Gaijin Days

Two-hour limit

2011-11-06T13:12:00.000-05:00

One of the most impenetrable ideas concepts in Japan was the two-hour limit on restaurant reservations. If you called a restaurant and reserved a table, you'd be warned that you had to leave after two hours. And, sure enough, even if you were prepared to order more food, consume more booze, and fatten the restaurant's bottom line, when two hours were up, you'd be given the check and politely told that your time was up. However, if you simply showed up without bothering to call first, there was no limit on how long you could stay.

Let me explain the absurdity a little further. Izakayas in Japan were often open till 11:00 p.m. or later, but the mostly after-work crowd would thin out fast after 9:00 p.m., either because people wanted to move to another spot or because they had a long train ride to deepest Chiba or darkest Kanagawa and needed to get home. There wasn't a "second seating" as there might be in a popular New York restaurant, so no one was lined up waiting for your seat after the initial rush. You might think that, in a restaurant that was emptying out, but still open for several more hours, they'd be happy for you to continue to eat and drink, especially if you were a large group (the only time I ever bothered to make a reservation). Not so. If your reservation started at 7:00 pm, you were out at 9:00, period. But, just show up with the same group at the same time without any prior warning and the staff would often be too polite to ask you to leave even if you ran right up against closing time.

I only found my way around this conundrum once. I brought a large group of friends to an izakaya I frequented in Shibuya. When the two hour mark rolled around, the waiter came up and told us that our reservation was up. We looked around and found the restaurant was emptying out, with no one waiting. We'd like to stay longer, I told the waiter. "I'm so sorry," he responded, "but we have a two-hour limit on reservations." "Well," I told him, "we want to keep on eating and drinking. Can you recommend a good place nearby?"

The waiter went and consulted with the manager, who hurriedly came over and said we could stay. Evidently the prospect of losing money to a competitor awakened the man's capitalist instincts.

Gaijin's Torment: Adjusting to Japanese Food

2011-04-11T15:04:00.007-04:00

The day comes for every gaijin in Japan when he or she encounters food that he just can't -- or won't -- swallow. Back in the day, for many gaijin this food item was raw fish (though it's hard to believe this is still the case, when sushi is the first solid food fed to half the children in Manhattan). Though I wasn't yet a fan, I had at least conquered my fear of raw fish by the time I got to Japan, so this wasn't a problem for me.

Nor did I flinch at eating the grasshoppers caramelized in sugar that were once served to me in an izakaya the way that chips or pretzels would be in an American bar. (They were really good.) I happily ate thinly-sliced raw horse meat and was surprised to find the raw chicken sashimi to be delightful. The cod sperm-sac stew I had at a chankonabe restaurant was silky, salty, and perfect on a cold winter night. My yakitori-shop-owning gourmand of a friend, Daisuke, even took me to a famous "hormone" restaurant, where we waited for an hour for a chance to eat pig liver, intestines, uterus and other organ meats completely raw. I'd happily go back there if I ever get the chance.

But I was shocked to that mayonnaise, the French condiment that now symbolizes American cuisine the world over, shows up repeatedly, and unexpectedly, in Japanese cuisine. It coats okonomiyaki (lit. "whatever-you-like" savory hotcakes), covers takoyaki (battered octopus-chunks), and, when people feel compelled to eat some vegetables in an izakaya, serves as the dipping sauce for yasai (veggie) sticks. Mayonnaise is what you put on grilled whole squid or roasted dried squid at the ballgame. And, if a restaurant eschews carrot-ginger or shiso dressing for a green salad, mayo inevitably replaces them. I didn't even know they had mayonnaise in Japan, but when I got there, it was everywhere and on everything.

Corn, which I did not expect to see in Japan either, also appeared where I least expected it. A green salad an in izakaya consisted of a few slices of iceberg lettuce, one wedge of tomato, a sprig of parsley, mayo dressing, and a spoonful of corn kernels. One can imagine the irritation of eating a bunch of corn kernels one-by-one with chopsticks, so they often tended to be left floating around uneaten in the bottom of a bowl of watery mayonnaise. Corn kernels also showed up in the most inappropriate place of all: pizza.

In fact, not only corn defiled pizza in Japan. There was canned tuna, too. Though some Italian restaurants served good brick-oven style pizzas, the New York variety could not be had except through delivery services that charged about $30 for a pie, at a time when the going rate in New York was about $10. And a plain pie could not be had -- except after one picked off all the corn and tuna. Corn and tuna were, in fact, the baseline items for all delivery pizza in Tokyo. You could get corn and squid or tuna and spicy cod roe, or corn and tuna, but you simply could not get a plain pie delivered to your house.

Pepperoni was out of the question.

Aquarium Buffet

2011-02-09T15:28:00.006-05:00

There's just one word you need to know when visiting an aquarium in Japan: Oishi-sou.

My first-ever visit to a Japanese aquarium took place in 1991, when my then-girlfriend and I went on an afternoon date to the Sunshine City Aquarium in Ikebukuro, in the northwestern part of Tokyo. Many people are familiar with the hotel-office-residence-shopping center-restaurant-entertainment complexes sometimes called "cities within a city" that have sprung up all over Tokyo in recent years. Some of the better known of these developments are Roppongi Hills, Tokyo Midtown, Shiodome City Center, and Takashimaya Times Square. Sunshine City was the one of the first, if not the first, of these mega-projects to appear on the Tokyo skyline.

The Sunshine City Aquarium sits on the top floor of Sunshine City's main 60-storey tower, a testament to both Japanese engineering (the weight of all that water on such a high floor!) and Bubble Era excess (putting a frickin' aquarium on the top floor of a 60-storey tower!). As an aquarium it was pretty good: nice lighting, lots of cool ocean species, you get the idea.

After paying for our tickets and entering the aquarium, we arrived at the first tank, displaying silvery fish swimming in a school against a machine-made current. Beautiful, I thought. All around me, Japanese visitors pointed excitedly at the tank. Oishi-sou!, one would exclaim gleefully. Oishi-soo da ne!, their companion would enthusiastically agree.

The next tank featured brilliantly red giant Japanese crabs. Wow, huge!, I thought. The Japanese visitors around me consulted with each other agreed that the crabs, too, were Oishi-sou! The squid tank? Oishi-sou! The octopus? Oishi-sou! This continued at practically every tank. Little kids, young couples on dates, middle-aged women, my girlfriend -- all who cast their eyes on the aquatic creatures pronounced them Oishi-sou. By the time I reached the last exhibit, even I was thinking Oishi-sou! when I saw whatever was swimming around there.

Oishi-sou, you see, literally means "looks delicious" -- as in, "Where's the wasabi and soy sauce?! Quick, someone grab that tuna and fillet it for me right now!"

That trip to Sunshine City has forever warped my aquarium-going experience. Now when I go to an aquarium it's impossible for me to shut off the part of my brain that's contemplating the culinary possibilities.

That yellow fin tuna? Sashimi.

That school of shimmering sardines? Pickled in soy sauce.

The Atlantic lobster? Quick, someone boil some water!

Sea worms? Ah, maybe not.

Fireworks

2010-06-28T15:00:00.008-04:00

In Japan, summer is just not summer without fireworks (hanabi).

Hanabi range from hand-held sparklers lit in the yard on a summer evening to major fireworks displays (hanabi taikai), like the annual events over the Sumida River and Tokyo Bay, for which everything else stops and it seems as if all of Tokyo has turned out to watch. Hanabi taikai don't commemorate anything in particular -- except people's desire to see fireworks in the summertime -- and there are usually several big fireworks displays in each city throughout the summer. As with summer festivals, like O-bon or the Gion Matsuri in Kyoto, a hanabi taikai is an excuse to wear traditional Japanese clothing. Most young women wear a yukata, a colorful lightweight cotton kimono, and young men wear yukata or jimbei, which are basically a short-sleeved, short-legged karate suit. Women wear geta (wooden sandals) and men wear geta or zori, which are the ancestor of the flip-flop. If you get on the subway and notice all the young people dressed in yukatas and jimbei, it's a pretty safe bet that there's a fireworks display going on somewhere nearby.

I have many good memories of watching fireworks in Japan. Some of the best involved boarding a fishing scow from a loading dock in Yokohama with two dozen other customers of the Bus Bar (a mobile bar in an old bus, now parked on a Yokohama loading dock, which will be the subject of a future post) and motoring out past the Yokohama Bay Bridge and into Yokohama Harbor to see the fireworks over the towers of the Yokohama's Minato Mirai.

But perhaps my most memorable hanabi taikai was the one some friends and I put on ourselves, from my rooftop balcony, on July 4, 1993.

July 4 was a Sunday, and I had invited Dave S. (Meishi Man) and his girlfriend, Chieko, over to my house for a barbecue. As was the custom, I supplied the yakitori and did the cooking, and they supplied the beer and the company. That day, in addition to beer, Dave also brought what can only be described as an arsenal of fireworks, which he had purchased at the 7-11.

Growing up in New Jersey, fireworks were illegal. Occasionally, a friend would acquire some illegal firecrackers in Chinatown. Sometimes, friends with relatives in the South would return home with more exotic fireworks that they had purchased in Washington, D.C., where fireworks were legal. But, in general, fireworks were hard to come by when I was a kid. Imagine my surprise and delight when I saw, during my first summer in Japan, that every convenience store sells extensive supplies of ordnance ranging from sparklers to bottle rockets to streamers to tank-buster bombs. On July 4, 1993, Meishi Man showed up at my house with the biggest package of fireworks I had ever seen: a 3,000 -yen jumbo pack of explosive delights.

By the time it had gotten dark enough for fireworks, we'd been barbecuing and drinking beer for hours. Blowing stuff up on my balcony and launching bottle rockets all over the neighborhood seemed like a really excellent idea. We figured that fireworks were normal in the summertime and that no one would complain. After fifteen minutes of shelling, however, my next-door neighbor leaned out her window and complained that we were scaring her dog. So, we decided to pack up our weaponry and head to Yoyogi Park, a large green space in the middle of Tokyo, a few blocks away from my place. We stopped at 7-11 for more beer and more bombs before making our way to the park.

We were a bit apprehensive about being stopped by the police for launching fireworks in the park. Japanese cops were always looking for reasons to bust gaijin, and Meishi Man had nearly been arrested once when pushing home a bicycle he had fished out of a river and planned to refurbish. But the beer gave us courage, and we really, really wanted to continue blowing things up. We made our way to Yoyogi Park's central meadow -- the place I had first met Meishi Man the previous November at the Yale-Yale touch football game won by Harvard. As we scanned the darkness for signs of something or someone that might halt our revelry, what we saw surprised us: the unmistakable lights of a half-dozen other mini hanabi-taikai scattered around the meadow. Fireworks in the park were just a rite of summer. No one would stop us from exploding the rest of our arsenal.

In the relative cool of the summer night, we drank our beer and, one after another, touched cigarette lighter to fuse and launched bottle rockets and streamers into the Tokyo night.

More Early Morning Baseball Adventures

2010-02-23T15:30:00.001-05:00

It soon became clear why I was able to hook on with the Wakakusa team just by asking. We were very bad. Half the team was over forty, the right fielder looked as if he had never played a game of baseball before (because, as it turned out, he hadn't), the third baseman (one of the better players) never bothered to go to bed the night before the games, and each week we struggled to put nine players on the field. I don't recall winning any games in the year and a half I played for Wakakusa, but this was a familiar feeling for me, having been on an 0-17 team during my senior year of high school.

But playing for Wakakusa was fun and full of adventure.

Often, the fun started the night before. Saturday nights were usually spent drinking with friends, though I imposed a midnight curfew on myself to make sure I had at least four hours of sleep before the alarm rang at 4;30 am. However, during the warm months, at about 2:30 am each week, I would be awakened by the bosozoku -- the "speed tribes" -- teenage motorcycle gangsters who would cruise the streets of Tokyo, blocking traffic, gunning their engines, and generally irritating everyone within earshot. Bosozuku were the minor leagues for the yakuza gangs, and they didn't care who they pissed off. The cops were scared of them and did nothing about them, just happy to see them pass off into the next police box's district. But, the bosozoku were nothing if not punctual, and they followed the same circuit each week, which brought them to the intersection of Yamanote Road and Inokashira Road, perhaps 100 meters from my apartment, where they would stop and gun their engines for several minutes, at precisely the same time each Sunday morning. Each week, upon being awakened, I would lie in my futon fuming and fantasizing of revenge: spreading nails and broken glass across the intersection, or of stretching piano wire at neck height between the pillars of the pedestrian bridge crossing the intersection. I'd fall back to sleep to the comforting thought of bosozoku bloodily wiping out as their tires shredded or slicing their own heads off on piano wire they couldn't see in the dark.

As the first gaijin in the league, I became a local celebrity. Word about me spread throughout the league, and members of the other team would often introduce themselves before the game. They all knew my name, and it was very disconcerting. As I warmed up, I'd hear them talking about me:

He's got a good arm.

Can he hit?

Look! He does have a big ass, just like the major leaguers.

