Fireworks

In Japan, summer is just not summer without fireworks (hanabi).

Hanabi range from hand-held sparklers lit in the yard on a summer evening to major fireworks displays (hanabi taikai), like the annual events over the Sumida River and Tokyo Bay, for which everything else stops and it seems as if all of Tokyo has turned out to watch. Hanabi taikai don't commemorate anything in particular -- except people's desire to see fireworks in the summertime -- and there are usually several big fireworks displays in each city throughout the summer. As with summer festivals, like O-bon or the Gion Matsuri in Kyoto, a hanabi taikai is an excuse to wear traditional Japanese clothing. Most young women wear a yukata, a colorful lightweight cotton kimono, and young men wear yukata or jimbei, which are basically a short-sleeved, short-legged karate suit. Women wear geta (wooden sandals) and men wear geta or zori, which are the ancestor of the flip-flop. If you get on the subway and notice all the young people dressed in yukatas and jimbei, it's a pretty safe bet that there's a fireworks display going on somewhere nearby.

I have many good memories of watching fireworks in Japan. Some of the best involved boarding a fishing scow from a loading dock in Yokohama with two dozen other customers of the Bus Bar (a mobile bar in an old bus, now parked on a Yokohama loading dock, which will be the subject of a future post) and motoring out past the Yokohama Bay Bridge and into Yokohama Harbor to see the fireworks over the towers of the Yokohama's Minato Mirai.

But perhaps my most memorable hanabi taikai was the one some friends and I put on ourselves, from my rooftop balcony, on July 4, 1993.

July 4 was a Sunday, and I had invited Dave S. (Meishi Man) and his girlfriend, Chieko, over to my house for a barbecue. As was the custom, I supplied the yakitori and did the cooking, and they supplied the beer and the company. That day, in addition to beer, Dave also brought what can only be described as an arsenal of fireworks, which he had purchased at the 7-11.

Growing up in New Jersey, fireworks were illegal. Occasionally, a friend would acquire some illegal firecrackers in Chinatown. Sometimes, friends with relatives in the South would return home with more exotic fireworks that they had purchased in Washington, D.C., where fireworks were legal. But, in general, fireworks were hard to come by when I was a kid. Imagine my surprise and delight when I saw, during my first summer in Japan, that every convenience store sells extensive supplies of ordnance ranging from sparklers to bottle rockets to streamers to tank-buster bombs. On July 4, 1993, Meishi Man showed up at my house with the biggest package of fireworks I had ever seen: a 3,000 -yen jumbo pack of explosive delights.

By the time it had gotten dark enough for fireworks, we'd been barbecuing and drinking beer for hours. Blowing stuff up on my balcony and launching bottle rockets all over the neighborhood seemed like a really excellent idea. We figured that fireworks were normal in the summertime and that no one would complain. After fifteen minutes of shelling, however, my next-door neighbor leaned out her window and complained that we were scaring her dog. So, we decided to pack up our weaponry and head to Yoyogi Park, a large green space in the middle of Tokyo, a few blocks away from my place. We stopped at 7-11 for more beer and more bombs before making our way to the park.

We were a bit apprehensive about being stopped by the police for launching fireworks in the park. Japanese cops were always looking for reasons to bust gaijin, and Meishi Man had nearly been arrested once when pushing home a bicycle he had fished out of a river and planned to refurbish. But the beer gave us courage, and we really, really wanted to continue blowing things up. We made our way to Yoyogi Park's central meadow -- the place I had first met Meishi Man the previous November at the Yale-Yale touch football game won by Harvard. As we scanned the darkness for signs of something or someone that might halt our revelry, what we saw surprised us: the unmistakable lights of a half-dozen other mini hanabi-taikai scattered around the meadow. Fireworks in the park were just a rite of summer. No one would stop us from exploding the rest of our arsenal.

In the relative cool of the summer night, we drank our beer and, one after another, touched cigarette lighter to fuse and launched bottle rockets and streamers into the Tokyo night.

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.

