My Date With Cho-san

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.