I started out as our team's catcher, forming a battery with Umezawa-san (or "Ume-san"), a sidearmer who like most Japanese pitchers threw mostly breaking stuff but could also get a surprising amount of zip on the fastball for a 47 year-old sushi chef. Even though catching had been hell on my knees since the tenth grade, when I had to give it up, I enjoyed catching more than any other position. It allowed me to see the whole field, to be involved in every play, to be in control of the game, and to talk to the batters and the umpire. On one particularly bright Sunday morning, the rising sun bore directly at the batter's box from center field. At "balls in!" the umpire and I stood behind the plate, shielding our eyes as we waited for the first batter. "Sure is bright out," I said. After a pause the umpire hesitantly responded, "Oh, is that so?," as if this was new information that he wasn't sure how to address.

Later, I replayed the exchange in my head. All I had said was, "Mabushii desu ne . . ." ("Sure is bright out"). Why had he answered, "Oh, is that so?" when it was obviously so bright out? And what was he so sheepish about? Only much later did I realize I had made an ever so small, and ever so important error. I'd replaced the "bu" in mabushii with "zu." So, I had told the umpire, out of the blue, "Mazushiii desu ne . . ." ("You know, I am very poor. [I don't have any money].") No wonder he had responded the way he did.

After a few weeks, my knees were aching beyond my capacity to endure it any longer, and I told my manager that I could not catch any more. He asked if I could pitch, and I told him I had pitched in high school. I should have known better, because saying you played high school baseball has an entirely different meaning in Japan. Rather than shabby uniforms and games no one attends, high school baseball conjures up images of the nationally televised national high school baseball championship, known informally as "Koshien," after the famous field on which it the final games are played, the hallowed home field of the Hanshin Tigers. Koshien is a single-elimination tournament played by teams from all over the country before capacity crowds. The final is often an epic extra-inning marathon in which both starting pitchers -- who have started every game of the tournament -- throw goose eggs at the other side for 16 innings. Many players, like Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui, go directly from Koshien to Japan Professional Baseball. So, when one says, "I played high school baseball" in Japan, people are impressed.

My manager told me I was starting that morning. At least for that game, he was onto something. The slightly smaller Japanese baseball made it much easier for me to throw a curveball, and for six innings, I throw no-hit ball. We lost in the seventh (we played seven inning games) when I walked a batter and then, with two outs, the batter hit a routine pop fly to our right fielder, who, playing as if he'd never played the game before (because he hadn't), dropped it and then kicked it into foul territory, allowing the only run of the game to score. But my manager was beaming with the thought that he now improved the team's chances considerably. In future games, though, my pitching did not live up to the early promise. A player on another team told me I had a good fastball, but I was telegraphing when I was going to throw the curve.

That did not stop me from making two all-star game appearances during my time on the team. Wakakusa's manager managed our division's all-star team both years, and he selected me both times. I always assumed that it was because I was the league's only gaijin, but I enjoyed playing in the games nevertheless. The first year, I played right field, and made a nice play to double a runner off first base on a line drive that I had to run some distance to catch. The second year, I started the game as pitcher and, against the best players from the other division, got lit up like a string of red plastic chili lights. It was a very, very long night. But, these games were in the evening, under the lights at a good university baseball field, and a lot of my friends came to see me play.

Playing baseball was one of the best experiences I had in Japan. I got to meet real salt-of-the-earth, every day Japanese people, who were more fun and easy-going than most of the people in the button-down places I worked, where everyone had graduated from Tokyo University and took himself very seriously. I made some good friends, particularly Ume-san, whose sushi shop I used to visit even after I stopped playing for the team. And, I hit my first home run since Little League -- a dinger into the Tama River on the fly that I knew was gone the minute I made contact.

Dawn Baseball

2010-02-16T15:50:00.002-05:00

It's hard to imagine in the depths of winter that spring is near. But the proof that I am right in spite of the snow is that, starting tomorrow, thousands of professional baseball players will be suiting up in locker rooms across Florida and Arizona for the first day of spring training. So, my mind turns to baseball.

In a couple of short weeks, it will be March. March has a very distinct smell, of new grass pushing its way through damp, thawing earth. For me, growing up in the Northeast, where we were permitted to begin practicing for high school baseball on March 8, new, damp grass is the smell of baseball, of a new season, of the end of the long, dark winter with nothing to watch on TV except basketball, and the approach of summer. More than two decades after graduating from high school, the March smell still fills me with longing to play ball.

Tokyo -- when you can find some grass -- also has the green scent of spring in early March. In 1993, the spring baseball smell overcame me, and I began asking around about adult baseball leagues. It turned out that one of the staff at the gym knew a member who played in such a league. I was introduced, and before I knew it, was a member of the ironically named team, Wakakusa -- "New Grass".

Our pre-season meeting took place in a bowling alley. It was here that I learned that our games took place at 6:30 a.m. on Sunday mornings. Most of the men in my league were blue collar guys who worked on weekends -- sushi chefs, soba makers, factory workers, and even a professional bowler -- and Sunday mornings were the only time they could play. But it was a high-level league, with a number of former players from the industrial leagues and from the Big Six colleges, and I was happy just to have the chance to play baseball again, even at the literal crack of dawn. I was so happy that I volunteered to play where the team needed me most, as catcher, even though I had given this position up in tenth grade because, thanks to years of catching, by the age of 15 I had the knees of a forty year old. (Do the math and figure out whose knees I have now.)

At the end of the meeting, we scheduled our first and only practice, at the playing fields, near Futago-Tamagawa Station, running along the Tama River, which forms the southern boundary between Tokyo and Kanagawa Prefecture. On practice day, I arrived at the field a little early. I picked a bench at the nearest diamond and waited for my teammates. The sun was coming up to my left, over the bridge carrying the train line into Kanagawa, and a mist rose from the slowly warming baseball diamonds. Off to the right, tiny on the horizon, Mt. Fuji's still snow-covered peak slowly turned from pink to yellow to white as the sun climbed in the sky. Though I wore a hooded sweatshirt over my uniform top, the cold March wind blew right through my sanitary leggings and my polyester uniform pants. No one showed up for the practice. I trudged home.

At the gym the next day, I saw my new teammate, the professional bowler. He asked why I had missed practice. Only then did I realize that the playing fields ran for miles along the Tama's banks and that I had been waiting in the wrong place. Our field was actually a mile or so further upriver from the train station. We arranged that from then on, another teammate, Umezawa-san, would meet me at the station and drive me to the field.

For the next eight months, from March through November, I rose every Sunday morning at 4:30 am, grabbed some rice balls and canned coffee for the train at the 7-11, boarded the first train from Tomigaya Station at 5:05 am, and arrived at Futago-Tamagawa shortly before 6:00 am, where Umezawa-san would pick me up in the van he used to ferry fish from the Tsukiji fish market to his sushi restaurant each morning. We'd play a seven inning game from 6:30 am to 8:30 am, followed by breakfast at a nearby Denny's. (Yes, I always had the Grand Slam.) Then Umezawa-san would drop me back at Futago-Tamagawa Station, and I would board the train home, letting the little old ladies from the Kanagawa suburbs start their Sunday outings in Tokyo with the spectacle of a gaijin, smelling slightly of fish, dressed in a baseball uniform that, at 9:30 am, was already covered in sweat and diamond dirt.

The Right to Use a Used Right

2010-01-27T16:30:00.006-05:00

In mid-1993, about six months after renting my own apartment, I left work early because I was not feeling well. By evening, it was clear I had a very bad cold. I felt nauseated, my head was pounding, and my joints ached. I was also very hungry (I almost never lose my appetite when sick), but I had no food in the house and no cash on me to buy any -- even if I could have made it to the supermarket. And I couldn't call anyone, because I had no phone. Just when things looked their bleakest, there was a knock on the door. It was my girlfriend. She had called me at work, been told that I had gone home sick, and come to my apartment because that was the only way to reach me.

Yes, I had no phone.

In those days, Nippon Telephone & Telegraph (NTT) held a monopoly on land lines, and cell phones were so rare that my friends and I used to call them "asshole detectors" -- as in "anyone who had one had to be an asshole." NTT used its monopoly position to charge an exorbitant fee for the "right" to have a telephone. (Not the phone, not installation, not a phone number -- just the "right" to own a phone.) And, in 1993, the fee for a telephone right was 70,000 yen, or about $700. In Japan, public phones in good working order were everywhere, including a block away at the 7-11. Prepaid telephone cards obviated the need for large amounts of coinage. And, from special gold phones, you could even call the US. Plus, I spent 8 hours a day in my office, where people could always reach me, and most of the rest of the time out doing stuff. Plus, after living in a dorm for a year, I had already gotten used to not having my own phone and I kind of liked it. No wrong numbers in the middle of the night. No telemarketers. No calls from Mom when I was in the middle of something. As a matter of principle, I refused to give NTT 70,000 of my hard-earned yen just for a telephone.

Of course, being at the invincible age of 23, it never occurred to me that I might get sick. Or that I might get sick and have no food in the house. Or that I might get sick, have no food in the house, and be too sick to go to the nearby 7-11 to buy food. Or that I might get sick, have no food in the house, be unable to go to the 7-11 to buy food, and be unable to call a friend from the nearest pay phone because the nearest pay phone was at the 7-11. After returning to health, I decided that my principle was silly and I needed a phone.

It turned out that a secondary market existed for "used" phone rights. Rather than pay $700 for a "new" phone right directly from NTT, you could go to a broker and buy a used one for about $650. After returning to work, I found a phone line broker in the Japan Times classifieds. For my $650, I not only got my phone "right" but the broker also arranged for NTT to come to my apartment to install the phone line -- for which, of course, there was a separate fee. I got a used telephone/answering machine from a friend, so at least I did not need to pay for that. And I did get most of my money for the "right" back eventually. When I moved back to the US in 1994, I sold my "right" back to the same broker for 60,000 yen ($600).

Nothing about the telephone right system ever made sense to me. If NTT wanted the highest number of people possible to subscribe to telephone service to amortize the initial cost of installing telephone infrastructure around Japan, why would it charge such a high fee? And if NTT was simply exercising its monopolistic power to screw the Japanese consumer, why did it allow people to utilize "used" rights for which NTT did not get a single yen, when it could have simply charged the 70,000 yen as a fee to every subscriber? Or, instead, why didn't NTT itself buy back "used" rights for 60,000 and resell them at the regular price? At least that way, it would have gotten 10,000 for each of the rights sold in the secondary market rather than give money away to brokers. Finally, if the right was not subject to wear and tear, why would a used one be any cheaper than a new one? Like a new car, a new right lost value the moment you purchased it, but, unlike a car, a telephone right lacked moving parts that wear down.

The only reasons I can imagine why used rights are sold at a discount are the transaction cost involved in having to go to a third party to get one and the lesser prestige of a used right. Japanese people typically don't like used things -- for example, Japanese houses are typically built to last only 30 years (compared to 100 years in the US), because most Japanese don't want to live in houses with other people's cooties -- so they tear down the house they just bought and build anew. Perhaps it was the same with a telephone right: the fact that someone had used it before somehow made it kind of icky.

Christmas in Japan

2009-12-18T17:00:00.003-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

ATMs Need Vacations, Too

2009-11-15T10:15:00.002-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Halloween in Tokyo: Meishi Man Strikes Again

2009-10-30T11:40:00.004-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2009-10-16T17:57:00.002-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Korea Part II or Life as a Japanese Tourist

2009-10-03T10:00:00.002-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Detour to Seoul, Korea

2009-10-01T09:00:00.001-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Japanese Baseball

2009-09-17T18:20:00.002-04:00

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!)

My Brush with Sumo Greatness

2009-09-11T11:46:00.006-04:00

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.

My First Hatsumode

2009-09-02T09:00:00.003-04:00

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.

A Human Stream

2009-08-31T09:00:00.001-04:00

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.

More on the Japanese Election

2009-08-30T20:43:00.003-04:00

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.

LDP Swept Out of Power

2009-08-30T13:50:00.003-04:00

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.

Hanami II

2009-08-28T14:38:00.003-04:00

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 . . . .

Hanami

2009-08-26T18:15:00.005-04:00

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

The Birth of Meishi Man

2009-08-21T12:31:00.002-04:00

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.

Unrelated Japan Photo #11

2009-08-19T10:10:00.000-04:00

Matsuyama Park, Kyoto, 2007

Chopstickery Pet Peeves

2009-08-19T10:00:00.004-04:00

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.

Why I Learned Japanese

2009-08-17T10:00:00.001-04:00

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.

Unrelated Japan Photo #10

2009-08-14T09:49:00.000-04:00

The Enoshima Dentetsu (江ノ島電鉄), the single-track streetcar running from Kamakura Station to Fujisawa Station in Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo. Arguably the best-loved attraction in Kamakura after the Great Buddha of Kamakura.

One Whiskey, One Sake, and One Beer

2009-08-13T10:00:00.005-04:00

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.

The Curry Shop Girl

2009-08-12T10:00:00.000-04:00

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.

Unrelated Japan Photo #9

2009-08-11T21:39:00.002-04:00

Outside Kamakura, Japan, 2006.

Does anyone know the name of this temple? You can see it from the Enoden, on your way from Kamakura to Fujisawa.

Added 9/11/09: It's Ryuko-ji, a Nichiren Buddhist temple, founded in 1137, where Nichiren is said to have been executed.

Cleaning Ladies in the Men's Room

2009-08-11T16:27:00.000-04:00

One of life's little differences in Japan was that, every once in a while, you'd be standing at a urinal in an office building bathroom, and the next thing you know -- there's a little old lady in a uniform cleaning the bathroom around you.

