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.

Christmas in Japan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.