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.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Dawn Baseball
It's hard to imagine in the depths of winter that spring is near. But the proof that I am right in spite of the snow is that, starting tomorrow, thousands of professional baseball players will be suiting up in locker rooms across Florida and Arizona for the first day of spring training. So, my mind turns to baseball.
In a couple of short weeks, it will be March. March has a very distinct smell, of new grass pushing its way through damp, thawing earth. For me, growing up in the Northeast, where we were permitted to begin practicing for high school baseball on March 8, new, damp grass is the smell of baseball, of a new season, of the end of the long, dark winter with nothing to watch on TV except basketball, and the approach of summer. More than two decades after graduating from high school, the March smell still fills me with longing to play ball.
Tokyo -- when you can find some grass -- also has the green scent of spring in early March. In 1993, the spring baseball smell overcame me, and I began asking around about adult baseball leagues. It turned out that one of the staff at the gym knew a member who played in such a league. I was introduced, and before I knew it, was a member of the ironically named team, Wakakusa -- "New Grass".
Our pre-season meeting took place in a bowling alley. It was here that I learned that our games took place at 6:30 a.m. on Sunday mornings. Most of the men in my league were blue collar guys who worked on weekends -- sushi chefs, soba makers, factory workers, and even a professional bowler -- and Sunday mornings were the only time they could play. But it was a high-level league, with a number of former players from the industrial leagues and from the Big Six colleges, and I was happy just to have the chance to play baseball again, even at the literal crack of dawn. I was so happy that I volunteered to play where the team needed me most, as catcher, even though I had given this position up in tenth grade because, thanks to years of catching, by the age of 15 I had the knees of a forty year old. (Do the math and figure out whose knees I have now.)
At the end of the meeting, we scheduled our first and only practice, at the playing fields, near Futago-Tamagawa Station, running along the Tama River, which forms the southern boundary between Tokyo and Kanagawa Prefecture. On practice day, I arrived at the field a little early. I picked a bench at the nearest diamond and waited for my teammates. The sun was coming up to my left, over the bridge carrying the train line into Kanagawa, and a mist rose from the slowly warming baseball diamonds. Off to the right, tiny on the horizon, Mt. Fuji's still snow-covered peak slowly turned from pink to yellow to white as the sun climbed in the sky. Though I wore a hooded sweatshirt over my uniform top, the cold March wind blew right through my sanitary leggings and my polyester uniform pants. No one showed up for the practice. I trudged home.
At the gym the next day, I saw my new teammate, the professional bowler. He asked why I had missed practice. Only then did I realize that the playing fields ran for miles along the Tama's banks and that I had been waiting in the wrong place. Our field was actually a mile or so further upriver from the train station. We arranged that from then on, another teammate, Umezawa-san, would meet me at the station and drive me to the field.
For the next eight months, from March through November, I rose every Sunday morning at 4:30 am, grabbed some rice balls and canned coffee for the train at the 7-11, boarded the first train from Tomigaya Station at 5:05 am, and arrived at Futago-Tamagawa shortly before 6:00 am, where Umezawa-san would pick me up in the van he used to ferry fish from the Tsukiji fish market to his sushi restaurant each morning. We'd play a seven inning game from 6:30 am to 8:30 am, followed by breakfast at a nearby Denny's. (Yes, I always had the Grand Slam.) Then Umezawa-san would drop me back at Futago-Tamagawa Station, and I would board the train home, letting the little old ladies from the Kanagawa suburbs start their Sunday outings in Tokyo with the spectacle of a gaijin, smelling slightly of fish, dressed in a baseball uniform that, at 9:30 am, was already covered in sweat and diamond dirt.
In a couple of short weeks, it will be March. March has a very distinct smell, of new grass pushing its way through damp, thawing earth. For me, growing up in the Northeast, where we were permitted to begin practicing for high school baseball on March 8, new, damp grass is the smell of baseball, of a new season, of the end of the long, dark winter with nothing to watch on TV except basketball, and the approach of summer. More than two decades after graduating from high school, the March smell still fills me with longing to play ball.
Tokyo -- when you can find some grass -- also has the green scent of spring in early March. In 1993, the spring baseball smell overcame me, and I began asking around about adult baseball leagues. It turned out that one of the staff at the gym knew a member who played in such a league. I was introduced, and before I knew it, was a member of the ironically named team, Wakakusa -- "New Grass".
Our pre-season meeting took place in a bowling alley. It was here that I learned that our games took place at 6:30 a.m. on Sunday mornings. Most of the men in my league were blue collar guys who worked on weekends -- sushi chefs, soba makers, factory workers, and even a professional bowler -- and Sunday mornings were the only time they could play. But it was a high-level league, with a number of former players from the industrial leagues and from the Big Six colleges, and I was happy just to have the chance to play baseball again, even at the literal crack of dawn. I was so happy that I volunteered to play where the team needed me most, as catcher, even though I had given this position up in tenth grade because, thanks to years of catching, by the age of 15 I had the knees of a forty year old. (Do the math and figure out whose knees I have now.)
