Geisha, Interrupted

host bar, anyone?

Hmmm...I could either discuss the defeat of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party in yesterday's Upper House elections, or show you this really amusing promotional video for a Tokyo host bar.  Hmmm: host bar!

I had a friend back in the hostessing world, who inadvertently "fell in love" with a host.  He was some ripped Phillipino guy with dyed hair and piercing eyes who called himself "Derrick".  Her name was Michi, and she was Japanese.  In the dressing room Michi would sometimes brag about how sweetly Derrick treated her (catering to her, asking about her problems, comforting her, etc.).  Yet when Michi wasn't around, people often said things like: "how stupid could she be, doesn't she know she's just his customer?!?"  I was guilty of wondering so much myself. 

Then, some events went down that basically shut us all up.  After the bar where we worked in Ginza shut down, Michi became the mama-san at a lower-class hostess bar in a less pretentious neighborhood.  I worked for her there briefly, during which time something funny started happening: Derrick started coming to our club with her.  I don't know if she gave him a discount or not, but she started pouring the drinks for him rather than its being the other way around.  And she catered to him well, because he was her customer.  Instead of his mandatory host-suit, Derrick showed up at our club in muscle shirts and  designer jeans which were all too carefully faded and torn to look cool.  He may have even been wearing make-up.

The whole situation had me totally confused, left to wonder what the real difference was between a "customer" and a "date" anyway, in a world that was so ruled by money.  Funny things happen when people get paid by the bottle, I'm telling you.

I cut all my ties with Michi and Derrick's subculture after i quit drinking (I had to), but I do think of them sometimes.

I hope they are both ok.

thunder and fire flowers

When it rained for 6 weeks, I cursed the rain.  Then when the sun came out for three days, I cursed the heat.  Right now, it is thundering very loudly in Tokyo.  It's not just any thunder.  It comes at very close intervals and lasts for quite extended amounts of time.  There is lightning, but no rain. 

Nope, I don't like this either. My apartment is even shaking a little, as if by a small earthquake.  The clamor from outside makes me feel as if the many buildings which surround me in this this precariously placed city, might just be collapsing one by one. 

On a brighter note, T-bone and I got to see half of a fireworks spectacle on the Sumida river last night.  It was the top half.  Since we stood on a bridge near the apartment, two miles away from the actual show, many buildings prevented us from seeing the lower half of the spectacle (called "hanabi," or "fire flowers" in Japanese).

Since nighttime photography does not appear to be one of my strong points, the pictures below kind of look like the city is burning.  It's as if Tokyo is on fire, and everyone has lined up on the bridge to watch.

Damn, I am morbid today.

trials of a translatrix

The below exerpt is from the script of a recent Japanese television program. It is the most spectacularly fulfilling dialogue I have ever had the fortune to translate from Japanese into English:

S-san :Everyone probably wears this shirt without understanding its meaning. (Points to a Japanese person wearing a T-shirt that reads: "Hysteric Narcotics".)

P-sensei:　 When most foreigners buy T-shirts in other languages, they inquire about the text's meaning. Because in America, the messages on T-shirts are thought to be messages from the heart.

S-san:　Now when we all go shopping, let's find out the meanings on our T-shirts before we buy them!

Students:　OK!

Yes! Yes! Yes!! You finally get it! This is one of those moments of deep cultural understanding that makes me feel like what I'm doing here is all worthwhile. That, or I just wanted a break from the never-ending-transcript. Back to work for me now.

My Little Ex-Blog

I was just trying to figure out my google account so that I could post comments on other people's blogs, when I came across an old blog I used to keep.  I clicked on this link hesitantly, as I was sure my old blog would be too painful to read.  Surprisingly, however, I find that my ex-blog is soooo cuuuute!  And naive!  And marginally retarded!

Check it out for yourself!

http://morethansushi.blogspot.com/

I called it "More Than Sushi".  How cute is that?  And I kept it up for almost three months, writing about the life of a foreign English teacher in Yokohama living with a Japanese homestay family whom I didn't always get along with.

The last post I ever wrote looks to be published on July 22, 2003.  This is three days before a Japanese psychiatrist broke confidentiality to call my employer and inform him that I was "mentally unstable," whatever that means.  I subsequently got fired from my job and kicked out of my homestay family's house. (Consequently, a lot of this ended up in my upcoming book.) 

And I have not looked at this old blog since.  Not until today.

Summer 2003: this was my post-eating-disorder-pre-rampant-alcoholism phase.  The summer ends, as one may guess, with my moving from Yokohama to the center of Tokyo to embark on my silly career stint as a professional drunk (or nightclub hostess).  It seemed the thing to do at the time. 

If I remember correctly, during the months I was posting on More Than Sushi I was also cutting myself pretty actively.  But there is no mention of any of that in My Little Ex-Blog.  That's because cutting isn't cute.

I Am Mr. Taxi

I miss drinking I miss drinking I miss drinking I miss drinking I miss drinking I miss drinking

That said, waaah!