The first time this happened to me, I was at Canon. I was standing there, absent-mindedly doing my thing, when all of a sudden, a woman walked in and began to clean the urinal next to me. I was so surprised, it nearly caused me to miss.

Over the years, I saw enough cleaning ladies in men's bathrooms, gym locker rooms, etc., that I got used to it. I came to realize that, unlike Americans, Japanese don't sexualize nudity unnecessarily. Nudity is sexual when people are having sex; at other times, it's just an absence of clothing. Men and women bathed naked together in public baths before prudish Victorian-era westerners arrived and told them to cut it out if they wanted to be considered "civilized" and not get colonized for their "own good." Even though there are only a few places -- mostly in rural outposts -- where men and women can still enjoy the public baths together, it's still very common for couples to bathe together in private baths at an onsen (without it being foreplay -- don't think of the heart-shaped bubble bath from old Love Boat episodes!), and Japanese parents often bathe with their children at home, at least until the children reach puberty. It's not considered sexual, it's considered essential for families to feel close to one another.

Nonsexualized nudity. It's so . . . civilized.

Gaijin Insecurities: The Japanese Language Proficiency Pecking Order

2009-07-28T18:31:00.002-04:00

At the same touch-football game where I met Dave S., I also encountered a strange gaijin phenomenon for the first time: insecure gaijin who speak Japanese to each other to reassure themselves that their Japanese is better than the other guy's.

Back in 1991, the number of (Caucasian) foreigners who could speak decent Japanese was small. Rather than correctly attribute this to a general lack of interest in learning Japanese among non-Japanese, many Japanese, acting on a misguided national or ethnic pride, convinced themselves that Japanese blood was somehow required to learn Japanese. (Which is why I was frequently asked if I was part-Japanese.) Moreover, because the Japanese education system emphasizes reading and writing over speaking in foreign-language education, leaving most Japanese unable to speak English despite six years of mandatory English education (and more for those with college degrees), many believe that mastering a foreign language is not possible for people of normal intelligence.

These factors led many Japanese to believe that gaijin who could string together a sentence or two of Japanese were absolute Einsteins. And they fawningly told those gaijin so. After hearing this enough, many gaijin who spoke a little Japanese started to believe it.

However, a Japanese-speaking foreigner was no longer special if he wasn't the only one. Another foreigner was always a potential threat to one's ego, hence the need to learn where one stood in the Japanese-ability pecking order -- whether one could continue feeling superior to yet another gaijin who could not get past konnichiwa or would have to go home and sulk because someone else's Japanese was better.

After the game, as Dave and I prepared to head to "Oh, God!," I noticed two of the Yalies packing up their things. Their Japanese girlfriends were there, and they were each speaking Japanese to them. As each tried to make sure that the other knew he could also speak good Japanese, their voices grew louder and louder, until they both gave up the pretense and started speaking Japanese to each other, each trying to show that he was higher on the Japanese-ability scale.

I thought this was exceedingly silly. For me, speaking Japanese to another English speaker outside a classroom always had an "ick" factor to it. But it was not long before I started encountering people who wanted to reassure themselves that my Japanese wasn't as good as theirs by speaking Japanese to me. My icky feeling would instantly kick in. I'd answer their question in English and refuse to be sucked into their little self-affirmation game.

Even leaving Japan does not cure many ex-gaijin of their need to salve their egos by proving to themselves that they are the still the most specialist gaijin of all. It's still common for people I first meet, upon finding out that we both lived in Japan, to start speaking Japanese to see whether they are entitled to feel superior or must suck up to me.

Only two exceptions existed to my rule against speaking Japanese with another gaijin. One was when we were with a Japanese person who spoke no English. Then it was just a matter of courtesy and necessity and didn't give me the willies. The other was the rarer occasion where Japanese was actually our common language. For example, in 1991, I took Japanese lessons at a school that prepared foreigners for entrance into college. Most of the students were from Korea, and a few were from southeast Asia and the Middle East. Japanese was our common language.

You should have seen the faces of the people on the street when they saw us walking through Shibuya speaking Japanese to each other after class . . . .

Yale Loses the All-Yalie Harvard-Yale Game

2009-07-24T11:30:00.002-04:00

In November 1991, a Look Japan colleague who had attended Yale told me that her friends were organizing a Harvard-Yale touch football game that Saturday in Yoyogi Park, in central Tokyo, in honor of the actual Harvard-Yale football game back in the US later that day. Thinking I might run into someone I knew, I decided to go.

Upon arriving, I found 25 people in Yale gear, one guy wearing a Harvard sweatshirt, and one guy from some other school. Seeing no one I knew, I introduced myself to the guy wearing the Harvard sweatshirt. His name was Dave S., and he was from the class of '90, one year ahead of me. We hadn't known each other at school. We threw a ball around a bit to warm up and then, with the third non-Yalie, formed the nucleus of the "Harvard" side when we divided up into teams. Our side won.

Afterwards, I remarked on the fact that so few Harvard people had shown up and asked him how he had learned about the game.

"You're shittin' me. This was a Harvard-Yale game?" he asked.

"Yeah, you didn't know?"

"No."

"You played this whole game without knowing?"

"I didn't know. Seriously."

"Then what were you doing here?" I asked him.

"I was just walking through Yoyogi Park, and I saw a bunch of gaijin playing football. I just decided I would join them." (Not ask if he could join, decided he would join. This, as I would later learn, was classic Dave S.)

"What about the Harvard sweatshirt?" I asked.

"This? I always wear this sweatshirt."

"You really didn't know?" I persisted.

"Really. I didn't know."

So, that was their plan! The Yalies had tried to win the Harvard-Yale touch football game by not inviting anyone from Harvard! And, yet, they still lost, their plot foiled by one of their own who spilled the beans about the game to a colleague from Harvard and a Harvard grad who decided to barge into a gaijin football game without invitation.

Afterwards, Dave and I decided to grab a drink. He suggested that he call his girlfriend, Chieko, and that we meet her at a nearby bar called "Oh, God!," off Omote-Sando street in Harajuku, where they had cheap food, a pool table, and American movies on the projection TV. Perfect for a couple of guys in their early 20s. Over the next year or so, Dave and Chieko became my close friends, and "Oh, God!" became one of our regular hangouts -- all because Dave had decided to insert himself into a football game he just happened to be passing by.

Oh, Those Drunken Yakitori Nights!

2009-07-23T13:00:00.004-04:00

Yakitori -- chicken parts on sticks -- is a salaryman standby in Japan and one of my favorite feeds. Yakitori comes in many varieties, as all parts of the chicken are used, from the white breast meat that Americans eat to the exclusion of every other part of the chicken to the knee cartilege (hiza nankotsu), one of my favorite cuts of all. Yakitori places are as varied as yakitori itself, ranging from upscale restaurants to smoky open-air joints stuck under the tracks near railway stations. The latter were my favorite.

My way of finding a good yakitori joint was to look for a really grubby place that was very crowded with salarymen. If the place was packed despite having zero ambiance, then chances were good people were there for the food.

My favorite yakitori joint, Komatsu, was this kind of place. Located in Yurakucho, the Ginza's grubby neighbor, it stood near the entrance of a short tunnel under the Yamanote Line tracks, half-way between Yurakucho and Shimbashi stations, that contained about six yakitori places. Although the tunnel seemed to be pedestrianized, it was actually a city street, and a couple of times a night a car or truck would drive right through the middle of this yakitori bazaar. Komatsu was run by a middle-aged woman, the daughter of the founder, who was occasionally helped by one or the other of her two daughters. It held perhaps 12 seats -- two long tables and a small counter near the grill -- under the sloping barrel roof of the tunnel. If you didn't get there by 6:00 p.m. or so, you couldn't get in again until late. Komatsu would be packed even when the other places nearby were empty.

Soon after starting at Look Japan, my friends David Benjamin and Junko Yoshida, who had been going there for years, introduced me to Komatsu, and Benji and I developed a custom of going there once a month or so. One evening, we swung by on the back end of the rush. The place had emptied out except for a couple of salarymen. After we had been there for an hour or so, and the salarymen, who were already drunk when we got there, had become totally shitfaced, one of them worked up the courage to talk to the foreigners, probably to try to impress his friend with either his guts or his English ability.

When middle-aged Japanese men in the 1990s approached foreigners to practice or show of their English, they usually asked one or more of the following three questions. This is how the conversation usually went:

Question 1. "Are you a student?"

Answer: "No. I am working."

Follow-up question: "Are you teaching Ingurish?"

Answer: "No."

(No follow-up.)

Question 2. "Do you like Japanese sushi?" (It was always Japanese sushi, as if there were some other kind.)

Answer: "Yes."

Follow-up question: "Really?" (This was always asked in a tone of utter disbelief, as if what divided the Japanese from the rest of the world and maintained order in the universe was that Japanese ate raw fish and no one else could even think of eating it without gagging.)

Answer: "Yes, really." (Stunned silence. No follow up.)

Question 3. "Do you like Japanese gyaru (girls)?" (The previous questions were just warm-up for this, the most important question, loaded with unexpressed resentment that so many Japanese girls had foreign boyfriends, and asked only to confirm the asker's pre-existing belief: Of course he likes Japanese girls! They're only here to steal our women! )

Answer: "Some of them, yes." (This answer seemed to be sufficient confirmation of their pre-conceived explanation for my presence and led to no follow-up.)

Here the conversation would usually end.

At Komatsu that day, one of the two men leaned over from the next table, business cards in hand, and introduced himself to us in English. He immediately launched into the Three Questions. However, he was clearly struggling with his English, which was barely understandable. I thought I would cut him a break and speak Japanese.

He ignored me and continued to ask questions in barely intelligible English, worsened by a thick accent and way too much booze.

I continued to try to make conversation in Japanese. However, in those days Japanese-speaking foreigners were rare, and many Japanese people simply refused to believe that foreigners could learn their language. Because I spoke good Japanese, people often assumed that the only explanation was some hidden Japanese ancestry and would ask if my mother was Japanese. This guy's demeanor suggested that he just did not believe that I was speaking Japanese to him. Or, perhaps was concentrating so hard on formulating questions in English that he could not understand what I was saying to him. Whatever the reason, I gave up and let him continue to struggle along.

Eventually he finished the interrogation. Apparently I answered the Three Questions appropriately, because my friend then announced that he wanted to consummate our new friendship by giving me his business card -- the ultimate sign that the relationship was expected to continue.

The business card he had already given me was still sitting in front of me on the table.

"I already have your card," I said to him in English.

"Let me give you my card," he persisted.

"Meishi ha, mou itadakimashita yo," I said, repeating myself in Japanese, thinking that perhaps he had not understood me.

"No, no, let me give you my card," came the response in English.

"No, really," I said, holding my copy of his business card in front of his face, "I already have your card."

"No, let me give you my card," he said, drunkenly thrusting a second copy of his card into my hand.

The man and his buddy stood up to leave. They shook our hands and insisted that we get together again. They then stumbled out of Komatsu, to search for more booze or to catch the train home to deepest Yokohama, Chiba, suburban Tokyo, or perhaps beyond. Needless to say, Benji and I never saw our Komatsu friends again.

The Red Button Creeps Closer and Closer

2009-07-13T17:00:00.001-04:00

Next to the office door at Look Japan was a white board containing the names of every employee, in their order of seniority, from Shacho down to lowly me, the newest employee. One of the names on the list always had a red button next to it, and each day the button would move to the next name on the list.

The button indicated whose turn it was to lead chorei (朝礼) that day. Chorei translates as "morning assembly," and every work day at Look Japan commenced with one. Chorei is customary in many Japanese companies, particularly the more traditional ones, and Shacho was very insistent on this custom being followed. In fact, Shacho was so fond of chorei, it was said that he believed that a company was not a company without it.

The rest of us hated chorei as much as Shacho loved it, especially when it was Shacho's turn to lead it, because while everyone else was anxious to get to the work piled on their desks, Shacho would drone on and on. I hated chorei because it meant that I would have to give a speech in Japanese, and each day as I saw the little red button getting closer and closer to my name on the white board, my sense of dread would increase.

Not that it really should have. The rule was that your speech could be about anything. Some people would talk about work. I tended to talk about some experience I had recently. The speech did not even have to been in Japanese, as we had English-speaking employees who spoke little or no Japanese. It didn't matter. We each had to do chorei when it was our turn. That was what made us a company.

Even though I dreaded chorei, I learned to live with it, and even to use it to my advantage. For example, do-yo no ushi-no-hi is a day in July that traditionally marks the height of summer and is thought to be the hottest day of the year -- a tradition that obviously predates the introduction of the thermometer. Japanese have a custom of eating eel that day, because it is loaded with iron and thought to help you withstand the heat on the hottest day. In July 1992, shortly before I left Look Japan, my turn to lead chorei happened to fall on that day. I wanted to eat eel, which is quite expensive, and I thought that, if I brought up the custom that morning, Shacho just might treat us to eel for lunch. So, for my chorei speech, I simply said, "今日は土用の丑の日です。うなぎを食べましょう" (Today is do-yo no ushi no hi, so I am going to eat eel").

It worked like a charm. Shacho immediately jumped in and said, "What a great idea! Let's eat eel today!" Not only did he treat the entire company, but we all got to leave the office for a few hours in the middle of the day to go to the eel restaurant down the street.

