Tune In Tokyo:The Gaijin Diaries (19 page)

As the cute anime sluts come nearer, I grab the hamster and toss him at them. I shake off the mouse, the duckling, the chicken, and their furry little friends and start running for my life. I run past game-center arcades with electronic images of teddy bear/bunny rabbit/kitty cat mascots dancing blissfully around the sign at the entrance; past amusement park advertisements like the one saying “Let’s Summer!” showing a cute little girlie surfing with a cherubic snowman and a toothy squirrel with a Mohawk amid lots of pastel pinks, oranges, and blues; past the Tsutaya CD and video store, on the steps of which a group of round-faced girls dressed in what look like Tiger Lily costumes are smiling, waving, and handing out promotional packets advertising the new SMAP album. As I near the Shibuya Crossing intersection in front of the station, Astro Boy, the first-ever anime character, shoots out of the sky and fires the cutest little laser beams out of his fingers toward me. I duck and dive and run across the street and am almost to the threshold of Shibuya Station when who should block my path but Hello Kitty herself, standing before me, fixing me with her static gaze, staring into my very soul.

She’s much taller than I would have thought (seven feet at least) and, I gotta say, I see a most beguiling, loveable evil in her small black eyes and li’l yellow nose. She smacks me in the face. Her open hand is sooooo soft. She smacks me again and again, alternating slaps with soft caresses of my face and, wow, honestly, it’s like being made love to by a giant feather pillow.

“Hello Kitty, I wanna be your dog!” No! No! Must…be…strong! Think of un-cute things: Evil clowns! The Cuban Missile Crisis! Ann Coulter being interviewed in a bikini on
Larry King
!

I click my heels together three times, open my eyes, and Hello Kitty is gone. I discover I am in absolutely everyone’s way as they push and shove me aside to enter the station. I come back to myself, look around to make sure I’m no longer being followed, and step into the station.

On the Chuo Line train home, I keel over in my seat, my hands clutching plastic CD bags. I begin to sink into sleep, ready to dream of more exquisite abuse at the hands of Miss Kitty, when my sinking eyes catch a glimpse of a familiar English word on the T-shirt of a woman sitting opposite me.

She is an elderly woman, maybe sixty-five, with a stoic and inscrutable face, sleepy eyes, and a faraway gaze. She is dressed casually in high-water slacks and a Bermuda hat. Her T-shirt says “Bitch.” I swear to God.

She looks adorable.

I have recently come into possession of a videotape with very dark powers. This video could wreak unspeakable havoc if it fell into the wrong hands, which it did when I got it from Rachel the other night. We were sitting around on the floor of her small flat in Ogikubo desperately trying to get stoned off some really, really weak weed and talking about things we missed about our homeland.

“Pop-Tarts,” I sigh.

“Antiperspirant,” she coos.

“Squeeze cheese.”

“Jon Stewart.”

We look at each other wistfully and say, in unison, “Mexicans!”

“You know what?” Rachel starts, sheepishly. “I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I really miss
Survivor
.”

“Oh, Rachel,” I respond, shaking my head with profound disappointment.

I’ve always considered myself free of certain curious traits shared by a good number of my fellow Americans: a high tolerance threshold for precocious children in television commercials, sitcoms, and movies; the biological need to wear baseball hats; the tendency to order sandwiches bigger than one’s head—these kinds of things. And I know for a fact that the same would be true of the need to see people fighting tooth and nail, embarrassing themselves, putting their lives in danger, and offing each other one by one on prime time.

It’s not that the idea of people flung together on television to make each other’s lives miserable doesn’t appeal to me. Of course it does. I am human, after all. Humiliation television is a staple of Japanese TV, and I’ve enjoyed watching some of the late-night shows that deal with this very issue. I can’t really understand what’s going on, but I’m able to catch on with the help of Akiko, my roommate and interpreter. One of the best I’ve seen gathers together a different group of four or five up-and-coming female teen “idols” every week—always cute models or pop stars—and makes them choose who among them is a) the bitchiest, b) the least talented, c) the ugliest, and d) the stupidest. The announcer reads the results of each vote, people cheer, and the camera zooms in on the unfortunate winner, who does her best to save face and laugh it off, bowing her head repeatedly.

“She just voted ugliest girl,” Akiko would explain, completely straight-faced.

One time there was one girl who won all four. All four. Yet when the camera zoomed in on her face, she may as well have just been told she would have to wait thirty minutes for a table by the window. She nodded, looked a little disappointed, and quietly waited for the camera to leave her the fuck alone. Then she probably went home and threw herself belly-first onto her pink sword with the satin trimming on the sheath.

