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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Chopstickery Pet Peeves

I'll relate a story that actually occurred before I went to Japan, but it's fun nonetheless.

Between my junior and senior years of college, after studying Japanese in college for a year, I posted a flyer seeking a Japanese language exchange partner at Yaohan (now Mitsuwa), Japanese shopping center in Edgewater, New Jersey. A woman named Noriko answered my ad. During that summer, we got together periodically to exchange Japanese and English language pointers.

One day, Noriko and her roommate, who was also Japanese, invited me to their apartment for dinner. To eat with, they gave me warebashi, those disposable bamboo chopsticks, still attached to each other at one end, that you have to break apart to use. (Although this sounds tacky -- you wouldn't give your guest a plastic fork in the US -- it's actually common in Japan, because it's considered more polite to give someone unused chopsticks, as opposed to the ones you've been sticking in your mouth for a couple of years.)

I pulled apart the chopsticks and then started rubbing them together to remove splinters, as I had seen some Asian American friends do at school. As I rubbed, I asked Noriko, in as good Japanese as I could muster at the time, "Please tell me if I ever do anything considered rude in Japan."

Noriko and her roommate looked at each other and then Noriko pointed to my splinter-removing technique. "That's rude," she said. I felt like a dope.

Moral of the Story: Don't assume that Asian Americans know any more about Japanese etiquette than you do, just because they're Asian American.

Etiquette Note: One of my pet peeves is people who treat chopsticks like toys. You don't play with your knife and fork at the table, do you? If you want to practice drumming, get some drumsticks. Treat chopsticks like you would tableware: leave them on the table if you're not using them to eat. Doing otherwise is considered extremely rude.

My Other Chopstick-Related Pet Peeve: People who insist on using chopsticks in Asian restaurants because it's "more authentic" that way, even though they can't use them properly. Most of these people hold the chopsticks near the bottom, like a pencil. But chopsticks operate more like scissors. Imagine if you decided that, rather than using the handles, you would use the scissors by holding them near the tips of the blades. You'd lose the advantage of the lever-and-fulcrum principle on which chopsticks depend. You'd also look rather silly.

Even a fork works on the same principle. If you hold a fork down by the tines, like a four-year old, it doesn't work so well, does it? That's why adults hold forks at the other end.

Get your hands as far away from the business end of the chopsticks as possible and you'll have much more control and grabbing power. If you ever get Chinese take-out and they give you those disposable chopsticks in the red paper cover with the chopsticks instructions on the back, read the directions! They distill 5,000 years of chopsticks know-how into three easy steps. Chopsticks work much better as shown in the diagram. Trust me.

My Japanese friends are always amazed at my chopstickery. (Like the Japanese language itself, gaijin are presumed to be inherently incapable of learning to use chopsticks properly -- probably because most gaijin hold chopsticks like pencils.) They always want to know: How did you learn to use chopsticks so well? The answer: China House, Foster Village Shopping Center, Bergenfield, New Jersey, circa 1978.

I followed the instructions on the place mats.

"Someday, You'll Be President of the United States"

"Someday, you'll be president of the United States."

This was the highest compliment that Shacho ("president") could think to pay me. As far as I know, it was based solely on one fact: I arrived in the office before Shacho arrived every day. I don't think that Shacho really knew whether I was a good employee or not. After all, he did not understand English, and I am sure that he never even tried to read the English-language news magazine, Look Japan, that he published every month.

I was so used to rising early to get to work on time at Canon, that even after I changed jobs and dormitory locations, I continued to rise early to go to work. Once I moved into Oshikawa-san's dormitory in Ohta-ku and began working at Look Japan, I took the Keihin-Tohoku line from Kamata Station in the south easternmost corner of Tokyo to Tokyo Station to get to work -- the busiest line in metropolitan Tokyo on the busiest stretch of its route. The Keihin-Tohoku line passed through Kamakura, Yokohama and Kawasaki and was already sardine-jammed when it finally reached the Tokyo city limits at Kamata.

Getting a seat was out of the question. I just wanted to get a strap to hang on, so that I could read a book or a newspaper over the heads of the exalted souls who could sit. Otherwise, I was condemned to riding in the open space between the doors, where -- even if I could raise my arms -- there was nothing to hold on to, and the only thing stopping me from falling to the floor when the train rounded a curve at speed was the other people jammed against me, arms also pinned to their sides, propping me up.