"Someday, You'll Be President of the United States"

2009-07-10T12:30:00.002-04:00

"Someday, you'll be president of the United States."

This was the highest compliment that Shacho ("president") could think to pay me. As far as I know, it was based solely on one fact: I arrived in the office before Shacho arrived every day. I don't think that Shacho really knew whether I was a good employee or not. After all, he did not understand English, and I am sure that he never even tried to read the English-language news magazine, Look Japan, that he published every month.

I was so used to rising early to get to work on time at Canon, that even after I changed jobs and dormitory locations, I continued to rise early to go to work. Once I moved into Oshikawa-san's dormitory in Ohta-ku and began working at Look Japan, I took the Keihin-Tohoku line from Kamata Station in the south easternmost corner of Tokyo to Tokyo Station to get to work -- the busiest line in metropolitan Tokyo on the busiest stretch of its route. The Keihin-Tohoku line passed through Kamakura, Yokohama and Kawasaki and was already sardine-jammed when it finally reached the Tokyo city limits at Kamata.

Getting a seat was out of the question. I just wanted to get a strap to hang on, so that I could read a book or a newspaper over the heads of the exalted souls who could sit. Otherwise, I was condemned to riding in the open space between the doors, where -- even if I could raise my arms -- there was nothing to hold on to, and the only thing stopping me from falling to the floor when the train rounded a curve at speed was the other people jammed against me, arms also pinned to their sides, propping me up.

To avoid the crowded trains, I took to getting on the train at 7:00 a.m. and eating breakfast at my desk while I read the paper and otherwise killed time until work started at 9:00. My Japanese colleagues found my usual breakfast of covenience-store onigiri (rice balls) and coffee endlessly amusing. Everyone knows, they said, that you eat onigiri with green tea, not coffee. Mixing Japanese food with western drink apparently knocked the universe out of its delicate balance. As for me, green tea did not pack enough of a caffeine punch. I needed the hard stuff.

As a result of my early arrival, I was always there when Shacho arrived, and Shacho usually arrived before everyone else. My desk was directly in front of the office door, and when Shacho arrived, there I would be, reading the paper. He'd greet me with a robust Ohayo gozaimasu ("good morning") and a big grin, and it was clear he was happy to see me there, because it signaled my enthusiasm for my job and the company he had built from the ground up over the last 35 years.

I, however, felt like a fraud. I hated working at Look Japan. I never had enough work to do, and was always bored. The company was too uptight, with too many meaningless rules, and the photographers we used for stories used to laugh and tell us we weren't really journalists, because we had to wear suits. This was fine with Shacho, who loved to tell us that he wanted businessmen, not journalists, working for him -- part of the problem in my mind. Working there also made me uncomfortable because I felt that Shacho liked me for the wrong reason. While I am sure that our editor-in-chief, Nishimura-san, reported to him that I was a good employee, Shacho himself never read a word I wrote or edited. But, because I was there every morning when he arrived, Shacho frequently told me that, one day, I'd be President.

Only one employee arrived earlier than I did, Kamiya-san, our accountant, whose responsibility it was to open the office and get the coffee started. Kamiya-san hated me as much as Shacho loved me, and for equally irrelevant reasons. Our magazine had 48 pages each month, and there was a set amount of work to do for each issue. I wrote one article and was responsible for editing half of the articles written by outside authors each month. However, I worked very efficiently and generally wound up editing more than half of the magazine each month. Still, I usually ran out of work part-way through the month and had nothing to do. After a while, I started passing the time by translating Japanese newspaper articles to increase my vocabulary.

Nishimura-san and the Japanese editors were extremely happy with me. I turned around the work quickly and there were no last-minute rushes, no missed deadlines, no end-of-month panic. But, Kamiya-san, who, like Shacho, did not speak English and probably never read the magazine, saw me sitting around for half the month, reading Japanese magazines and not "working." Every time she looked at me, her disapproval was written clearly on her face. She was convinced I was a slacker and a fraud, and I am sure it burned her up inside every time Shacho told me, "Someday, you're going to be President of the United States."

In a way, Shacho and Kamiya-san epitomized my Look Japan experience: I was bored out of my mind while two people who did not understand what my job entailed reached completely opposite conclusions about my value as an employee based on observations that had nothing to do with my work.

Look Japan

2009-07-09T20:00:00.000-04:00

In September 1991, I finished my Canon internship and started a new job at Look Japan, Inc., an English-language magazine dedicated to explaining Japan to the outside world. A product of the free-wheeling post-Occupation days when independent entrepreneurial ventures sprouted like mushrooms after the rain, Look Japan was started as a newsletter by our president, Kimura-san (or shacho ("president"), as we called him), who neither spoke nor read English, but saw the value of getting Japanese business news to the outside world back in the 1950s.

By the time I arrived, 35 years later, Look Japan had developed a unique business model. We had a circulation of 50,000 copies per month, which later rose to 75,000. But we only had about 200 subscriptions. The remainder of the issue was purchased by the Foreign Ministry and then distributed for free to universities and libraries around the English-speaking world. When the company wanted to sell more copies, it went to the Foreign Ministry and lobbied for them to buy more.

Because of its connection with the government, Look Japan was hardly impartial. With an editorial staff of seven people, and a business side staff of about the same number of people, we had three separate editorial review panels consisting of 15 people each. All of the panel members were former government officials, university professors, and businessmen with a government connection or a pro-government agenda. Whenever we published any article giving that tried to balance the good with the bad of Japan, no matter how much more emphasis we gave to the good, we were criticized for being partial. In other words, any deviation from the Japan-is-great message was perceived as an attack. I would have been perfectly happy getting paid money to write Japanese government propaganda -- if that's how the job was presented to me. But the company maintained the fiction that we were completely independent journalists, so working under these constraints was irritating, to say the least.

Although we wrote a few regular columns in house, most of the articles were contributed by outside authors drawn from the same pool of pro-government academics and businessmen as our editorial review panels. The magazine paid very generously for articles -- a great way of lubricating relations with people who had influence with those who controlled the Foreign Ministry's budget. Some of these authors insisted in writing in English to show their erudition and sophistication. Others wrote in Japanese and had their articles translated by our staff. My job, in addition to writing a piece per issue of my own, was to turn these articles into coherent English. Sometimes this led to fights with a Japanese author who believed that, because he was a Tokyo University professor or government official and therefore outranked me in hierarchical Japanese society, he outranked me in deciding what constituted proper English grammar or vocabulary as well. Fortunately, since we edited the galleys of the magazine, we had the final say, and we were backed up by our editor-in-chief, Nishimura-san. And, since the business staff, which had the relationships with these authors did not appear to read the magazine, we were almost never challenged on the text of the final edition.

I spent a year in total at Look Japan, which had its ups and downs, but which I mostly remember favorably two decades later. I made some good friends there, like Nishimura-san and my co-editor Seo-san. I also got to meet some interesting people as a result of working there, from a government economist with whom I am still friends, to foreign baseball players active in Japan, to Akebono, the first non-Japanese Grand Champion (yokozuna) in sumo. I'll be blogging on my experiences at Look Japan over the next few weeks, until I run out of stories. Stay tuned.

My Short-Lived Homestay

2009-07-07T09:00:00.000-04:00

While I was at Canon, I convinced myself that I needed to do a year-long home stay in order to perfect my Japanese, picturing that I would find some welcoming family who would become my friends for life. One of my Canon colleagues volunteered to help find me a home stay, and did, in Itabashi-ku in northwestern Tokyo. I started the home stay in September 1991, after my internship at Canon ended, and I moved out of the Canon dorm that came with the internship.

When I arrived, it was not at all what I pictured. Instead of a welcoming family, who would take me in as their "adopted" American son for a year, what I got was a family that took in boarders to make some extra money. They had a college student, whom I don't remember ever talking to, and a five-year old, slightly retarded girl, who was attending a special school that was not available in her hometown.

The mother and older sister, who did not live there, but was at the house all the time, were both nutritionists, so my breakfast and dinner were always very healthy. As soon as I moved in, I began losing weight as a result of my healthier diet, which worried them very much because they thought I was not eating enough, but I was quite happy about this change in my appearance. The father was a coarse working stiff from Kyushu, with such a thick Kyushu accent that I was never able to understand what he was saying. Because I could never understand what he was saying, he thought I was stupid, and would use sign language to try to communicate with me, when all I wanted was for him to speak a little more slowly and more clearly.

The worst aspect of the home stay was that I had a 10:00 p.m. curfew. I am not sure whether eventually they would have given me a key once they got to know me, but they did not and I had to be home by 10:00 when they locked the front door. To make matters worse, where they lived in Itabashi-ku was near the very end of the Mita subway line, and it took me about 45 minutes to get home from central Tokyo, where I usually hung out with my friends, meaning that I had to leave the goings-on by 9:15 p.m. to get home on time. I found this quite insulting, given that I was an adult with a job and was used to keeping my own hours completely at college.

To make matters even worse, the Mita subway line, which traveled mostly through poorer parts of Tokyo, had not yet been updated and had subway cars without air-conditioning. Even in September, the subway was stiflingly hot, and I would arrive at work in the morning drenched in sweat.

After a few weeks of the home stay, I noticed that I was constantly sneezing and itchy-eyed. I finally realized I was having a bad allergic reaction to the family dog. I suffered horribly for a few weeks, but then realized that this was my face-saving ticket out of the home stay. I called my friend Kakurai-san at Canon and asked him if he would find out from Oshikawa-san whether the offer was still open for me to move into Oshikawa-san's dorm. He called me back almost immediately to tell me that it was. I moved out that weekend, closing one brief chapter of my life in Japan and opening a new one with the Oshikawa family.

Unrelated Japan Photo #8

2009-07-07T08:34:00.003-04:00

Philosopher's Walk (Tetsugaku no michi), Kyoto (July 2006)

My Dad, the Kamikaze Pilot

2009-07-06T08:00:00.001-04:00

A few years after I met Oshikawa-san at Canon, he told me something about himself.

During the war, he was a pilot. A kamikaze pilot.

This astonishing statement takes a little explaining. Oshikawa-san obviously never flew his one-way mission. In the last months of the war, when the Japanese army was conscripting every able-bodied man for the final, apocalyptic show-down with the United States, Oshikawa-san was drafted. He was 16. And whether he was pushed into kamikaze service or, more likely, was, as a high school student, so deeply indoctrinated with end-time emperor worship that he volunteered to make the ultimate show of patriotism, he never told me. It was enough for me to know that, in order to protect the homeland, he trained to fly his plane, specially designed to hold explosives rather than enough fuel for a return trip, into an American warship at the water-line. He never got the chance because -- fortunately for him, his family, me, and who knows how many American sailors and their families -- the war ended before his training did.

Oshikawa-san also told me another shocking fact about the war. He was stationed in Nagasaki. Suddenly, in early August 1945, the soldiers were suddenly mustered out of the city and into the surrounding hills without explanation. On August 9, 1945, with the soldiers safely outside the city, most of Nagasaki disappeared in a 1000-degree fireball in the second atomic bombing. News of the bombing of Hiroshima was as a state secret and the Japanese government kept it from the civilian population and low-level soldiers like Oshikawa-san alike. Oshikawa-san's story may have been repeated in hundreds of cities throughout Japan -- potential A-bomb targets all. The government evacuated soldiers to fight another day, but left millions of innocent Japanese civilians to their fate.

To bring the reality of the bombings even closer to home, Oshikawa-san's wife, Chisako, is from Hiroshima (although I believe she was born after the war). Her grandparents died in the atomic bomb blast.

I don't presume to think that meeting me led to some kind of epiphany of forgiveness on the part of the Oshikawa family. The Oshikawas were, like many Japanese of their generation, fascinated by the United States and had visited there as tourists. Any bitterness about the war had long since receded into the past for them. But, still, the fact that this family -- so deeply and directly touched by the horrendous conflict with the United States -- decided to call me their "son" is something I will never forget.

Punch Perms and Umeboshi -- My First Izakaya Experience

2009-07-05T08:00:00.001-04:00

A week or so after I arrived at Canon Fujigaoka Dormitory No. 1, Arai-san, the dormitory manager, prevailed upon my dorm mates to take me out and get to know me. They asked me if I had ever been to an izakaya, and when I asked what that was, they told me it was a "Japanese-style bar." Sounded good to me. We arranged to meet one day after work at the local izakaya, which was half-way between Fujigaoka Station and our dormitory. I knew the place they described from passing it twice a day on my walks uphill both ways to and from the station.

When I arrived, most of the other guys were already there, about six in total. Like every other izakaya I have been to since, it was noisy with the conversation of customers and the shouts of the waiters welcoming guest, thanking departing customers and conveying their orders to the cooks and beer-pullers. (I call them beer-pullers rather than bartenders because Izakaya don't have bars as we know them in the US and don't serve drinks that require bartenders. The drinks menu usually consists of beer, sake, shochu (a spirit made from either potatoes or wheat), chu-hai (shochu mixed in a highball glass with some kind of flavoring), and soft drinks.) I sat down at the table and someone gave me a small glass and poured me a beer from the shared bottle.

