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.

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.

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.

Cleaning Ladies in the Men's Room

One of life's little differences in Japan was that, every once in a while, you'd be standing at a urinal in an office building bathroom, and the next thing you know -- there's a little old lady in a uniform cleaning the bathroom around you.

The first time this happened to me, I was at Canon. I was standing there, absent-mindedly doing my thing, when all of a sudden, a woman walked in and began to clean the urinal next to me. I was so surprised, it nearly caused me to miss.

Over the years, I saw enough cleaning ladies in men's bathrooms, gym locker rooms, etc., that I got used to it. I came to realize that, unlike Americans, Japanese don't sexualize nudity unnecessarily. Nudity is sexual when people are having sex; at other times, it's just an absence of clothing. Men and women bathed naked together in public baths before prudish Victorian-era westerners arrived and told them to cut it out if they wanted to be considered "civilized" and not get colonized for their "own good." Even though there are only a few places -- mostly in rural outposts -- where men and women can still enjoy the public baths together, it's still very common for couples to bathe together in private baths at an onsen (without it being foreplay -- don't think of the heart-shaped bubble bath from old Love Boat episodes!), and Japanese parents often bathe with their children at home, at least until the children reach puberty. It's not considered sexual, it's considered essential for families to feel close to one another.

Nonsexualized nudity. It's so . . . civilized.

I Love the Smell of Filet o' Fish in the Morning

During my internship, I left my dorm at 7:00 a.m. to make it to work on time, and because eating before I left home would leave me hungry long before the noon lunch break, I took to eating after I arrived in the neighborhood of the office. After paying $18 for pancakes at a hotel restaurant one morning, I resolved to look for other options.

Near the end of my commute were several fast food chains, running from Morinaga to McDonald's. I soon discovered that McDonald's served reasonable pancakes at a reasonable price, and it became my regular stop each morning. Unlike in the U.S., the pancakes were cooked to order and brought to your table when they were done, which was never more than about 5 minutes. The pancakes always came with a deep bow and an apology for having made you wait so long.

Although McDonald's offered a full breakfast menu of pancakes, Egg McMuffins, etc., I noticed after a while that the only people who ordered breakfast items were me and the foreign tourists who wandered in from a nearby hotel -- probably after they saw the $18 pancakes in the hotel restaurant. The Japanese always bought items from the regular menu, like Filet o' Fish. I wondered whether this was just particular to McDonald's, but when I went to Morinaga, it didn't even have a breakfast menu. It just hawked the regular menu of burgers all day long.

The idea of fish -- especially Filet o' Fish -- in the morning made my stomach turn, and I thought the Japanese salarymen breakfasting on them to be utterly bizarre. It was only after some time in Japan that I realized that Japanese cuisine recognizes no distinction between breakfast and the other meals. A traditional Japanese breakfast, such as you might get in a ryokan inn, contains fish, pickles, rice, miso soup, and other things you'd eat during the rest of the day. Eventually, as a result of going to Korea and seeing kimchi in the breakfast buffet, it dawned on me that people throughout the world eat the same things all day long, and the idea that you don't eat breakfast for dinner and vice-versa (all-day breakfast at diners notwithstanding) may be a uniquely Western idea.

We were the weird ones, not the Japanese.

Nearly 20 years later, I love Japanese breakfast, especially the grilled fish. Since Japanese breakfasts are much more labor-intensive than Western ones, I rarely get to eat them, but I relish them every time.

The idea of a Filet o' Fish for breakfast, however, still turns my stomach.

Not on the Menu

The Japanese are world-famous for their service. But, in Japan, good service does not mean that the customer is always right. It means offering the prescribed service very quickly, efficiently, and well. "Off the menu" requests, however, create near havoc. Only newly arrived foreigners and Japanese who have lived abroad for too long don't know enough to stick to the menu.

My colleague Tracey first went to Japan as a model in the late 1980s. At some point during her stay, she went to Almond in Roppongi, and ordered an "iced coffee" from the menu. A while later, the waitress brought her back what Americans and Japanese understand as iced coffee -- cold coffee over ice. According to Tracey -- although I have never verified this with my Aussie friends -- in her native Queensland, iced coffee is hot black coffee with a scoop of vanilla ice cream in it, and this confection, she explained to the waitress, was what she wanted.

"It's not on the menu," she was informed.

"But, I see you have coffee on the menu, and you also have vanilla ice cream on the menu," Tracey noted, "so please bring me coffee with vanilla ice cream in it and charge me for both."

"I can't do that. It's not on the menu."

"Okay," Tracey continued. "I'd like a cup of hot coffee and a dish of vanilla ice cream, please."

"No."

"Why not?" Tracey asked. "They're on the menu."

"Because I know what you're going to do with them."

An exasperated Tracey asked to see the manager. She explained her desire for an Australian iced coffee, the injustice of being forbidden from ordering coffee and ice cream from the menu, and the fact that how she choose to consume them was no one's business but her own.

Finally, in a face-saving measure for all concerned, a compromise was reached. Tracey was permitted to order coffee and vanilla ice cream, but she was to make sure that no other customer saw her combine them, and she was to promise never to order coffee and ice cream at Almond again.

Lest you think that this was an isolated incident, in the early 1990s, Miyamoto Misao, an American-trained Japanese psychologist known for his books making fun of the bureaucrats in Japan's Department of Health, where he had worked, told a similar story about his attempt to order a glass of white wine at a famous hotel bar. The bartender told him that white wine was only available by the bottle. However, the observant Mr. Miyamoto spied an open bottle of white wine behind the bar and asked if he could have a glass from it. No, the bartender told him, that bottle was only for making the cocktail Kir (white wine and creme de cassis). Well, Miyamoto replied, I'd like a Kir, hold the creme de cassis. Impossible, he was told: if you get one, everyone else will want one. Once again, the manager was called to broker a compromise. Miyamoto was permitted to buy a glass of white wine this time, but instructed never to expect that kind of service again.

Way Too Polite For My Own Good

In July 1991, I attended Canon's annual summer office party, held on the rooftop beer garden at the Odakyu Department Store in Nishi-Shinjuku, Tokyo.

A few weeks into my internship, I had already gained a reputation for being able to hold my liquor -- a skill whose social importance in Japan should not be underestimated. Even though some Asians -- like my father-in-law -- apparently cannot produce the enzyme that metabolizes alcohol, leaving them unable to drink booze, drinking plays a very large part in Japanese social life, and "strong" drinkers, as they are called, are held in high esteem. Although being able to hold your liquor may be a virtue in some circles in the US, our history of religiously-inspired opposition to alcohol consumption has made alcohol use somewhat less than universally acceptable, and before I went to Japan I thought that calling someone a "big" drinker carried a veiled accusation of alcoholism. But alcohol use does not have a stigma in Japan, and people like my father-in-law are somewhat ashamed -- or at least very inconvenienced -- by being unable to drink. Being labeled a "strong" drinker in Japan always struck me as a bit ironic, since I had always considered myself a lightweight, notwithstanding that I was a founding member of a drinking society in my senior year at Harvard -- a fact that only enhanced my drinking cred in Japan.

My colleagues entered me into the beer chugging contest, which I learned when my name was called over the PA. I duly won the first round, which meant that I had to participate in the second round. But, while waiting for the second round to start, I drank liberal amounts of sake along with my colleagues, so that by the second round, I had a pretty good buzz going. To this day, I still believe that I finished my beer the fastest of anyone in the second round, but in my state, I forgot to raise the glass over my head to prove it. I did not get to proceed to the third and final round, which was probably just as well. I did not stop from drinking more sake, however.

At 9:00 p.m. sharp, the party ended. Because all Japanese restaurant reservations last exactly two hours, all Japanese parties do, too, although an after-party, the nijikai (literally, the "second gathering"), usually follows. When someone asked if anyone knew a place to go for the nijikai, I -- who had been there only for a matter of weeks at this point -- piped up that I knew the perfect place, a German-style beer hall near Shinjuku Station. No one else knew it, so I led the way.