To avoid the crowded trains, I took to getting on the train at 7:00 a.m. and eating breakfast at my desk while I read the paper and otherwise killed time until work started at 9:00. My Japanese colleagues found my usual breakfast of covenience-store onigiri (rice balls) and coffee endlessly amusing. Everyone knows, they said, that you eat onigiri with green tea, not coffee. Mixing Japanese food with western drink apparently knocked the universe out of its delicate balance. As for me, green tea did not pack enough of a caffeine punch. I needed the hard stuff.

As a result of my early arrival, I was always there when Shacho arrived, and Shacho usually arrived before everyone else. My desk was directly in front of the office door, and when Shacho arrived, there I would be, reading the paper. He'd greet me with a robust Ohayo gozaimasu ("good morning") and a big grin, and it was clear he was happy to see me there, because it signaled my enthusiasm for my job and the company he had built from the ground up over the last 35 years.

I, however, felt like a fraud. I hated working at Look Japan. I never had enough work to do, and was always bored. The company was too uptight, with too many meaningless rules, and the photographers we used for stories used to laugh and tell us we weren't really journalists, because we had to wear suits. This was fine with Shacho, who loved to tell us that he wanted businessmen, not journalists, working for him -- part of the problem in my mind. Working there also made me uncomfortable because I felt that Shacho liked me for the wrong reason. While I am sure that our editor-in-chief, Nishimura-san, reported to him that I was a good employee, Shacho himself never read a word I wrote or edited. But, because I was there every morning when he arrived, Shacho frequently told me that, one day, I'd be President.

Only one employee arrived earlier than I did, Kamiya-san, our accountant, whose responsibility it was to open the office and get the coffee started. Kamiya-san hated me as much as Shacho loved me, and for equally irrelevant reasons. Our magazine had 48 pages each month, and there was a set amount of work to do for each issue. I wrote one article and was responsible for editing half of the articles written by outside authors each month. However, I worked very efficiently and generally wound up editing more than half of the magazine each month. Still, I usually ran out of work part-way through the month and had nothing to do. After a while, I started passing the time by translating Japanese newspaper articles to increase my vocabulary.

Nishimura-san and the Japanese editors were extremely happy with me. I turned around the work quickly and there were no last-minute rushes, no missed deadlines, no end-of-month panic. But, Kamiya-san, who, like Shacho, did not speak English and probably never read the magazine, saw me sitting around for half the month, reading Japanese magazines and not "working." Every time she looked at me, her disapproval was written clearly on her face. She was convinced I was a slacker and a fraud, and I am sure it burned her up inside every time Shacho told me, "Someday, you're going to be President of the United States."

In a way, Shacho and Kamiya-san epitomized my Look Japan experience: I was bored out of my mind while two people who did not understand what my job entailed reached completely opposite conclusions about my value as an employee based on observations that had nothing to do with my work.

Punch Perms and Umeboshi -- My First Izakaya Experience

A week or so after I arrived at Canon Fujigaoka Dormitory No. 1, Arai-san, the dormitory manager, prevailed upon my dorm mates to take me out and get to know me. They asked me if I had ever been to an izakaya, and when I asked what that was, they told me it was a "Japanese-style bar." Sounded good to me. We arranged to meet one day after work at the local izakaya, which was half-way between Fujigaoka Station and our dormitory. I knew the place they described from passing it twice a day on my walks uphill both ways to and from the station.

When I arrived, most of the other guys were already there, about six in total. Like every other izakaya I have been to since, it was noisy with the conversation of customers and the shouts of the waiters welcoming guest, thanking departing customers and conveying their orders to the cooks and beer-pullers. (I call them beer-pullers rather than bartenders because Izakaya don't have bars as we know them in the US and don't serve drinks that require bartenders. The drinks menu usually consists of beer, sake, shochu (a spirit made from either potatoes or wheat), chu-hai (shochu mixed in a highball glass with some kind of flavoring), and soft drinks.) I sat down at the table and someone gave me a small glass and poured me a beer from the shared bottle.

