The Vapors' "Turning Japanese" is one of those songs with no way to deduce the meaning aside from the singer outright telling you. How does one "turn Japanese"? Is there a machine for this? Is it, like, a racist thing? Or is it about that stuff you do alone in your bedroom (which, as some amateur lyrics detectives have pointed out, could cause you to make a particular face)? The answer to every theory is "no." According to singer David Felton, it's about "all the cliches about angst and youth and turning into something you didn't expect to." So, the song's character is angry, depressed, confused, and becoming something unexpected—in this case, he's Hulk-raged into a Japanese person. So it's a literal meaning, which probably nobody thought of except for the writer. But why Japanese? Because it was the first thing the band thought of, apparently. As Felton noted, "It could have been Portuguese, Lebanese, anything that fitted with that phrase." Nothing completes a poetic metaphor like words picked because they sound good with other words.