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.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Sunday, November 15, 2009
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.
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.
Friday, October 30, 2009
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.
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.
Friday, October 16, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
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:
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.
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.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
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!)
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!)
Friday, September 11, 2009
My Brush with Sumo Greatness
Who remembers the great Saturday afternoon sports show, ABC's Wide World of Sports? In the days before cable TV, ESPN, and multiple 24 hour a day sports channels, WWS offered a rare glimpse at sports from around the world that Americans infrequently got to watch on TV, like skiing, rugby, rodeo, and swimming. In the 1970s, with the rise of the first American sumo wrestler, Takamiyama (Jesse James Wailani Kuhaulua, from Hawaii), WWS exposed Americans to sumo for the first time. While my friends made fun of the "fat guys pushing each other around," I was fascinated and watched sumo every time it was on WWS. Naturally, ABC's coverage focused on Takamiyama, with his trademark mutton-chop sideburns.
Watching sumo did not lead to an interest in Japan. After WWS stopped showing sumo, I forgot all about it and Takamiyama. And when I suffered an upset stomach after a school trip to a Japanese steakhouse in fourth grade, I decided that I hated Japanese food and all things Japanese.
I didn't see another sumo match until shortly after moving to Japan in 1991, when I watched sumo on TV with my dorm-mates at the First Canon Fujigaoka Dorm one Saturday afternoon. It was then that I remembered Wide World of Sports and Takamiyama, and recalled my childhood fascination with sumo. My interest deepened when I started hanging out regularly with my mother's former student from Wisconsin in the 1960s, David Benjamin ("Benjie"), and his wife Junko Yoshida, who were living in Tokyo at the time. As it turned out, Benjie and Junko were sumo aficionados, and Benjie was then writing a book on sumo, The Joy of Sumo (soon to be republished in an updated edition under a new title). Sumo tournaments (basho) take place in odd-numbered months, last for fifteen days, and culminate in a final day when the championship (yusho) is often decided (by total number of wins). Benjie, Junko and I developed a custom of having an early dinner together at their house while watching the final day of the tournament.
Benjie and Junko gave me an education in sumo as a sport, the kind of education you couldn't get from most sumo books at the time (other than Benjie's), because they focused on sumo as Shinto ritual and mostly avoided the fact that sumo is a sport. Benjie and Junko would explain things like how the quality of wrestlers was declining as Japan became wealthier and fewer young men viewed sumo as a ticket out of poverty, and we'd try to pick out which matches were being thrown -- which often happened on the last day with wrestlers who entered the day 7-7 and needed a win to avoid demotion in ranking and the accompanying reduction in salary. (Sumo wrestlers are paid according to rank, but only the wrestlers in the top two divisions receive salaries, and these wrestlers support their sumo stables and the lower-ranking non-salaried wrestlers.)
Between my watching the Wide World of Sports in the 1970s and arriving in Japan in 1991, Takamiyama retired from wrestling (in 1984 to be exact), obtained Japanese citizenship, and became an oyakata, a sumo stable owner and coach. In accordance with tradition in sumo and many other areas of Japanese life, upon changing status, he also changed his name -- to Azumazeki Daigoro, and became referred to by his title, Azumazeki-oyakata. He also recruited to his stable a young Hawaiian wrestler named Chad Rowan, or, as he came to be known in the sumo world, Akebono.
Shortly after arriving at Look Japan magazine in September 1992, I learned that my colleague Ann Safir had arranged an interview with Akebono and, although I did not learn until much later that Azumazeki-oyakata was Takamiyama, I asked if I could go along because I liked sumo. Ann, who wasn't that interested in sumo, told me I could do the interview if I wanted. It took place on a Saturday morning, at the Azumazeki stable in a working-class section of eastern Tokyo. Akebono was already the highest-ranking wrestler in the stable, having achieved the rank of sekiwake, the third-highest in sumo. Because his salary was the highest, and sumo stables live off the earnings of their wrestlers, what Akebono said, went. And what he said that morning was that they would hold an extra training session for our benefit.
The training area in the Azumazeki stable consisted of a dirt floor, lined on two sides by a wall with poles against which the wrestlers would push for upper-body strengthening, and on two sides by an elevated viewing platform from which the coaches could watch. The wrestlers all wore beige training belts (mawashi), rather than the colorful mawashi they wore in tournaments, and their hair was tied up in bundles on their heads, rather than in the elaborate tournament hairstyles. Because sumo wrestlers are heavy, they look short on TV, but from a few feet away, it was clear that all of these men were tall, too. (Akebono, of course, was famous for being unusually tall for a sumo wrestler, at 6'8".) They were huge, and under the fat is bulging muscle. And when they crashed into each other to practice the sumo face-off, the sound was tremendous. Anyone who thinks that sumo is just a couple of fat guys pushing each other around should see sumo up close. The face-off is like an offensive linesman crashing into a defensive linesman in football -- except that the sumo wrestlers do it without pads, helmets, or any protection whatsoever. These guys are seriously strong athletes.
After the practice, the wrestlers cleaned up, and Akebono invited us to a lunch being held for him and a few other wrestlers at a nearby restaurant. It was there we conducted the interview. Akebono seemed more interested in talking to a couple of fawning young women that someone had brought along to meet him, and it was hard to get him to focus on the interview, but we were eventually able to get enough from him for our article. Sumo also has a well-known connection with both organized crime and the revanchist extreme right wing of Japanese politics (which are pretty much one and the same), and there were a few dubious people at the lunch with us (who I think brought the fawning young women for Akebono). When Ann and I wrapped up the interview, and Ann took off, Akebono invited me to hang out with them, but feeling a little uncomfortable hanging around with people I was pretty sure were gangsters, I told him I had to get going, thanked him, and left. Of course, now I regret passing up the chance to become buddies with Akebono and see more of sumo's seamy underside, but at the time beating it seemed like the best thing to do.
I followed sumo religiously through the rest of my time in Japan, and rooted Akebono on from afar as he climbed the ranks to become the first-ever foreign-born yokozuna (Grand Champion, the highest rank in sumo) in the face of great nationalist and xenophobic opposition, but I lost touch with sumo when I returned to the US and had no way to watch the matches. However, in the last three years, since marrying Kaori and subscribing to Japan TV on cable, I get to watch most basho and have turned Kaori into a sumo fan. Benjie calls me a wimp for watching the tape-delayed matches in the afternoons, rather than getting up at 3:00 am to watch the matches live, but I think I'm doing okay. I drink Japanese beer and pretend I am back in Tokyo, watching on a weekend afternoon, as the goddess Amaterasu intended.
Watching sumo did not lead to an interest in Japan. After WWS stopped showing sumo, I forgot all about it and Takamiyama. And when I suffered an upset stomach after a school trip to a Japanese steakhouse in fourth grade, I decided that I hated Japanese food and all things Japanese.
I didn't see another sumo match until shortly after moving to Japan in 1991, when I watched sumo on TV with my dorm-mates at the First Canon Fujigaoka Dorm one Saturday afternoon. It was then that I remembered Wide World of Sports and Takamiyama, and recalled my childhood fascination with sumo. My interest deepened when I started hanging out regularly with my mother's former student from Wisconsin in the 1960s, David Benjamin ("Benjie"), and his wife Junko Yoshida, who were living in Tokyo at the time. As it turned out, Benjie and Junko were sumo aficionados, and Benjie was then writing a book on sumo, The Joy of Sumo (soon to be republished in an updated edition under a new title). Sumo tournaments (basho) take place in odd-numbered months, last for fifteen days, and culminate in a final day when the championship (yusho) is often decided (by total number of wins). Benjie, Junko and I developed a custom of having an early dinner together at their house while watching the final day of the tournament.
Benjie and Junko gave me an education in sumo as a sport, the kind of education you couldn't get from most sumo books at the time (other than Benjie's), because they focused on sumo as Shinto ritual and mostly avoided the fact that sumo is a sport. Benjie and Junko would explain things like how the quality of wrestlers was declining as Japan became wealthier and fewer young men viewed sumo as a ticket out of poverty, and we'd try to pick out which matches were being thrown -- which often happened on the last day with wrestlers who entered the day 7-7 and needed a win to avoid demotion in ranking and the accompanying reduction in salary. (Sumo wrestlers are paid according to rank, but only the wrestlers in the top two divisions receive salaries, and these wrestlers support their sumo stables and the lower-ranking non-salaried wrestlers.)
Between my watching the Wide World of Sports in the 1970s and arriving in Japan in 1991, Takamiyama retired from wrestling (in 1984 to be exact), obtained Japanese citizenship, and became an oyakata, a sumo stable owner and coach. In accordance with tradition in sumo and many other areas of Japanese life, upon changing status, he also changed his name -- to Azumazeki Daigoro, and became referred to by his title, Azumazeki-oyakata. He also recruited to his stable a young Hawaiian wrestler named Chad Rowan, or, as he came to be known in the sumo world, Akebono.
Shortly after arriving at Look Japan magazine in September 1992, I learned that my colleague Ann Safir had arranged an interview with Akebono and, although I did not learn until much later that Azumazeki-oyakata was Takamiyama, I asked if I could go along because I liked sumo. Ann, who wasn't that interested in sumo, told me I could do the interview if I wanted. It took place on a Saturday morning, at the Azumazeki stable in a working-class section of eastern Tokyo. Akebono was already the highest-ranking wrestler in the stable, having achieved the rank of sekiwake, the third-highest in sumo. Because his salary was the highest, and sumo stables live off the earnings of their wrestlers, what Akebono said, went. And what he said that morning was that they would hold an extra training session for our benefit.