I guess the reason I enjoy watching the Japanese get up to all this foolishness is because they’re generally so pathologically shy, their reactions to such awful circumstances as being hung upside down by their toenails and whipped with udon noodles or forced to mud-wrestle a businessman who happens to be wearing only Speedos and a wristwatch make for compelling viewing. The contestants, who often appear to have found themselves on television by accident, nod answers to questions and explain slowly and thoughtfully their feelings about what has happened to them as the sadistic laughter of the audience and panel of hosts roll in. Americans, on the other hand, believe in the manifest destiny of stardom. We’ll do shocking things to get noticed, we relish the spotlight we’re given, and we don’t really know when to shut up once we have it. We love to talk about absolutely nothing important and to cry while doing so. We enjoy the attention way too much. The Japanese just seem to endure it.

“Oh, please, don’t be such a snob,” Rachel chides. “It’s really cool and totally addictive. It’s like a drug, I swear, especially when you have a tape and you can watch them all back-to-back.”

The two magic words: addictive, drug.

“Oh my God, you have a tape?!” I shout, tapping my arm, looking for a vein.

She reaches into the cupboard under her television and pulls out an old-school videocassette labeled on the side, “Survivor Season 1: Chronic.” She hands it to me, and I can feel myself already surrendering to its sweet, sweet oblivion.

You see, I know my tendency to get sucked in by appalling television shows. I get my emotions tangled in their ridiculously threaded and highly unlikely plotlines and find it impossible to tear myself away. I watched one Friday episode of
General Hospital
when I was thirteen and ended up addicted for three years. I take the videotape home to Koenji and slide it into the VCR.

Though I try to keep an emotional distance from the proceedings, it’s not easy, what with my attachments and aversions to certain people quickly forming and the hand-wringing uncertainty of the outcome. It’s frightening, but I quickly find myself seduced by the show. All my previous dismissals of it fade more and more with each new immunity challenge. I am an expatriate obsessed. And I am able to indulge my obsession uninterrupted, for I have the entire series on video, from start to finish. No commercial breaks, no waiting long weeks to find out who will be the next to be crushed under the weight of all the backstabbing, allegiance switching, and general inhumanity. It all happens in an action-packed, two-day holiday from work. By the end of the videotape, my eyes are swollen and blood-red, my mouth is covered with potato chip crumbs, I’m inadvertently blowing drool bubbles when I exhale, and I’ve lost the ability to move my toes. I stumble bleary-eyed out into the kitchen and out the front door. I don’t know where I am or how I got here. I catch a reflection of myself in the neighbor’s kitchen window. Wow, I look horrible. Like a ninety-year-old woman. Then I realize it is a ninety-year-old woman I’m staring at. Grumpy old Miss Ueno, doing dishes, gazing out the window, and giving me her obligatory daily look of suspicion and disapproval. I wave to her and quietly vote her off the island.

“I need the next tape!” I say to Rachel calmly. “Give it to me! Where is it?!”

“I knew you’d love it,” Rachel sings.

“I don’t just love it. I
need
it. Please tell me you have another season on video.”

She doesn’t. I gasp.

“You know what, though?” she offers. “Just watch the same season again. It’s really fun because you know when everyone’s going to be kicked off and you can look forward to it.”

So, like any junkie, I go back for sloppy seconds.

I again watch the episodes straight through in a marathon effort that tests nothing more than my ability to sit down for long stretches of time. But it is only in the following weeks that I realize the huge impact that
Survivor
has made on my life.

The world around me has become my own personal tribal council. I am now fixated on the idea of voting people who are in some way undesirable out of my life. On the train late on a Saturday night, sitting next to a drunken salaryman keeling over into the about-to-throw-up position, I find myself looking around to see who might be encouraged to join in an alliance with me to get him voted off the train.

Or standing in line at the invariably long lunch-hour ATM line at the bank, the machines already occupied by customers engaged in every form of banking transaction possible by machine in Japan—withdrawals, bankbook updates, transfers, deposits, movie tickets, laundry, pap smears, and so forth—all taking up precious time. “The tribe has spoken,” I grumble to myself, gazing at the tiny lady who shows no signs of giving up her position at the machine.

And of course in class, on those days when a student—for example a young female university student named Noriko, eyelashes curled, lip gloss immaculately applied, mobile phone ringing repeatedly—is too scared to speak to me, too embarrassed to speak to her partner, yet too dedicated to say “screw English” and walk out, I relish the idea of being able to just close my eyes, cast a vote in my head, and exterminate the weakest link from the room.

Soon I start to think about the English teachers here at Lane and how the
Survivor
rules could be applied to us. If for some reason we were forced to vote other teachers out of the school, who would be the ultimate survivor?

“It would totally be me,” my roommate Eric says without a moment’s hesitation. I admire his self-assurance, but I smile at the thought of voting him off at the tribal council just to thwart his plan and take him down a few pegs. To the camera, I’d say, “Eric, you’re a good guy and a great roommate, and I love listening to you and your boyfriend have sex upstairs, but your overconfidence is a real drag.” This all given I haven’t been voted off yet.

