Tune In Tokyo:The Gaijin Diaries (4 page)

I feel flushed as one usually does when walking from a porn shop out into public view, and then it hits me. Not only did I “go to tempting,” as Miho had so poetically put it, but I’d completely given myself over to tempting—swallowed it whole—and come away with the brown paper bag with the free “love oil” inside that I am now clutching tightly to my side. I think of the flyer Miho had given me with its friendly, approachable God wrapped in white. Then I think of Mr. 666 and wonder if he’s a top or a bottom. Is this wrong?

By way of divine punishment, on my way back to the station, I find myself back in the Straight Greaseball District, where the pack of young, sharp-dressed hoods are still gathered. One of them is quickly walking alongside an office lady on her way home with groceries, who wants none of his foolishness and wastes no time in outpacing him. Realizing he’s been outrun by a woman in heels, he stops, swishes his hair back into place, and, attempting to save face by opening his phone and pretending to take a call, swaggers back to his fellow navel-baring delinquents. Bada-bing.

As I skirt through the street towards what I can now see is the east entrance of the train station, one excitable Japanese guy chases me down and, his English obviously failing him, simply points to a flyer he’s holding in front of my face and says, “SEX!” Can’t really disagree, but I politely decline and move on, after which I am chased down by an African guy saying, “Come, man, come on! Hot ladies for you! You come to my bar!” I tell him no thanks, but he continues with his sales pitch. “HOT WOMEN, MAN!! HOT WOMEN!! ALL FOR YOU, MAN!! COME ON!” I speed up and wave him away, at which point he stops, stomps his feet, and yells in mortal frustration, “WHY NOT, MAN??!!” I want to turn around, stomp my foot, and bellow self-righteously, “Because I have too much respect for women!!” But this isn’t why.

I take the Yamanote train to Shinagawa Station, where I will transfer to the Tokaido Line and ride all the way to back down to Fujisawa. At Shinagawa the platform is a sea of people. The train soon comes, and as people pile in, two uniformed attendants standing by each pair of doors push, nay cram, the people in, forcing everyone on board to assume positions normally reserved for doctor visits. The carriage is a piece of modern art, each arm, newspaper, briefcase, set of headphones, chin, book, and elbow squeezing into each other like blood cells in a particularly narrow capillary. And just when you think no other living soul can possibly fit into the carriage, a stiff looking businessman leaps in and, as the doors shut, slowly morphs into whatever position the carriage allows (broken cigarette, leather slingback, praying mantis).

The train is so packed that every part of my body is being touched (not an altogether horrible sensation). When the train stops at Yokohama Station the people start flooding out, and I’m nearly strangled to death by my own bag (carrying my precious porn—an irony Miss Miho would have appreciated) because, though the strap is still over my shoulder, the bag and I are apparently separated by a few dozen people; those people, unfortunately for me, live in Yokohama. Thankfully, I’m able to pull it back to me without slicing anyone in half, and the rest of the ride isn’t nearly as intimate.

Arriving back at my apartment, I go immediately to my tiny room, flop onto the futon, open my bag, take out the magazine (an imported American one), tear off the shrink-wrap, open it, and gasp.

I gasp not with lust, amazement, or even amusement. It is with disillusionment and disgust that I turn the pages of this very expensive magazine and move my eyes over the glossy, full-color content. Every crotch shot, every hint of man-meat, every flash or flicker of cock and/or balls is scratched out. It is unthinkable. Yes, yes, a very lucky man at some porn importer has the dream job of thumbing through all the magazines coming into the country and taking a big, thick black marker, or sometimes a pencil eraser, to each and every hard, throbbing penis contained within. Such blatant disregard for art and those who buy it I have never witnessed. All those gorgeous photographs laid to waste because of some weird Japanese law against showing the crotch area to those who wish to pay good money to see it.

You can still make out some of the goods, but really, the whole point of porn is that it makes absolutely no demands on your imagination. It puts everything you want to see right in front of you so you can enjoy it briefly before getting on with your life.

