Christmas in Japan

Christmas in Japan was always a little surreal. Decorations went up in the department stores and Christmas music played over the loudspeakers. Stores held Christmas sales. You could find stands selling live Christmas trees, and "Christmas cakes" appeared in markets in time for the holiday. There was a big, breathless run-up to the holiday, and then . . .

. . . nothing happened. It was just another work-day, except for the gaijin taking personal vacation days so they could have the day off. By the early 1990s, the Japanese had perfected Christmas as the perfect capitalist holiday -- all the spending, none of the paid days off for the workers, and no religion to get in the way of the consumerism.

I arrived in Japan in 1991, just in time for the first post-Bubble Christmas. That is to say, the Bubble-era consumerist customs still survived, but fewer people could afford to engage in them because year-end bonuses had crashed. But for those who still had money, an acceptable Christmas celebration (which took place on Christmas Eve, because Christmas day was a work day) consisted of: (1) dinner at an expensive French restaurant (Italian for those who could not afford French); (2) a gift for the girlfriend from Tiffany; (3) a Mercedes or BMW for transportation (rental for those who did not own one); and (4) a reservation at a hotel, preferably an upscale one, because most unmarried salarymen and office ladies lived in company dormitories or, in the case of many young women, with their parents. Because of the high demand for hotel rooms on Christmas Eve, booking (and paying for) a hotel room well in advance was absolutely necessary, and I heard stories from Japanese friends of people who paid for a room a full year in advance on the chance that they might have a girlfriend at Christmastime. (I always wondered what happened to the guys who had a room but no girlfriend on Christmas Eve. There must have been a secondary market for unnecessary, paid-up hotel rooms.)

My own Christmases in Japan were of a much more traditional nature, spent with my friends Benjamin and Junko, and my girlfriend of the moment, at Benjie and Junko's apartment in the Nakameguro section of Tokyo. Benjie had been my mother's student when she taught high school in Wisconsin in the 1960s and ironically had reestablished contact with my mother not long before I went to Japan. He and Junko semi-adopted me, and while I was in Japan I spent most major holidays with them -- including Thanksgiving (they not only had an oven -- a relative rarity in Japan in those days -- but managed to find whole turkeys, too), Christmas, and the last day of each Sumo tournament. Benjie, who could work himself into a lather of indignation about Japan's hollow aping of American Christmas traditions, was particularly keen on making the Christmas season as "Christmas-y" as possible, and, in addition to always having a live and fully decorated Christmas tree, Benjie decreed that, between Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, only Christmas music played in the house. (Benjie had amassed dozens of 1000-yen bootleg Christmas CDs from music stalls in Tokyo for this very purpose, so, fortunately, there was little repetition.)

I would usually arrive at their place around noon on Christmas Day, which allowed me to do my Christmas shopping that morning -- the stores being both open, because it was not a holiday, and empty, because most people were at work. A full-0n traditional Christmas dinner, several bottles of wine, and the exchange of presents would follow. Benjie and Junko were excellent present-buyers, always managing to find something unusual and welcome for me. Spending Christmas with them always took the sting of homesickness out of the holiday and removed some of the dissonance that accompanied spending Christmas in country that had no Christmas tradition.

In 1993, Junko got a promotion that required her and Benjie to move to California, leaving me with a big hole in my life in Tokyo, as well as at a loss for what to do for my last Christmas in Japan. I don't actually recall what I did. I had no girlfriend at the time, and I think I took the day off on principle and spent it by myself. I do know that I bought some Christmas music to listen to in my apartment -- the only Christmas CDs I own are 1000-yen bootlegs from Japan. But my wife won't let me play them when she's around.

ATMs Need Vacations, Too

Thanks to Citibank and the competition presented by its 24-hour ATM machines, ATMs in Japan now provide money outside of regular banking hours. But this wasn't always the case.

