Tune in Tokio

inscrutable behaviors of the Japanese people

But I will miss those many moments when I could actually feel my students reaching out to me from the dark corners of the language barrier and communicate from their heart. I asked an advanced class one time to write me a short essay about a person they admire. Most of the students conveniently forgot to do the assignment and simply avoided my classes for a few weeks until they were satisfied that I’d forgotten. One student, a university female, wrote one sentence: “I most admire my cat because her life is so easy.” Not really what I was looking for, but at least she’d turned something in. Then, one day a few weeks later, I found a neatly typed essay from Masahiro, a retired banker, on the top of my stack of papers to grade.

The Person I Most Admire

As well as my father, I admire my mother the most. During the WWII, our family was living in the northeastern part of China, then called Manchuria. I was born in Shenyang in 1943, and my younger brother in Pyongyang in 1945. My father was from Hokkaido and began working for Manchurian Railroad right after his graduation from a college in Shanghai. My mother, born in Tokyo, married him through an arranged meeting in Tokyo held only once a little before the WWII took place, and left for Manchuria.

Despite of their dream of having better days as a railroad officer when the war ends, my father, like all of Japanese and Manchurian Japanese citizens, was aware that Japan would be defeated by the Allies. And the day came. Our family had to stay in Manchuria but live separately, as he was ordered to take care of Japanese pioneers, who mostly came to this continent to develop lands and engage in agriculture, and merchants to return home in Japan safely. My mother and I fled to north part of Korea, where my younger brother was born. It took him more than a year to get together with his wife and sons.

I was two to three years old then, but I can imagine that she took me on her back and fled to Pyongyang. Soon after the birth of my brother we returned to Manchuria, where father was waiting for us. It was already the time when Manchurian Railroad was no longer operative, and we still had attacks from the Chinese army, robbery by Siberian soldiers, and so forth, though the war had really ended in Japan. My parents often took me to the railway area to pick up coals spilt from trains. Those gathered coals could sell and helped our living.

Years passed since we came back to my mother’s birthplace, Tokyo. She was so strong physically and mentally like many of other Japanese women at that time that we could be safely flee to anywhere. I admire her power and high spirit to return home, as I learned how tough days they spent. More words would be necessary to describe what troubles and accidents they met if space allows. My father died of cancer 26 years ago and 28 years after we got on board an American frigate leaving for Sasebo from China.

A devastating and lovingly told story. I was full of awe and wonder at the brutal odyssey of Masahiro’s life, his honesty, and his skill in retelling it in a language that was not his own. Since I felt that correcting his grammar was completely pointless and, in fact, rude, I simply wrote, “Thank you, Masahiro, what an amazing story,” made a copy of it for my scrapbook, and placed it in the graded pile.

Feeling quite overwhelmed, I picked up the next piece of homework with a sigh and saw that it was from Tomoyuki, the young J. D. Salinger freak. His assignment was to list one thing he thinks should be banned and explain why:

Getting on the train in a drunken stupor should be banned. Have you ever taken the Yokosuka Line at night? It’s quite terrible. There are a lot of fucked up sons of bitches on the train, tarzans spitting, swaying, etc. Most of them have terrible breath. Some guys throw up on the floor, others begin to fight out loud. It’s extremely noisy and stinky in the train. To make matters worse, whenever they make trouble with other sober passengers, the police don’t punish them strictly. Japan is a paradise for drunks.

In a word: poignant.

Best of all was the dialogue turned in by Yohichi the movie cameraman, an intermediate student. The assignment was to write a short dialogue in which two people are deciding what to do for the evening, and there must be at least one conflict involved. Yohichi’s conversation went like this:

A: What do you want to do tonight?

B: I don’t know.

A: How about marijuana? It’s very fun.

B: But it’s not lawfulness. I don’t want to go jail. How about mushrooms instead? It’s lawfulness.

A: Sounds great!