Our waiter was a middle-aged man with what looked like a short, neatly-trimmed Afro and much tanner skin than most Japanese. He looked like one of my sports coaches in high school, which is to say, he looked black, but he was clearly Japanese. I struggled to explain his looks to myself, and then came up with a story to make sense of them: he was part African-American, and his father had probably been a serviceman stationed at one of the U.S. military bases in Japan. I asked one of the guys whether he thought the waiter was half-black, and when he asked why, I explained my reasoning. No, he told me, the waiter's hair was curly because he had a panchi paamu ("punch perm"), a permanent wave hairstyle popular in the 1980s and early 1990s with gangsters and some members of the working class, who thought it made them look tough.

The conversation alternated between my dorm-mates peppering me with questions and talking amongst themselves about topics that quickly lost me. Whenever I did understand the conversation and attempted to contribute something, by the time I had translated my comment from English to Japanese inside my head, the conversation had moved on to another topic.

At some point in the evening, the conversation turned to what would become a familiar topic over the years, my level of knowledge and/or comfort with certain Japanese foods. They wanted to know if I ate "raw fish," sushi being considered the ultimate gross-out food for non-Japanese and the real test for how far a foreigner was willing to go in Japanese culture. I told them I did. They tried a few other foodstuffs they thought would be offputting to me, and I had eaten them all. Finally, they asked me if I had ever had an umeboshi. I did not know what an umeboshi was. They tried to explain to me what it was, and even looked it up in my Japanese-English dictionary, to find the translation "pickled plum." A picked plum did not make any more sense to me, so finally they ordered one to see if I would eat it.

The waiter brought a tiny round dish, about two inches across, with a single, reddish shriveled round object that did not look like any plum I had ever seen. They warned me that it was very sour. Good, I said, I love sour foods.

For some reason, even though they knew that I did not know what an umeboshi was, for some reason, it did not occur to them that I would not know how to eat one properly. Evidently, they are considered too sour to eat as-is, and you are meant to take a small piece with chopsticks and use it to flavor something else, like rice. I, however, seeing a grape-sized piece of what they said was a plum, picked up the umeboshi and popped it into my mouth whole. It wasn't that sour.

Everyone at the table gasped.

Thinking I had breached some kind of etiquette, I spit the umeboshi back into the dish.

Then, realizing I had now definitely committed a faux pas, I popped the umeboshi back in my mouth and ate it. Only then did they tell me that it was considered too sour to eat whole and explained how it was supposed to be consumed. They ordered another and showed me.

So, this day featured my introduction to izakaya and umeboshi (and punch perms). I became a huge fan of izakaya dining and would travel across Tokyo to go to a good one.

And I still eat umeboshi whole.

Just Sauce

During my Canon internship, I was assigned to the Internal Communications Division, whose role was to disseminate news about Canon internally. We published a company magazine, as well as a monthly video program called "Video News." My task during the summer was to make an English version of the most recent Video News program into English, so that it could be disseminated for the first time to the overseas subsidiaries.

The Internal Communications Division shared a large room overlooking the Kanto Plain with a couple of other divisions. We had a pod of seven desks, with our division-head, Tamano-san, at its head. Tamano-san was a roundish, bespectacled, good-natured man in his early 40s with salt and pepper hair, who spoke pretty good English. Our other division members included Kakurai-san, Matsuura-san and Nakajima-san. Nakajima-san was a cameraman and video operator, so I worked with him most closely. Since he did not speak much English, it was a good chance for me to work on my Japanese. I did not get to practice much Japanese with Matsuura-san, who had lived in the United States as a child, but I did spent most of my summer trying to summon the courage to ask her out, which I never did. Kakurai-san, I later learned, had a reputation for hanging out at some of Tokyo's stranger sex clubs, though he seemed like a normal enough guy to me.

At the base of our pod of desks, at the other end from Tamano-san, were several cardboard boxes containing plastic bottles of brown liquid. No one ever took any of the bottles out; they just sat there all summer. All summer long, I wondered what they were. Finally, one day, I asked Tamano-san, what was in the bottles.

"Sauce," he said.

"What kind of sauce?," I asked.

"Just sauce," he responded.

"But what kind of sauce is it?," I persisted, thinking that maybe he had not understood me.

"It's not a kind of sauce," a bit flustered why I did not understand. "It's 'sauce'."

I gave up.