Our waiter was a middle-aged man with what looked like a short, neatly-trimmed Afro and much tanner skin than most Japanese. He looked like one of my sports coaches in high school, which is to say, he looked black, but he was clearly Japanese. I struggled to explain his looks to myself, and then came up with a story to make sense of them: he was part African-American, and his father had probably been a serviceman stationed at one of the U.S. military bases in Japan. I asked one of the guys whether he thought the waiter was half-black, and when he asked why, I explained my reasoning. No, he told me, the waiter's hair was curly because he had a panchi paamu ("punch perm"), a permanent wave hairstyle popular in the 1980s and early 1990s with gangsters and some members of the working class, who thought it made them look tough.

The conversation alternated between my dorm-mates peppering me with questions and talking amongst themselves about topics that quickly lost me. Whenever I did understand the conversation and attempted to contribute something, by the time I had translated my comment from English to Japanese inside my head, the conversation had moved on to another topic.

At some point in the evening, the conversation turned to what would become a familiar topic over the years, my level of knowledge and/or comfort with certain Japanese foods. They wanted to know if I ate "raw fish," sushi being considered the ultimate gross-out food for non-Japanese and the real test for how far a foreigner was willing to go in Japanese culture. I told them I did. They tried a few other foodstuffs they thought would be offputting to me, and I had eaten them all. Finally, they asked me if I had ever had an umeboshi. I did not know what an umeboshi was. They tried to explain to me what it was, and even looked it up in my Japanese-English dictionary, to find the translation "pickled plum." A picked plum did not make any more sense to me, so finally they ordered one to see if I would eat it.

The waiter brought a tiny round dish, about two inches across, with a single, reddish shriveled round object that did not look like any plum I had ever seen. They warned me that it was very sour. Good, I said, I love sour foods.

For some reason, even though they knew that I did not know what an umeboshi was, for some reason, it did not occur to them that I would not know how to eat one properly. Evidently, they are considered too sour to eat as-is, and you are meant to take a small piece with chopsticks and use it to flavor something else, like rice. I, however, seeing a grape-sized piece of what they said was a plum, picked up the umeboshi and popped it into my mouth whole. It wasn't that sour.

Everyone at the table gasped.

Thinking I had breached some kind of etiquette, I spit the umeboshi back into the dish.

Then, realizing I had now definitely committed a faux pas, I popped the umeboshi back in my mouth and ate it. Only then did they tell me that it was considered too sour to eat whole and explained how it was supposed to be consumed. They ordered another and showed me.

So, this day featured my introduction to izakaya and umeboshi (and punch perms). I became a huge fan of izakaya dining and would travel across Tokyo to go to a good one.

And I still eat umeboshi whole.

Unrelated Japan Photo #7

2009-07-04T09:17:00.001-04:00

19th century foreigner's house in Kobe, Japan (July 2006)

I Love the Smell of Filet o' Fish in the Morning

2009-07-04T08:00:00.004-04:00

During my internship, I left my dorm at 7:00 a.m. to make it to work on time, and because eating before I left home would leave me hungry long before the noon lunch break, I took to eating after I arrived in the neighborhood of the office. After paying $18 for pancakes at a hotel restaurant one morning, I resolved to look for other options.

Near the end of my commute were several fast food chains, running from Morinaga to McDonald's. I soon discovered that McDonald's served reasonable pancakes at a reasonable price, and it became my regular stop each morning. Unlike in the U.S., the pancakes were cooked to order and brought to your table when they were done, which was never more than about 5 minutes. The pancakes always came with a deep bow and an apology for having made you wait so long.

Although McDonald's offered a full breakfast menu of pancakes, Egg McMuffins, etc., I noticed after a while that the only people who ordered breakfast items were me and the foreign tourists who wandered in from a nearby hotel -- probably after they saw the $18 pancakes in the hotel restaurant. The Japanese always bought items from the regular menu, like Filet o' Fish. I wondered whether this was just particular to McDonald's, but when I went to Morinaga, it didn't even have a breakfast menu. It just hawked the regular menu of burgers all day long.

The idea of fish -- especially Filet o' Fish -- in the morning made my stomach turn, and I thought the Japanese salarymen breakfasting on them to be utterly bizarre. It was only after some time in Japan that I realized that Japanese cuisine recognizes no distinction between breakfast and the other meals. A traditional Japanese breakfast, such as you might get in a ryokan inn, contains fish, pickles, rice, miso soup, and other things you'd eat during the rest of the day. Eventually, as a result of going to Korea and seeing kimchi in the breakfast buffet, it dawned on me that people throughout the world eat the same things all day long, and the idea that you don't eat breakfast for dinner and vice-versa (all-day breakfast at diners notwithstanding) may be a uniquely Western idea.

We were the weird ones, not the Japanese.

Nearly 20 years later, I love Japanese breakfast, especially the grilled fish. Since Japanese breakfasts are much more labor-intensive than Western ones, I rarely get to eat them, but I relish them every time.

The idea of a Filet o' Fish for breakfast, however, still turns my stomach.

Jona-san

2009-07-03T08:00:00.001-04:00

Japanese people have a lot of trouble with the name Jonathan. It's the "th" that they find hard to pronounce, and, as a result, Jonathan usually comes out as Jonasan in Japanese.

But being called Jonasan in Japanese creates problems. "San" is the honorific that attaches to everyone's name in Japan -- usually translated as "Mr., Ms. or Mrs." in English -- and my name becomes Jonasan-san in polite situations. Oshikawa-san was the first to draw attention to how much trouble this caused for Japanese people. "Jonasan-san to iu no ha mendokusai yo!," he would say. "Jonasan-san-san-san -- kiri ga nai!" ("It's really annoying having to say Jonathan-san! Jonathan-san-san-san -- it never ends!")

Most people, like Oshikawa-san, adopted the solution of dropping the second "san" entirely in addressing me. Technically speaking, dropping the "san" is considered rude, except among family and close friends, and even between people who are close, it's still common to use a diminutive of "san," like "chan" or "kun," is used instead. (For example, we call our daughter "Emma-chan".) But, the minds of my friends, the san in Jonasan was honor enough for me.

Not being a particularly formal person, I didn't mind this so much. But, after a while, some people would forget that "san" was actually part of my name. Then, when they felt familiar enough to dispense with honorifics, they would call me "Jona." This I did mind.

Having the name Jonathan presented another problem. Even though it's common in the West to introduce oneself as Mr. or Dr. so-and-so, in Japan it's considered bad form to put "san" at the end of your own name. Foreigners introducing themselves as "Smith-san" is a commonly raised, "heartwarming" example of how non-Japanese can never really understand Japanese etiquette. When I introduced myself as Jonasan, people often thought I was introducing myself as "Mr. Jona," and I would get funny looks. After a while, I started introducing myself as "kamome no Jonasan no Jonasan" (Jonathan, as in Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a very famous book in Japan) or "resutoran no Jonasan no Jonasan" (Jonathan, as in "Jonathan's", a chain of "family" restaurants).

Even today, I still run into this problem.

Unrelated Japan Photo #5

2009-07-02T21:24:00.001-04:00

Shimogamo Shrine, Kyoto (July 2006)

No Overtime Day

2009-07-02T08:00:00.001-04:00

In the 1980s, the U.S. was trying to figure out how to compete with the Japanese. Rather than try to make American products better and more competitive, which should have been the natural reaction, the U.S. government tried to beat up on Japan and force them to do things less well. One of the things the U.S. frequently focused on was the Japanese work ethic. If the Japanese only worked less, the thinking went, they would have more leisure time and spend more money, driving up domestic demand for both Japanese and foreign goods, and making the Japanese less dependent on exports. Right.

I don't know if Canon was listening or not, but it did have a huge market for cameras and copiers in the U.S. and was probably very sensitive to "Japan bashing," as it came to be known. Coincidence or not, Canon tried to make its own little contribution to increased leisure time for its employees. Every Wednesday was "No zangyo day" ("no overtime day").

Every day, at 5:15 p.m., a chime rang at Canon to let everyone know that the official work day was over. On Wednesdays, however, the chime was followed with the announcement, "Today is no zangyo day."

There was no admonishment to leave the office and no managers came around telling people they should go home. More importantly, the managers kept on working, and as long as they were there, none of their subordinates were going home. It was also telling that No Overtime Day was on a Wednesday, rather than a Friday, when people might really take advantage of it.

No Overtime Day was purely for show. Not once did I see any Canon employee leave at 5:15 p.m. on No Overtime Day.

Oshikawa-san

2009-07-01T08:00:00.005-04:00

I met Oshikawa Ken, my Japanese "dad," in 1991. Most gaijin who say they have a Japanese "family" usually mean their homestay family. I met my Japanese family at Canon.

Oshikawa-san was a middle-manager in the Internal Training Division, and pretty much every Canon employee knew him because he trained every new hire that came through the door. Oshikawa-san was short, chubby, balding, and wore coke-bottle glasses that made his eyes seem huge. He was a former kamikaze pilot (more on that in another post), Tokyo beat-cop, and most importantly, a Canon employee for more than 30 years. Canon recognized his special place at the company by keeping him on for 2 years beyond the mandatory retirement age of 63 and by appointing him manager of the Musashi-Nitta Dormitory. In true Canon fashion, he met his wife Chisako there. Oshikawa-san was a larger-than-life presence at Canon -- everyone's favorite uncle, who was always in the middle of whatever fun was going on.

According to my orientation at Harvard before leaving for Japan, one of my most important duties would be to give a proper self-introduction (jiko-shokai) on my first day. I arrived in Japan on a Friday and worked very hard over the weekend on my jiko-shokai, laboring intensively with a Japanese-English dictionary and my still-limited Japanese.

Like other points from the orientation, I misunderstood the point of the jiko-shokai as well. It needed only to be a brief introduction that told my new colleagues who I was and where I was from, but I treated the 30-odd assembled employees of the Internal Communications Division and the Internal Training Division to my whole life story to date. As I droned on, I could see some of the blue-uniformed women stifling yawns, and I tried to speed things up. But Oshikawa-san later told me that he had been touched by the obvious effort that I had made to make a speech in Japanese, and he liked me right away because of it. (I also later learned that at least one long, boring speech was an essential part of every Japanese gathering.)

One evening, there were plans for everyone in our office to go out after work. The closing chime rang at 5:15 pm, and while the younger workers didn't budge, Oshikawa-san and some of the other middle managers (the mado-giwa-zoku, or "ones who sit near the window") gathered in the corner meeting area and produced several bottles of beer from a small fridge.

Oshikawa-san suddenly bellowed across the room: Jonasan! Kotchi ni koi yo! Nome, nome! ("Jonathan, come over here! Drink, drink!) He waived at me with his palm facing me and his hand motioning towards the floor -- the Japanese way of waving someone over, which looks to an American as if they are waiving you away. I had intended to keep on working until it was time to leave like everyone around me, but because Oshikawa-san had never spoken to me before and was a manager, I figured I'd better go over. He sat me down and poured me some beer, and I drank with the older guys until 6:30, when it was time for the whole group to leave for the restaurant.

From there, a great friendship was born. When Oshikawa-san found out that, instead of returning to the US after my internship was over, I would be starting another job in Japan, he insisted that I come live at the Musashi-Nitta dorm. I initially turned him down, having arranged for a year-long homestay, but when the homestay became unbearable within a month, I contacted him and he immediately arranged everything with the powers that be at Canon. I was given one of the empty rooms across the hall from his family's apartment, where I lived until he retired from managing the dormitory a year later. Once or twice a month, both while I lived in the dormitory and afterwards, the Oshikawas invited me to dinner at their house. Shortly before I left Japan after three years, Oshikawa-san paid me the intense honor of telling me, Jonasan, omae wa uchi no musuko da yo ("Jonathan, you're our son").

Oshikawa-san died in 2002, a month after learning he had cancer. The family did not tell me until after the funeral because I was having a difficult time in Boston then and they did not want to trouble me. (So Japanese!) They knew I would have hopped on a plane right away had I known he was sick.

Oshikawa-san would have been happy to know that I married a Japanese woman and still return to Japan often. We are still close with the Oshikawa family, talk frequently with my "big sister" Keiko, and see them whenever we can. Keiko and her mother attended our wedding in Kyoto. I've visited Oshikawa-san's grave and helped wash it, and I always greet him at the family shrine whenever I visit the Oshikawas' apartment in Kawasaki. I only wish that he could have lived long enough to see his American "granddaughter," Emma, but I am sure he knows all about her.

There Are No Mountains Out There

2009-06-30T10:28:00.007-04:00

One day, as I stood near the window of our office at Canon, overlooking the massive Tokyo prefectural government building next door, I thought I saw some large purplish shapes through the thick Tokyo summer haze on the western horizon. Were they mountains, or just darker clouds?

I asked a colleague, "Are those mountains?"

"Mountains?," she replied with a laugh. "There are no mountains out there!"

I could almost hear "silly!" at the end of her response.

Years later, when I played Sunday morning baseball in a men's league on the banks of the Tama River, I could sometimes see a pink, sunrise-lit Mount Fuji rising over the suburban Kawasaki skyline on the southwestern horizon, so far away that it appeared by optical illusion like a toy Fuji, only a foot or so high.

My Canon colleague had been wrong. There were mountains out there. I wondered if she saw them now. Without the summer smog trapped between us and the mountains by the Pacific breeze, from our vantage point in the westernmost tower of high-rise Tokyo we should have seen the majestic Japanese Alps of Nagano Prefecture over the Kanto Plain.