Was he listening in on the conversation Rachel and I were having the other night in the lobby? Plagiarist.

In so many ways, Japan is America on Opposite Day, which is what has kept my eyes popping open every morning for the past two years, eager to see what absurdities it would bear witness to in the next sixteen hours. It’s not just that Japanese verbs come at the end of Japanese sentences. It’s in our very essence that we Westerners feel like we’re peeping into the otherworld of the looking glass when we stare into the eyes of a Japanese face. Where in America we tend to go to the movies and have conversations with the movie screen, a Japanese cinema, no matter how funny or exciting the film, is as still and reverential as a Shinto shrine. A good- looking draft beer in America will have at most an inch of foam at the top, and if there’s more, we will ask for it to be topped off. Here, if your draft beer comes with less than a quarter of the glass full of creamy, bubbly, delicious foam, the customer will think the beer is old and stale and might ask for a new one. If someone compliments your spouse, saying something like, “Oh, your wife is a great cook,” it is customary in America to say, “Yeah, isn’t she great? How about that bean dip, huh?” and then perhaps slap her on the butt affectionately. But in Japan, it is considered proper to reply with an insult, like, “Oh, that silly bitch couldn’t cook her way out of a to-go box. That shit was take-out.” Something like that.

When you walk into a low-end American restaurant, you are lucky to be greeted with a smile or any degree of enthusiasm by any employee. They’re usually too busy talking to their coworkers about how they’re supposed to be on break and how this is such bullshit that they haven’t had their break and when the fuck are they gonna get their break? When you enter a food joint here-no matter if it’s the grimiest of noodle bars-you are met with the welcoming screams and cries of the entire staff, starting with a few of the floor people and trailing around the place until every person employed by the restaurant has greeted you loudly with an ear-piercing “HELLO! WELCOME! GOOD AFTERNOON! PLEASE SIT DOWN! HELLO! WELCOME! GOOD AFTERNOON! PLEASE SIT DOWN!” Then just when you think you’re safe, you get up to leave, trip the wire, and set off the alarm of “THANK YOU! PLEASE COME AGAIN! THANK YOU! PLEASE COME AGAIN! THANK YOU PLEASE COME AGAIN!” Sometimes it’s enough to make you long for the days of being completely ignored by the cashier at the drugstore as she prattles on and on to her coworker about how her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend is a total slutmunch.

No matter how well you think you know this place, no matter how much you think you’ve got your finger on the pulse of the Japanese psyche, you will always be trumped, be it by rice and miso soup, pixilated pornography, Dance Dance Revolution, or thirteen-year-old girls swooning over animated images of young men falling in love with each other and doing it all night.

After the concert, Rachel and I go out for a sayonara dinner in Shibuya, and as a goodbye gift, she gives me a wallet and a framed picture of me sitting in the Vagina Room. Rachel has been telling me for months, ever since she found out I was planning to leave, that I’m not really going to leave, that I will chicken out at the last minute and try to move in with her in the studio apartment she recently rented in Okubo.

“Are you excited about not going home?” she asks as we feast at a table by the window of our favorite Indian curry shop. “The Chemical Brothers are playing a show next week.” Then she sings in her best falsetto, “I can get us into the after party…”

“I’m torn,” I say, fumbling with my cool new holographic wallet. “I really want to go home to Jimmy, and, you know, find something new and different to do with my life, like, I don’t know, study dog grooming or something. You know, I’ve got to get serious. I’m not going to be young and handsome forever, and eventually I’m going to lose…”

She looks at me with sad, puppy-dog eyes.

“Oh my God, really? Where are the Chemical Brothers playing?”

I look out at the bustling city around me, the city that helped once again unlock my sense of adventure and awe as it smacked me affectionately in the face every morning and said, “Time for breakfast rice and salmon!”

“I’ll tell you what, though, I am going to continue studying Japanese,” I say.

“Really?”

“Yeah. You know, I’ve already dedicated so much time to it. I figure, well, why not?”