"Sauce," I later learned, is what Japanese use to refer to the brown demi-glace sauce used for tonkatsu (fried pork cutlet) and other fried, breaded foods (but not tempura). Apparently, when it was introduced into Japan, where no sauces previously existed, demi-glace sauce became "sauce." And, because "sauce" was an English word, Tamano-san expected me to understand what it was.

After a very brief period of trying to come up with Japanese words for foreign concepts in the 19th century, they apparently gave up and began adopting foreign words to describe the new things they represented. Over time, Japanese appears to have lost its ability to generate new words, and now most new words seem to be foreign words or "Japanese" words made up of foreign words. Often, the new words are contractions or hybrids, but because they are based (mostly) on English, Japanese often think of them as English words and are surprised when Americans don't understand them.

Some examples are:
remocon -- remote control
arafo -- around forty (years old)
arafi -- around fifty
waapuro -- word processor
depaato -- department store
neeto -- (a person) Not in Employment Education or Training

Even in New York, the local Japanese community makes up contractions for local places, where the whole English name is just too tiring to say. My favorite of these is:

Gurasen -- Grand Central Station

"Something you don't have in America"

I'm trying to keep my posts in more or less chronological order, but more episodes are occurring to me the more I write.

My first day as a Canon intern was July 1, 1991, a day spent on orientation. I reported at 9:30 a.m., as requested, and was taken to meet Hiroshi Matsumoto. Matsumoto-san was a lifetime Canon employee in his fifties, short, pot-bellied, with a grey suit and greying hair surrounding his round face. He wore a Canon lapel pin. He had worked all over the Canon system, including in the U.S., where he had perfected his English. Like the other madogiwa-zoku -- "the ones with desks near the window," the middle managers -- Matsumoto-san's lifetime of hard work had been rewarded not by promotion to the highest echelons of power, but instead by a kind of pre-retirement involving several years of collecting a big paycheck while performing easy work like affixing his seal to documents that came across his desk and welcoming foreign interns. After a lifetime of overtime, Matsumoto-san's job ended promptly when a chime signalled the end of the work day at 5:15 pm -- a chime the younger workers ignored and the madogiwa-zoku took as their signal to dip into the mini fridge in the corner for a beer.

Matsumoto-san grabbed my hand flaccidly, the handshake of a man who learned the custom as an adult, not one whose adolescence was gripped by the fear that a less-than-firm handshake would convey the wrong impression. We sat down opposite one another in the conference room, arranged like so many other "western style" meeting rooms I would see in Japan, with two small sofas facing each other across a low table. Like many Japanese men of his generation, Matsumoto-san's eyes never quite met mine as we talked, always fixing on a spot on my forehead or above my left shoulder.

A young woman came in wearing the blue uniform that was mandatory for female employees. Matsumoto-san said something to her that I did not catch and she left the room. We chatted about my background and his time in the U.S., and the woman returned, bearing a tray with two glasses full of ice cubes and dark liquid.

Matsumoto-san looked directly me in the eye for the first time. "This," he said with a smile, "is something you don't have in the United States. I never found it in all the time I lived there."

I looked down at the glass in front of me. It looked like iced coffee. But, with this introduction, it had to be something else.

"A Japanese invention," he said with pride. "Iced coffee."

I thought back to the iced coffee my dad used to make by the pitcher and drink from yellow plastic glasses in the summertime when I was a kid. It would not be the last time I heard someone in Japan take credit for an American invention. "What a great idea," I said, diplomatically. I settled back and let Matsumoto-san tell me all about Canon.

Toilet Slippers

I began looking for a job in Japan in January 1991, five months before graduating from college. Until December 1990, my post-college plan was to follow my long-distance girlfriend to her home state of Virginia, work for a year as a private school teacher, and then enroll in law school at UVA. This plan suddenly changed when she began seeing someone else -- although she claimed her new relationship was just for fun until I graduated -- and I needed something else to do. The U.S. economy was in the tank (Bush recession #1), and I felt a strong need to get as far as I could from Harvard and Virginia after graduation.