“’Twouldn’t be me,” Will from South Africa imagines aloud. “Jdddiengkcmd wowiuet cuirtios oourdke todlsh mwlekeri, and dkeiwpo wojdap wieorot woeikd ih sowheiwo rowierhs.” I’m not sure what reason he’s giving, but I tend to think it has something to do with the fact that no one can ever understand a goddamn word he is saying. Ever. No, it ’twouldn’t.

So who would it be? Definitely not Brodie and his mullet. No reasonable teacher would allow that hairstyle to survive and prosper at this school. And what about everyone’s favorite ex-military man McD? He has the deltoids and abs to survive in the real
Survivor
, certainly. But that will get you nowhere here. Recently he put a sign on his shelf reading, “THE STUFF ON THIS SHELF IS NOT PUBLIC PROPERTY. HANDS OFF,” which I think somehow alienated the majority of the other teachers. It was completely unnecessary, since none of us want his Listerine, razors, cologne, or collection of muscle tees, and we definitely aren’t interested in pilfering his lesson plans, which we imagine contain multiple-choice exercises like:

Please write the correct choice on the line. If you circle the answer and don’t write it on the line, the answer is wrong. Sorry. I can’t help you if you don’t follow directions. Pay attention next time.

1) McD gave his girl a dozen roses and took her out to Applebee’s ____________(to celebrate/for celebrating) their one-week anniversary.

2) McD beat up the guys trying to scam on his girl ____________ (with/by) his bare hands.

I’ll hazard a guess that he and his shelf would be two of the first to go, though the shelf might last longer depending on how badly we needed to shave.

And how about yours truly? How long would I last in this game?

“We’d get voted off at the same time,” Rachel says with absolute certainty. “Everyone would write both our names on that little paper with exclamation marks after them once they got sick of hearing us talk about stupid shit. We don’t have any other role here. We have nothing else to contribute.”

I think back to the last few no-doubt very loud conversations Rachel and I had in the teachers’ room. Let’s see, we covered 1) the screw-ability of Japanese heartthrob Masaya Kato (extreme), 2) the lameness of the sandwich choices at the Daily Yamazaki convenience store (potatoes on white bread is not nearly as good as it sounds), and 3) how Madonna rates as a lyricist (verdict: not great but better than Björk). Yeah, I’d vote us off, too.

My
Survivor
obsession begins to subside a bit, and I try and return to some semblance of a normal life—the carefree life I had before that odious videotape—until I’m shaken back into survival mode after a curious twist of fate at our busy conversation school.

PLI and Wyndam, the two companies that until recently co-owned Lane Language School, are constantly at odds with each other, the former being PR-based and the latter concentrated on curriculum development. It is a marriage made in hell. As teachers, we are actually contracted to and paid by Wyndam, but this is all about to change. The two companies are dissolving their partnership, and PLI will take over the entire school. For most of us teachers, this is not good news. Why? The PR people.

The job of the PR people is to bring prospective students into the school, show (sometimes drag) them around, and convince them that really expensive English lessons are just what they need. During their tour of the school, the PR person will joyfully tell them as many lies about the greatness of the school as they can fit into thirty minutes. To a young, homely male college student—“Most guys your age usually find girlfriends here.” To an elderly, blue-haired obaasan—“Do you like my Japanese? I learned it using this school’s method.” (Our school doesn’t teach Japanese.) Lies, lies, lies. And then they come to us and ask us to do a “level check” on the student, hoping we don’t manage to ruin the momentum they’ve got going and scare him or her away with our loud Western speech and pronounced gestures.

The PR people are an enigma, and they wear very strong cologne. They’re kind of like “the TV people” that Carol Ann is so spooked by in
Poltergeist
: disruptive, creepy to be around (as salespeople usually are), and possessed of evil clown faces. They also never take on the same form twice, and the smile you saw yesterday may turn into something much scarier if you don’t watch yourself. So we’re less than thrilled that they will now be overseeing every aspect of the school, lording it over us with what we can only assume will be a firm hand, a steady grip, and, perhaps, a swimming pool full of dead bodies.

But the real poignant moment comes when we’re told via office memo that as a result of the switchover in ownership, the Ginza school will close and the entire Lane School will become concentrated on the two floors we now occupy in Shinjuku. Which means that some of Lane’s one hundred teachers will be let go.

Upon hearing the news, each of us feels a surge of vulnerability course through our bodies.

“Oh shit, if I lose a job as a freaking English teacher in Japan, I’m going to gouge my eyes out,” Rachel said. And I must say I am right there with her. It’s about as hard to get fired from a teaching job in Japan as it is to be mistaken for a native Japanese. As my former employer so clearly demonstrated, some schools seem to import village idiots from across the English-speaking world to come and try their luck teaching in this fair country. As a result, some poor Japanese folks are probably walking around saying things like “Jerry, he a lazy, good-for-nothing mama’s boy and he deserve what he get. I’m
glad
I fucked his cousin!” So what does it say about one if one is actually sacked from the easiest job to get in the country?