Just Sauce

2009-06-29T11:32:00.003-04:00

During my Canon internship, I was assigned to the Internal Communications Division, whose role was to disseminate news about Canon internally. We published a company magazine, as well as a monthly video program called "Video News." My task during the summer was to make an English version of the most recent Video News program into English, so that it could be disseminated for the first time to the overseas subsidiaries.

The Internal Communications Division shared a large room overlooking the Kanto Plain with a couple of other divisions. We had a pod of seven desks, with our division-head, Tamano-san, at its head. Tamano-san was a roundish, bespectacled, good-natured man in his early 40s with salt and pepper hair, who spoke pretty good English. Our other division members included Kakurai-san, Matsuura-san and Nakajima-san. Nakajima-san was a cameraman and video operator, so I worked with him most closely. Since he did not speak much English, it was a good chance for me to work on my Japanese. I did not get to practice much Japanese with Matsuura-san, who had lived in the United States as a child, but I did spent most of my summer trying to summon the courage to ask her out, which I never did. Kakurai-san, I later learned, had a reputation for hanging out at some of Tokyo's stranger sex clubs, though he seemed like a normal enough guy to me.

At the base of our pod of desks, at the other end from Tamano-san, were several cardboard boxes containing plastic bottles of brown liquid. No one ever took any of the bottles out; they just sat there all summer. All summer long, I wondered what they were. Finally, one day, I asked Tamano-san, what was in the bottles.

"Sauce," he said.

"What kind of sauce?," I asked.

"Just sauce," he responded.

"But what kind of sauce is it?," I persisted, thinking that maybe he had not understood me.

"It's not a kind of sauce," a bit flustered why I did not understand. "It's 'sauce'."

I gave up.

"Sauce," I later learned, is what Japanese use to refer to the brown demi-glace sauce used for tonkatsu (fried pork cutlet) and other fried, breaded foods (but not tempura). Apparently, when it was introduced into Japan, where no sauces previously existed, demi-glace sauce became "sauce." And, because "sauce" was an English word, Tamano-san expected me to understand what it was.

After a very brief period of trying to come up with Japanese words for foreign concepts in the 19th century, they apparently gave up and began adopting foreign words to describe the new things they represented. Over time, Japanese appears to have lost its ability to generate new words, and now most new words seem to be foreign words or "Japanese" words made up of foreign words. Often, the new words are contractions or hybrids, but because they are based (mostly) on English, Japanese often think of them as English words and are surprised when Americans don't understand them.

Some examples are:
remocon -- remote control
arafo -- around forty (years old)
arafi -- around fifty
waapuro -- word processor
depaato -- department store
neeto -- (a person) Not in Employment Education or Training

Even in New York, the local Japanese community makes up contractions for local places, where the whole English name is just too tiring to say. My favorite of these is:

Gurasen -- Grand Central Station

Yokohama Strep Throat Blues

2009-06-27T08:11:00.002-04:00

One morning in July 1991, a couple of weeks after arriving in Japan, I woke up with a terrible case of strep.

I crawled down to the concierge desk to speak with Arai-san, the dorm manager at the Fujigaoka Dormitory No. 1. He called Canon to report that I was sick and then made me go see the doctor down the street, who was Chinese and apparently spoke English.

I was surprised when I entered the doctor's office to find that, just as in a Japanese house, I had to remove my shoes. I took a pair of slippers from a cubby hole on the wall, put them on the raised office floor, stepped up into the slippers, and then put my shoes into the vacated cubby-hole. I then entered the waiting area, which was filled with old people.

The rap on Japanese medicine is that you wait for three hours for a three-minute visit. The practice is walk-in, so you don't get an appointment. You are just asked to come on a certain day. And wait.

Wait I did. It was several hours before I saw the doctor. With nothing to do, I studied the faces of the geriatric patients around me. Doctors in Japan see a sick patient every day or two until they are better, and Japanese often talk about "commuting" to the doctor when they are sick. In that first long wait, I got to know the other patients' faces well enough that I recognized many of them when I came back to the office over the next few days.

When I finally saw him, he did speak English, which he had learned in his native Taiwan. Three years later, when I was having a racing heartbeat and had to go to the hospital to get an electrocardiogram, I could handle it in Japanese, but at this point, my Japanese still was not up to a medical conversation, and the doctor being able to speak English was a great relief. He confirmed that I had strep and prescribed both penicillin and Chinese herbal medicine (kampo-yaku in Japanese), which was meant to be mixed with hot water and consumed like tea. He told me I had a very bad case and would be out of work for 10 days. Ten days!, I thought. My whole internship was only nine weeks long, minus the two week summer vacation.

Japanese doctors also sell the medicine they prescribe, which has led to accusations that they overprescribe medicine to increase their income. My colleague Ann Safir used to complain that a Japanese doctor would prescribe penicillin for a hangnail. The practice may have affected the way that Japanese think about being sick, because usually the first question my Japanese friends will ask when I say I have a cold is, "Are you taking medicine for it?" My wife Kaori is a big proponent of cold medicine, although my philosophy is to try to take as little medicine as possible.

When I got back to the dorm, Arai-san asked if I had been given Chinese medicine. When I said yes, he took the packets and sent me to my room. A few minutes later, he came up with a thermos full of hot medicine, some teacups and a bottle of honey. He warned me that the medicine tasted awful and that the honey to cut down on its bitterness. I was supposed to drink a thermos-full every day. I also had to take the penicillin, which like other medicine, is administered differently in Japan. Rather than a pill, the medicine comes in a one-dose package of powder. You take a mouthful of water, pour the powder into your mouth, and swallow. If you do it the opposite way -- powder, then water -- you not only taste the medicine in all its bitterness, but the powder sticks to the moist places in your mouth and the bitterness lingers on. I don't recommend taking it this way.

The next few days were awful. I had hot sweats, where I had to pull off all the sheets, followed by cold spells, when I had to put on sweats and pull the covers over my head. I slept pretty much constantly, except when I was drinking the Chinese medicine or eating food Arai-san's wife cooked for me. When I was awake, I had no television to watch or books to read. But, sometime in the midst of my ordeal, several of my colleagues traveled all the way to deepest Yokohama to pay me a visit after work, including several female colleagues, who were allowed into the living quarters of the dorm under the special circumstances -- i.e., me being a foreign intern. They brought me a copy of the Herald Tribune, which reported that there had been a coup against Gorbachev in Russia. I read every article and did the entire crossword puzzle.

Drinking the kampo-yaku for four days, even with the honey, was awful. But in combination with the penicillin, it really worked. Within four days, I was back on my feet and in the office. I've been a proponent of Chinese medicine ever since.

Unrelated Japan Photo #4

2009-06-27T07:14:00.003-04:00

Ginkakuji Temple, Kyoto (July 2006)

The Company Dorm

2009-06-25T21:50:00.003-04:00

In the early 1990s, a perk of working for a large company like Canon was the company dormitory. Given the high cost of housing in Tokyo, dormitories were a great benefit, offering small but clean accommodations for a fraction of what an apartment would cost. Employees could live in a dorm while they were single, and many were eligible to move to subsidized family housing when they got married. The only disadvantage of the dorms was that, in return for their low price, they tended to be very far away.

During my time in Japan, I lived in two Canon dormitories, the Canon Fujigaoka Dormitory No. 1 in deepest Yokohama, and the Mushashi-Nitta Dormitory in Ohta Ward, literally on the edge of Tokyo, near the Tamagawa River dividing Tokyo from Kawasaki. (More on Musashi-Nitta in a later post.)

A company dorm was usually overseen by a long-time company employee. A managership was a way of rewarding a valued employee who did not rise to senior management with a free apartment and a few additional years on the company payroll beyond the mandatory retirement age. The overseers of Fujigaoka No. 1 were Arai-san and his wife. Like many Japanese men in his late 40s or early 50s at the time, Arai-san stopped keeping up with popular fashions in the 1970s and favored tinted eyeglasses and shaggy hair. The Arais were extremely concerned about me adjusting to dorm life and made sure that the guys living there welcomed me too.

At the dorm's entrance, there was a concierge window where you could receive mail, pick up dry cleaning, and make pay phone calls in the days before cell phones. Next to the window was a board with a name plate for each person hanging on a hook according to room number. The red side meant you were out, the green side meant you were in, and you were supposed to turn it to the appropriate side when you came or left. I thought this was extremely paternalistic -- whose right is it for anyone to know where I am!, I thought -- but I eventually realized it was just practical. It saved the Arais the trouble of going all the way to your room when you got a phone call or had a guest, only to find that you were not there.

After flipping over your name plate, you turned left, into the shoe box area. Each person had their own box for keeping shoes and slippers in -- this being Japan where shoes were only worn outside and slippers were worn inside the dorm. Once you had changed your footwear, you stepped up from the genkan (entrance) into the dorm itself. For those of you who have never traveled to Japan but plan to go there someday, a step up is usually a signal that you need to take off your shoes, and the genkan is almost always a step or two lower than the floor of the house.

Most employees living in the dorm shared a room. As a foreign intern, I got a room to myself -- probably because Canon feared both that, as an American, I could not live in such a small room with someone else and that a Japanese employee would consider it a hardship to have to share such close quarters with an American, who was assumed not to speak Japanese and to have uncouth foreign habits. The dorm had no cafeteria, but it had a kitchen for us to use, along with a TV room. Each floor had a large common bathroom. Like a Japanese-style inn, the shower and o-furo (bath), a vital part of any Japanese living quarters, was on the first floor. The o-furo was communal, about two feet deep so that you could sit in it neck deep and soak, and the size of a small swimming pool. (I know from experienced that you can swim in some of these large o-furo, even though that's bad form.) My dorm-mates frequently invited me to join them in the o-furo after we'd been drinking together, but during my first months in Japan I was still not comfortable with the idea of sitting naked in a bathtub with a bunch of other men and always begged off. I eventually learned to love the o-furo and its relatives the sento (public bath) and onsen (hot spring bath) as much as the Japanese do. But it was several years in coming. Oh, think of all the o-furo time I missed!

The last thing to note about the dorm was the curfew. At 11:00 pm, the front gate closed and the door was locked. Again, having come from college dorms where I could come and go as I pleased, bring women into my room, etc., I thought a curfew was too paternalistic for grown men. However, I soon learned that the back door was unlocked all night. This was a perfect example of the Japanese concepts of honne (true feeling/intention) and tatemae (a person's facade). The front door -- the public face of the dorm -- was the tatemae that said everyone had to be home by 11:00 pm or suffer the consequences. The back door was the honne that recognized we were all adults.

"Something you don't have in America"

2009-06-24T22:43:00.001-04:00

I'm trying to keep my posts in more or less chronological order, but more episodes are occurring to me the more I write.

My first day as a Canon intern was July 1, 1991, a day spent on orientation. I reported at 9:30 a.m., as requested, and was taken to meet Hiroshi Matsumoto. Matsumoto-san was a lifetime Canon employee in his fifties, short, pot-bellied, with a grey suit and greying hair surrounding his round face. He wore a Canon lapel pin. He had worked all over the Canon system, including in the U.S., where he had perfected his English. Like the other madogiwa-zoku -- "the ones with desks near the window," the middle managers -- Matsumoto-san's lifetime of hard work had been rewarded not by promotion to the highest echelons of power, but instead by a kind of pre-retirement involving several years of collecting a big paycheck while performing easy work like affixing his seal to documents that came across his desk and welcoming foreign interns. After a lifetime of overtime, Matsumoto-san's job ended promptly when a chime signalled the end of the work day at 5:15 pm -- a chime the younger workers ignored and the madogiwa-zoku took as their signal to dip into the mini fridge in the corner for a beer.

Matsumoto-san grabbed my hand flaccidly, the handshake of a man who learned the custom as an adult, not one whose adolescence was gripped by the fear that a less-than-firm handshake would convey the wrong impression. We sat down opposite one another in the conference room, arranged like so many other "western style" meeting rooms I would see in Japan, with two small sofas facing each other across a low table. Like many Japanese men of his generation, Matsumoto-san's eyes never quite met mine as we talked, always fixing on a spot on my forehead or above my left shoulder.

A young woman came in wearing the blue uniform that was mandatory for female employees. Matsumoto-san said something to her that I did not catch and she left the room. We chatted about my background and his time in the U.S., and the woman returned, bearing a tray with two glasses full of ice cubes and dark liquid.

Matsumoto-san looked directly me in the eye for the first time. "This," he said with a smile, "is something you don't have in the United States. I never found it in all the time I lived there."

I looked down at the glass in front of me. It looked like iced coffee. But, with this introduction, it had to be something else.

"A Japanese invention," he said with pride. "Iced coffee."

I thought back to the iced coffee my dad used to make by the pitcher and drink from yellow plastic glasses in the summertime when I was a kid. It would not be the last time I heard someone in Japan take credit for an American invention. "What a great idea," I said, diplomatically. I settled back and let Matsumoto-san tell me all about Canon.

Unrelated Japan Photo #3

2009-06-24T21:30:00.003-04:00

Himeji Castle, Himeji, Japan (June 2006)

Toilet Slippers

2009-06-23T20:32:00.001-04:00

I began looking for a job in Japan in January 1991, five months before graduating from college. Until December 1990, my post-college plan was to follow my long-distance girlfriend to her home state of Virginia, work for a year as a private school teacher, and then enroll in law school at UVA. This plan suddenly changed when she began seeing someone else -- although she claimed her new relationship was just for fun until I graduated -- and I needed something else to do. The U.S. economy was in the tank (Bush recession #1), and I felt a strong need to get as far as I could from Harvard and Virginia after graduation.