Upon arriving at the beer hall, I immediately ordered an enormous tankard. But, I was already feeling a but queasy and, after drinking a quarter of it, I felt even moreso. When one of the women whose dorm was on the same train line as mine announced that she was leaving, I decided to go, too. We bid the others farewell, walked the short distance to Shinjuku Station, and boarded the Yamanote Line for Shibuya Station. The side-to-side swaying of the train hurtling down the tracks toward the first stop, Yoyogi Station, made me feel even worse, and shortly after the train departed from Yoyogi, I knew that I would not be able to keep the contents of my stomach where they were. Somewhere between Yoyogi and Harajuku Station, it started coming up.

Being terribly embarrassed about throwing up on a train in such a nice, clean and orderly country like Japan, I did the only thing I could think to do: I cupped my hands and threw up into them. Then I rode the rest of the way between Yoyogi and Harajuku with a stinking pint beer, sake, chicken, squid, crackers, cheese, bile, stomach acid and god-knows-what-else in my cupped hands. In the days when foreigners were still relatively rare in Tokyo, I must have been quite the amazing sight: a white gaijin sitting on the train, with puke all over his white dress shirt, holding a pint of puke in his hands. I waited until we reached Harajuku Station, got off the train, threw the vomit onto the tracks, and wiped my hands on some discarded newspaper.

My colleague, who was very worried about me, got off the train too, got me some water, and waited with me for a half-hour or so until I was able to board the train to Shibuya Station. But after arriving, I knew I could never survive the hour-long trip on the Denentoshi Line back to distant Fujigaoka, Yokohama, plus the fifteen-minute up-the-hill-and-down-again walk to my dormitory. I borrowed some money from my colleague and found a taxi. I am sure that this was the driver's worst nightmare -- a drunk gaijin covered in already vomit who was likely to throw up again in his cab -- but I was already in the cab by the time he realized this, so he was out of luck. Fortunately, I did not throw up in the cab, but I did have to ask the driver to pull over once so I could throw up again, which I think he appreciated. Not all hairy barbarians are actually barbaric. The ride also cost me about $100.

The irony of being afraid to vomit on the train was that, as any Japan-hand will tell you, people in Tokyo throw up on the train all the time, without much embarassment at all -- a natural consequence of Japan being such a hard-drinking country. Riding on a commuter line to the suburbs at 9:00 or 10:00 p.m., when the salarymen are heading home after drinking with their colleagues, there are so many drunks on the trains that the problem becomes how to avoid getting puked on. Subway platforms are covered in vomit late at night. But, by morning, it's all been cleaned up, so you'd never know it was there -- unlike New York, where people throw up in public less frequently but the vomit can feed roaches and rats for days before someone with the power or will to do anything about it notices its existence.

I drank too much on many more occasions during my years in Japan. But I learned not to enter any more beer-chugging contests, not to mix beer and sake, and to drink within walking distance of home whenever possible.

My Date With Cho-san

In the summer of 1991, I had my first job in Japan and my first "real" job anywhere -- a paid summer internship at Canon, Inc., at its then-headquarters in Shinjuku, Tokyo. This was in the early post-Bubble days, when everyone thought the recession would be short and the Bubble would be back any day now. Canon was still spending money on prestige interns -- current students and recent graduates from top universities around the world, who gave Canon the ability to brag about its interns from Harvard and the Sorbonne. There were seven or eight of us that summer. I still have the pictures, but I have forgotten the names. A guy from Texas; a Japanese woman who had grown up in Paris; some others I do not recall.

In addition to us interns, Canon had a lone foreign employee at its corporate headquarters, a Canadian whom I will call him Gary -- not to protect him, but just because I cannot remember his name either. I don't remember what exactly Gary did, but it was one of those typical gaijin jobs that involved correcting English correspondence or giving English lessons to corporate execs. It must have been something like that because Gary spoke almost no Japanese.

At some point during my summer at Canon, Gary told me about his friend Cho-san. Gary and Cho-san had shared a hospital room when Gary had his appendix removed, and had become friends, even though Cho-san's English was about as good as Gary's Japanese. Cho-san had invited Gary to go to his bar sometime, and Gary had been meaning to go, but had never got around to it. He suggested that we invite a couple of girls from Canon and check out Cho-san's place, which was located in Shinjuku Ni-chome.

