Two-hour limit

One of the most impenetrable 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

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

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

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

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

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

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.