Songfacts®:

• Rivers Cuomo wrote this love song for his Japanese wife, Kyoko Ito. In Verse 1 the Weezer frontman recounts the way she used to avoid the magazine racks in supermarkets because of her emotional reaction to reading bad news. Kyoko explained in a Genius annotation:
  
  "I had this phobia for 30 plus years. I knew that something was wrong with me, but I never thought it was something you can fix. Recently I finally decided to seek professional help and tackle on this issue. It might be good thing to be sensitive to others' feeling, but it got to the point that it is interfering not only my life, but my family's happiness. And I fed up with being depressed.
  
  After started treatment, I started to pay attention to countless not 'news-worthy' good news. The world is not that bad."
• Rivers Cuomo also wrote about Kyoto on the 2010 Hurley track "Unspoken" which is about the difficulties of adjusting to married life.
• Cuomo disclosed to Kerrang!: "This has the same bassline as a song on our first record called Only In Dreams. And in fact that bassline I took from a Smokey Robinson song. So this was a compound theft!
  
  Sometimes it happens – you write something you think is original and then you realize it sounds like something else. But then sometimes you hear something on the radio and think, 'Oh, that's a really cool idea, I'm going to use that.'"