I had been studying Japanese with no particular purpose in mind for the last three semesters. I never thought I would actually go to Japan. But, after breaking up with my girlfriend, Japan suddenly seemed like the ideal place to go after graduation. I had always wanted to live abroad, I reasoned, and couldn't I make myself more employable by perfecting my Japanese (which, in my ignorance, I thought would take only a year)? After all, in those days, there were pages and pages of jobs listed in the New York Times classifieds for Japanese speakers. Sure, the Japanese economy had slowed down too, but it would soon be roaring back, wouldn't it?

Thus, on a cold and miserable Cambridge day in January 1991, I figured the Japanese for "I have broken up with my girlfriend and I want to work in Japan," blurted this out to my surprised Japanese instructor at the end of class, and forever changed the course of my life. The Japanese instructors eventually found me a summer internship at Canon, Inc. as part of the Japanese department's internship program, and also learned of a one-year copyediting job at Look Japan magazine that traditionally went to a new Harvard graduate each year. By the time I graduated in June, I actually had two jobs lined up, a summer internship starting in June, and a magazine editing gig starting in September. I also did my own job search before graduating and, before my summer internship had ended, I even had my post-Look Japan job already lined up.

The Japanese department's summer internship program was impressive. Over the years, the instructors had established relationships with a number of major Japanese corporations that were eager to associate themselves with Harvard's brand, and students who had two years of Japanese instruction and good grades in their Japanese classes were eligible to participate. Included in the program was a comprehensive day-long orientation in Japanese etiquette and culture. Harvard had a vested interest in maintaining these relationships from year-to-year, and the instructors were keen for their students to reflect well on the department with how well-versed they were in Japanese culture and etiquette. The instructors also hoped to prevent a student destroying a relationship with a major cultural gaffe. The etiquette instruction covered everything from the need to prepare a self-introduction speech for the first day of our internships to remembering not to blow our noses in front of other people, a very bad faux pas.

It was in this orientation that I first learned about slipper culture. I knew already that Japanese people went shoeless in the house because we had a Japanese neighbor when I was a kid. I did not know about the complicated slipper rules, such as the fact that one never wears slippers on tatami mats, because slippers chew up tatami. What made an even greater impression on me was the rule about wearing different slippers in the toilet and in the rest of the house. Because bathrooms are considered unclean, Japanese keep toilet slippers and house slippers separate, and you are supposed to change into the toilet slippers when you use the toilet and then back into your regular slippers when you leave. Japanese frequently point to foreigners wearing the toilet slippers outside the toilet not only for the humor of it, but also as an example of non-Japanese people's supposed inability to assimilate Japanese customs and etiquette.

I don't know why this custom exists, and anyone with a different view should correct me, but I have a two-part theory. First, Shinto religion deals heavily with cleanliness and uncleanliness. Before entering a Shinto shrine, you must ritually wash your hands and mouth to purify yourself to enter. Death, being unclean, is left to the Buddhists to handle, which is why there are no Shinto funerals. Women were historically banned from many Shinto shrines and other sacred places because menstruation was thought to make them unclean and thus unfit for sacred spaces. The same holds for the sumo dohyo, where women are still forbidden to tread. Since toilets are unclean places, the Shinto legacy requires that toilet cooties are kept in the toilet and not spread through the rest of the house.

The second reason is much more mundane. Traditional-style Japanese toilets are porcelain lined holes in the ground over which you must squat to do your thing. It is much easier to miss one of these toilets than a western one, and wastes can more easily get onto shoes or places on the ground where you might tread on them and track them into the house. Thus, the Japanese toilet itself provided a practical reason for switching slippers at the toilet door and keeping the dirty toilet slippers in the toilet area. Even though most Japanese now use western-style toilets, the custom has become ingrained.

As a result, depending on the size of the toilet -- whether in a private home or in a dormitory or restaurant -- one or several pairs of rubber or plastic slippers are left in the toilet for everyone to use. (Apparently, Japanese people are afraid of the cooties on the bottom of the slippers, but not afraid of the cooties on the inside of the slippers from other people wearing them.)