We arrived on the appointed evening and found an empty bar, except for a man and a woman, whom Cho-san proceeded to ignore for the rest of the evening as he attended to us. Cho-san set us up with Tokyo's then-official drink, whiskey-and-water, and spent the rest of the evening sitting at our table, fixing us drinks and chatting, hostess-style. I had been pursuing one of the women who joined us, a Canon employee name Yayoi-san, pretty much since I had arrived at Canon, but I was getting the distinct impression from her that she had invited her friend Kaori along to be my consolation prize. Being 22 and easy, I shifted my attention to Kaori over the course of the evening, and she eventually became my first Japanese girlfriend.

Several weeks later, my internship was over, I had moved on to a new job, and I was dating Kaori. Cho-san telephoned me out of the blue. He had been invited to a party at the U.S. Embassy, and since he did not speak English, he wanted to know if I would come with him to translate. It was a strange request from someone I had met only once in basically a business setting, but I had no plans that night, and he sounded desperate, so I reluctantly agreed.

The party turned out to be on the Embassy grounds but was not any kind of official function. This was obvious because, as soon as I showed up, the American population at the party reached single digits. Not only that, Cho-san seemed to know everyone there. He began introducing me to friends, who kept telling him, "Cho-san, your friend is so handsome." Throughout the evening, people kept coming over and telling Cho-san (but not me), how handsome I was.

Although this should have registered with me, it did not. Being a gaijin in Japan, I was told I was handsome practically on a daily basis, and women at Canon used to make up reasons to come to my division to get a look at the foreign guy. By the time I went out with Cho-san that night, my head had swelled to such enormous dimensions that it's a wonder my neck could still support the thing. I did think it was a little strange that people seemed to be congratulating Cho-san on my "handsomeness," but, you know, Japan is a strange country, I thought, and just kept drinking the free beer.

After a couple of hours, I had reached the limits of my Japanese ability, and the party mercifully ended. Cho-san prevailed upon me to get just one more drink at his friend's bar in Roppongi, nearby the Embassy. I wanted to go home, but he insisted. The bar was up a couple of flights of stairs in a small building in the midst of a maze of back streets from which I would never be able to find my way out. The bar was what Japanese call a "snack," a small, intimate, and usually very expensive bar whose attraction is the personalized service customers get from the host or hostess. We entered the bar and the hostess, recognizing Cho-san, exclaimed in excitement that it had been ten years since they had seen each other. She beckoned us to prime corner seats at the end of the bar, and after we were introduced, she, too, congratulated Cho-san on how handsome I was.

Cho-san left me at the bar to talk to another customer he knew, and the hostess, a beautiful woman around 40, posted herself at my end of the bar and began peppering me with questions about where I was from, how long I had been in Japan, how I met Cho-san. As I talked with her, I noticed how animated she was, how unusually "big" her movements were, for Japanese women in those days (and still to some extent now) were usually more "dainty" than she was, for lack of a better word. It was attractive to me, and though she was clearly too old for me, I found myself wishing I could meet a younger version of her. Then, for no reason at all, the thought flashed into my mind, "Did she used to be a man?"

No sooner had I dismissed the thought as utterly ridiculous than the hostess stated matter-of-factly, "You know, I used to be a man." Pointing to her face, she said, "I had this fixed." "And these," she said, cupping her breasts. And, demurely covering her pelvic area with crossed hands as if I had walked in on her while she was undressing, she smiled at me and said: "Of course I had this fixed, too!"

Suddenly, the entire evening made sense. As I would later learn, Shinjuku Ni-chome was Tokyo's gay nightclub district, and even though the only customers in Cho-san's bar the night we met were a man and a woman (at least I think she was a woman!), he ran a gay bar. It's possible that Gary didn't even know. And Cho-san probably thought, by virtue of my presence in his bar, that I was gay. There was a reason why all of Cho-san's friends kept telling him how handsome I was.

Shortly thereafter, we left the bar. It was late, and I really needed to get home to get some sleep for work the next day. We took a taxi to the nearest subway station. I did not say anything to Cho-san, but it must have dawned on him that he was mistaken about me, and he apologized for having come on so strong. He left me at the train station, and my one and only date with a man came to an end.