Back in the early 1990s, ATM machines had limited hours. Although they were open later than banks, their hours were only slightly longer -- usually until 7:00 p.m. They were also closed on Sundays and holidays. There was many a time when I tried to withdraw cash after work or on a Sunday and found the doors to the bank locked, with me cursing the stupidity of ATMs ever being unavailable.

According to my Japanese friends, the reason was the need for maintenance. In the US, if you went to an ATM outside banking hours and it was out of money, you would go to the next ATM down the line and think nothing of it. Apparently, in Japan, causing a customer to go to the next ATM would cause a shame worthy of ritual suicide with a long, sharp blade. So, rather than inconvenience customers by forcing them to go to the next ATM if the first one was out of money, Japanese banks elected to deny their customers all access to their money after 7:00 pm on weekdays and all day on Sundays and holidays.

The lack of access to ATM machines nearly caused me to starve over the new year holiday in 1993. New Year's Day is probably the most important holiday on the Japanese calendar. It used to be celebrated on the lunar new year -- what we in the west know as "Chinese New Year." However, when the Japanese began to adopt all things Western in the late 19th century, they adopted the western calendar and the January 1st New Year's Day along with it. Most businesses throw in a couple of extra days off at the holiday, so with the weekend, you usually get at least five days off. During the 1992-1993 new year holiday, I forgot that the ATMs would be closed. I went to the bank and found not only that it would be closed that day, but that it would be closed for two more days after that as well. Having spent all my cash on hand in the expectation that I could just go to the bank, I literally ran out of cash.

My savior was the fact that doing laundry in Tokyo was so expensive. Each load of laundry at the local laundromat cost 600 or 700 yen ($6-7), so I got into the habit of saving all of my 100 yen coins for laundry. After striking out at the bank, I went home wondering how I was going to eat that weekend and discovered my stash of 100 yen coins. The bowl contained 2000 yen or so, which was enough for me to buy food at the supermarket for the next couple of days. Needless to say, the cashier was quite surprised when I paid entirely in coins.

Why it did not occur to me to borrow money from a friend until the ATMs opened again, I do not know. Perhaps it would have dawned on me eventually if I had not discovered my laundry coin hoard. Nevertheless, I would never found myself in that predicament in the first place if Japanese ATM machines didn't need holidays, too.

Halloween in Tokyo: Meishi Man Strikes Again

The Yamanote Line is a Japan Rail surface line that circles downtown Tokyo in about an hour. In the late 1980s or early 1990s, a tradition developed among gaijin in Tokyo to ride the Yamanote Line one full loop on Halloween -- in costume.

I was ignorant of this tradition my first Halloween in Japan and purposefully ignored it my second. But in 1993, in my third year in Japan, my friend Dave S. -- Meishi Man -- convinced me to join him and his girlfriend Chieko for the annual circumnavigation of Tokyo. Although generally I avoided engaging in the kind of gaijin activities that said to Japanese, "We don't care about your customs and rules, we're just gonna have fun!," I knew this was my last chance to experience this event, and I was curious about what would happen.

On the evening of October 31, 1993, hundreds of gaijin, some in costume, some (like us) not, packed the southbound Yamanote Line platform at Shibuya Station, having heard through the grapevine to board the 9:06. Who knows how the train was selected -- whether an actual person dictated the time and place and sent word through friends to disperse through the gaijin community, or whether it was a decision of the collective gaijin consciousness in Tokyo -- but there we were, all waiting on the same platform at the same time, like a pre-email/cellphone/text messaging flash mob. Most of us had taken the precaution of drinking heavily before arriving, a party atmosphere pervaded the crowd, and as 9:06 approached, the anticipation and excitement grew, just like in the last minutes before midnight on New Year's Eve.

In Tokyo, the trains around 9:00 pm are very crowded, as that is the time when the after-work drinking parties break up and the salarymen begin their trek home to darkest Yokohama, Chiba, Saitama, and Machida. Shibuya is one of Tokyo's major interchange stations, where commuters disembark from the Yamanote Line and board lines to the suburbs. When the 9:06 pulled in, hundreds of bleary-eyed commuters had to navigate their way through the crush of costumed foreigners, and then a wave of boisterous gaijin rushed the train.

