Toru introduces me to his piano teacher. We exchange greetings in Japanese, and she lies through her teeth about enjoying the concert.
Her: I enjoyed your playing.
Me: No. It was horrible. I’m very sorry.
H: No, the music was very pretty.
M: My viola sounded like a…a car accident. Like a car accident.
H: No, no.
M: But Toru played very beautifully.
H: [silent judging of Toru]
M: Do you like my necktie?
H: You are so tall.
I’m thrilled that my Tokyo debut wasn’t a complete disaster. This concert will be my goodbye kiss to Tokyo, for I have decided that I must soon take my leave of the city and return to my home planet. Or, rather, Jimmy has threatened to divorce me if I don’t come home within the next month. So, because gay divorces can get really ugly-especially when there is a cat and a treasure trove of pop-up books, drug paraphernalia, and David Bowie CDs involved-I must return.
I came to Tokyo to wake myself up, to force myself into uncomfortable scenarios, to go record shopping. After two years, I feel the need to return home, to come back to earth and try to relearn its language. I’ve spent too much time away from the natural flow of my mother tongue. I see Japanglish phrases on T-shirts or advertisements, and they’re making a little too much sense to me these days. I saw a shirt on a young girl the other day that read:
I know exactly what that means.
Not that I’ve totally figured things out. Even the seemingly straightforward T-shirt messages are getting lost in translation: look at that ratty rock and roll hipster chick in the T-shirt that reads “Pretty Stupid” or the Harajuku chickadee whose black tee has “Cum Dumpster” painted in blood red on the front. Funny! But wait. Are they being ironic or brutally honest? Am I meant to a) wink, nudge, and laugh, or simply b) laugh? What used to make sense doesn’t anymore, and what didn’t does.
Sitting at my laptop one recent night trolling the Internet for cheap music, I came upon a listing for the 1988 Siouxsie and the Banshees album
My language skills are compromised. I need to go home.
And besides, the culture wars are in full swing back home in the mighty USA, and it would be a real shame to miss out on that festival of Christian love. My country needs me.
A famous traveler once said, “He who is tired of Tokyo is tired of not being able to get a decently sized pan pizza for under thirty bucks.” I’m sure someone said that. And I would have to agree, but I must say, my love for a big fat cheesy pizza notwithstanding, I’m far from tired of Tokyo. Like any great city, it sucks the life right out of you on a daily basis. But it also offers a multitude of small treasures to enjoy as it pummels you into submission: the reliable promptness of the reliably color-coded trains carrying reliably daft young creatures of fashion to their favorite two stops on the Yamanote train: Shibuya and Harajuku; the clash of the old and the new, like when you see a ninety-year-old woman literally fight a teenager for a seat on the train; the takoyaki octopus balls; the unintentionally existential English-language signs you see in random places, like the one I saw at Mos Burger that read, “Always close a door behind you.” Or the one on the door of a restaurant in Ikebukuro saying, “We are looking for our staff.” How sad. Where on earth did their staff go, leaving them like that?
Change is in the air here, and not just for me. I’ve heard through the grapevine that my old bookish roommate Ewan is engaged to be married to a Japanese woman, with whom he’ll return to Australia and no doubt render his family speechless. Donna also has nuptials in her future, as she’s taking her love of a guy in uniform to its logical extreme and getting hitched to an American sailor. And those new Edwin jeans I bought the other day, vouched for in advertisements by Brad Pitt himself, were out of style by the time I squeezed myself into them.
So I’ve started making preparations to leave. I’ve sent boxes home, started packing up my room, and attempted to sell anything of value I don’t need. I went down the road to one of the consignment shops in Koenji the other day to see if I could get rid of my little boom box, hoping to trade it and use the money to take myself out to lunch. The woman didn’t seem too interested in buying it, and after a few unsuccessful attempts to pawn it off on her, I gave up and told her she could just have it. I started to set it down on the floor, but, waving her hands like a hummingbird, she explained that she really didn’t want me to leave it, that she would really just prefer if I took it the hell out of her damn store. So I left the store with my boom box after a few irritated bows, left it outside the shop on the sidewalk, and took myself out to lunch anyway. When I walked back past the shop on my way home, the boom box was no longer on the sidewalk. It was probably for sale inside for two thousand yen.
Since announcing my imminent departure, I’ve received many goodbye gifts from fellow teachers, students, and friends. The folks in my business class threw me a going away party and gave me a huge Japanese flag that they’d all signed. I received a wall hanging from a student and a CD of traditional Japanese music from the mothers of the kids I teach. I’ve gotten enough handkerchiefs to patch myself together a nice set of bay window curtains, and enough bottles of sake to render me legally blind.
So it’s a beautiful Sunday afternoon and I’m sitting in a massive field listening to a Japanese hip-hop band performing for me and hundreds of others at a music festival in the east Tokyo district of Odaiba on Tokyo Bay. One of the main sponsors of the festival is Shane British English School, whose advertisements always show a dorky- looking and pasty-faced British guy hanging off of a double-decker bus, inviting you to study English the way it’s meant to be spoken: Britishly.
There are many foreigners in attendance, and all the Japanese bands on the bill have been making admirable efforts to use whatever English they know when addressing the audience. The shirtless rapper wearing a sarong on stage just said, “It’s a lock and loll liot!!!” to whoops and screams from the crowd.
I’m here with the usual suspects of Jo, Grant, Shunsuke, and Rachel. A few minutes ago, Jo and I joined the mailing list for one of the Tokyo bands that played called Ex-Girl. They’re an all-girl trio wearing dresses and wigs that wouldn’t be out of place in a Las Vegas revue, and they play a glammy tribal punk pop of sorts. For obvious reasons, I’m desperate to be friends with them. In the flyers for the festival, it says they are from the planet Kero Kero. I wonder if they have Diet Mountain Dew and wheat bread there. Do they need English teachers?
After chatting to the Ex-Girl girls until our Japanese and their English completely give out, we get some more beers and rejoin the others for a boogie. As we all dance and swig and chatter, I find myself thinking about what I’ve learned on my Japan odyssey. A cloyingly American thing to do, but I am what I am, and I’ve got to tie this shit up somehow.
I’ve learned that sometimes assuming does indeed make an ass out of you and me. When I’d first started teaching and asked my students what they eat for breakfast, many of them had replied, “Rice and miso soup.” I’d foolishly assumed that this meant they ate them together in the same bowl, like we Americans do with dishes like macaroni and cheese or Corn Flakes and ice cream. This is not so, as I found out when eating lunch with Shunsuke one day. He saw me empty my rice into my bowl of miso soup, looked around uncomfortably, making sure the waitress and surrounding customers were minding their own damn business, and said to me, “That like cat food. But it’s OK, you are foreigner.”
Or the time when I wanted to send a Japanese card home to the folks and had bought one at the convenience store, assuming it was an all-purpose card. When I brought it home, Akiko told me it was a card intended for a person whose family member has recently died. I sent it to my folks anyway, telling them that the Japanese translated roughly to, “Happy Earth Day.”
But I am tired of teaching. My mojo in the classroom never fully returned, and I’ve taken that as a sign that I’m meant to move on to something else, something that involves a little less of what some gaijinfolk call Japanger:
juh-pan?-gur, n.:
