A still from the music video to "Lost in Japan" composited with a map of Japan and its surroundings. A young man sits in the back seat of a car driving through a city at night, looking wistfully out the window. His gaze is directed to the right of the frame, where the map is, but the look in his eyes is far more distant.

Do you got plans tonight?
Song’s “a couple of hundred miles from Japan”, but I —
I was thinking other lyrics mean that can’t be right,
And I can’t get this off of my mind.

Shawn Mendes’ song “Lost in Japan” has had me geographically confused since I first heard it covered by Scary Pockets. If you haven’t listened to the lyrics, the song is about a person who is thinking about their crush and the possibility of taking a last-minute flight to Japan to see them. As the chorus goes:

Do you got plans tonight?
I’m a couple hundred miles from Japan, and I
I was thinking I could fly to your hotel tonight
‘Cause I can’t get you off my mind

The question I can’t get off my mind is: where is the song supposed to be taking place? From the chorus, we can infer that

  1. the crush is somewhere in Japan
  2. the singer is outside of Japan, and
  3. both people are close enough to an international airport for one to entertain the idea of flying to the other’s hotel.

The most likely candidates for airports within “a couple hundred miles from Japan” are in South Korea.