Yokohama Strep Throat Blues

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.