I distinctly remember the look of sheer surprise on the face of one salaryman as dozens foreigners, many in costume, and most of us drunk, crammed aboard. Suddenly, the car was packed as tight as the morning rush, but without people respecting any of the etiquette that makes packed trains in Japan bearable. Gaijin shouted to friends at the other end of the car. They swung on the hanging straps. One guy even climbed up onto the overhead luggage racks and rode lying down. The same scene was no doubt playing itself out up and down the train. Within a stop or two, every commuter had exited our car. When the train pulled into the next station, only the very intrepid commuter boarded, and most waited for the next one.

The train quickly grew hot, and windows were opened. (The Japanese train systems turn the air-conditioning on and off according to the calendar and not temperature of the car, so in the spring the ceiling fans start turning on a set day, then the air-conditioning, and then, at last, both. In the fall, the reverse happens on a set schedule. No matter how hot it gets after the air-conditioning is turned off, it won't be turned back on until the next summer.) Chieko, Meishi Man, I and a girl I was dating were near a window. The train pulled into the next station, our window right next to the green-uniformed platform master (the guy you see on TV pushing people onto crowded trains so the doors can shut). He stood inches from the window as he scanned up and down the train to make sure all the doors were shut so he could signal the train to leave. The train started to pull out. "Grab his hat!" I joked. Meishi Man smiled as if this were the greatest idea ever conceived. He stuck his hand out the window, and in one perfectly-timed motion, swiped the platform master's hat from his head, pulled his arm in the window, and put the hat on Chieko's head, just as the train pulled away. The platform master stared at us in shock as we rolled away from him. Chieko laughed. I was mortified that Dave had actually done what I suggested. The poor guy would now have to go to his superiors, try to explain why he lost his hat, and probably get fined on top of having to shell out for a new hat. Another gaijin-hater was surely born that very night.

We got as far as Akihabara or Nippori (about 40 minutes) before I had to get off because all the beer I had consumed before boarding needed to return to nature. Meishi Man and Chieko rode on, saying that they would meet us when the train came around again. Disoriented by drink and the desperate need to pee, this made sense to me for some reason, even though it would mean an hour of waiting. We got off the train, I found the station's restroom, and then rejoined my date on the platform. We waited for a while on the platform, watching one Yamanote Line train after another arrive and depart in both directions, before realizing it was pointless to wait. Too tired for any more partying, and finding ourselves on the opposite side of Tokyo from where I lived, we decided to board another train and just go home.

How I Overcame Blatant Housing Discrimination to Rent My Own Apartment in Tokyo

During the summer of 1992, Oshikawa-san informed me that he was retiring as a dormitory manager, and moving to an apartment he had purchased in Kawasaki. For me this meant that, after a year, I'd no longer have a rent-free room in a Canon dormitory to call home and I needed to find an apartment.

My friends and adoptive parents Benjie and Junko lived in a neighborhood I liked in Tokyo called Nakameguro, and I figured I'd look there. B&J lived there, it was an easy commute to my office, and it was close to neighborhoods where I frequently hung out, like Shibuya and Aoyama. One Saturday, with Junko by my side as my Japanese guarantor (required to get an apartment lease), I began making the rounds of the local real estate agents on my quest for my first apartment ever.

In the first office we entered, Junko explained our connection, my employment situation, my Ivy League pedigree, and the kind of place I wanted. The agent listened politely and then said matter-of-factly that he could not help me. The real estate agents in Nakameguro had recently gotten together and decided not to rent any more apartments to foreigners because there were too many there already. There was nothing he could do about it. Sorry. Maybe I could try another neighborhood?

Hoping that he was just a bigoted outlier, we went to another agent and heard the same story. Too many foreigners were living in Nakameguro now, so the real estate agents had decided not to rent to foreigners anymore, lest the neighborhood get a bad reputation.