At the end of the meeting, we scheduled our first and only practice, at the playing fields, near Futago-Tamagawa Station, running along the Tama River, which forms the southern boundary between Tokyo and Kanagawa Prefecture. On practice day, I arrived at the field a little early. I picked a bench at the nearest diamond and waited for my teammates. The sun was coming up to my left, over the bridge carrying the train line into Kanagawa, and a mist rose from the slowly warming baseball diamonds. Off to the right, tiny on the horizon, Mt. Fuji's still snow-covered peak slowly turned from pink to yellow to white as the sun climbed in the sky. Though I wore a hooded sweatshirt over my uniform top, the cold March wind blew right through my sanitary leggings and my polyester uniform pants. No one showed up for the practice. I trudged home.
At the gym the next day, I saw my new teammate, the professional bowler. He asked why I had missed practice. Only then did I realize that the playing fields ran for miles along the Tama's banks and that I had been waiting in the wrong place. Our field was actually a mile or so further upriver from the train station. We arranged that from then on, another teammate, Umezawa-san, would meet me at the station and drive me to the field.
For the next eight months, from March through November, I rose every Sunday morning at 4:30 am, grabbed some rice balls and canned coffee for the train at the 7-11, boarded the first train from Tomigaya Station at 5:05 am, and arrived at Futago-Tamagawa shortly before 6:00 am, where Umezawa-san would pick me up in the van he used to ferry fish from the Tsukiji fish market to his sushi restaurant each morning. We'd play a seven inning game from 6:30 am to 8:30 am, followed by breakfast at a nearby Denny's. (Yes, I always had the Grand Slam.) Then Umezawa-san would drop me back at Futago-Tamagawa Station, and I would board the train home, letting the little old ladies from the Kanagawa suburbs start their Sunday outings in Tokyo with the spectacle of a gaijin, smelling slightly of fish, dressed in a baseball uniform that, at 9:30 am, was already covered in sweat and diamond dirt.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, December 18, 2009
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.
. . . 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.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
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.
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.
Friday, October 30, 2009
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.
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.
Friday, October 16, 2009
How I Overcame Blatant Housing Discrimination to Rent My Own Apartment in Tokyo
During the summer of 1992, Oshikawa-san informed me that he was retiring as a dormitory manager, and moving to an apartment he had purchased in Kawasaki. For me this meant that, after a year, I'd no longer have a rent-free room in a Canon dormitory to call home and I needed to find an apartment.
My friends and adoptive parents Benjie and Junko lived in a neighborhood I liked in Tokyo called Nakameguro, and I figured I'd look there. B&J lived there, it was an easy commute to my office, and it was close to neighborhoods where I frequently hung out, like Shibuya and Aoyama. One Saturday, with Junko by my side as my Japanese guarantor (required to get an apartment lease), I began making the rounds of the local real estate agents on my quest for my first apartment ever.
In the first office we entered, Junko explained our connection, my employment situation, my Ivy League pedigree, and the kind of place I wanted. The agent listened politely and then said matter-of-factly that he could not help me. The real estate agents in Nakameguro had recently gotten together and decided not to rent any more apartments to foreigners because there were too many there already. There was nothing he could do about it. Sorry. Maybe I could try another neighborhood?
Hoping that he was just a bigoted outlier, we went to another agent and heard the same story. Too many foreigners were living in Nakameguro now, so the real estate agents had decided not to rent to foreigners anymore, lest the neighborhood get a bad reputation.
I was fuming. How can they do this? Boy, I wish you'd come to New York and see what it feels like to be rejected from an apartment because you're Japanese. Oh yeah. We have anti-discrimination laws. If this happened to you in New York, you could do something about it. That's what makes this situation suck so bad. No possibility of revenge.
Next, I decided to look in the neighborhood of Gakugei-Daigaku, which was a college neighborhood, and I figured there would be a lot of young people my age around. Junko and I went to the first agent we found near the train station. He didn't give us the speech about "no new foreigners." Good sign. The first apartment he took us to was brand new but the train passed within inches of the window. No good.
The second place he took us to was a little more expensive and a little farther from the station. But it was a dream apartment. A newly constructed place on a green, leafy block, with two rooms on the second floor of a two-story building. Great sunlight. It felt perfect. I said I'd take it. We went back to the office, and the agent got the application papers together, which I began filling out with Junko's help. The agent called the landlord to tell him he had found a renter, and the next thing I knew, the agent started apologizing to the person on the other end of the phone and bowing. (By the way, Japanese people bow on the telephone, too. Speaking and bowing are so intertwined that it's impossible to stop just because you're on the phone. At lot of Japanese-speaking foreigners pick up this habit, too.) He turned to me and started bowing and apologizing. Apparently, the landlord had said the he didn't want any foreigners in the apartment and was very angry that the agent had forgotten this fact. I left Gakugei-Daigaku without an apartment.