The training area in the Azumazeki stable consisted of a dirt floor, lined on two sides by a wall with poles against which the wrestlers would push for upper-body strengthening, and on two sides by an elevated viewing platform from which the coaches could watch. The wrestlers all wore beige training belts (mawashi), rather than the colorful mawashi they wore in tournaments, and their hair was tied up in bundles on their heads, rather than in the elaborate tournament hairstyles. Because sumo wrestlers are heavy, they look short on TV, but from a few feet away, it was clear that all of these men were tall, too. (Akebono, of course, was famous for being unusually tall for a sumo wrestler, at 6'8".) They were huge, and under the fat is bulging muscle. And when they crashed into each other to practice the sumo face-off, the sound was tremendous. Anyone who thinks that sumo is just a couple of fat guys pushing each other around should see sumo up close. The face-off is like an offensive linesman crashing into a defensive linesman in football -- except that the sumo wrestlers do it without pads, helmets, or any protection whatsoever. These guys are seriously strong athletes.
After the practice, the wrestlers cleaned up, and Akebono invited us to a lunch being held for him and a few other wrestlers at a nearby restaurant. It was there we conducted the interview. Akebono seemed more interested in talking to a couple of fawning young women that someone had brought along to meet him, and it was hard to get him to focus on the interview, but we were eventually able to get enough from him for our article. Sumo also has a well-known connection with both organized crime and the revanchist extreme right wing of Japanese politics (which are pretty much one and the same), and there were a few dubious people at the lunch with us (who I think brought the fawning young women for Akebono). When Ann and I wrapped up the interview, and Ann took off, Akebono invited me to hang out with them, but feeling a little uncomfortable hanging around with people I was pretty sure were gangsters, I told him I had to get going, thanked him, and left. Of course, now I regret passing up the chance to become buddies with Akebono and see more of sumo's seamy underside, but at the time beating it seemed like the best thing to do.
I followed sumo religiously through the rest of my time in Japan, and rooted Akebono on from afar as he climbed the ranks to become the first-ever foreign-born yokozuna (Grand Champion, the highest rank in sumo) in the face of great nationalist and xenophobic opposition, but I lost touch with sumo when I returned to the US and had no way to watch the matches. However, in the last three years, since marrying Kaori and subscribing to Japan TV on cable, I get to watch most basho and have turned Kaori into a sumo fan. Benjie calls me a wimp for watching the tape-delayed matches in the afternoons, rather than getting up at 3:00 am to watch the matches live, but I think I'm doing okay. I drink Japanese beer and pretend I am back in Tokyo, watching on a weekend afternoon, as the goddess Amaterasu intended.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
My First Hatsumode
Hatsumode translates literally as "first visit" but means the first visit to a Shino shrine of the new year. New Year's is the most important holiday of the Japanese calendar. (Before westernization, it was celebrated on the lunar new year, like Chinese New Year, but at some point, it was switched to January 1.) It's customary to perform hatsumode during the first ten days of January.
My first hatsumode was with (girlfriend, not wife) Kaori on New Year's Eve 1991-92. Kaori and I had gone out for dinner together in the Harajuku area of Tokyo on New Year's Eve, and finished eating around 10:00 pm. We did not know of any parties and were sure that every hotel room in Hoteru Gai was already full by that time. We were not quite sure what to do with ourselves, when I suggested that we go to Meiji Jingu Shrine, the shrine to Emperor Meiji, who oversaw the modernization of Japan, which is located near Harajuku, next to Yoyogi Park. I had heard that Japanese people visit a shrine to mark the New Year, and since Meiji Jingu was nearby, it seemed like a fun thing to do. Kaori agreed.
It was a pleasant evening for December. A bit chilly, not freezing, a nice night for a quick trip to the shrine while we figured out what else to do that night. We walked up the fashionable, tree-lined Omote-Sando Street towards the Shrine. (Sando literally means "[humble] pilgrimage route" and omote means "front," so Omote-Sando street is literally the "front approach for making a humble pilgrimage" to the Meiji Shrine.) Near Harajuku station, we crossed over to the wide gravel path leading through the giant stone torii gate marking the entrance to the shrine. From there, we walked for five minutes along the gravel road as giant cypress trees towered above us on either side, blocking out the sky except for a little sliver directly over the very middle of the gravel road.
"No one here," we said to each other, smiling at our good fortune, as we made a left turn under another giant torii gate onto the road approaching the actual shrine entrance. Off to the right, through the cypress trees, we could see bright floodlights that lit up the Shrine for New Years visitors. We continued down the approach route, gravel crunching under our feet, and turned right to the actual shrine entrance.
There, in front of us, was a crowd of thousands of visitors, who had turned out at the single most popular hatsumode location in Tokyo, if not all of Japan. The crowd did not appear to be moving. We thought about leaving and turned around to find that we were already sandwiched by thousands more who had quietly come up behind us while we were enjoying our walk in the night air. We had no choice but to stay.
Every few minutes, the crowd moved up ten feet or so. We realized that the shrine officials were letting only a few hundred people through the main gate at a time to control the crowds. The progress was slow. The air was getting colder, and before long, we were freezing. Neither one of us was dressed for the cold, and we stomped our feet, clapped our hands, and clung to each other to keep warm. I wished I had a flask of whiskey or a One Cup sake to generate some heat from within.
We inched our way forward, until after an hour or so, we got close enough to see the roof of the shrine. And here, we saw one of the prettiest sights I had ever seen. In Japan, it's customary to deposit money into a collection box when saying a prayer at a Shinto shrine or Buddhist temple. Although the really devout and desperate give bills, most throw a coin or two into the box. (My wife always says I am giving too much when I throw a 100-yen ($1) coin into the box. The going rate, apparently, is 10 yen.) Because of the size of the crowds that night, it was not possible to get to the actual shrine and throw money in the box. Instead, officials had roped off the area in front of the shrine and spread out tarps onto which people could throw their offerings. And, as each successive group of several hundred was let through the gate, a hail of coins, many of them handfuls of silver one-yen coins saved for the occasion, flew into the air, were illuminated by the flood lights, and fell like glistening snow.
Every few minutes, as each group entered, we watched thousands of coins twinkle as they sailed through the cold night air. Finally we were let in, and we, too, threw our coins into the night sky. A group came in behind us and launched their handfuls of coins into the air, many of which fell on us and around us. I later found a one-yen coin in the collar of my jacket.
Having paid our respects to the dead emperor, we were directed to exit to the right, by a path that led back to the main approach and Harajuku Station. The last trains had already left, and so we found a taxi back to Oshikawa-san's dormitory. Since my room was very close to the never-locked back door, and everyone seemed to be asleep, I was able to sneak Kaori into my room and sneak her back out the next morning before anyone was the wiser.
Had we known better, we never would have gone to Meiji Jingu on New Year's Eve. It's the Japanese equivalent of going to Times Square to freeze you ass off amongst the drunks on New Year's Eve -- the kind of thing that only kids and wide-eyed out-of-towners do -- only better organized and more respectful. I will never do it again. But I am really glad I did it once.
My first hatsumode was with (girlfriend, not wife) Kaori on New Year's Eve 1991-92. Kaori and I had gone out for dinner together in the Harajuku area of Tokyo on New Year's Eve, and finished eating around 10:00 pm. We did not know of any parties and were sure that every hotel room in Hoteru Gai was already full by that time. We were not quite sure what to do with ourselves, when I suggested that we go to Meiji Jingu Shrine, the shrine to Emperor Meiji, who oversaw the modernization of Japan, which is located near Harajuku, next to Yoyogi Park. I had heard that Japanese people visit a shrine to mark the New Year, and since Meiji Jingu was nearby, it seemed like a fun thing to do. Kaori agreed.
It was a pleasant evening for December. A bit chilly, not freezing, a nice night for a quick trip to the shrine while we figured out what else to do that night. We walked up the fashionable, tree-lined Omote-Sando Street towards the Shrine. (Sando literally means "[humble] pilgrimage route" and omote means "front," so Omote-Sando street is literally the "front approach for making a humble pilgrimage" to the Meiji Shrine.) Near Harajuku station, we crossed over to the wide gravel path leading through the giant stone torii gate marking the entrance to the shrine. From there, we walked for five minutes along the gravel road as giant cypress trees towered above us on either side, blocking out the sky except for a little sliver directly over the very middle of the gravel road.
"No one here," we said to each other, smiling at our good fortune, as we made a left turn under another giant torii gate onto the road approaching the actual shrine entrance. Off to the right, through the cypress trees, we could see bright floodlights that lit up the Shrine for New Years visitors. We continued down the approach route, gravel crunching under our feet, and turned right to the actual shrine entrance.
There, in front of us, was a crowd of thousands of visitors, who had turned out at the single most popular hatsumode location in Tokyo, if not all of Japan. The crowd did not appear to be moving. We thought about leaving and turned around to find that we were already sandwiched by thousands more who had quietly come up behind us while we were enjoying our walk in the night air. We had no choice but to stay.
Every few minutes, the crowd moved up ten feet or so. We realized that the shrine officials were letting only a few hundred people through the main gate at a time to control the crowds. The progress was slow. The air was getting colder, and before long, we were freezing. Neither one of us was dressed for the cold, and we stomped our feet, clapped our hands, and clung to each other to keep warm. I wished I had a flask of whiskey or a One Cup sake to generate some heat from within.
We inched our way forward, until after an hour or so, we got close enough to see the roof of the shrine. And here, we saw one of the prettiest sights I had ever seen. In Japan, it's customary to deposit money into a collection box when saying a prayer at a Shinto shrine or Buddhist temple. Although the really devout and desperate give bills, most throw a coin or two into the box. (My wife always says I am giving too much when I throw a 100-yen ($1) coin into the box. The going rate, apparently, is 10 yen.) Because of the size of the crowds that night, it was not possible to get to the actual shrine and throw money in the box. Instead, officials had roped off the area in front of the shrine and spread out tarps onto which people could throw their offerings. And, as each successive group of several hundred was let through the gate, a hail of coins, many of them handfuls of silver one-yen coins saved for the occasion, flew into the air, were illuminated by the flood lights, and fell like glistening snow.
