QotD: You'd Never Believe It

What story from your wild-and-crazy youth would nobody believe about you today?

I think it's a safe bet that there are plenty of them.  Most people couldn't believe them even at the time, because I do not and have never dressed wild or crazy or anything.  I dress like a class-A square.  I have no piercings other than on my ears; I have no tattoos.  While I did have Doc Martens, I was never prone to wearing them with those horizontally striped stockings or anything.  There were few outside indications of my wildness, and I liked it that way.  Cops don't mess with you as much as if you dress like what you are.  Now that I am to all appearances a totally average 30-something mom, I seriously doubt anyone thinks I've done the things I've done. 

Ah, but I have.

I mentioned in my last post that I laid my "theory of Japan" down on my husband, and he agreed.  He agreed, laughing because he couldn't believe it, believe that I had seen this Japan. 

This post--man, I've been trying to come up with a way to write it.  To tell the whole story, I would really have to do it anonymously, I think, or in a "fictional" setting.  But, when my "novel" comes out (haha!), you'll all know that some of it, at least, is true.  I'm going to try to keep this out of the "too much information" realm, and actually it's not as bad as I'm making it sound right now, and my husband knew that...oh, fuck it.  On with the story.

I did see a Japan that was not the Japan most foreigners see, and that is why I came away with a much different idea of Japan.  For one thing, I went to Japan without any previous knowledge or interest in any aspect of Japanese culture (besides thinking Koizumi was terribly yummy).  One thing that immediately struck me about the expats in Japan is that a very large number of them went to Japan because of a previously held interest (or obsession, really) with some aspect of the culture, usually either anime and video games or Buddhism--much the same, really.  Most of the expat fellas are there also specifically looking for a Japanese woman, primarily in the stereotypical vein of Japanese women.  And those people see in Japan what they are primed to see by their interest.  The wannabe Buddhists will spend hours meditating over cinnamon trees and visit shrines in Shikoku.  Those looking for a stereotypical Japanese girlfriend will find one.  If they're looking for anime girls, they'll spend a lot of time in Harajuku and find them.  And so on.  They will find, in other words, exactly what they want to see and not much else.

Also, and my husband found this hilarious but true, most expats make few Japanese friends, and those that they do make are a specific type of Japanese person, the type I call the "gaijin hanger-on."  These are the Japanese who seek out expats, frequently by hanging out in Roppongi, and who have many gaijin friends.  These are not normal Japanese people.  I mean that they are literally not normal, not that they're somehow wrong.  Normal Japanese people rarely if ever befriend a foreigner and do not encounter foreigners in their daily lives and, most importantly, want to keep it that way.

It is notable that my husband was not one of these Japanese, but he is also not a normal Japanese person.  He hung out with Koreans, and he went to the high school that is reserved for those unruly students who will not submit to the tests, to the kiritsu, to the droning lectures.  He was, in other words, a pariah.  But he was not a gaijin hanger-on, as I was the only one he ever knew until he met me, and he met me in a very Japanese location.  Fuck Roppongi.  Roppongi is my worst nightmare, but that is totally off topic.

Anyway, back to my Japan.

One night I had gone to Kawasaki to see my boyfriend, and he abruptly broke up with me.  I couldn't get a train all the way home (I lived in Shizuoka-ken at the time, so it was far by train), and anyway I was due to meet friends in Tokyo the next day.  I couldn't afford a hotel (well, I didn't think I could--I didn't yet know about some of the cheaper hotels in Japan).  It was late December and cold.  I had no idea what I should do.  The first thing I did do was go and buy a notebook and Three Essential Pens so that I could keep a record of anything that I did end up doing...and, man, did I.  That notebook makes for some fabulous reading these days.  Anyway.

The very next thing that happened, as I was standing there admiring the pens, was that two well-dressed and fairly sober Japanese salarymen approached me.  "Nomi ni ikimasu ka?" one asked--"would you go for a drink?"  They were of a typical size and build for middle-aged Japanese men, so I figured I could easily beat them up if necessary, and they seemed harmless enough.  So, I smiled and agreed. 

This is how I discovered that if you are youngish and pretty-ish and foreign and apparently without anything better to do, you need not ever buy your own drinks.  But it isn' t what you're thinking.  In America, if this had happened, you would assume I was essentially a prostitute, but there was never any sex expected in return.  What these men want from you, in return for all the beer you can drink (which is, ahem, quite a lot) and even dinner and taxi rides and karaoke is very simple and yet was almost incomprehensible to me:  They want to have a girl talk to them and listen to them and laugh at their jokes and just be companionable.  Sure, sometimes they do want sex, and let's face it, sometimes so did I, but it was never demanded of me.  It was never an unspoken assumption. 