I was fuming. How can they do this? Boy, I wish you'd come to New York and see what it feels like to be rejected from an apartment because you're Japanese. Oh yeah. We have anti-discrimination laws. If this happened to you in New York, you could do something about it. That's what makes this situation suck so bad. No possibility of revenge.

Next, I decided to look in the neighborhood of Gakugei-Daigaku, which was a college neighborhood, and I figured there would be a lot of young people my age around. Junko and I went to the first agent we found near the train station. He didn't give us the speech about "no new foreigners." Good sign. The first apartment he took us to was brand new but the train passed within inches of the window. No good.

The second place he took us to was a little more expensive and a little farther from the station. But it was a dream apartment. A newly constructed place on a green, leafy block, with two rooms on the second floor of a two-story building. Great sunlight. It felt perfect. I said I'd take it. We went back to the office, and the agent got the application papers together, which I began filling out with Junko's help. The agent called the landlord to tell him he had found a renter, and the next thing I knew, the agent started apologizing to the person on the other end of the phone and bowing. (By the way, Japanese people bow on the telephone, too. Speaking and bowing are so intertwined that it's impossible to stop just because you're on the phone. At lot of Japanese-speaking foreigners pick up this habit, too.) He turned to me and started bowing and apologizing. Apparently, the landlord had said the he didn't want any foreigners in the apartment and was very angry that the agent had forgotten this fact. I left Gakugei-Daigaku without an apartment.

Eventually, the agent found me an apartment whose landlord was a corporation that did not care who lived in the building as long as they could pay the rent. It was located in Tomigaya in Shibuya Ward, within a few minutes' walk of the western edge of Yoyogi Park. On the top floor of a four-storey building, it had sliding glass windows on two sides and wraparound balconies and a roof deck that were bigger than the apartment itself and would later be the scene of many barbecues. A short walk to Yoyogi-Koen Station, the apartment was also within walking distance of Shibuya, Shinjuku, Aoyama, and Shimokitazawa, saving me countless taxi fares when I drank past the last train of the evening on weekends. The local shopping district had an old-time feel and a couple of good restaurants, and I came to love the neighborhood during the time I lived there.

By September 1992, the recession, which had started in 1990, was biting hard, and it was becoming clear that the good old days of the Bubble Economy were never coming back. Six months later, when things were even worse, one of my American friends mentioned to me that she had just rented a new apartment in Nakameguro.

Vacant apartments cost landlords money. Even foreign tenants were better than no tenants at all. So much for the realtors' anti-foreigner pact.

Korea Part II or Life as a Japanese Tourist

My second trip to Korea took place just about a year after the first, under very different circumstances. My switching jobs from Look Japan to the law firm at which I worked next did not require a trip to Seoul for a visa, since I was merely changing jobs, not work statuses. But, as it happened, my law firm selected Seoul for the bi-annual company retreat in October 1992.

Company retreats in foreign countries were a product of the Bubble Economy of the 1980s, when the Yen suddenly tripled in value thanks to the Plaza Accords, where the United States forced Japan to revalue its currency to make Japanese goods more expensive in the U.S. and U.S. goods cheaper in Japan. (Fat lot of good that did! Twenty years later, we still run a huge trade deficit with Japan, and they still don't want to buy our cars. Don't blame them.) Suddenly, traveling abroad became less expensive than traveling domestically, and a lot of Japanese companies held their company retreats overseas.

This trip took place on a whole different level than my previous trip. We were on a packaged tour and stayed at the Hilton Hotel in the middle of Seoul. We were chauffeured, shuttled, and buffeted throughout the three-day, two-night stay. During this time, I got to know what it's like to be a Japanese tourist on a packaged tour in a foreign country, and it was a great change from my trip the previous year.

We were met at the airport by a bus with a Japanese-speaking tour guide. She was very pretty, but there was something slightly sleazy about her, as if she had just graduated to tour guide from bar hostess or perhaps even prostitute. It became clear very quickly that her primary objective was to try to get us to buy stuff from people she and/or her company knew.