Every few minutes, as each group entered, we watched thousands of coins twinkle as they sailed through the cold night air. Finally we were let in, and we, too, threw our coins into the night sky. A group came in behind us and launched their handfuls of coins into the air, many of which fell on us and around us. I later found a one-yen coin in the collar of my jacket.
Having paid our respects to the dead emperor, we were directed to exit to the right, by a path that led back to the main approach and Harajuku Station. The last trains had already left, and so we found a taxi back to Oshikawa-san's dormitory. Since my room was very close to the never-locked back door, and everyone seemed to be asleep, I was able to sneak Kaori into my room and sneak her back out the next morning before anyone was the wiser.
Had we known better, we never would have gone to Meiji Jingu on New Year's Eve. It's the Japanese equivalent of going to Times Square to freeze you ass off amongst the drunks on New Year's Eve -- the kind of thing that only kids and wide-eyed out-of-towners do -- only better organized and more respectful. I will never do it again. But I am really glad I did it once.
Monday, August 31, 2009
A Human Stream
During my first year in Japan, I lived an existence quite like an average Japanese salaryman, living in a company dormitory, eating most meals from what I could buy at a convenience store or izakaya, having a long commute to the office, and having nowhere private I could spend time with my girlfriend. (Women were not allowed in my dorm.) Like most unmarried Japanese women, (girlfriend) Kaori lived with her parents, so she had nowhere private to spend time with me, either.
We thus did what most Japanese people our age did: we went to "love hotels." Unlike their low-rent American equivalent, the no-tell motel, love hotels tended to be more cheesy than sleazy. The decor was routinely tacky, featuring as you might imagine, "fantasy" themes like Greek columns or floor-to-ceiling mirrors. However, love hotels were generally clean, discreetly located in back alleys away from prying eyes, and relatively inexpensive. They were conveniently priced for a three-hour "rest" during the daytime or an all-night "stay" from 10:00 pm to 10:00 am. Some tourist books used to advise people traveling to Japan on the cheap to stay in love hotels, although you have to be out during the daytime and can't leave your luggage there. I once stayed overnight in a love hotel in Kamakura when nothing else was available on short notice.
In the suburbs, love hotels tend to cluster near highway exits, and are noticeable from their excessive use of neon and their architecture, which runs from the Parthenon to Magic Kingdom. In cities, they tend be located near major train stations, usually on back streets away from where the main entertainments are.
The area of Tokyo known as Shibuya has a fairly extensive love hotel area, known colloquially as "hoteru gai" ("hotel town" or "hotel street"), which sits atop one of the hills that surrounds the Shibuya train station and shopping district. Hoteru Gai is a warren of back streets, many of them dead ends, most of them containing love hotels of one description or another, ranging in price from reasonable to very expensive. Because Shibuya was convenient to both of our homes (in the sense that we could both easily get to Shibuya by train), Shibuya was a regular meeting place for me and Kaori. We also had a couple of regular spots in Hoteru Gai.
Kaori being only 20 (I was 22!), she was still subject to a curfew of last train, and it was rare that we booked a "stay." But on one occasion, we stayed overnight on a weekday. The next morning, we left the hotel early to get to work -- just like everyone else in all the other hotels in Hoteru Gai. We walked out onto the street and were joined by a few other people leaving the other hotels on our alley. Our alleyway emptied into a larger street, and as each successive alleyway fed into the main street, the trickle grew into a human stream. Couples reaching the main street immediately broke away from each other and walked separately. Everyone walked briskly, making for the station, their eyes strictly in front, no one (except me) looked around for fear of making eye contact with an acquaintance, a gossipy co-worker or a friend of their real girlfriend or boyfriend. By the time we reached Dogenzaka Street, a major shopping street running down the hill to Shibuya Station, the trickle from our alleyway had become a river of people running down to the station, everyone speeding as quickly as possible away from Hoteru Gai, making for the plausible deniability of Shibuya Station.
We thus did what most Japanese people our age did: we went to "love hotels." Unlike their low-rent American equivalent, the no-tell motel, love hotels tended to be more cheesy than sleazy. The decor was routinely tacky, featuring as you might imagine, "fantasy" themes like Greek columns or floor-to-ceiling mirrors. However, love hotels were generally clean, discreetly located in back alleys away from prying eyes, and relatively inexpensive. They were conveniently priced for a three-hour "rest" during the daytime or an all-night "stay" from 10:00 pm to 10:00 am. Some tourist books used to advise people traveling to Japan on the cheap to stay in love hotels, although you have to be out during the daytime and can't leave your luggage there. I once stayed overnight in a love hotel in Kamakura when nothing else was available on short notice.
In the suburbs, love hotels tend to cluster near highway exits, and are noticeable from their excessive use of neon and their architecture, which runs from the Parthenon to Magic Kingdom. In cities, they tend be located near major train stations, usually on back streets away from where the main entertainments are.
The area of Tokyo known as Shibuya has a fairly extensive love hotel area, known colloquially as "hoteru gai" ("hotel town" or "hotel street"), which sits atop one of the hills that surrounds the Shibuya train station and shopping district. Hoteru Gai is a warren of back streets, many of them dead ends, most of them containing love hotels of one description or another, ranging in price from reasonable to very expensive. Because Shibuya was convenient to both of our homes (in the sense that we could both easily get to Shibuya by train), Shibuya was a regular meeting place for me and Kaori. We also had a couple of regular spots in Hoteru Gai.
Kaori being only 20 (I was 22!), she was still subject to a curfew of last train, and it was rare that we booked a "stay." But on one occasion, we stayed overnight on a weekday. The next morning, we left the hotel early to get to work -- just like everyone else in all the other hotels in Hoteru Gai. We walked out onto the street and were joined by a few other people leaving the other hotels on our alley. Our alleyway emptied into a larger street, and as each successive alleyway fed into the main street, the trickle grew into a human stream. Couples reaching the main street immediately broke away from each other and walked separately. Everyone walked briskly, making for the station, their eyes strictly in front, no one (except me) looked around for fear of making eye contact with an acquaintance, a gossipy co-worker or a friend of their real girlfriend or boyfriend. By the time we reached Dogenzaka Street, a major shopping street running down the hill to Shibuya Station, the trickle from our alleyway had become a river of people running down to the station, everyone speeding as quickly as possible away from Hoteru Gai, making for the plausible deniability of Shibuya Station.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
More on the Japanese Election
When I lived in Japan and was more of a young hothead, I used to think that Japan was a sham democracy. After all, it had had essentially one-party rule for all of the post-war period, and the United States had funneled money to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party until the end of the Cold War and the LDP had in turn funneled money to the opposition parties. Moreover, the urban population seemed to be itching for change, while the rural areas, which were rapidly becoming "rotten boroughs" were able to elect majorities and control the government. Plus, the LDP kept piling up majorities by larding the country with pork barrel projects that were unneeded but greased the right palms.
I still think that there was a lot wrong with Japanese politics during the postwar period, and who knows how much will change now, given that the Democratic Party of Japan still has a lot of former LDP pork barrelers in its ranks. But what is interesting to me is the question of legitimacy. For all its problems, my view now is that Japan has had a real democracy during this time, its democratic government has been legitimized over time, and this election is the fruition of the solidification of democracy in Japan after centuries and centuries of monarchical and authoritarian governments.
The LDP was corrupt, no doubt about it. But the Japanese voters kept on returning it to power in what were clean elections in the sense that massive vote fraud was not needed to keep the conservatives in power, as we've seen in places like Iran in 2009 and Florida in 2000. Japan was, and is, a conservative country, in the sense that the appeal of left wing policies espoused by socialists and communists never held widespread appeal beyond a certain limited slice of the population. A big reason the LDP kept being returned to power was that the LDP presided over incredible post-war growth that caused Japan to transform from a burned out hulk to one of the richest countries in the world in a mere 30 years. The opposition Socialists and Communists could not compete with this record of success. Thus, for the 40 years following the LDP's founding in 1955, its continual reelection was legitimate. There was never any need for the LDP to cling to power through violence or fraud.
I think there is a reasonable chance that, had the left-wing parties ever showed any real chance of winning an election during the height of the Cold War, serious oppression could have resulted, winked at by the US. Japan might have wound up looking a little more like South Korea than it did. (Don't forget that the LDP was founded by members of the pre-war right-wing elite that was closely tied to the miltarists, who were returned to power in 1948 after a brief socialist turn, when the US embraced the right-wingers in the "reverse course," when Occupation policy changed directions in response to outbreak of the Cold War.) But there was never a "need" for this result, because the voters kept returning the same party to power that was backed by the US and Japan's business and military elites. As a result, there was never an election that seriously threw the legitimacy of the system into doubt because fraud was necessary to maintain the conservative block in power.
Even during the period after 1994, when the LDP returned to power after a brief hiatus, despite the great satisfaction of most Japanese voters, its return was the result of pragmatism -- there really was no alternative. As hated as the LDP had become because of its corruption, the opposition parties were not seen as ready to govern. Japanese voters had no choice, so they kept returning the LDP to power.
