The Birth of Meishi Man

My friend Dave S. and I developed a regular habit of hitting an izakaya called Tonta once a month or so. Tonta was under the Yamanote Line tracks, halfway between Yurakucho Station and Shimbashi Station, directly behind the Imperial Hotel. It was down three steps in a half-basement and had everything a good izakaya needs -- long communal tables, advertisements from Kirin and Sapporo of buxom young Japanese women in bikinis holding pints of beer, cigarette smoke, cheap beer and sake, and decent food. I don't know whether Tonta is particularly well known, or it just happens to be known to certain cameramen in Japan, but every once in a while, I see the interior of Tonta (which is burned into my memory) on TV.

A group of two at Tonta would usually be seated across a communal table from one another, with people you did not know on either side of you. If you came with a larger group, you could get a table to yourself, but not usually with two people, unless it was a slow night. When seated alongside strangers, the etiquette is generally to pretend they don't exist. It's the only way to have some privacy when you are seated six inches from a couple of strangers. Of course, speaking in English provided a buffer for our conversations, but you never knew who could speak English, so it was best just to imagine they didn't exist anyway. (Japanese usually assumed we could not speak Japanese, so it was common, as soon as we sat down, to hear conversations about America, the speaker's inability to speak English, etc.)

One night, we were seated at a table right near the door. A large foreigner in a suit -- probably staying at the Imperial -- came to the door, looked through the window, saw us sitting there, and decided it was okay to come in. Because he was by himself and it was very crowded, the waitress seated him at the end of a table, which happened to be our table. Foreigners are generally not used to being seated with strangers, and even less used to the idea that, if you are seated with strangers, you are supposed to ignore them. The foreigner immediately started talking to the two salarymen seated on either side of him. From his accent, we could tell he was German.

The two salarymen did their best speaking English with him. His booming voice matched his large frame and we could hear everything he said. Suddenly, he asked them, "So, is this a Chinese restaurant?"

Dave and I checked our laughter. The two Japanese, probably expecting such ignorance, explained to him earnestly that this was an izakaya, a kind of Japanese bar.

After a while, Dave and I tuned out the conversation, which was following the standard Japanese-gaijin format of "Do you like Japanese sushi?" and so on, and went on drinking. Eventually, the two salarymen bid the German a good night and left to return either to the office for more work or to their homes in deepest Chiba or Kanagawa Prefecture. Dave then abruptly announced, "I'm going to get his meishi!" He went over to the German, talked for five minutes, and came back with his business card.

I didn't know it at the time, but I had just witnessed the birth of Meishi Man.

I don't know whether Dave had been reading books about networking or what, but over the coming months, he became obsessed with obtaining people's business cards. We'd be out drinking somewhere, and all of a sudden, he'd be collecting the meishi of everyone in sight. There was no rhyme or reason to his obsession. He did not seem to target people in any particular field. He just wanted cards, any cards, as though, somehow, if he collected enough of them, he would have some kind of networking breakthrough, reach some kind of meishi collecting nirvana, that would lead to a new career opportunity. I don't know what he did with all the cards. He never mentioned to me that he had later contacted a single person whose card he had collected while out drinking with me.

In the end, Dave proved a good networker, apparently networking his way into a job as the president of a Japanese subsidiary in Italy after business school. I don't know if he still collects business cards obsessively. I'm just proud to say that I knew Meishi Man when he was just a meishi boy.