After getting on the bus, our very first stop was at one of the beautiful imperial palaces I had visited the previous year. However, we were hustled in as a group for a mere half-hour visit, which not only missed the most beautiful part of the palace -- a viewing pavilion surrounded by a man-made lake -- but spent 15 of the 30 minutes arranging a group picture and taking pictures of some of our female employees in traditional Korean dresses (hanbok). We then stopped at a store in Itaewon, which for those of you who know Japan, is the Roppongi of Seoul, where the American servicemen hang out at gaijin bars. We then went to the hotel to check in before being shuttled off to dinner.

Dinner was another tourist trap. We were taken to a massive restaurant with hundreds of other guests, all of whom also seemed to be Japanese. We had a private hall where we had some of the blandest, worst Korean food I have ever eaten. Although many Japanese people now eat very spicy food and you can get great Korean food in Tokyo, in those days, many if not most Japanese could not tolerate spicy food and hated the taste and smell of garlic. In fact, ninniku kusai ("reeking of garlic") used to be an ethnic slur used by Japanese to describe Koreans. (Similar to the way that WASP Americans before WWII sometimes referred to Italian Americans derisively as "garlic eaters.") As we ate our tasteless Korean food, we watched a group of Korean women clad in hanbok and sporting expressions of utter boredom perform what I assume was a "traditional" Korean dance.

After the dinner, one of the male lawyers who was widely known in the firm as a sukebe (a lecher), prevailed upon Miss Dubious Tour Guide -- whom he was hitting on very hard -- to take us to a bar for drinks. Mr. Sukebe then invited some of the female paralegals I was friends with, who felt they could not say no because of Mr. Sukebe was a lawyer and they were only paralegals. The paralegals then begged me to go along with them so they would not be alone with the lawyer. Miss Dubious Tour Guide then took us to -- of course -- a karaoke bar run by friends of hers that seemed to cater exclusively to Japanese businessmen. I have no idea how much it cost because, per Japanese etiquette, Mr. Sukebe paid the tab, but I know the whiskey was watered even before Miss Dubious Tour Guide showed us the mizuwari (whiskey & water) making skills she had no doubt perfected at her previous job, because I drank glass after glass of mizuwari and did not even develop a small buzz. Most of the evening was spent watching Mr. Sukebe trying to convince Miss Dubious Tour Guide to accompany him back to the hotel. I don't know if he succeeded or not.

When the evening was finally, mercifully over, we got into a couple of taxis to the Hilton. I said "Hilton" to the driver. He did not understand. I said "Hiruton," with a Japanese accent, thinking this might be closer to the way they said it in Korea, but still, no recognition. I tried "Hilton" a few more times with various accents until finally, the driver said "Ah, Hilton!" and we sped off.

The next day was our "free" day -- free of Miss Dubious Tour Guide and her ripoff establishments. Since I was the only one of my friends who had been to Seoul before, I led a party to one of the markets and then to Insadong Street and one of the palaces. For lunch, we decided to try to find a restaurant off the beaten track and away from tourist areas, and wandered down some of the dirt back roads of Seoul until we found a place that looked good -- no English or Japanese writing anywhere, just pictures of food in the window, as you typically find in a Korean restaurant. The male Japanese lawyers looked nervous and wondered if the restaurant was "okay" (i.e., "safe"), but fortunately the intrepid female lawyers and paralegals pushed ahead.

Inside the restaurant, we were seated at a large table on the floor. One of our group called for a "menu" -- fortunately, that word is the same in English, Japanese, and Korean. Our waitress pointed at the wall behind us, which was entirely written in hangul script. We shook our heads and said, "No, menu." The waitress once again pointed at the wall. This happened two or three more times. In the meanwhile, another waitress had quietly come up behind (the restaurant was empty because it was about 2;30 in the afternoon), and I watched her face the light bulb went off in her head and an expression of understanding came over her face. A minute later, she came back with menus with pictures on them, from which we ordered. One intrepid paralegal began ordering food from the menu, and then changed her mind halfway, and started pointing to the pictures, saying, "not this one, that one." I am sure the waitress, who spoke neither Japanese nor English as far as I could tell, thought she was saying "this one and that one, too."

