>\n
I found myself reminded of that intention whenever I heard Bourdain had traveled to and appreciated one of my own places of interest in the world. He first made it to Korea in 2006,\u00a0on his Travel Channel show\u00a0No Reservations<\/em><\/a>. I didn\u2019t see it then, but I\u2019d been harboring slow-burning Korea-related interests of my own: the following year I fell into studying the Korean language, a pursuit that played a part in my move, a few years thereafter, to Los Angeles\u2019s Koreatown. In the middle of my time there, Bourdain turned up and made the neighborhood the subject of\u00a0an episode of\u00a0Parts Unknown<\/em><\/a>, his CNN successor to\u00a0No Reservations<\/em>. Just a few months before I\u00a0relocated from Los Angeles to Seoul<\/a>, Bourdain returned to Korea to\u00a0give it the\u00a0Parts Unknown\u00a0<\/em>treatment<\/a>, a hard-drinking, hard-eating, backwards-told travelogue that surely qualifies as avant-garde by the standards of mainstream cable television.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n