Martin Fackler in his piece in the New York Times today referred to the Japanese voters as "traditionally passive," but this really misses the point. There have been episodes of hard fought elections and real resistance by the left in Japan since the war -- the elections before 1955, the resistance to the renewal of the security treaty with the US in 1960, and the resistance to the construction and expansion of Narita Airport in the 1970s come to mind. In recent elections, Japanese voters did not turn out in large numbers because there was no point -- the opposition had not gotten its act togther sufficiently to convince the majority of Japanese voters that it was capable of governing the country responsibly. Had the Japanese voters been given a real choice, they would have turned out to vote, as this did today. Passivity had nothing to do with it. Voters were either aquiescent to a system that worked for them, or they saw no legitimate alternatives. In this election, rather than discredited socialists and communists, the Japanese voters had a legitimate center-left alternative for the first time, and they embraced it.
Which brings me back to my point. There is no question of the legitimacy of this election, and no chance of the LDP attempting to avoid the results and cling to power, because Japanese democracy has become fully legitimized over the last 60 years. The near constant return of the LDP time and time again reflected the will of the people. Moreover, the LDP did not need to build up an army of thugs to beat up the opposition, because the opposition was never a serious threat. The LDP itself embraced the system, because the system worked for it. And when the LDP finally reached the end of its vitality, it had neither the desire nor the ability to steal the election, even though the business, military, organized crime and other powers that be still support the LDP. The LDP lived by the electoral system, because Japanese voters allowed it to for so many years, and now it has died by the electoral system, with no alternative but to step aside peacefully.
I still think that there was a lot wrong with Japanese politics during the postwar period, and who knows how much will change now, given that the Democratic Party of Japan still has a lot of former LDP pork barrelers in its ranks. But what is interesting to me is the question of legitimacy. For all its problems, my view now is that Japan has had a real democracy during this time, its democratic government has been legitimized over time, and this election is the fruition of the solidification of democracy in Japan after centuries and centuries of monarchical and authoritarian governments.
The LDP was corrupt, no doubt about it. But the Japanese voters kept on returning it to power in what were clean elections in the sense that massive vote fraud was not needed to keep the conservatives in power, as we've seen in places like Iran in 2009 and Florida in 2000. Japan was, and is, a conservative country, in the sense that the appeal of left wing policies espoused by socialists and communists never held widespread appeal beyond a certain limited slice of the population. A big reason the LDP kept being returned to power was that the LDP presided over incredible post-war growth that caused Japan to transform from a burned out hulk to one of the richest countries in the world in a mere 30 years. The opposition Socialists and Communists could not compete with this record of success. Thus, for the 40 years following the LDP's founding in 1955, its continual reelection was legitimate. There was never any need for the LDP to cling to power through violence or fraud.
I think there is a reasonable chance that, had the left-wing parties ever showed any real chance of winning an election during the height of the Cold War, serious oppression could have resulted, winked at by the US. Japan might have wound up looking a little more like South Korea than it did. (Don't forget that the LDP was founded by members of the pre-war right-wing elite that was closely tied to the miltarists, who were returned to power in 1948 after a brief socialist turn, when the US embraced the right-wingers in the "reverse course," when Occupation policy changed directions in response to outbreak of the Cold War.) But there was never a "need" for this result, because the voters kept returning the same party to power that was backed by the US and Japan's business and military elites. As a result, there was never an election that seriously threw the legitimacy of the system into doubt because fraud was necessary to maintain the conservative block in power.
Even during the period after 1994, when the LDP returned to power after a brief hiatus, despite the great satisfaction of most Japanese voters, its return was the result of pragmatism -- there really was no alternative. As hated as the LDP had become because of its corruption, the opposition parties were not seen as ready to govern. Japanese voters had no choice, so they kept returning the LDP to power.
Martin Fackler in his piece in the New York Times today referred to the Japanese voters as "traditionally passive," but this really misses the point. There have been episodes of hard fought elections and real resistance by the left in Japan since the war -- the elections before 1955, the resistance to the renewal of the security treaty with the US in 1960, and the resistance to the construction and expansion of Narita Airport in the 1970s come to mind. In recent elections, Japanese voters did not turn out in large numbers because there was no point -- the opposition had not gotten its act togther sufficiently to convince the majority of Japanese voters that it was capable of governing the country responsibly. Had the Japanese voters been given a real choice, they would have turned out to vote, as this did today. Passivity had nothing to do with it. Voters were either aquiescent to a system that worked for them, or they saw no legitimate alternatives. In this election, rather than discredited socialists and communists, the Japanese voters had a legitimate center-left alternative for the first time, and they embraced it.
Which brings me back to my point. There is no question of the legitimacy of this election, and no chance of the LDP attempting to avoid the results and cling to power, because Japanese democracy has become fully legitimized over the last 60 years. The near constant return of the LDP time and time again reflected the will of the people. Moreover, the LDP did not need to build up an army of thugs to beat up the opposition, because the opposition was never a serious threat. The LDP itself embraced the system, because the system worked for it. And when the LDP finally reached the end of its vitality, it had neither the desire nor the ability to steal the election, even though the business, military, organized crime and other powers that be still support the LDP. The LDP lived by the electoral system, because Japanese voters allowed it to for so many years, and now it has died by the electoral system, with no alternative but to step aside peacefully.
LDP Swept Out of Power
I'm taking a break from the past today to reflect on today's historic election in Japan, in which the Democratic Party of Japan (DJP) defeated the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in a rout, sweeping from power the party that had ruled Japan essentially uninterrupted since 1955.
I was in Japan in 1993, when the opposition briefly broke the LDP's hold on power and governed for 11 months. The central bureaucracy, which was strongly tied to the LDP, worked to frustrate the Hosokawa government and it collapsed in under a year, returning the LDP to power. But the LDP has never quite been the same since, ruling as weak government with the exception of the six years when Junichiro Koizumi was prime minister.
This election represents the end of cold-war politics in Japan, and a final triumph over the urban and suburban areas over the rural districts that held disproportionate political power under the LDP. The DJP is expected to spend more on social infrastructure and less on massive construction projects, as well as to strengthen Japan's relationships with other Asian countries and distance itself somewhat from the United States. It will be interesting to see if an apology for WWII is finally forthcoming, since the DJP is not in the pocket of the Bereaved Families Association, which prevented such an apology, as the LDP was.
The DJP's biggest challenge will probably be internal. The party is a collection of different constituencies, formed of defectors from the LDP and the remains of the old Japan Socialist Party. The disparate branches of the DJP are tied together by their opposition to the LDP, rather than by a common program. So, will the DJP be able to implement a program, or will it quickly become caught up in infighting? It's impossible to say at this point. But Japan has long needed a political shakeup, and now that shakeup has come in dramatic fashion. There is now a great opportunity for change. Will the bureaucrats frustrate it? Will the DJP squander its historic chance? Only time will tell.
I was in Japan in 1993, when the opposition briefly broke the LDP's hold on power and governed for 11 months. The central bureaucracy, which was strongly tied to the LDP, worked to frustrate the Hosokawa government and it collapsed in under a year, returning the LDP to power. But the LDP has never quite been the same since, ruling as weak government with the exception of the six years when Junichiro Koizumi was prime minister.
This election represents the end of cold-war politics in Japan, and a final triumph over the urban and suburban areas over the rural districts that held disproportionate political power under the LDP. The DJP is expected to spend more on social infrastructure and less on massive construction projects, as well as to strengthen Japan's relationships with other Asian countries and distance itself somewhat from the United States. It will be interesting to see if an apology for WWII is finally forthcoming, since the DJP is not in the pocket of the Bereaved Families Association, which prevented such an apology, as the LDP was.
The DJP's biggest challenge will probably be internal. The party is a collection of different constituencies, formed of defectors from the LDP and the remains of the old Japan Socialist Party. The disparate branches of the DJP are tied together by their opposition to the LDP, rather than by a common program. So, will the DJP be able to implement a program, or will it quickly become caught up in infighting? It's impossible to say at this point. But Japan has long needed a political shakeup, and now that shakeup has come in dramatic fashion. There is now a great opportunity for change. Will the bureaucrats frustrate it? Will the DJP squander its historic chance? Only time will tell.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Hanami II
More on hanami.
Some interesting cultural differences came to light during cherry blossom viewing. Americans and Japanese both use blankets or tarps when picnicking outdoors, but for Japanese a tarp or blanket functions in a sense like indoor space. While Americans wouldn't think twice about walking or sitting on the tarp with their shoes on, Japanese people consider this to be quite dirty and always remove their shoes before stepping onto the picnic surface. (It's probably also due to the fact that the tarp/blanket functions as the eating surface, and you wouldn't step on that.)
At a small hanami party or other picnic in Japan, both Americans and Japanese would sit while eating and talking. The more people involved, however, the more like a party it would seem to the Americans, and their years of party instincts would take over. In other words, they would stand. After a while, all of the Japanese would be sitting on the blankets and all of the Americans would be standing around talking.
There are other times, too, when Japanese take off their shoes when it would not occur to Americans to do so. When a Japanese person needs to stand on a chair to reach something high, they will remove their footwear -- whether its shoes at the office or slippers at home -- before standing on the chair. Also, Japanese parents make their children take off their shoes when they get a seat on the subway, since Japanese kids, like children everywhere, have a way of always putting their feet on the seats. Japanese doctors' offices, dentists' offices, some hospitals, and even hair salons are also places where you change into slippers before walking in. I even had to remove my shoes and change into slippers for a tour of one of Canon's factories.
Then there are all those oyaji (old farts) at the office who are so accustomed to taking off their shoes inside that they wear slippers or sandals at the office . . . .
Some interesting cultural differences came to light during cherry blossom viewing. Americans and Japanese both use blankets or tarps when picnicking outdoors, but for Japanese a tarp or blanket functions in a sense like indoor space. While Americans wouldn't think twice about walking or sitting on the tarp with their shoes on, Japanese people consider this to be quite dirty and always remove their shoes before stepping onto the picnic surface. (It's probably also due to the fact that the tarp/blanket functions as the eating surface, and you wouldn't step on that.)