It did not matter. When we got the food, it was extraordinary -- the diametric opposite of the previous night's awful tourist fare -- with kimchi that was so delicious that you couldn't stop eating it even though every bite inexorably increased the heat in your mouth to the point of being unbearable. More touring in the afternoon, and I then led the way to a restaurant near Insadong Street where I had eaten on two nights the year before.

On our last day in Seoul, we did not have time for touring, as we had an early flight back to Tokyo. We ate breakfast in the hotel and then boarded our bus to the airport. Miss Dubious Tour Guide was there again. The pictures we had been made to take on the first day suddenly appeared and were offered to us for sale as souvenirs. Sure enough, just before the entrance to Kimpo Airport, our bus stopped once more so that we could go to a tourist shop and spend the rest of our Won. At this point, I realized that the terrible food, the watered whiskey, and the rest of the attempts to separate the Japanese tourists from their money were all part of a subtle Korean effort to extract some measure of revenge on the Japanese for their repeated invasions and decades of colonial rule in Korea.

In the shop, I bought my only souvenir of the trip -- a vacuum pack of radish kimchi (gaktooki), suitable for bringing through Japanese customs, which instructed in English and Japanese to open it and allow it to ferment for a couple of days before consuming. I did, and it was delicious.

Detour to Seoul, Korea

Changing positions from an internship at Canon to a full-time job at Look Japan required a change in my visa status from intern to work permit. Because only consulates could process visa changes (as opposed to renewals), I had to leave Japan for the nearest consulate. Since Japan is an island country, it doesn't leave too many options. Most gaijin, myself included, go to Seoul, Korea, which is about a two-hour flight from Tokyo.

Many foreign employees of Look Japan had been in this position before me, and the company already had an established routine for handling it. You traveled to Seoul on Sunday, checked in at the YMCA near the Japanese consulate, showed up at the consulate first thing on Monday morning, picked up your passport with new visa stamp on Tuesday, and flew back to Tokyo that afternoon.

Seoul in 1991, at the beginning of Korea's rapid economic development, was a very interesting place. The main streets were lined with glass office buildings that looked exactly like those in Tokyo, only newer. The streets leading off the main streets were paved, but when you walked into the small alleyways behind the glass office towers, you found many an unpaved dirt or gravel road. The back streets were where you found little Buddhist temples, the restaurants where the locals ate, and interesting little shops. I wandered for hours.

The YMCA was in the "old" city, near the old imperial palaces of the Yi Dynasty and the parks now surrounding them, the night markets, and Insadong Street, which is lined with shops selling Korean pottery. In one of them, I bought a three-piece tea cup containing a handle-less cup, a filter for the tea leaves, and a cover that doubled as a saucer. (I used this throughout my stay in Japan, and would have it now but for the fact that, when I returned to New York in 1994, it was not just cracked but thoroughly pulverized into about twenty distinct pieces.) Korea is well-known in Asia for its pottery, and the better-known Japanese pottery industry owes its success entirely to Korea. At the end of the 16th century, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the warlord who unified Japan after 150 years of civil war, invaded Korea twice to punish Korea for refusing his demands to allow Japan to use Korea as a staging ground for an invasion of China. Korea, with Chinese assistance, repelled Hideyoshi both times, but Hideyoshi kidnapped hundreds of Korean potters, took them back to Japan, and installed them in various towns around Japan, many of which are still famous for their ceramics. Many of the great Japanese potters are descended from the Korean potters Hideyoshi brought back to Japan in the 1590s.