In the etiquette lesson, I somehow missed the fact that toilet slippers were provided for common use and that people did not need to carry around their own personal pair of toilet slippers. When shopping for the things I would need in Japan, I duly bought two pairs, in different colors so I could distinguish them. When I decided to get ready for bed on my first night in the Canon Fujigaoka Dormitory No. 1, I slipped on my burgundy house slippers for the walk down the hall and grabbed my black toilet slippers along with my toiletries. I arrived at the toilet door, slipped off my house slippers and placed them alongside the other slippers there, put on my toilet slippers, slid open the sliding glass door and was about to step in when I saw . . . a dozen pairs of identical green vinyl toilet slippers inside the door for all to use and a couple of young men standing at urinals wearing those same green vinyl slippers. I experienced an "Oh, now I get it ..." moment as I recalled the etiquette lesson. Totally embarrassed, I quickly shut the door, high-tailed it back to my room, and put my "toilet" slippers away. I then returned to the toilet, slipped on the green plastic slippers, and hoped that no one had noticed. My "toilet" slippers remained in the back of a closet until they eventually became my replacement "house" slippers.

"Wow, white people really ARE white!"

One evening, on the interminable train ride back to deepest Yokohama after another day as a Canon intern, I noticed an attractive young woman standing by the door looking at me. She was remarkable not just because she was attractive, but especially because she did not turn away and avoid eye contact when I looked at her. Lingering eye-contact with a strange member of the opposite sex was not common in Tokyo and this was the first time I had ever experienced it.

When the train was approaching Fujigaoka Station, I decided to venture closer and see what happened. She did not shy away. Instead, she asked me a one-word question, "Fujigaoka?" I responded: "Fujigaoka." Then I asked her, "Fujigaoka?," and she answered "Aobadai," the name of the next station.

I responded in Japanese, "That's too bad." Her eyes widened. "You speak Japanese?" I told her I did. The train pulled into Fujigaoka Station and the doors opened. I stepped off. So did she.

I suggested that we go to the only place that Fujigaoka had to offer, Mr. Donut. We walked across the square from the station, got our coffees, and found an isolated table on the second floor to sit and talk. She told me her name was Emu, she was 19, and I was the first foreigner she had ever spoken to.

In Japanese, the word for "caucasian" is hakujin, literally meaning "white person." Growing up in the American racial milieu, I had never thought of white people as being actually white, any more than I thought of black people being black or Asian people being yellow. These were all descriptive shortcuts in my mind. But as Emu and I were getting to know each other at the Fujigaoka Mr. Donut, she looked down at my hand and suddenly exclaimed, "Hontou ni shiroinda!" -- "Wow, [white people] really ARE white!" -- as if she had never really believed it to be true, but now the indisputable facts were staring her in the face.

I could have been offended, but I didn't care what she called me. I was already smitten.

On the next Saturday, we had a date, in Shibuya. The date was going amazingly well until, late in the afternoon, in a coffee shop ironically named "Emu," I asked a question I never should have asked: Did she have a boyfriend?

I asked this question because, just before coming to Japan, I had suffered a terrible heartbreak. My long-distance girlfriend had become involved with a male "friend" -- who had pursued her aggressively from the start knowing she had a boyfriend. I had watched all this happen, in slow-motion, at long-distance, powerless to do anything about it. And, yet, I stuck around and watched it happen.

I did not actually suspect that Emu had a boyfriend. I was just covering the bases. Given my recent experience, I wanted to clear any doubts from my mind before I got in any deeper. And when she told me she did, I was shocked -- actually heartbroken, even though I'd only known her for a couple of days. I asked where he was, and she told me he was away at tennis camp. Still angry at my ex-girlfriend (for whom Emu was now a stand-in), and feeling a misplaced need to protect her boyfriend (who was now a stand-in for me), I launched into a lecture about how she shouldn't go around giving men the wrong impression that she was available when she wasn't . . . .

A week later, I called Emu, still hoping I could see her. She answered the phone, but pretended to be her sister and said she wasn't home. I asked her to tell "Emu" to call me when she got in, but I never heard from her again. I am sure that I had hurt and completely embarassed her with my unsolicited and unnecessary criticism.

Of course, I eventually realized how badly I had screwed up. She was probably genuinely interested, and who knows how serious she really was with her boyfriend? Plus, many Japanese women, particularly at that age, considered themselves free agents until marriage and were always looking for someone better-looking, more fun, richer, sexier until they found "the one." Had I kept my mouth shut -- even after learning about the boyfriend -- he might have become history. During my first three-year stay in Japan, I dated several other women, but I never met another one like Emu.

(Good thing, too, as it turned out. Hi, Honey! I love you!)