At a small hanami party or other picnic in Japan, both Americans and Japanese would sit while eating and talking. The more people involved, however, the more like a party it would seem to the Americans, and their years of party instincts would take over. In other words, they would stand. After a while, all of the Japanese would be sitting on the blankets and all of the Americans would be standing around talking.
There are other times, too, when Japanese take off their shoes when it would not occur to Americans to do so. When a Japanese person needs to stand on a chair to reach something high, they will remove their footwear -- whether its shoes at the office or slippers at home -- before standing on the chair. Also, Japanese parents make their children take off their shoes when they get a seat on the subway, since Japanese kids, like children everywhere, have a way of always putting their feet on the seats. Japanese doctors' offices, dentists' offices, some hospitals, and even hair salons are also places where you change into slippers before walking in. I even had to remove my shoes and change into slippers for a tour of one of Canon's factories.
Then there are all those oyaji (old farts) at the office who are so accustomed to taking off their shoes inside that they wear slippers or sandals at the office . . . .
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Hanami
One of my favorite activities in Japan was hanami -- cherry blossom viewing. Hanami is an annual rite in Japan that takes place in late March/early April. The country nearly comes to a stop for the week that the blossoms are out, with offices holding after-work viewing parties for which junior workers are sent out during the day to find and hold a good spot. Hanami takes place wherever cherry trees can be found, and some of the best places are in spots you wouldn't guess. For example, a great place to view cherry blossoms in Tokyo is Aoyama Cemetery, where the avenues between the graves are lined with cherry trees. The park is packed even at night, when people visit the cemetery to see the trees lit up by the street lights, called yozakura, or "night cherry [blossoms]." (I am sure that, in the old days, yozakura was done by the light of the moon, but you can barely see the moon in Tokyo now, given all the light pollution, and the street lights illuminate the trees quite beautifully.)
My first hanami took place in 1992. Dave S. (who had not yet assumed his secret identity, Meishi Man), his girlfriend Chieko, and my first girlfriend in Japan, Kaori (who shares the same first name as my wife -- Hi Honey!!), went to Aoyama Cemetery on the spur of the moment one Saturday when the blossoms were out.
We bought some convenience-store bento boxes and some beer and found a spot under the trees, next to a large group of men who seemed to be work-mates. Their set-up was quite elaborate, complete with a blue tarpaulin, large platters of cold cuts, and a crate of jars of Ozeki "One Cup" sake -- sake that comes in a glass with a pull-top lid for drinking on the go, a workingman's favorite in Japan.
Being in earshot of this group, they soon overheard us speaking in Japanese and started to get friendly. With a mid-day beer buzz making me sleepy, I put my head down on Kaori's lap, and stared up at the cherry blossoms above. Suddenly, a man's sake-reddened face burst into the scene above me. "O-den ga suki?" ("Do you like o-den?"), he blurted. (O-den is a popular dish of vegetables, vegetable cakes and fish cakes that simmer in a broth for hours, usually consumed in cold weather, and hanami season is generally still cold.) The question was sudden, and out of context, and I didn't even know the guy who was asking me, but through the beer haze I said that I did.
"Okay, wait a minute," he said. He returned a couple of minutes later with a serving of o-den that he bought from the open-air vendor just a little way down the cemetery avenue. We thanked him appreciatively, and then began to talk with our new-found friends. Naturally, they wanted to know how Dave and I had learned Japanese, what we were doing in Japan, where we worked, etc. They didn't ask us the usual question about whether we liked Japanese girls. The answer to that question must have seemed obvious.
The men had been there for hours before we arrived and their party broke up before we left. They had a lot of leftover cold cuts and One Cup sakes, and they insisted that we take all of it. A single One-Cup is enough rot-gut to generate a really good buzz, and we were already pretty full from beer, so I think we wound up having only one cup each, and then Dave took the rest home. We ate some cold cuts and then threw away the rest. It's possible we went to "Oh God!" after that, since it was nearby Aoyama Cemetery, but I really don't remember.
From that first cherry blossom experience, I began to organize a hanami party every year. When I later moved into my own apartment, which had a big roof-deck, a friend gave me a barbecue set, which I used to lug to Aoyama Cemetery or Inokashira Park (another famous viewing spot) to cook yakitori. The parties were successively bigger each year; I think the last of them drew about 40 people.
I've only gotten to see the cherry blossoms once more since leaving Japan in 1994. In 2007, my wife Kaori and I visited her parents when the cherry trees were blooming, and I had the rare treat of seeing the blossoms in Kyoto, which is famous for its cherry trees. The last "Unrelated Japan Photo" I posted is from that trip.
I've tried to recreate hanami in New York, and have found an excellent spot in Central Park where the blossoms are as plentiful as in a Japanese park. It's always fun, but the general party atmosphere of life stopping while the trees are blooming is missing. There are always a few Japanese there also trying to recreate what they are missing from Japan, but it's never quite the same. Most Americans, it seems, don't even notice the blossoms.
P.S. Out of nostalgia, I just looked on the internet and found that the bar is not "Oh God!," but "Oh! God," as if God walked in on you unexpectedly. The placement of the exclamation point is so classic and so quintessentially Japanese! How could I have forgotten this wonderful tidbit?
A review is here: http://ultimatepubguide.com/pubs/info.phtml?pub_id=334
My first hanami took place in 1992. Dave S. (who had not yet assumed his secret identity, Meishi Man), his girlfriend Chieko, and my first girlfriend in Japan, Kaori (who shares the same first name as my wife -- Hi Honey!!), went to Aoyama Cemetery on the spur of the moment one Saturday when the blossoms were out.
We bought some convenience-store bento boxes and some beer and found a spot under the trees, next to a large group of men who seemed to be work-mates. Their set-up was quite elaborate, complete with a blue tarpaulin, large platters of cold cuts, and a crate of jars of Ozeki "One Cup" sake -- sake that comes in a glass with a pull-top lid for drinking on the go, a workingman's favorite in Japan.
Being in earshot of this group, they soon overheard us speaking in Japanese and started to get friendly. With a mid-day beer buzz making me sleepy, I put my head down on Kaori's lap, and stared up at the cherry blossoms above. Suddenly, a man's sake-reddened face burst into the scene above me. "O-den ga suki?" ("Do you like o-den?"), he blurted. (O-den is a popular dish of vegetables, vegetable cakes and fish cakes that simmer in a broth for hours, usually consumed in cold weather, and hanami season is generally still cold.) The question was sudden, and out of context, and I didn't even know the guy who was asking me, but through the beer haze I said that I did.
"Okay, wait a minute," he said. He returned a couple of minutes later with a serving of o-den that he bought from the open-air vendor just a little way down the cemetery avenue. We thanked him appreciatively, and then began to talk with our new-found friends. Naturally, they wanted to know how Dave and I had learned Japanese, what we were doing in Japan, where we worked, etc. They didn't ask us the usual question about whether we liked Japanese girls. The answer to that question must have seemed obvious.
The men had been there for hours before we arrived and their party broke up before we left. They had a lot of leftover cold cuts and One Cup sakes, and they insisted that we take all of it. A single One-Cup is enough rot-gut to generate a really good buzz, and we were already pretty full from beer, so I think we wound up having only one cup each, and then Dave took the rest home. We ate some cold cuts and then threw away the rest. It's possible we went to "Oh God!" after that, since it was nearby Aoyama Cemetery, but I really don't remember.
From that first cherry blossom experience, I began to organize a hanami party every year. When I later moved into my own apartment, which had a big roof-deck, a friend gave me a barbecue set, which I used to lug to Aoyama Cemetery or Inokashira Park (another famous viewing spot) to cook yakitori. The parties were successively bigger each year; I think the last of them drew about 40 people.
I've only gotten to see the cherry blossoms once more since leaving Japan in 1994. In 2007, my wife Kaori and I visited her parents when the cherry trees were blooming, and I had the rare treat of seeing the blossoms in Kyoto, which is famous for its cherry trees. The last "Unrelated Japan Photo" I posted is from that trip.
I've tried to recreate hanami in New York, and have found an excellent spot in Central Park where the blossoms are as plentiful as in a Japanese park. It's always fun, but the general party atmosphere of life stopping while the trees are blooming is missing. There are always a few Japanese there also trying to recreate what they are missing from Japan, but it's never quite the same. Most Americans, it seems, don't even notice the blossoms.
P.S. Out of nostalgia, I just looked on the internet and found that the bar is not "Oh God!," but "Oh! God," as if God walked in on you unexpectedly. The placement of the exclamation point is so classic and so quintessentially Japanese! How could I have forgotten this wonderful tidbit?
A review is here: http://ultimatepubguide.com/pubs/info.phtml?pub_id=334
Friday, August 21, 2009
The Birth of Meishi Man
My friend Dave S. and I developed a regular habit of hitting an izakaya called Tonta once a month or so. Tonta was under the Yamanote Line tracks, halfway between Yurakucho Station and Shimbashi Station, directly behind the Imperial Hotel. It was down three steps in a half-basement and had everything a good izakaya needs -- long communal tables, advertisements from Kirin and Sapporo of buxom young Japanese women in bikinis holding pints of beer, cigarette smoke, cheap beer and sake, and decent food. I don't know whether Tonta is particularly well known, or it just happens to be known to certain cameramen in Japan, but every once in a while, I see the interior of Tonta (which is burned into my memory) on TV.
A group of two at Tonta would usually be seated across a communal table from one another, with people you did not know on either side of you. If you came with a larger group, you could get a table to yourself, but not usually with two people, unless it was a slow night. When seated alongside strangers, the etiquette is generally to pretend they don't exist. It's the only way to have some privacy when you are seated six inches from a couple of strangers. Of course, speaking in English provided a buffer for our conversations, but you never knew who could speak English, so it was best just to imagine they didn't exist anyway. (Japanese usually assumed we could not speak Japanese, so it was common, as soon as we sat down, to hear conversations about America, the speaker's inability to speak English, etc.)