Insadong Street goes up a hill towards one of the imperial palaces and at the top of the street was what would become my favorite coffee shop of all time, called "Koffee." Following the advice of my Look Japan colleague Ann Safir, who had done this trip before me, I ignored the crazy post-modern facade with its neon sticks jutting out of the walls at crazy angles, and inside I found a zone of calm containing a shop containing a ceramics shop on one side and a coffee shop on the other that used ceramics by the same artists to serve the coffee. I made a point to go to Koffee every day I was there, and when I returned to Seoul the following year on a company trip.

I also toured as many of the imperial palaces and other historical sites as I could, such as the famous Nandaemon ("Great Southern Gate"), which once permitted access through the wall surrounding Seoul, but in 1991 was a great traffic circle and the symbol of Seoul. This great gate was burned down in the last year or two by an arsonist. Sadly, this put Nandaemon into a great tradition in Seoul, where half of the historical buildings have an inscription reading something like the following:

Built in 1490. Burned by the Japanese in 1592. Rebuilt in
1595. Burned by the Japanese in 1598. Rebuilt in 1604. Burned
by the Japanese in 1910. Rebuilt in 1945.

The Japanese and Korean cultures are probably more closely related to each other than they are to any other cultures, as Korea was the greatest single source of immigrants to Japan in Japan's pre-historical and early historical times, and most of the Chinese culture, like Buddhism and writing, that came to Japan was filtered through Korea. The Japanese imperial family is thought to be descended from Korean nobility that invaded Japan in the 3rd or 4th century, and in those early historical times, Japan maintained close contact with one of the Korean kingdoms and sometimes became involved in Korean domestic affairs -- facts that were later used by Japanese militarists to justify invasion and annexation of Korea in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Although Japanese and Korean culture have many similarities, many differences were apparent even in my three day trip. Strangers in Japan rarely made eye contact with me, but people walking down the street in Korea frequently looked me in the eye, and even smiled. While Japanese people rarely touch each other in public, Koreans walk down the street arm-in-arm with their friends, even of the same sex -- both men and women. Cultural differences were even apparent among children. Japanese children frequently hid behind their mother's legs when they saw me, but Korean kids were the opposite: while visiting one of the imperial palaces, I was spotted by a group of young elementary school kids on a class trip, probably around six years old, who all began waving at me and shouting "Harro! Harro!"

But not all the differences favored the Koreans. Japanese are generally extremely conscientious and it is very hard (though not impossible) to get cheated in Japan, particularly as a (white) foreigner. In Korea, though, foreigners were marks. For example, on my last day in Seoul, after getting my visa, I had some time to kill before my flight and went to one of the parks, where I met two young women studying to be tour guides who wanted to practice their English with me. When it came time to go to the airport, they helped me get a taxi and told the driver where I was going. In Seoul, at least in those days, cabbies stopped to pick up other customers if they were going the same way, so I shared my cab with several other passengers for part of the trip. When I got there, however, the cabbie wanted to charge me for the entire fare on the meter, even though the other passengers had paid him. Not knowing any Korean, I couldn't really argue with him. It really didn't matter anyway, though, since it seemed like a phenomenal amount of money in Won, but only translated into a couple of bucks, which I figured he needed more than me.

All in all, I loved Seoul. The old city, the ceramics, the imperial palaces, the parks, the people, and the FOOD!!! The food alone was worth the trip. I have heard that the city has changed greatly since then, but I really hope I get to go back someday.

Japanese Baseball

While working at Look Japan, I discovered that my boss, editor-in-chief Nishimura-san, shared my love of baseball. During the year we worked together, we went to numerous baseball games.