I didn't know, at the time, what went on in hostess bars--that essentially hostess bars are set up exactly for this purpose, to provide men with a way to have companionable interaction with those of the opposite sex.  I also didn't yet know that the geisha existed for a similar purpose, although they were also artists, which the hostesses are mostly not.  Geisha, though, in addition to their arts (shamisen, traditional dance and song) were required to be excellent conversationalists. 

But how terribly sad, I always thought, that Japanese people have never figured out how to talk to members of the opposite sex, how sad that they do not go home to a friend.  The typical Japanese wife does not expect companionship from her husband, and he does not expect it from her.  I don't know if the wives ever get male companionship (it would seem not, although there are now "host bars" as I discovered one cold night in Kabukicho), but the men do, when they pay for it.

My husband, of course, knew all of this.  He knew that Japanese husbands and wives live like this, and I suppose that is why he had decided never to marry (obviously, he changed his mind when he met me).  He was startled to hear that I knew it and amused to hear how I came to know it, and I say 'amused' because he did also know that I was not a hooker but just someone who was fascinated by this new culture and also always looking for free beer.

So, that weekend when my boyfriend broke up with me in Kawasaki, was the weekend also when 2001 became 2002.  I spent part of it very respectably at a friend's house in Chiba, making osechi ryori with his mom and drinking umeshu and laughing riotously at my friend's 14-year-old brother, Kazu, getting slyly drunk off of stolen sips.  But New Year's Eve found me in Kabukicho (to find it, I had to call one of my Japanese friends, a man, who knew me well enough to just laugh when I asked him for directions instead of lecturing me on the many dangers and perditions to be found there--I'm a girl who can handle rather a lot of perdition without ever getting chafed).  I met Africans there, the only Africans I ever met in Japan, who were working as touts for the strip clubs.  I met hordes of Chinese guys, also working as touts.  I found myself in various bars, being bought drinks by various men of all nationalities, and then somehow I lost all of them and ended up back on the street and accosted by a roving gang of "hosts" from one of the host bars.  All of them scared me very much as they had bleached blonde, feathery hair and blue eyes (contacts) and thus looked like the ghost of Luke Skywalker more than anything else--except one, Nobu, whom I talked to for quite a long time.  He continued talking to me even after I had assured him that I didn't have enough money for a fine fellow like him, but he did regale me with ribald tales of rich, bored Japanese women.  He earnestly wished he could buy me a beer, but business had been slow.

See?  Even the hosts are lonely.

And that's why I didn't see the same Japan as most foreigners do, and that's why I don't think about Japan in the same way.  I spent a lot of time with lonely salarymen and hosts and wannabe yakuza and tattoo artists and a whole gang of construction workers in Numazu whose girlfriends would not have sex with them except in a scheduled monthly performance and sometimes not even then.  I spent a lot of time getting to know Japanese bar owners and allowed myself to be fed raw horsemeat and fish sperm (the fish sperm were? was? fed to me by a gay man, no less).  I hung out with lots and lots of Japanese soldiers, too, of course, once I was shacked up with my boyfriend.  To nearly all of these people, I was their sole foreign friend, and a completely unexpected one.  We never went to expat bars.  We never spoke English.  They were not, by and large, interested in learning English.  And to meet many of these people, I wandered around alone late at night and let myself be drawn into conversations with strangers, followed them to a drinking establishment, and toasted them vigorously (most of my friends actually toasted with "otsukaresama" instead of the typical "kampai") with shochu.  That's not necessarily recommended behavior or the behavior of a completely nondubious, morally upright young lady or whatever the fuck, and that's why most gaijin won't ever see it. 

I suppose it's presumptuous to call it "my Japan," this Japan I've described, but I kind of feel that way, because no other foreigner seems to know what the hell I'm talking about.  There are plenty of Japanese people who don't even know what I'm talking about.  Hardly anyone who doesn't have to will sit in the freezing cold, in the middle of the night, sharing drinks from various flasks and bottles hidden in paper bags, huddled around a fire in the alleyway, talking to men who work in strip clubs.  What foreigner has been so stupid as to have missed the last train to Tokyo and be stranded in an unknown city and thrown herself on the mercy of the aforementioned band of construction workers, who gave me food and shelter and drink that cold night?

The thing is, of course, that this was the Japan I loved.  I loved these people, even the salarymen who just desperately wanted female companionship, though I felt sorry for them a bit too.  That was my Japan.

[Two things:  The boyfriend in Kawasaki was not T.  It was a different boyfriend.  Also, when I say "the kiritsu" I am referring to the entire ritual that takes place at the beginning and ending of (apparently) every goddamned class period in Japanese public schools.  The class leader shouts 'kiritsu' (stand up) and everyone stands.  This is followed by 'yasume' (at ease), 'ki o tsuke' (at attention), 'rei' (bow--during the bow, a greeting of some sort is usually monotonously groaned by the class in unison), and 'chakuseki' when everyone sits down.  Kiritsu means stand up, but it isn't how you would say "stand up" in a less formal (less fascist) setting.]