One night, we were seated at a table right near the door. A large foreigner in a suit -- probably staying at the Imperial -- came to the door, looked through the window, saw us sitting there, and decided it was okay to come in. Because he was by himself and it was very crowded, the waitress seated him at the end of a table, which happened to be our table. Foreigners are generally not used to being seated with strangers, and even less used to the idea that, if you are seated with strangers, you are supposed to ignore them. The foreigner immediately started talking to the two salarymen seated on either side of him. From his accent, we could tell he was German.
The two salarymen did their best speaking English with him. His booming voice matched his large frame and we could hear everything he said. Suddenly, he asked them, "So, is this a Chinese restaurant?"
Dave and I checked our laughter. The two Japanese, probably expecting such ignorance, explained to him earnestly that this was an izakaya, a kind of Japanese bar.
After a while, Dave and I tuned out the conversation, which was following the standard Japanese-gaijin format of "Do you like Japanese sushi?" and so on, and went on drinking. Eventually, the two salarymen bid the German a good night and left to return either to the office for more work or to their homes in deepest Chiba or Kanagawa Prefecture. Dave then abruptly announced, "I'm going to get his meishi!" He went over to the German, talked for five minutes, and came back with his business card.
I didn't know it at the time, but I had just witnessed the birth of Meishi Man.
I don't know whether Dave had been reading books about networking or what, but over the coming months, he became obsessed with obtaining people's business cards. We'd be out drinking somewhere, and all of a sudden, he'd be collecting the meishi of everyone in sight. There was no rhyme or reason to his obsession. He did not seem to target people in any particular field. He just wanted cards, any cards, as though, somehow, if he collected enough of them, he would have some kind of networking breakthrough, reach some kind of meishi collecting nirvana, that would lead to a new career opportunity. I don't know what he did with all the cards. He never mentioned to me that he had later contacted a single person whose card he had collected while out drinking with me.
In the end, Dave proved a good networker, apparently networking his way into a job as the president of a Japanese subsidiary in Italy after business school. I don't know if he still collects business cards obsessively. I'm just proud to say that I knew Meishi Man when he was just a meishi boy.
A group of two at Tonta would usually be seated across a communal table from one another, with people you did not know on either side of you. If you came with a larger group, you could get a table to yourself, but not usually with two people, unless it was a slow night. When seated alongside strangers, the etiquette is generally to pretend they don't exist. It's the only way to have some privacy when you are seated six inches from a couple of strangers. Of course, speaking in English provided a buffer for our conversations, but you never knew who could speak English, so it was best just to imagine they didn't exist anyway. (Japanese usually assumed we could not speak Japanese, so it was common, as soon as we sat down, to hear conversations about America, the speaker's inability to speak English, etc.)
One night, we were seated at a table right near the door. A large foreigner in a suit -- probably staying at the Imperial -- came to the door, looked through the window, saw us sitting there, and decided it was okay to come in. Because he was by himself and it was very crowded, the waitress seated him at the end of a table, which happened to be our table. Foreigners are generally not used to being seated with strangers, and even less used to the idea that, if you are seated with strangers, you are supposed to ignore them. The foreigner immediately started talking to the two salarymen seated on either side of him. From his accent, we could tell he was German.
The two salarymen did their best speaking English with him. His booming voice matched his large frame and we could hear everything he said. Suddenly, he asked them, "So, is this a Chinese restaurant?"
Dave and I checked our laughter. The two Japanese, probably expecting such ignorance, explained to him earnestly that this was an izakaya, a kind of Japanese bar.
After a while, Dave and I tuned out the conversation, which was following the standard Japanese-gaijin format of "Do you like Japanese sushi?" and so on, and went on drinking. Eventually, the two salarymen bid the German a good night and left to return either to the office for more work or to their homes in deepest Chiba or Kanagawa Prefecture. Dave then abruptly announced, "I'm going to get his meishi!" He went over to the German, talked for five minutes, and came back with his business card.
I didn't know it at the time, but I had just witnessed the birth of Meishi Man.
I don't know whether Dave had been reading books about networking or what, but over the coming months, he became obsessed with obtaining people's business cards. We'd be out drinking somewhere, and all of a sudden, he'd be collecting the meishi of everyone in sight. There was no rhyme or reason to his obsession. He did not seem to target people in any particular field. He just wanted cards, any cards, as though, somehow, if he collected enough of them, he would have some kind of networking breakthrough, reach some kind of meishi collecting nirvana, that would lead to a new career opportunity. I don't know what he did with all the cards. He never mentioned to me that he had later contacted a single person whose card he had collected while out drinking with me.
In the end, Dave proved a good networker, apparently networking his way into a job as the president of a Japanese subsidiary in Italy after business school. I don't know if he still collects business cards obsessively. I'm just proud to say that I knew Meishi Man when he was just a meishi boy.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Chopstickery Pet Peeves
I'll relate a story that actually occurred before I went to Japan, but it's fun nonetheless.
Between my junior and senior years of college, after studying Japanese in college for a year, I posted a flyer seeking a Japanese language exchange partner at Yaohan (now Mitsuwa), Japanese shopping center in Edgewater, New Jersey. A woman named Noriko answered my ad. During that summer, we got together periodically to exchange Japanese and English language pointers.
One day, Noriko and her roommate, who was also Japanese, invited me to their apartment for dinner. To eat with, they gave me warebashi, those disposable bamboo chopsticks, still attached to each other at one end, that you have to break apart to use. (Although this sounds tacky -- you wouldn't give your guest a plastic fork in the US -- it's actually common in Japan, because it's considered more polite to give someone unused chopsticks, as opposed to the ones you've been sticking in your mouth for a couple of years.)
I pulled apart the chopsticks and then started rubbing them together to remove splinters, as I had seen some Asian American friends do at school. As I rubbed, I asked Noriko, in as good Japanese as I could muster at the time, "Please tell me if I ever do anything considered rude in Japan."
Noriko and her roommate looked at each other and then Noriko pointed to my splinter-removing technique. "That's rude," she said. I felt like a dope.
Moral of the Story: Don't assume that Asian Americans know any more about Japanese etiquette than you do, just because they're Asian American.
Etiquette Note: One of my pet peeves is people who treat chopsticks like toys. You don't play with your knife and fork at the table, do you? If you want to practice drumming, get some drumsticks. Treat chopsticks like you would tableware: leave them on the table if you're not using them to eat. Doing otherwise is considered extremely rude.
My Other Chopstick-Related Pet Peeve: People who insist on using chopsticks in Asian restaurants because it's "more authentic" that way, even though they can't use them properly. Most of these people hold the chopsticks near the bottom, like a pencil. But chopsticks operate more like scissors. Imagine if you decided that, rather than using the handles, you would use the scissors by holding them near the tips of the blades. You'd lose the advantage of the lever-and-fulcrum principle on which chopsticks depend. You'd also look rather silly.
Even a fork works on the same principle. If you hold a fork down by the tines, like a four-year old, it doesn't work so well, does it? That's why adults hold forks at the other end.
Get your hands as far away from the business end of the chopsticks as possible and you'll have much more control and grabbing power. If you ever get Chinese take-out and they give you those disposable chopsticks in the red paper cover with the chopsticks instructions on the back, read the directions! They distill 5,000 years of chopsticks know-how into three easy steps. Chopsticks work much better as shown in the diagram. Trust me.
My Japanese friends are always amazed at my chopstickery. (Like the Japanese language itself, gaijin are presumed to be inherently incapable of learning to use chopsticks properly -- probably because most gaijin hold chopsticks like pencils.) They always want to know: How did you learn to use chopsticks so well? The answer: China House, Foster Village Shopping Center, Bergenfield, New Jersey, circa 1978.
I followed the instructions on the place mats.
Between my junior and senior years of college, after studying Japanese in college for a year, I posted a flyer seeking a Japanese language exchange partner at Yaohan (now Mitsuwa), Japanese shopping center in Edgewater, New Jersey. A woman named Noriko answered my ad. During that summer, we got together periodically to exchange Japanese and English language pointers.
One day, Noriko and her roommate, who was also Japanese, invited me to their apartment for dinner. To eat with, they gave me warebashi, those disposable bamboo chopsticks, still attached to each other at one end, that you have to break apart to use. (Although this sounds tacky -- you wouldn't give your guest a plastic fork in the US -- it's actually common in Japan, because it's considered more polite to give someone unused chopsticks, as opposed to the ones you've been sticking in your mouth for a couple of years.)
I pulled apart the chopsticks and then started rubbing them together to remove splinters, as I had seen some Asian American friends do at school. As I rubbed, I asked Noriko, in as good Japanese as I could muster at the time, "Please tell me if I ever do anything considered rude in Japan."
Noriko and her roommate looked at each other and then Noriko pointed to my splinter-removing technique. "That's rude," she said. I felt like a dope.
Moral of the Story: Don't assume that Asian Americans know any more about Japanese etiquette than you do, just because they're Asian American.
Etiquette Note: One of my pet peeves is people who treat chopsticks like toys. You don't play with your knife and fork at the table, do you? If you want to practice drumming, get some drumsticks. Treat chopsticks like you would tableware: leave them on the table if you're not using them to eat. Doing otherwise is considered extremely rude.
My Other Chopstick-Related Pet Peeve: People who insist on using chopsticks in Asian restaurants because it's "more authentic" that way, even though they can't use them properly. Most of these people hold the chopsticks near the bottom, like a pencil. But chopsticks operate more like scissors. Imagine if you decided that, rather than using the handles, you would use the scissors by holding them near the tips of the blades. You'd lose the advantage of the lever-and-fulcrum principle on which chopsticks depend. You'd also look rather silly.