I set the magazine down and, lying on my bed staring at the cracks in the ceiling, let out a frustrated laugh. I lean over and pull the flyer that Miss Miho had given me out of my back pocket and look at the illustrations on the front. There’s God again, smiling widely in his pristine white robe. When I’d looked at it before, he seemed like a benevolent, soft-featured God with a voice like Morgan Freeman’s. Now, it seems, he is smiling knowingly, like he’s just told a great joke about a Jew, a priest, and a homosexual and is waiting for me to get it. Did he just wink at me?

A little ashamed of myself, I look over at my porn, its pages open to a photo spread of a farmhand asking his boss for a raise up against a wheelbarrow, a big, thick black blotch running through the best parts. I look back at God, his eyes twinkling, his mouth grinning with a self-satisfied “gotcha!”

Miho Johnson was right. God is always watching. Even when you’re hopelessly lost in Shinjuku.

I’ll be damned.

My tiny new Japanese cell phone may cause cancer, but it cures it, too. I bought it last night and have been playing with it for the better part of the morning. It’s sleek and silver, about the thickness of ten playing cards wrapped in tissue paper. None of the two thousand possible ringtones really appeal to me, so I’m happy to discover I can program in my own songs. The instruction manual includes a picture of a keyboard, each note corresponding to a certain button combination on the keypad, so naturally I’ve spent an hour programming in the theme song to
Dallas
. The dramatic crescendo could use some work, but I decide to do something else and save my emotional energy.

I’ve already read the two books I’d brought with me, so I start nosing around the place for any discarded literature. My roommate Sean, the heartbreaker of the household, had recently let me borrow some of his
Playboy
s, but I’d lost interest after reading the interviews. Plus, a few too many of the pages were sticking together.

I thumb through the day’s
Daily Yomiuri
newspaper before remembering that my other roommate, Ewan, has a shelf full of books in his room, the only traditional tatami room in our small, Western-style apartment. Ewan is a thirty-nine-year-old Australian introvert, possibly the only introvert Australia has ever produced and exported. He is tall and thin, with an angular, friendly face like that of a marionette or that elf who wants to be a dentist in
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
. He’s soft-spoken, loves pasta and chopping up vegetables, and has never been married. Yep, that’s about all I know.

I slide open his door and tiptoe in, my socked feet enjoying the tickle of the woven tatami underneath. From the bare-bones look of the room, it appears Ewan has really thrown himself into capturing the minimalist Japanese decorating style. There’s no furniture except for a folded futon on the floor and a small bookcase in the corner. Since I’m a snoop, I pad over to the closet space and start sliding open doors. Each cabinet holds absolutely nothing interesting. There are folded sweaters. Folded pants. Socks. A crate of underwear. A box of envelopes. Some pens. A disposable camera. I close the doors so I don’t collapse on the floor and plummet into a deep sleep, and then I turn and step lightly toward the bookshelf, hoping for the best. Since Ewan’s a bookish fellow, I figure he’ll have a respectable collection of titles to choose from. Maybe I’ll finally read
The Brothers Karamazov
,
Look Homeward, Angel
, or
Dianetics
.

Unfortunately, it turns out that his are the books I would read only if I had a gun to my head. Titles like
If Lions Could Talk, Third World Geology
, and
The Psychology of Rabbits
abound. My eyes brighten when I see the word “sex” in one of the titles, but it turns out to be
The Sex Life of Plants
.

I search and search his room looking for something, anything, readable. The most exciting thing I come across is a map of Yokohama, which I promptly swipe and have a read through. (It doesn’t hold my interest for long, too bogged down with details, unrealistic plot contrivances, soulless narrative…) Then I see a book about learning Japanese kanji characters, and I nearly run away screaming.

Though I planned to take some emergency Japanese lessons at Berlitz before arriving in Tokyo, I never actually got around to it, what with all the emergency CD shopping, emergency bar hopping, emergency beachgoing, emergency Internet surfing, emergency lying around, and emergency last-minute freaking out. I did buy a language book called
Japanese the Fast and Fun Way
and a Japanese-English dictionary, but the extent of my study has so far been a few perfunctory looks at their back covers (very nice: simple, colorful, practical).

Though I learned the two phonetic alphabets without too much trouble, I’m deathly afraid of the kanji symbols that make up the bulk of the written language. Not just because there are twenty thousand of them, each with two pronunciations. Not even because each symbol must also be written in a certain stroke order. (To a guy who mixes his cursive and printed script, and upper-and lowercase letters when he writes—KinD oF LikE this—this is absolutely out of the question.)