Eventually, the agent found me an apartment whose landlord was a corporation that did not care who lived in the building as long as they could pay the rent. It was located in Tomigaya in Shibuya Ward, within a few minutes' walk of the western edge of Yoyogi Park. On the top floor of a four-storey building, it had sliding glass windows on two sides and wraparound balconies and a roof deck that were bigger than the apartment itself and would later be the scene of many barbecues. A short walk to Yoyogi-Koen Station, the apartment was also within walking distance of Shibuya, Shinjuku, Aoyama, and Shimokitazawa, saving me countless taxi fares when I drank past the last train of the evening on weekends. The local shopping district had an old-time feel and a couple of good restaurants, and I came to love the neighborhood during the time I lived there.
By September 1992, the recession, which had started in 1990, was biting hard, and it was becoming clear that the good old days of the Bubble Economy were never coming back. Six months later, when things were even worse, one of my American friends mentioned to me that she had just rented a new apartment in Nakameguro.
Vacant apartments cost landlords money. Even foreign tenants were better than no tenants at all. So much for the realtors' anti-foreigner pact.
My friends and adoptive parents Benjie and Junko lived in a neighborhood I liked in Tokyo called Nakameguro, and I figured I'd look there. B&J lived there, it was an easy commute to my office, and it was close to neighborhoods where I frequently hung out, like Shibuya and Aoyama. One Saturday, with Junko by my side as my Japanese guarantor (required to get an apartment lease), I began making the rounds of the local real estate agents on my quest for my first apartment ever.
In the first office we entered, Junko explained our connection, my employment situation, my Ivy League pedigree, and the kind of place I wanted. The agent listened politely and then said matter-of-factly that he could not help me. The real estate agents in Nakameguro had recently gotten together and decided not to rent any more apartments to foreigners because there were too many there already. There was nothing he could do about it. Sorry. Maybe I could try another neighborhood?
Hoping that he was just a bigoted outlier, we went to another agent and heard the same story. Too many foreigners were living in Nakameguro now, so the real estate agents had decided not to rent to foreigners anymore, lest the neighborhood get a bad reputation.
I was fuming. How can they do this? Boy, I wish you'd come to New York and see what it feels like to be rejected from an apartment because you're Japanese. Oh yeah. We have anti-discrimination laws. If this happened to you in New York, you could do something about it. That's what makes this situation suck so bad. No possibility of revenge.
Next, I decided to look in the neighborhood of Gakugei-Daigaku, which was a college neighborhood, and I figured there would be a lot of young people my age around. Junko and I went to the first agent we found near the train station. He didn't give us the speech about "no new foreigners." Good sign. The first apartment he took us to was brand new but the train passed within inches of the window. No good.
The second place he took us to was a little more expensive and a little farther from the station. But it was a dream apartment. A newly constructed place on a green, leafy block, with two rooms on the second floor of a two-story building. Great sunlight. It felt perfect. I said I'd take it. We went back to the office, and the agent got the application papers together, which I began filling out with Junko's help. The agent called the landlord to tell him he had found a renter, and the next thing I knew, the agent started apologizing to the person on the other end of the phone and bowing. (By the way, Japanese people bow on the telephone, too. Speaking and bowing are so intertwined that it's impossible to stop just because you're on the phone. At lot of Japanese-speaking foreigners pick up this habit, too.) He turned to me and started bowing and apologizing. Apparently, the landlord had said the he didn't want any foreigners in the apartment and was very angry that the agent had forgotten this fact. I left Gakugei-Daigaku without an apartment.
Eventually, the agent found me an apartment whose landlord was a corporation that did not care who lived in the building as long as they could pay the rent. It was located in Tomigaya in Shibuya Ward, within a few minutes' walk of the western edge of Yoyogi Park. On the top floor of a four-storey building, it had sliding glass windows on two sides and wraparound balconies and a roof deck that were bigger than the apartment itself and would later be the scene of many barbecues. A short walk to Yoyogi-Koen Station, the apartment was also within walking distance of Shibuya, Shinjuku, Aoyama, and Shimokitazawa, saving me countless taxi fares when I drank past the last train of the evening on weekends. The local shopping district had an old-time feel and a couple of good restaurants, and I came to love the neighborhood during the time I lived there.
By September 1992, the recession, which had started in 1990, was biting hard, and it was becoming clear that the good old days of the Bubble Economy were never coming back. Six months later, when things were even worse, one of my American friends mentioned to me that she had just rented a new apartment in Nakameguro.
Vacant apartments cost landlords money. Even foreign tenants were better than no tenants at all. So much for the realtors' anti-foreigner pact.
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