Even a fork works on the same principle. If you hold a fork down by the tines, like a four-year old, it doesn't work so well, does it? That's why adults hold forks at the other end.
Get your hands as far away from the business end of the chopsticks as possible and you'll have much more control and grabbing power. If you ever get Chinese take-out and they give you those disposable chopsticks in the red paper cover with the chopsticks instructions on the back, read the directions! They distill 5,000 years of chopsticks know-how into three easy steps. Chopsticks work much better as shown in the diagram. Trust me.
My Japanese friends are always amazed at my chopstickery. (Like the Japanese language itself, gaijin are presumed to be inherently incapable of learning to use chopsticks properly -- probably because most gaijin hold chopsticks like pencils.) They always want to know: How did you learn to use chopsticks so well? The answer: China House, Foster Village Shopping Center, Bergenfield, New Jersey, circa 1978.
I followed the instructions on the place mats.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Why I Learned Japanese
People often ask me, why I decided to learn Japanese. Well . . .
I went to college at the height of the Bubble Economy, when Americans fears of a Japanese takeover were fanned by the Japanese purchasing ever signature building in New York City, and the New York Times had three or four pages of classified want ads desperately seeking people who could speak even the tiniest bit of Japanese. All around me at Harvard, people were studying Japanese, hoping to cash in on the Japanese wave.
One of those people was my girlfriend, Joanne. Between our sophomore and junior years of college, Joanne got a summer job in Okayama through the Japanese department's internship program. During that summer, she would write me letters telling me how much she loved Japan and how she would be going back there after college to work before going to business school. During that summer, I had a crummy job back in New Jersey, none of my high school friends were around, I had absolutely nothing to do, and I convinced myself that Joanne was The Girl, even though we had actually broken up just before the summer break.
By that time, I already knew that I wanted to work for a while after college, and I had always wanted to live abroad. Given my newly discovered desire to follow Joanne to the ends of the earth, I thought to myself, "I'll go to Japan with Joanne." Having made that decision, I thought I had better start cracking on the Japanese studies.
Of course, a couple of months after I started studying Japanese, Joanne and I broke up. But I kept studying Japanese, because I found it fascinating. It was utterly different than the French and Latin I had studied before. I was also kind of tickled at the idea of learning a language that few Americans could speak.
When it came time to graduate, I still wanted to work rather than head straight to graduate school. But, it was 1991 -- the midst of the first Bush recession -- and not even Harvard grads were getting jobs. I decided to try my luck in Japan, and began applying for jobs before graduation, eventually landing the Canon internship and the Look Japan editing job before I even left the U.S.
As it happened, in 1990, Germany reunified and Joanne dropped Japanese like a hot potato and started studying German. I ran into her years later in New York -- ironically, at a Japanese restaurant -- and she told me she had never returned to Japan after that internship. I wound up with a lifelong interest in Japan and a Japanese wife because of Joanne, and Joanne never did anything with her Japanese interests. Funny how life works out.
I went to college at the height of the Bubble Economy, when Americans fears of a Japanese takeover were fanned by the Japanese purchasing ever signature building in New York City, and the New York Times had three or four pages of classified want ads desperately seeking people who could speak even the tiniest bit of Japanese. All around me at Harvard, people were studying Japanese, hoping to cash in on the Japanese wave.
One of those people was my girlfriend, Joanne. Between our sophomore and junior years of college, Joanne got a summer job in Okayama through the Japanese department's internship program. During that summer, she would write me letters telling me how much she loved Japan and how she would be going back there after college to work before going to business school. During that summer, I had a crummy job back in New Jersey, none of my high school friends were around, I had absolutely nothing to do, and I convinced myself that Joanne was The Girl, even though we had actually broken up just before the summer break.
By that time, I already knew that I wanted to work for a while after college, and I had always wanted to live abroad. Given my newly discovered desire to follow Joanne to the ends of the earth, I thought to myself, "I'll go to Japan with Joanne." Having made that decision, I thought I had better start cracking on the Japanese studies.
Of course, a couple of months after I started studying Japanese, Joanne and I broke up. But I kept studying Japanese, because I found it fascinating. It was utterly different than the French and Latin I had studied before. I was also kind of tickled at the idea of learning a language that few Americans could speak.
When it came time to graduate, I still wanted to work rather than head straight to graduate school. But, it was 1991 -- the midst of the first Bush recession -- and not even Harvard grads were getting jobs. I decided to try my luck in Japan, and began applying for jobs before graduation, eventually landing the Canon internship and the Look Japan editing job before I even left the U.S.
As it happened, in 1990, Germany reunified and Joanne dropped Japanese like a hot potato and started studying German. I ran into her years later in New York -- ironically, at a Japanese restaurant -- and she told me she had never returned to Japan after that internship. I wound up with a lifelong interest in Japan and a Japanese wife because of Joanne, and Joanne never did anything with her Japanese interests. Funny how life works out.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Thursday, August 13, 2009
One Whiskey, One Sake, and One Beer
Although I am trying to write chronologically, occasionally I remember things out of order and have to skip around in time. We return to my summer as a Canon intern.
In the middle of my summer at Canon, the entire company shut down for two weeks. I freaked out, because no one had warned me about the shut down, and I would not get paid during the break. When I got done freaking out, I decided to focus on what I would do during the break. One of my dorm-mates from Fujigaoka Dormitory, Shige-san, suggested that I come stay with him at his house in Kyoto for a few days. It sounded like a great idea, so I took him up on it.
Shige's family lived in the northern part of Kyoto, which (as I learned many years later from my wife, who is also from Kyoto) is dominated by old families, some with old money, who consider themselves the real Kyotoites and look down on people from the rest of Kyoto. There is a good chance that Shige's family had both an old name and old money, as they owned the second-largest distributor of tea-ceremony goods in Japan, and Shige and I stayed in their "extra" house, which was basically used as a crash pad for their sons when they were back in town. (During my stay in Kyoto, Shige took me to his parents' shop, where he showed me the single most expensive item -- a three-inch long curved piece of bamboo, used as a scoop for powdered green tea, which sold for I don't remember how many thousands of dollars.)
On my first night in Kyoto, Shige's parents took us to a very beautiful kaiseki restaurant. (Kaiseki is Japanese haute cuisine, the food served in the exquisitely arranged bite-sized portions one sees in travel magazine articles about Japanese food.) Unfortunately, I cannot remember the name or location of the restaurant, for I would love to go there again, but I do recall that it was down a small alleyway of polished paving stones lined by bamboo and lit with foot lights, and that inside, there was a small stream running along one wall of our room, under glass, and lit. It was absolutely over-the-top tasteful and understated, if you know what I mean.
I don't remember the restaurant's name or location because of what happened next: I drank a lot. Not enough to be sick or embarrass myself, but enough that my memories of that night 18 years ago are hazy.
We sat down at a low table on the tatami mats next to the little stream, me across from Shige's father, Shige across from his mother. A middle-aged, kimino-clad woman came in, and Shige's father ordered beer. Japanese have a custom of starting with beer because it is perceived as "lighter" than liquor and thus not such a shock to the system; it's warm-up booze. (However, this custom violates the rule I learned in college: Liquor before beer, never fear. Beer before liquor, never sicker. And I saw a lot of sickened people in Japan.)
We had some food, we talked as much as my Japanese would allow about the U.S., Harvard, my impressions of Japan, etc., and then, Shige's father asked me, "Nihonshu ha, suki desu ka?" ("Do you like sake?) We were already drinking beer, and the question sounded rhetorical to me, so I said I did. The kimono-clad waitress reappeared. (I guess Shige's father had buzzed her.) He said something to her. Moments later, she returned with a bottle of sake and several glasses. Now I had two glasses before me, one beer and one sake.
In Japan, it is rude to allow your guest's glass to become empty. So, whenever I drank a sip of either beer or sake, someone would fill up my cup. Because I was raised never to leave food over, every time they filled my cup, I drank it. Then they filled it again. I did not realize that the way to get them to stop filling the cup was to leave it full. (Saying no did not work, because it's actually polite in Japan to refuse what's being offered to you a couple of times, and they merely thought I had good manners.)
After some more food, Shige's father asked me, "Howisskee ha, suki desu ka?" ("Do you like whiskey?") Having learned nothing from the sake question, I said yes (even thought it was not really even true), and soon a bottle of whiskey appeared, along with glasses for the whole party. Now, the table before me was beginning to resemble that John Lee Hooker song -- one whiskey, one sake, and one beer -- and each time I sipped from one glass, it was filled up again.
I don't remember further details about the evening, except that the meal was delicious, I had a great time, Shige's parents were very nice people, and the restaurant itself was one of this most beautiful I have ever been to. But the story has a post-script. Shige's father probably asked me about whiskey to be polite. As an American, I was expected to like whiskey -- just like Americans in the movies -- even though no one I knew at the time drank it (except for my friend Paul O'Brien). I thought of whiskey as an old-fashioned old man's drink. Over the years, many Japanese, like Shige's father, would insist that I drink whiskey with them like a real American, to the point that I developed a taste for it, which I still have.
It's ironic that I had to go to Japan to become a whiskey-drinker.
In the middle of my summer at Canon, the entire company shut down for two weeks. I freaked out, because no one had warned me about the shut down, and I would not get paid during the break. When I got done freaking out, I decided to focus on what I would do during the break. One of my dorm-mates from Fujigaoka Dormitory, Shige-san, suggested that I come stay with him at his house in Kyoto for a few days. It sounded like a great idea, so I took him up on it.