Mostly we went to see the Yakult Swallows play. Japanese baseball teams are usually named for the corporation that owns them. In the Swallows' case, that was the Yakult yogurt company, which is famous for its miniature bottles of sweetened liquid yogurt drink, meant to be consumed as a health supplement, which are delivered by "Yakult Ladies" -- lime green moped-driving, uniform-clad women who bring your daily or weekly supply of yogurt directly to your house or office, just like the milkmen of yore. Like the Swallows, most Japanese baseball teams do not include their home city in their names, although the most popular team, the Yomiuri Giants (for the Yomiuri, a large circulation newspaper in Tokyo), do put Tokyo before their name, and the Yokohama Baystars don't have any corporate moniker cluttering up their uniforms. Perhaps the most confusing thing resulting from the use of corporate names is the Fighters, who are owned by Nippon Ham. Seeing the team's whole name in print -- Nippon Ham Fighters -- has led many a foreigner (including myself) to wonder what the hell a "Ham Fighter" is. I've never understood why Nippon Ham did not hyphenate its name.

Nishimura-san and I regularly saw the Swallows because they played at Meiji Jingu Stadium, right in central Tokyo, which was easy to get to, and because they were not as popular as the Giants, so tickets were easy to score. Jingu Stadium, unlike the Giants' home ground, the Tokyo Dome, is also an outdoor venue, with real grass, and as far as I am concerned, a much better place to watch baseball.

The atmosphere of a Japanese baseball game is very different from that of a Major League game. You are not harassed by security to see if you are bringing in outside food and drink, which means that there is a lively market for yakisoba (stir-friend noodles), yakitori (grilled chicken), various kinds of o-bento boxes, and beer outside the stadium, mostly sold by low-level yakuza. Once you get inside, rather than hot dogs and popcorn, the vendors bring around sushi and grilled squid. Rather than being restricted to whatever beer brand sponsors the team, you can wait for your favorite brand to come around. Or, you can get a whiskey-and-water, made in front of you by a vendor carrying a bottle of whiskey, a bucket of ice, and on her back a huge chrome tank of water with a small rubber hose and spigot.

The biggest difference, however, is how the fans follow the game. Just as at a college football game, the hometown fans sit on one side of the stadium and the away team's fans -- if any -- sit on the opposite side. The fans take turns cheering on their own team when it bats, while the other side stays silent, awaiting their team's turn at the plate. The cheering sections are led by professional cheerleaders, who stand atop their team's dugout, waving huge team flags and blowing whistles. They are often accompanied by a drummer and a trumpeter to help lead the cheers. Each player has his own special cheer made up by the cheerleaders, which all the fans chant in unison while clapping the designated rhythm that goes along with it. Often the fans use "cheer bats" -- hollow plastic miniature baseball bats -- to amplify their clapping sound. (The inflatable cheer sticks that you can now get at sporting events in the US were invented and marketed by an American baseball player who played in Japan and got the idea while playing there.) The cheering has nothing to do with what is going on during the game. It just continues relentlessly (although it is always done with a bit more enthusiasm when your team is winning). The purpose of cheering is different there -- it's not to express an opinion about what's happening in the game, it's to encourage your side with the knowledge that the fans are behind them, no matter how the game is going.

Each team's fans also have a special seventh-inning stretch ritual. Perhaps the most famous is that of the Hanshin Tigers' fans, who blow up 5-foot long balloons with a whistle attached, and then all release them simultaneously when the top of the inning ends, filling the stadium with flying, whistling balloons. Tigers fans are unrivaled for their passion and even conduct this ritual at away games. The Swallows' fans had a distinctive, if less amusing, ritual of waiving green vinyl umbrellas (of the kind that you buy for 100 yen at convenience stores) in the air during the seventh-inning break.

The actual baseball itself was a reflection of Japanese culture too -- extremely well-executed fundamental baseball on a very high level of play, but lacking a certain excitement and passion. Most Japanese teams play relentless "small ball" -- if there is a runner on base with less than two outs, the batter always, always, ALWAYS sacrifice bunts, regardless of whether it's the pitcher or the cleanup hitter batting, and without consideration for whether the score is tied or the team is behind by 10 runs. Nevertheless, I always enjoyed the whole experience at Japanese baseball games, and I have Nishimura-san to thank for being my baseball companion.

(By the way, Nishimura-san, I still have those cheer bats you bought me!)