Hanami

One of my favorite activities in Japan was hanami -- cherry blossom viewing. Hanami is an annual rite in Japan that takes place in late March/early April. The country nearly comes to a stop for the week that the blossoms are out, with offices holding after-work viewing parties for which junior workers are sent out during the day to find and hold a good spot. Hanami takes place wherever cherry trees can be found, and some of the best places are in spots you wouldn't guess. For example, a great place to view cherry blossoms in Tokyo is Aoyama Cemetery, where the avenues between the graves are lined with cherry trees. The park is packed even at night, when people visit the cemetery to see the trees lit up by the street lights, called yozakura, or "night cherry [blossoms]." (I am sure that, in the old days, yozakura was done by the light of the moon, but you can barely see the moon in Tokyo now, given all the light pollution, and the street lights illuminate the trees quite beautifully.)

My first hanami took place in 1992. Dave S. (who had not yet assumed his secret identity, Meishi Man), his girlfriend Chieko, and my first girlfriend in Japan, Kaori (who shares the same first name as my wife -- Hi Honey!!), went to Aoyama Cemetery on the spur of the moment one Saturday when the blossoms were out.

We bought some convenience-store bento boxes and some beer and found a spot under the trees, next to a large group of men who seemed to be work-mates. Their set-up was quite elaborate, complete with a blue tarpaulin, large platters of cold cuts, and a crate of jars of Ozeki "One Cup" sake -- sake that comes in a glass with a pull-top lid for drinking on the go, a workingman's favorite in Japan.

Being in earshot of this group, they soon overheard us speaking in Japanese and started to get friendly. With a mid-day beer buzz making me sleepy, I put my head down on Kaori's lap, and stared up at the cherry blossoms above. Suddenly, a man's sake-reddened face burst into the scene above me. "O-den ga suki?" ("Do you like o-den?"), he blurted. (O-den is a popular dish of vegetables, vegetable cakes and fish cakes that simmer in a broth for hours, usually consumed in cold weather, and hanami season is generally still cold.) The question was sudden, and out of context, and I didn't even know the guy who was asking me, but through the beer haze I said that I did.

"Okay, wait a minute," he said. He returned a couple of minutes later with a serving of o-den that he bought from the open-air vendor just a little way down the cemetery avenue. We thanked him appreciatively, and then began to talk with our new-found friends. Naturally, they wanted to know how Dave and I had learned Japanese, what we were doing in Japan, where we worked, etc. They didn't ask us the usual question about whether we liked Japanese girls. The answer to that question must have seemed obvious.

The men had been there for hours before we arrived and their party broke up before we left. They had a lot of leftover cold cuts and One Cup sakes, and they insisted that we take all of it. A single One-Cup is enough rot-gut to generate a really good buzz, and we were already pretty full from beer, so I think we wound up having only one cup each, and then Dave took the rest home. We ate some cold cuts and then threw away the rest. It's possible we went to "Oh God!" after that, since it was nearby Aoyama Cemetery, but I really don't remember.

From that first cherry blossom experience, I began to organize a hanami party every year. When I later moved into my own apartment, which had a big roof-deck, a friend gave me a barbecue set, which I used to lug to Aoyama Cemetery or Inokashira Park (another famous viewing spot) to cook yakitori. The parties were successively bigger each year; I think the last of them drew about 40 people.

I've only gotten to see the cherry blossoms once more since leaving Japan in 1994. In 2007, my wife Kaori and I visited her parents when the cherry trees were blooming, and I had the rare treat of seeing the blossoms in Kyoto, which is famous for its cherry trees. The last "Unrelated Japan Photo" I posted is from that trip.

I've tried to recreate hanami in New York, and have found an excellent spot in Central Park where the blossoms are as plentiful as in a Japanese park. It's always fun, but the general party atmosphere of life stopping while the trees are blooming is missing. There are always a few Japanese there also trying to recreate what they are missing from Japan, but it's never quite the same. Most Americans, it seems, don't even notice the blossoms.

P.S. Out of nostalgia, I just looked on the internet and found that the bar is not "Oh God!," but "Oh! God," as if God walked in on you unexpectedly. The placement of the exclamation point is so classic and so quintessentially Japanese! How could I have forgotten this wonderful tidbit?

A review is here: http://ultimatepubguide.com/pubs/info.phtml?pub_id=334

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.