Shige's family lived in the northern part of Kyoto, which (as I learned many years later from my wife, who is also from Kyoto) is dominated by old families, some with old money, who consider themselves the real Kyotoites and look down on people from the rest of Kyoto. There is a good chance that Shige's family had both an old name and old money, as they owned the second-largest distributor of tea-ceremony goods in Japan, and Shige and I stayed in their "extra" house, which was basically used as a crash pad for their sons when they were back in town. (During my stay in Kyoto, Shige took me to his parents' shop, where he showed me the single most expensive item -- a three-inch long curved piece of bamboo, used as a scoop for powdered green tea, which sold for I don't remember how many thousands of dollars.)
On my first night in Kyoto, Shige's parents took us to a very beautiful kaiseki restaurant. (Kaiseki is Japanese haute cuisine, the food served in the exquisitely arranged bite-sized portions one sees in travel magazine articles about Japanese food.) Unfortunately, I cannot remember the name or location of the restaurant, for I would love to go there again, but I do recall that it was down a small alleyway of polished paving stones lined by bamboo and lit with foot lights, and that inside, there was a small stream running along one wall of our room, under glass, and lit. It was absolutely over-the-top tasteful and understated, if you know what I mean.
I don't remember the restaurant's name or location because of what happened next: I drank a lot. Not enough to be sick or embarrass myself, but enough that my memories of that night 18 years ago are hazy.
We sat down at a low table on the tatami mats next to the little stream, me across from Shige's father, Shige across from his mother. A middle-aged, kimino-clad woman came in, and Shige's father ordered beer. Japanese have a custom of starting with beer because it is perceived as "lighter" than liquor and thus not such a shock to the system; it's warm-up booze. (However, this custom violates the rule I learned in college: Liquor before beer, never fear. Beer before liquor, never sicker. And I saw a lot of sickened people in Japan.)
We had some food, we talked as much as my Japanese would allow about the U.S., Harvard, my impressions of Japan, etc., and then, Shige's father asked me, "Nihonshu ha, suki desu ka?" ("Do you like sake?) We were already drinking beer, and the question sounded rhetorical to me, so I said I did. The kimono-clad waitress reappeared. (I guess Shige's father had buzzed her.) He said something to her. Moments later, she returned with a bottle of sake and several glasses. Now I had two glasses before me, one beer and one sake.
In Japan, it is rude to allow your guest's glass to become empty. So, whenever I drank a sip of either beer or sake, someone would fill up my cup. Because I was raised never to leave food over, every time they filled my cup, I drank it. Then they filled it again. I did not realize that the way to get them to stop filling the cup was to leave it full. (Saying no did not work, because it's actually polite in Japan to refuse what's being offered to you a couple of times, and they merely thought I had good manners.)
After some more food, Shige's father asked me, "Howisskee ha, suki desu ka?" ("Do you like whiskey?") Having learned nothing from the sake question, I said yes (even thought it was not really even true), and soon a bottle of whiskey appeared, along with glasses for the whole party. Now, the table before me was beginning to resemble that John Lee Hooker song -- one whiskey, one sake, and one beer -- and each time I sipped from one glass, it was filled up again.
I don't remember further details about the evening, except that the meal was delicious, I had a great time, Shige's parents were very nice people, and the restaurant itself was one of this most beautiful I have ever been to. But the story has a post-script. Shige's father probably asked me about whiskey to be polite. As an American, I was expected to like whiskey -- just like Americans in the movies -- even though no one I knew at the time drank it (except for my friend Paul O'Brien). I thought of whiskey as an old-fashioned old man's drink. Over the years, many Japanese, like Shige's father, would insist that I drink whiskey with them like a real American, to the point that I developed a taste for it, which I still have.
It's ironic that I had to go to Japan to become a whiskey-drinker.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
The Curry Shop Girl
After my home-stay went awry, I moved into the Canon dormitory managed by Oshikawa-san and his wife in Musashi-Nitta, in Ohta-ku, Tokyo.
Musashi-Nitta was a working-class neighborhood in the southeastern part of Tokyo, near the Tama River, which separates Tokyo from Kawasaki City. Tokyo lacks zoning laws, and Musashi-Nitta featured a diverse mixture of land uses, ranging from houses to shops (concentrated in the business district near the station) to small factories doing piece-work for Japan's big companies. There were even a few rice paddies scattered in the neighborhood near the Tama River, existing on some of the world's most expensive real estate due to extremely farmer-friendly tax policies. (I always wondered if people would eat the rice if they knew it came from a field next to a car-parts manufacturer, but they probably never knew where it came from.)
Like most neighborhoods in Japan, Musashi-Nitta featured a shotengai (shopping district) near the station, consisting of a street sloping downward in the direction of the river, demarcated at both ends with a gate reading Musashi-Nitta Shotengai. The shotengai featured a couple of convenience stores, a supermarket, a home electronics-goods store, a store where could buy household items like linens, pots and pans, and even small furniture items, and a few restaurants and "snacks" -- the Japanese name for a kind of local bar with a very small number of seats, very personalized service, and a reputation for looking askance at new people. The shotengai always had some kind of seasonal decorations hanging from the telephone poles -- pink plastic cherry blossoms in the spring, red and yellow plastic leaves in the fall -- that added some color to the drab grey exteriors of the neighborhood shops. The shotengai lay directly on my route from Musashi-Nitta station to Oshikawa-san's dormitory, so I would traverse it twice a day.
One of the restaurants was a curry-rice shop, occupying a location toward the bottom of the street at the Y where two streets came together. The shop was run by a middle-aged woman and her daughter, who was a year or two older than me. After a while, I started going there a couple of times a week. I was usually the only customer there, and it was a good chance to practice my Japanese.
The daughter always seemed sort of shy and sad, and I figured that being trapped in a curry shop in Musashi-Nitta with her mother was not exactly the kind of life she wished for, but it was nice being able to talk to someone during dinner. She would pepper me with questions about the U.S. and I would try my best to answer in my still-halting Japanese. She always seemed happy to see me when I came in, and I thought I had made a new friend.
I guess she had bigger ideas than that. She suggested that we go out one Saturday afternoon, and I accepted, thinking it was harmless. I don't remember where we went, but the next day, she showed up at my dormitory with a present for me. It was then I realized that she was interested in more than just friendship. I am not cynical about her motives, but I am sure that part of her interest resulted from the fact that the possibility of dating a gaijin (and Musashi-Nitta was not exactly the kind of place where you met a lot of them) offered her an exciting escape from life in the curry shop.
Although I was not happy to be put in this position and didn't want to hurt her feelings, I knew it would be crueler to lead her on, so I told her, as best I could, that I was only interested in a friendship. She burst into tears, which needless to say, only made me feel worse.
I pried myself away from her and went back to my room. I stopped going to the curry shop after that, and always walked by very quickly from that point onwards, hoping that I would not run into her, which I never did again.
Musashi-Nitta was a working-class neighborhood in the southeastern part of Tokyo, near the Tama River, which separates Tokyo from Kawasaki City. Tokyo lacks zoning laws, and Musashi-Nitta featured a diverse mixture of land uses, ranging from houses to shops (concentrated in the business district near the station) to small factories doing piece-work for Japan's big companies. There were even a few rice paddies scattered in the neighborhood near the Tama River, existing on some of the world's most expensive real estate due to extremely farmer-friendly tax policies. (I always wondered if people would eat the rice if they knew it came from a field next to a car-parts manufacturer, but they probably never knew where it came from.)
Like most neighborhoods in Japan, Musashi-Nitta featured a shotengai (shopping district) near the station, consisting of a street sloping downward in the direction of the river, demarcated at both ends with a gate reading Musashi-Nitta Shotengai. The shotengai featured a couple of convenience stores, a supermarket, a home electronics-goods store, a store where could buy household items like linens, pots and pans, and even small furniture items, and a few restaurants and "snacks" -- the Japanese name for a kind of local bar with a very small number of seats, very personalized service, and a reputation for looking askance at new people. The shotengai always had some kind of seasonal decorations hanging from the telephone poles -- pink plastic cherry blossoms in the spring, red and yellow plastic leaves in the fall -- that added some color to the drab grey exteriors of the neighborhood shops. The shotengai lay directly on my route from Musashi-Nitta station to Oshikawa-san's dormitory, so I would traverse it twice a day.
One of the restaurants was a curry-rice shop, occupying a location toward the bottom of the street at the Y where two streets came together. The shop was run by a middle-aged woman and her daughter, who was a year or two older than me. After a while, I started going there a couple of times a week. I was usually the only customer there, and it was a good chance to practice my Japanese.
The daughter always seemed sort of shy and sad, and I figured that being trapped in a curry shop in Musashi-Nitta with her mother was not exactly the kind of life she wished for, but it was nice being able to talk to someone during dinner. She would pepper me with questions about the U.S. and I would try my best to answer in my still-halting Japanese. She always seemed happy to see me when I came in, and I thought I had made a new friend.
I guess she had bigger ideas than that. She suggested that we go out one Saturday afternoon, and I accepted, thinking it was harmless. I don't remember where we went, but the next day, she showed up at my dormitory with a present for me. It was then I realized that she was interested in more than just friendship. I am not cynical about her motives, but I am sure that part of her interest resulted from the fact that the possibility of dating a gaijin (and Musashi-Nitta was not exactly the kind of place where you met a lot of them) offered her an exciting escape from life in the curry shop.
Although I was not happy to be put in this position and didn't want to hurt her feelings, I knew it would be crueler to lead her on, so I told her, as best I could, that I was only interested in a friendship. She burst into tears, which needless to say, only made me feel worse.
I pried myself away from her and went back to my room. I stopped going to the curry shop after that, and always walked by very quickly from that point onwards, hoping that I would not run into her, which I never did again.
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