I had been studying Japanese with no particular purpose in mind for the last three semesters. I never thought I would actually go to Japan. But, after breaking up with my girlfriend, Japan suddenly seemed like the ideal place to go after graduation. I had always wanted to live abroad, I reasoned, and couldn't I make myself more employable by perfecting my Japanese (which, in my ignorance, I thought would take only a year)? After all, in those days, there were pages and pages of jobs listed in the New York Times classifieds for Japanese speakers. Sure, the Japanese economy had slowed down too, but it would soon be roaring back, wouldn't it?

Thus, on a cold and miserable Cambridge day in January 1991, I figured the Japanese for "I have broken up with my girlfriend and I want to work in Japan," blurted this out to my surprised Japanese instructor at the end of class, and forever changed the course of my life. The Japanese instructors eventually found me a summer internship at Canon, Inc. as part of the Japanese department's internship program, and also learned of a one-year copyediting job at Look Japan magazine that traditionally went to a new Harvard graduate each year. By the time I graduated in June, I actually had two jobs lined up, a summer internship starting in June, and a magazine editing gig starting in September. I also did my own job search before graduating and, before my summer internship had ended, I even had my post-Look Japan job already lined up.

The Japanese department's summer internship program was impressive. Over the years, the instructors had established relationships with a number of major Japanese corporations that were eager to associate themselves with Harvard's brand, and students who had two years of Japanese instruction and good grades in their Japanese classes were eligible to participate. Included in the program was a comprehensive day-long orientation in Japanese etiquette and culture. Harvard had a vested interest in maintaining these relationships from year-to-year, and the instructors were keen for their students to reflect well on the department with how well-versed they were in Japanese culture and etiquette. The instructors also hoped to prevent a student destroying a relationship with a major cultural gaffe. The etiquette instruction covered everything from the need to prepare a self-introduction speech for the first day of our internships to remembering not to blow our noses in front of other people, a very bad faux pas.

It was in this orientation that I first learned about slipper culture. I knew already that Japanese people went shoeless in the house because we had a Japanese neighbor when I was a kid. I did not know about the complicated slipper rules, such as the fact that one never wears slippers on tatami mats, because slippers chew up tatami. What made an even greater impression on me was the rule about wearing different slippers in the toilet and in the rest of the house. Because bathrooms are considered unclean, Japanese keep toilet slippers and house slippers separate, and you are supposed to change into the toilet slippers when you use the toilet and then back into your regular slippers when you leave. Japanese frequently point to foreigners wearing the toilet slippers outside the toilet not only for the humor of it, but also as an example of non-Japanese people's supposed inability to assimilate Japanese customs and etiquette.

I don't know why this custom exists, and anyone with a different view should correct me, but I have a two-part theory. First, Shinto religion deals heavily with cleanliness and uncleanliness. Before entering a Shinto shrine, you must ritually wash your hands and mouth to purify yourself to enter. Death, being unclean, is left to the Buddhists to handle, which is why there are no Shinto funerals. Women were historically banned from many Shinto shrines and other sacred places because menstruation was thought to make them unclean and thus unfit for sacred spaces. The same holds for the sumo dohyo, where women are still forbidden to tread. Since toilets are unclean places, the Shinto legacy requires that toilet cooties are kept in the toilet and not spread through the rest of the house.

The second reason is much more mundane. Traditional-style Japanese toilets are porcelain lined holes in the ground over which you must squat to do your thing. It is much easier to miss one of these toilets than a western one, and wastes can more easily get onto shoes or places on the ground where you might tread on them and track them into the house. Thus, the Japanese toilet itself provided a practical reason for switching slippers at the toilet door and keeping the dirty toilet slippers in the toilet area. Even though most Japanese now use western-style toilets, the custom has become ingrained.

As a result, depending on the size of the toilet -- whether in a private home or in a dormitory or restaurant -- one or several pairs of rubber or plastic slippers are left in the toilet for everyone to use. (Apparently, Japanese people are afraid of the cooties on the bottom of the slippers, but not afraid of the cooties on the inside of the slippers from other people wearing them.)

In the etiquette lesson, I somehow missed the fact that toilet slippers were provided for common use and that people did not need to carry around their own personal pair of toilet slippers. When shopping for the things I would need in Japan, I duly bought two pairs, in different colors so I could distinguish them. When I decided to get ready for bed on my first night in the Canon Fujigaoka Dormitory No. 1, I slipped on my burgundy house slippers for the walk down the hall and grabbed my black toilet slippers along with my toiletries. I arrived at the toilet door, slipped off my house slippers and placed them alongside the other slippers there, put on my toilet slippers, slid open the sliding glass door and was about to step in when I saw . . . a dozen pairs of identical green vinyl toilet slippers inside the door for all to use and a couple of young men standing at urinals wearing those same green vinyl slippers. I experienced an "Oh, now I get it ..." moment as I recalled the etiquette lesson. Totally embarrassed, I quickly shut the door, high-tailed it back to my room, and put my "toilet" slippers away. I then returned to the toilet, slipped on the green plastic slippers, and hoped that no one had noticed. My "toilet" slippers remained in the back of a closet until they eventually became my replacement "house" slippers.

Unrelated Japan Photo #2

2009-06-23T14:42:00.003-04:00

I am the eighteenth rock. Ryoan-ji, Kyoto (July 2008).

Back blogging soon

2009-06-23T09:45:00.002-04:00

I was away this weekend in Vermont, attending the funeral of the daughter of an old and close family friend. I will be back blogging about Japan tonight or tomorrow.

"Wow, white people really ARE white!"

2009-06-19T20:02:00.006-04:00

One evening, on the interminable train ride back to deepest Yokohama after another day as a Canon intern, I noticed an attractive young woman standing by the door looking at me. She was remarkable not just because she was attractive, but especially because she did not turn away and avoid eye contact when I looked at her. Lingering eye-contact with a strange member of the opposite sex was not common in Tokyo and this was the first time I had ever experienced it.

When the train was approaching Fujigaoka Station, I decided to venture closer and see what happened. She did not shy away. Instead, she asked me a one-word question, "Fujigaoka?" I responded: "Fujigaoka." Then I asked her, "Fujigaoka?," and she answered "Aobadai," the name of the next station.

I responded in Japanese, "That's too bad." Her eyes widened. "You speak Japanese?" I told her I did. The train pulled into Fujigaoka Station and the doors opened. I stepped off. So did she.

I suggested that we go to the only place that Fujigaoka had to offer, Mr. Donut. We walked across the square from the station, got our coffees, and found an isolated table on the second floor to sit and talk. She told me her name was Emu, she was 19, and I was the first foreigner she had ever spoken to.

In Japanese, the word for "caucasian" is hakujin, literally meaning "white person." Growing up in the American racial milieu, I had never thought of white people as being actually white, any more than I thought of black people being black or Asian people being yellow. These were all descriptive shortcuts in my mind. But as Emu and I were getting to know each other at the Fujigaoka Mr. Donut, she looked down at my hand and suddenly exclaimed, "Hontou ni shiroinda!" -- "Wow, [white people] really ARE white!" -- as if she had never really believed it to be true, but now the indisputable facts were staring her in the face.

I could have been offended, but I didn't care what she called me. I was already smitten.

On the next Saturday, we had a date, in Shibuya. The date was going amazingly well until, late in the afternoon, in a coffee shop ironically named "Emu," I asked a question I never should have asked: Did she have a boyfriend?

I asked this question because, just before coming to Japan, I had suffered a terrible heartbreak. My long-distance girlfriend had become involved with a male "friend" -- who had pursued her aggressively from the start knowing she had a boyfriend. I had watched all this happen, in slow-motion, at long-distance, powerless to do anything about it. And, yet, I stuck around and watched it happen.

I did not actually suspect that Emu had a boyfriend. I was just covering the bases. Given my recent experience, I wanted to clear any doubts from my mind before I got in any deeper. And when she told me she did, I was shocked -- actually heartbroken, even though I'd only known her for a couple of days. I asked where he was, and she told me he was away at tennis camp. Still angry at my ex-girlfriend (for whom Emu was now a stand-in), and feeling a misplaced need to protect her boyfriend (who was now a stand-in for me), I launched into a lecture about how she shouldn't go around giving men the wrong impression that she was available when she wasn't . . . .

A week later, I called Emu, still hoping I could see her. She answered the phone, but pretended to be her sister and said she wasn't home. I asked her to tell "Emu" to call me when she got in, but I never heard from her again. I am sure that I had hurt and completely embarassed her with my unsolicited and unnecessary criticism.

Of course, I eventually realized how badly I had screwed up. She was probably genuinely interested, and who knows how serious she really was with her boyfriend? Plus, many Japanese women, particularly at that age, considered themselves free agents until marriage and were always looking for someone better-looking, more fun, richer, sexier until they found "the one." Had I kept my mouth shut -- even after learning about the boyfriend -- he might have become history. During my first three-year stay in Japan, I dated several other women, but I never met another one like Emu.

(Good thing, too, as it turned out. Hi, Honey! I love you!)

Unrelated Japan Photo #1

2009-06-19T19:30:00.001-04:00

Ryoan-ji, Kyoto, Japan (July 2008)

Not on the Menu

2009-06-18T19:45:00.001-04:00

The Japanese are world-famous for their service. But, in Japan, good service does not mean that the customer is always right. It means offering the prescribed service very quickly, efficiently, and well. "Off the menu" requests, however, create near havoc. Only newly arrived foreigners and Japanese who have lived abroad for too long don't know enough to stick to the menu.

My colleague Tracey first went to Japan as a model in the late 1980s. At some point during her stay, she went to Almond in Roppongi, and ordered an "iced coffee" from the menu. A while later, the waitress brought her back what Americans and Japanese understand as iced coffee -- cold coffee over ice. According to Tracey -- although I have never verified this with my Aussie friends -- in her native Queensland, iced coffee is hot black coffee with a scoop of vanilla ice cream in it, and this confection, she explained to the waitress, was what she wanted.

"It's not on the menu," she was informed.

"But, I see you have coffee on the menu, and you also have vanilla ice cream on the menu," Tracey noted, "so please bring me coffee with vanilla ice cream in it and charge me for both."

"I can't do that. It's not on the menu."

"Okay," Tracey continued. "I'd like a cup of hot coffee and a dish of vanilla ice cream, please."

"No."

"Why not?" Tracey asked. "They're on the menu."

"Because I know what you're going to do with them."

An exasperated Tracey asked to see the manager. She explained her desire for an Australian iced coffee, the injustice of being forbidden from ordering coffee and ice cream from the menu, and the fact that how she choose to consume them was no one's business but her own.

Finally, in a face-saving measure for all concerned, a compromise was reached. Tracey was permitted to order coffee and vanilla ice cream, but she was to make sure that no other customer saw her combine them, and she was to promise never to order coffee and ice cream at Almond again.

Lest you think that this was an isolated incident, in the early 1990s, Miyamoto Misao, an American-trained Japanese psychologist known for his books making fun of the bureaucrats in Japan's Department of Health, where he had worked, told a similar story about his attempt to order a glass of white wine at a famous hotel bar. The bartender told him that white wine was only available by the bottle. However, the observant Mr. Miyamoto spied an open bottle of white wine behind the bar and asked if he could have a glass from it. No, the bartender told him, that bottle was only for making the cocktail Kir (white wine and creme de cassis). Well, Miyamoto replied, I'd like a Kir, hold the creme de cassis. Impossible, he was told: if you get one, everyone else will want one. Once again, the manager was called to broker a compromise. Miyamoto was permitted to buy a glass of white wine this time, but instructed never to expect that kind of service again.

"Please Don't Throw Up on Me . . ."

2009-06-18T07:42:00.000-04:00

After another summer evening spent drinking with friends after work, I boarded the Denentoshi Line bound for the nether reaches of suburban Yokohama and found it empty. An empty train in Tokyo is a rare occurrence, happening only early on weekend mornings, and during the magical hour between the salaryman's mass post-drinking exodus to the suburbs around 10:00 p.m. and the jammed-packed last train around midnight. I sat down on the plush seat (yes, subway seats in Japan have cushions made of velour!), relishing the rare opportunity to sit on the train.

A salaryman boarded behind me. He was probably in his late-40s or early 50s, carried a briefcase in one hand and had the look of a man mired in middle management until retirement. Despite having an entire subway car minus one seat of possible places to arrange himself for his long ride home, he made a beeline for me, grabbed the strap hanging above my seat with his free hand, bent over, and began studying me from inches away.

The guy was puh-lastered, and clearly all his inhibitions had long since abandoned him. Maybe he was not as quite as drunk as the salaryman I had recently seen planted face-down in a Shibuya gutter with only one shoe on, but he was about as drunk as I had ever seen anyone who was still vertical. As the train departed the station its motion caused him to weave and wobble above me as he tried to stay upright holding onto the strap one-handed. When the train bent into a curve, he lost his balance and literally pirouetted on one leg, spinning completely around, while still hanging onto the strap. There was no point moving seats, because it was clear he was determined to follow me, so I decided to wait until we reached the next station, where I could switch cars.