The last straw is the fact that kanji symbols are listed in dictionaries according to the number of strokes, so to find a specific kanji I must know that it has twelve strokes and not ten or fourteen. I’m not prepared for that kind of life.

Lying on Ewan’s futon is a workbook filled with his, er, stroke practice. I’m impressed. Sure, it looks like they were done by a three-year-old, but at least he’s trying, and that’s more than I can say for me. Seeing how Ewan is so hard at work learning his letters, I start thinking maybe it’s time I finally make that leap into the linguistic unknown. I came here, after all, to shock my system, to give myself over to new and even scary possibilities. So far it’s been very easy to live here knowing only a few phrases and hand signals. Some teachers have actually been here upwards of five years and still struggle to understand train announcements. Sure, it might seem incredibly lazy, but if your job is to speak English, then the need for fluency in Japanese isn’t so desperate on a day-to-day basis.

Ignorance may sometimes be bliss, but not when you’re wondering whether or not you’re on the right train or if what you’re about to eat is filled with bean paste and not chocolate. Besides, it’s my God-given right as an American to speak my mind and fill others’ ears with my thoughts, my opinions, my innermost feelings, and my repressed childhood memories. It seems a shame that I should let a tiny thing like a complete ignorance of the language keep me from doing it. I now know only a few more words than most Americans learned from that Styx song “Mr. Roboto.” This absolutely must change.

Yes, my honeymoon period is officially over. I am settled. I am working. It is time to hit the books and prepare myself for my future career in Japanese films, television, infomercials, music videos, car shows, or Internet porn, whatever. I decide I’ll ask around at work for a good teacher.

I work in the Kamiooka school of Yokohama, situated on a big shopping street across from the gigantic Kamiooka Station/Bus Terminal/Shopping Center, and above a Burger King, which means that the smell of french fries pervades the entire school and I must eat at least one large order every day.

The pace here, like that at a Burger King, is manic. Every day I teach about seven forty-five-minute lessons and then spend another forty-five minutes in the free conversation room, where students of all levels discuss whatever topic is suggested or move from topic to topic according to interest level. (Mostly the students just sit and stare at the teacher until the teacher says something.) The classes generally consist of three people, unless a student pays extra to have individual instruction. We have ten minutes between classes, during which we’re meant to grade each student on a number of points (listening, grammar, confidence, pronunciation, poise, dress sense, etc.), make recommendations, pass the file on to the next teacher, then get the files for our next class, open them up, and quickly choose a lesson that each hasn’t done yet or needs to do again based on comments written by a previous teacher.

It’s all very stressful and crowded in the tiny teachers’ room as we scramble for the limited number of seats, sometimes ending up writing our files while leaning against the file cabinet that other teachers keep needing to use or sitting on someone’s lap. This sense of pandemonium coupled with the smell of burgers, fries, and chicken fingers wafting through the room sometimes makes me feel as if I’m not actually an English teacher at all, but a fry cook.

Needless to say, we teachers have been forced to become intimate with one another, much like actors and actresses filming a love scene. Except our love scenes are every forty-five minutes and generally involve not two people, but ten.

And to make our lives that much more exciting, there’s the persistent presence of Jill, our head teacher from Australia, a woman who, in spite of her fondness for brightly colored blazers and hair bleach, possesses all the warmth and approachability of a Salem, Massachusetts, prosecutor circa 1654.

Jill likes to lord it over us minions with a firm hand and a furrowed brow. And, sometimes, a hot pink pantsuit. Her most pronounced personality trait, besides a tendency to dribble ketchup and mayonnaise all over herself while eating BK Flame Broilers, is her staunch Australian patriotism, coupled with a similarly staunch dislike of Americans. She’s surely the proudest, most irrationally nationalistic person from Australia I’ve ever met. Of course, most Australians are proud of their country and generally get a massive kick out of being Australian, it’s just that their pronouncements about their homeland don’t sound like government-sponsored propaganda the way Jill’s do.

I’d recently overheard her chiding a student in one of her classes in her high-pitched Betty Boop squeal: “Why do you want to go to America? America is
dangerous
. Australia is much prettier, and the people are so much nicer.” Apparently she also works for the Australian Tourism Board.

