The Birth of Meishi Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, Those Drunken Yakitori Nights!

Yakitori -- chicken parts on sticks -- is a salaryman standby in Japan and one of my favorite feeds. Yakitori comes in many varieties, as all parts of the chicken are used, from the white breast meat that Americans eat to the exclusion of every other part of the chicken to the knee cartilege (hiza nankotsu), one of my favorite cuts of all. Yakitori places are as varied as yakitori itself, ranging from upscale restaurants to smoky open-air joints stuck under the tracks near railway stations. The latter were my favorite.

My way of finding a good yakitori joint was to look for a really grubby place that was very crowded with salarymen. If the place was packed despite having zero ambiance, then chances were good people were there for the food.

My favorite yakitori joint, Komatsu, was this kind of place. Located in Yurakucho, the Ginza's grubby neighbor, it stood near the entrance of a short tunnel under the Yamanote Line tracks, half-way between Yurakucho and Shimbashi stations, that contained about six yakitori places. Although the tunnel seemed to be pedestrianized, it was actually a city street, and a couple of times a night a car or truck would drive right through the middle of this yakitori bazaar. Komatsu was run by a middle-aged woman, the daughter of the founder, who was occasionally helped by one or the other of her two daughters. It held perhaps 12 seats -- two long tables and a small counter near the grill -- under the sloping barrel roof of the tunnel. If you didn't get there by 6:00 p.m. or so, you couldn't get in again until late. Komatsu would be packed even when the other places nearby were empty.

Soon after starting at Look Japan, my friends David Benjamin and Junko Yoshida, who had been going there for years, introduced me to Komatsu, and Benji and I developed a custom of going there once a month or so. One evening, we swung by on the back end of the rush. The place had emptied out except for a couple of salarymen. After we had been there for an hour or so, and the salarymen, who were already drunk when we got there, had become totally shitfaced, one of them worked up the courage to talk to the foreigners, probably to try to impress his friend with either his guts or his English ability.

When middle-aged Japanese men in the 1990s approached foreigners to practice or show of their English, they usually asked one or more of the following three questions. This is how the conversation usually went:

Question 1. "Are you a student?"

Answer: "No. I am working."

Follow-up question: "Are you teaching Ingurish?"

Answer: "No."

(No follow-up.)

Question 2. "Do you like Japanese sushi?" (It was always Japanese sushi, as if there were some other kind.)

Answer: "Yes."

Follow-up question: "Really?" (This was always asked in a tone of utter disbelief, as if what divided the Japanese from the rest of the world and maintained order in the universe was that Japanese ate raw fish and no one else could even think of eating it without gagging.)

Answer: "Yes, really." (Stunned silence. No follow up.)

Question 3. "Do you like Japanese gyaru (girls)?" (The previous questions were just warm-up for this, the most important question, loaded with unexpressed resentment that so many Japanese girls had foreign boyfriends, and asked only to confirm the asker's pre-existing belief: Of course he likes Japanese girls! They're only here to steal our women! )

Answer: "Some of them, yes." (This answer seemed to be sufficient confirmation of their pre-conceived explanation for my presence and led to no follow-up.)

Here the conversation would usually end.

At Komatsu that day, one of the two men leaned over from the next table, business cards in hand, and introduced himself to us in English. He immediately launched into the Three Questions. However, he was clearly struggling with his English, which was barely understandable. I thought I would cut him a break and speak Japanese.

He ignored me and continued to ask questions in barely intelligible English, worsened by a thick accent and way too much booze.

I continued to try to make conversation in Japanese. However, in those days Japanese-speaking foreigners were rare, and many Japanese people simply refused to believe that foreigners could learn their language. Because I spoke good Japanese, people often assumed that the only explanation was some hidden Japanese ancestry and would ask if my mother was Japanese. This guy's demeanor suggested that he just did not believe that I was speaking Japanese to him. Or, perhaps was concentrating so hard on formulating questions in English that he could not understand what I was saying to him. Whatever the reason, I gave up and let him continue to struggle along.

Eventually he finished the interrogation. Apparently I answered the Three Questions appropriately, because my friend then announced that he wanted to consummate our new friendship by giving me his business card -- the ultimate sign that the relationship was expected to continue.

The business card he had already given me was still sitting in front of me on the table.

"I already have your card," I said to him in English.

"Let me give you my card," he persisted.

"Meishi ha, mou itadakimashita yo," I said, repeating myself in Japanese, thinking that perhaps he had not understood me.

"No, no, let me give you my card," came the response in English.

"No, really," I said, holding my copy of his business card in front of his face, "I already have your card."

"No, let me give you my card," he said, drunkenly thrusting a second copy of his card into my hand.

The man and his buddy stood up to leave. They shook our hands and insisted that we get together again. They then stumbled out of Komatsu, to search for more booze or to catch the train home to deepest Yokohama, Chiba, suburban Tokyo, or perhaps beyond. Needless to say, Benji and I never saw our Komatsu friends again.