As I watched the man twisting and spinning above me, the plastic strap creaking each time his weight shifted in response to the train's motion, I could think only one thing: Please don't throw up on me.

Believe me, when a very drunken and overly curious man hangs inches above your head by a flimsy subway strap, a few seconds is a very long time. The ride to the next station felt interminable. When the train finally pulled in, I quickly got up, leaving my bemused admirer slurring something to me that I could not understand, and went two cars down so he could not follow.

And that was how I avoided a second vomit-related incident on the Tokyo subway.

Way Too Polite For My Own Good

2009-06-17T14:51:00.010-04:00

In July 1991, I attended Canon's annual summer office party, held on the rooftop beer garden at the Odakyu Department Store in Nishi-Shinjuku, Tokyo.

A few weeks into my internship, I had already gained a reputation for being able to hold my liquor -- a skill whose social importance in Japan should not be underestimated. Even though some Asians -- like my father-in-law -- apparently cannot produce the enzyme that metabolizes alcohol, leaving them unable to drink booze, drinking plays a very large part in Japanese social life, and "strong" drinkers, as they are called, are held in high esteem. Although being able to hold your liquor may be a virtue in some circles in the US, our history of religiously-inspired opposition to alcohol consumption has made alcohol use somewhat less than universally acceptable, and before I went to Japan I thought that calling someone a "big" drinker carried a veiled accusation of alcoholism. But alcohol use does not have a stigma in Japan, and people like my father-in-law are somewhat ashamed -- or at least very inconvenienced -- by being unable to drink. Being labeled a "strong" drinker in Japan always struck me as a bit ironic, since I had always considered myself a lightweight, notwithstanding that I was a founding member of a drinking society in my senior year at Harvard -- a fact that only enhanced my drinking cred in Japan.

My colleagues entered me into the beer chugging contest, which I learned when my name was called over the PA. I duly won the first round, which meant that I had to participate in the second round. But, while waiting for the second round to start, I drank liberal amounts of sake along with my colleagues, so that by the second round, I had a pretty good buzz going. To this day, I still believe that I finished my beer the fastest of anyone in the second round, but in my state, I forgot to raise the glass over my head to prove it. I did not get to proceed to the third and final round, which was probably just as well. I did not stop from drinking more sake, however.

At 9:00 p.m. sharp, the party ended. Because all Japanese restaurant reservations last exactly two hours, all Japanese parties do, too, although an after-party, the nijikai (literally, the "second gathering"), usually follows. When someone asked if anyone knew a place to go for the nijikai, I -- who had been there only for a matter of weeks at this point -- piped up that I knew the perfect place, a German-style beer hall near Shinjuku Station. No one else knew it, so I led the way.

Upon arriving at the beer hall, I immediately ordered an enormous tankard. But, I was already feeling a but queasy and, after drinking a quarter of it, I felt even moreso. When one of the women whose dorm was on the same train line as mine announced that she was leaving, I decided to go, too. We bid the others farewell, walked the short distance to Shinjuku Station, and boarded the Yamanote Line for Shibuya Station. The side-to-side swaying of the train hurtling down the tracks toward the first stop, Yoyogi Station, made me feel even worse, and shortly after the train departed from Yoyogi, I knew that I would not be able to keep the contents of my stomach where they were. Somewhere between Yoyogi and Harajuku Station, it started coming up.

Being terribly embarrassed about throwing up on a train in such a nice, clean and orderly country like Japan, I did the only thing I could think to do: I cupped my hands and threw up into them. Then I rode the rest of the way between Yoyogi and Harajuku with a stinking pint beer, sake, chicken, squid, crackers, cheese, bile, stomach acid and god-knows-what-else in my cupped hands. In the days when foreigners were still relatively rare in Tokyo, I must have been quite the amazing sight: a white gaijin sitting on the train, with puke all over his white dress shirt, holding a pint of puke in his hands. I waited until we reached Harajuku Station, got off the train, threw the vomit onto the tracks, and wiped my hands on some discarded newspaper.

My colleague, who was very worried about me, got off the train too, got me some water, and waited with me for a half-hour or so until I was able to board the train to Shibuya Station. But after arriving, I knew I could never survive the hour-long trip on the Denentoshi Line back to distant Fujigaoka, Yokohama, plus the fifteen-minute up-the-hill-and-down-again walk to my dormitory. I borrowed some money from my colleague and found a taxi. I am sure that this was the driver's worst nightmare -- a drunk gaijin covered in already vomit who was likely to throw up again in his cab -- but I was already in the cab by the time he realized this, so he was out of luck. Fortunately, I did not throw up in the cab, but I did have to ask the driver to pull over once so I could throw up again, which I think he appreciated. Not all hairy barbarians are actually barbaric. The ride also cost me about $100.

The irony of being afraid to vomit on the train was that, as any Japan-hand will tell you, people in Tokyo throw up on the train all the time, without much embarassment at all -- a natural consequence of Japan being such a hard-drinking country. Riding on a commuter line to the suburbs at 9:00 or 10:00 p.m., when the salarymen are heading home after drinking with their colleagues, there are so many drunks on the trains that the problem becomes how to avoid getting puked on. Subway platforms are covered in vomit late at night. But, by morning, it's all been cleaned up, so you'd never know it was there -- unlike New York, where people throw up in public less frequently but the vomit can feed roaches and rats for days before someone with the power or will to do anything about it notices its existence.

I drank too much on many more occasions during my years in Japan. But I learned not to enter any more beer-chugging contests, not to mix beer and sake, and to drink within walking distance of home whenever possible.

The Suit Jacket Swap

2009-06-16T08:38:00.002-04:00

In the early 1990s, when I worked in Tokyo, it was still required for men to wear suit jackets to the office, even in summertime. However, as I soon learned, "to the office" literally meant "to the office." Unless one's office was close enough to the subway to avoid becoming drenched in sweat on the walk from one to the other, suit jackets were carried on the train, put on shortly before arriving at the office, and taken off immediately upon arriving at work. They were not worn during the day unless there was a very important meeting. Jackets were then put on before leaving the office at night, and taken off as soon as one achieved a safe distance from the company.

A Girl Behind Every Telephone Pole

2009-06-16T08:22:00.003-04:00

On my third day after arriving in Japan, and my first day on the job, my Canon orienter, Koshiba-san, guided me to my Canon dormitory in the nether reaches of suburban Yokohama. The ride required us to walk from Nishi-Shinjuku to Shinjuku Station, board the Yamanote Line for Shibuya Station, and then board the Denentoshi Line for Fujigaoka Station, almost at the end of the line. Altogether, it was an hour and fifteen minutes from station to station. Once we arrived at Fujigaoka, whose main attraction was a Mr. Donut in front of the station, we had to walk fifteen minutes to the dormitory, up and down a hill -- meaning that my commute in the stifling July and August heat would literally be uphill both ways. I also later found that, although my sweat-soaked shirt would dry off on the hour-plus train ride, by the time I walked through the stifling tunnel leading from Shinjuku Station to the Canon headquarters, I would be utterly soaked again.

After settling in at the dorm and meeting the dormitory master, Arai-san, I walked Koshiba-san back to Fujigaoka Station. Although it's common to see non-Japanese throughout Japan these days, even in remoter suburbs like Fujigaoka, in 1991, seeing other foreigners even in a crowded place like Shibuya was a notable event. In Fujigaoka, we were unknown, particularly to one little girl. As I walked back from the station, I noticed an elementary-schooler walking a few steps ahead of me, wearing her little sailor-suit school uniform and gigantic leather "randoseru" bookbag. She must have heard my footsteps, for she turned around to see who was behind her and, upon seeing a foreigner, took off running down the street as fast as her legs could carry her. Puzzled, I kept walking. A few minutes later, I found her hiding behind a telephone pole, waiting for me to pass. I couldn't tell whether she just wanted another look, or whether she was simply making sure that it was safe to continue on home.

I never did see another foreigner in Fujigaoka during that entire summer.

My Date With Cho-san

2009-06-14T21:40:00.002-04:00

In the summer of 1991, I had my first job in Japan and my first "real" job anywhere -- a paid summer internship at Canon, Inc., at its then-headquarters in Shinjuku, Tokyo. This was in the early post-Bubble days, when everyone thought the recession would be short and the Bubble would be back any day now. Canon was still spending money on prestige interns -- current students and recent graduates from top universities around the world, who gave Canon the ability to brag about its interns from Harvard and the Sorbonne. There were seven or eight of us that summer. I still have the pictures, but I have forgotten the names. A guy from Texas; a Japanese woman who had grown up in Paris; some others I do not recall.

In addition to us interns, Canon had a lone foreign employee at its corporate headquarters, a Canadian whom I will call him Gary -- not to protect him, but just because I cannot remember his name either. I don't remember what exactly Gary did, but it was one of those typical gaijin jobs that involved correcting English correspondence or giving English lessons to corporate execs. It must have been something like that because Gary spoke almost no Japanese.

At some point during my summer at Canon, Gary told me about his friend Cho-san. Gary and Cho-san had shared a hospital room when Gary had his appendix removed, and had become friends, even though Cho-san's English was about as good as Gary's Japanese. Cho-san had invited Gary to go to his bar sometime, and Gary had been meaning to go, but had never got around to it. He suggested that we invite a couple of girls from Canon and check out Cho-san's place, which was located in Shinjuku Ni-chome.

We arrived on the appointed evening and found an empty bar, except for a man and a woman, whom Cho-san proceeded to ignore for the rest of the evening as he attended to us. Cho-san set us up with Tokyo's then-official drink, whiskey-and-water, and spent the rest of the evening sitting at our table, fixing us drinks and chatting, hostess-style. I had been pursuing one of the women who joined us, a Canon employee name Yayoi-san, pretty much since I had arrived at Canon, but I was getting the distinct impression from her that she had invited her friend Kaori along to be my consolation prize. Being 22 and easy, I shifted my attention to Kaori over the course of the evening, and she eventually became my first Japanese girlfriend.

Several weeks later, my internship was over, I had moved on to a new job, and I was dating Kaori. Cho-san telephoned me out of the blue. He had been invited to a party at the U.S. Embassy, and since he did not speak English, he wanted to know if I would come with him to translate. It was a strange request from someone I had met only once in basically a business setting, but I had no plans that night, and he sounded desperate, so I reluctantly agreed.

The party turned out to be on the Embassy grounds but was not any kind of official function. This was obvious because, as soon as I showed up, the American population at the party reached single digits. Not only that, Cho-san seemed to know everyone there. He began introducing me to friends, who kept telling him, "Cho-san, your friend is so handsome." Throughout the evening, people kept coming over and telling Cho-san (but not me), how handsome I was.

Although this should have registered with me, it did not. Being a gaijin in Japan, I was told I was handsome practically on a daily basis, and women at Canon used to make up reasons to come to my division to get a look at the foreign guy. By the time I went out with Cho-san that night, my head had swelled to such enormous dimensions that it's a wonder my neck could still support the thing. I did think it was a little strange that people seemed to be congratulating Cho-san on my "handsomeness," but, you know, Japan is a strange country, I thought, and just kept drinking the free beer.

After a couple of hours, I had reached the limits of my Japanese ability, and the party mercifully ended. Cho-san prevailed upon me to get just one more drink at his friend's bar in Roppongi, nearby the Embassy. I wanted to go home, but he insisted. The bar was up a couple of flights of stairs in a small building in the midst of a maze of back streets from which I would never be able to find my way out. The bar was what Japanese call a "snack," a small, intimate, and usually very expensive bar whose attraction is the personalized service customers get from the host or hostess. We entered the bar and the hostess, recognizing Cho-san, exclaimed in excitement that it had been ten years since they had seen each other. She beckoned us to prime corner seats at the end of the bar, and after we were introduced, she, too, congratulated Cho-san on how handsome I was.

Cho-san left me at the bar to talk to another customer he knew, and the hostess, a beautiful woman around 40, posted herself at my end of the bar and began peppering me with questions about where I was from, how long I had been in Japan, how I met Cho-san. As I talked with her, I noticed how animated she was, how unusually "big" her movements were, for Japanese women in those days (and still to some extent now) were usually more "dainty" than she was, for lack of a better word. It was attractive to me, and though she was clearly too old for me, I found myself wishing I could meet a younger version of her. Then, for no reason at all, the thought flashed into my mind, "Did she used to be a man?"

No sooner had I dismissed the thought as utterly ridiculous than the hostess stated matter-of-factly, "You know, I used to be a man." Pointing to her face, she said, "I had this fixed." "And these," she said, cupping her breasts. And, demurely covering her pelvic area with crossed hands as if I had walked in on her while she was undressing, she smiled at me and said: "Of course I had this fixed, too!"

Suddenly, the entire evening made sense. As I would later learn, Shinjuku Ni-chome was Tokyo's gay nightclub district, and even though the only customers in Cho-san's bar the night we met were a man and a woman (at least I think she was a woman!), he ran a gay bar. It's possible that Gary didn't even know. And Cho-san probably thought, by virtue of my presence in his bar, that I was gay. There was a reason why all of Cho-san's friends kept telling him how handsome I was.

Shortly thereafter, we left the bar. It was late, and I really needed to get home to get some sleep for work the next day. We took a taxi to the nearest subway station. I did not say anything to Cho-san, but it must have dawned on him that he was mistaken about me, and he apologized for having come on so strong. He left me at the train station, and my one and only date with a man came to an end.