In Jill’s mind, she’s not doing her job as an English teacher in Japan if she’s not riffing on the international nightmare that is the USA.

A few days ago I’d heard her say to a class of three stern-looking businessmen, “Americans are soooo lazy!” Which is fine, we are, fair enough, whatever. Sure, statistically we work longer days than anyone else in the world, but we also, statistically, probably ingest more kinds of fried potatoes while sitting on the couch for hours on end than any other country. But the fact that this statement is coming from a woman of about five feet eight inches and surely no less than 180 pounds somehow annoys me. She may hate Americans, but she sure as hell seems to love our Ben and Jerry’s New York Fudge Chunk Swirl.

During these chaotic breaks between classes, when we teachers are using one another’s backs as makeshift writing surfaces so we can recommend that Hiro work on his pronunciation and sentence production or that Masako give up studying English and perhaps take up a more suitable hobby like hang gliding or miming, Jill likes to barge into the teachers’ room and pick a playful fight with any available American in the room—like, for example, me—and ask inane questions like, “Why do you people refer to
fringe
as
bangs
? That’s so annoying.”

Though her outrage at America’s total lack of respect for such a mainstay of the English language as the word
fringe
is certainly understandable, I am at a loss as to how exactly we are meant to answer such a charge to her satisfaction. I have no idea how the word
bangs
came into being. Maybe it has something to do with Americans’ love of guns and the noises they make?

All I can think to say to this is, “Why do you say
cunt
instead of
can’t
?” but I don’t say it, because it would bring the conversation down to a level that no one is likely comfortable stooping to just yet. So I keep my comments to myself, look her in the eye, shrug my shoulders, and speak the only Japanese I have learned so far: “Wakarimasen.” (“I don’t know.”)

MOBA is the most popular language school in a country that has as many language schools as the U.S. has places to buy coffee milkshakes, and the students have many reasons for wanting to study English. Some are businessmen and women who do a lot of traveling abroad and need English so they can move up that ladder a little faster or chat people up in hotel bars more easily. Many are housewives with kids in school (or no kids at all) and money and time to kill. There are also a lot of high school and college-aged kids who want to travel, want to be able to speak to the foreigners they see, think “English is cool,” or simply want to know what Kanye West is going on and on and on about.

There are also a few people learning English because they’re movie buffs and want to be able to watch American movies without reading the subtitles. By far the best justification I’ve heard for studying English, though, was given by an extremely low-level fifty-something woman named Keiko, who says she is learning English because she wants to teach her son. This I regard as a triumph of convoluted logic. I don’t know how old her son is, but surely he’s at least a teenager by now. Why doesn’t she send
him
to the school? Really, at the rate she’s going, she’s going to be on her deathbed and her son is still going to be saying things like “This is a pen” and “I enjoy to surfing.”

I ask around about Japanese lessons, and everyone says I should talk to Joy, an excitable Latina from New York who seems to have an insatiable appetite for new hobbies.

“Well, I tried at this one school near Yokohama Station that’s got a really convenient schedule and everyone seems really nice and you can get private lessons,” she said.

“And how did it go?”

“Oh, I didn’t go with them because they were too expensive.”

“Oh.”

“But I heard the community center across the street has really cheap lessons.”

“Oh, cheap would be nice.”

“Yeah, but all the classes take place in the same room at the same time. It’s really loud and hard to hear the teachers.”

“Uh-huh. So…”

“So anyway,” she continues, “I’m thinking I just won’t take lessons right now because I kind of want to join a gym, and I’ve got my life drawing classes, and I want to study that flower arranging stuff. And learn how to kabuki.”

Thankfully, soon after this spirited but useless exchange, I meet Yoko Ojima, an intermediate-level student who takes private lessons. She’s about fifty years old and has wispy gold and purple streaks in her short hair. Her face is always immaculately made up, her lips a dramatic dark crimson, her eye shadow echoing the purple in her hair, her skin painted powder white. An active and busy woman, she runs a medical clinic that she co-owns with a male physician, whom she hates. Understandably, she is always at least five minutes late for her lessons, rushing in breathlessly with a few shopping bags, a leather bag overflowing with folders overflowing with papers, and a sheepish smile overflowing with many apologies.