The sun came out today.  Feeling the sun on my skin, the first thing that comes to mind is how quickly I could get drunk in such heat.   "Ii naa," a Japanese expression which conveys a longing feeling of envy, comes to mind.  Then again, I also say "ii naa" when I see the impaired salarymen stagger home at night or the drunks passing out on the train with open bottles, which goes to show that I'm basically nuts.

The problem with having been a chick who drank to deal with basically all aspects of being alive, is that in sobriety, almost everything I do or experience can potentially remind me of alcohol.  Especially when the seasons change, and even when the sun comes out after weeks of grayness.  Somebody please, please tell me this gets easier.

I don't want the rest of my life to feel like I am standing on the edge of a precipice, constantly reminding myself not to jump off.

I am still stalled at my fourth step, with basically no progress since I last complained about being stalled at my fourth step. This makes me identify with the taxi cab I photographed in the previous post.  There is a lot going on around me right now.

Also, I took these pictures for you.

 

Mr. Taxi's Bad Day: a photo essay

The time is early afternoon on a Saturday, the place: Shibuya crossing.  It is not the place to be if you are a lone taxi driver, waiting to proceed at the middle of an intersection, and the light is about to change.

Bring on the clowns!

 

Can you find the Mr. Taxi hiding in each of these pictures??

  

                           

And for extra credit, who the heck is that guy???

 

My Japanese TV Career...

can be best summed up by a single word: a "joke".  And it is the type of joke that gets more and more ridiculous- yet not necessarily funnier- as I keep responding to these casting calls.  It is also a joke because I could not be more indifferent to this line of work if I tried.  I am not an actress, I am just white. 

When the talent agency with which all foreigners in Japan are registered (and this is with the understanding that the word "talent" should be taken very loosely in translation) called me on Thursday evening to tell me that I had been selected for a small role, I couldn't think of a good enough reason to refuse.  I need money, after all.  The agent said that shooting would take place the next day.  I said that I could make it, because I am not terribly busy with work lately (largely why I need the money).

She went on to describe the role for which I had been chosen.  If there was any inkling of hope left inside of me that my Japanese modeling career was about to take off, it was killed off at that very moment.

"Your role is that of a scientist who doesn't really care about how she looks.  She is older than you and she looks tired, like she hasn't slept in days."

I had been chosen to play an ugly person.  In retrospect, this is likely because she was a prominent scientist, and some brains are not large enough to fit the concepts of beauty and intelligence inside them at the same time.  But whatever.

"Don't wear too much make-up and your hair should be messy.  Do you have a pair of glasses?"

"I wear glasses, sometimes."

"Are they designer glasses?"

"No, boring glasses."

"Ok, those would be perfect."

So aside from being an important scientist, I was basically chosen to play myself.  Well, the way I chose to present myself before leaving the house, or before leaving my neighborhood, as I am known to go to the convenience store in my pajamas.  I know all about indifference to appearances.

The shooting itself was actually very amusing for me.  My character, as I found out that day, was a scientist who discovered an enzyme that caused male pattern baldness.  How delightfully random.

I got to dress in a lab coat, look into a fake microscope and study test tubes filled with different colored mouth wash.  At one point, I poured one into the other without even spilling! I even had a spoken line.

3! 2! 1!...

Me: "It's 5-Alpha Reductase, type 2!!"

I had to do this about five times.  Each time, the director demanded more flamboyance and excitement, until I was practically shouting the line and describing the name of this enzyme through interpretive dance.

I forgot to ask when my segment is supposed to air, but I will certainly inquire about that soon.  If I could manage to get a copy of it on video tape, I know that these clips will provide countless hours of entertainment for my friends and family back at home.

The laughs will all be at my expense, of course, but that's entertainment.

Notes from the Urban Rainforest

I feel like this post should start out with a disclaimer of sorts.  Autumn, Winter and Spring are all beautiful seasons here in Japan.  This country has much natural beauty to offer, as I hope my previous posts have conveyed.

With that out of the way, to be honest, I feel like I'm never going to see the sun again.  June and July comprise Japan's rainy season.  It is almost at an end, yet the hot season is nothing to look forward to.  That is an understatement.  The hot season is wretchedly intolerable.  It can make even the most macho of businessmen carry paper fans and parasols.

The weather around here lately has been enough to make one blogger wonder why people even live on this volcanic archipelago anyway.  Tokyo itself is build upon the precise intersection of three different tectonic plates.  (Then she is reminded that some citizens did try to set up shop in China and Korea last century, but this didn't work out so well...) 

Lately, I fluctuate between feeling as if I live in an urban rain-forest, a sauna or perhaps a nuclear test site. 

Rainy season doesn't really pose torrential threats or anything, it just drizzles every day.   It rained heavily last weekend because of the Typhoon that bypassed the capital and went out to sea (to make room for the earthquake!).  But that was a freakishly early storm for the season.  The rains we experience now are usually gray and dull.  They are terrifically depressing. 

Such weather is not as violent or exciting as the windy storms which will pass through during typhoon season this coming Fall.  I far prefer the Autumn.  The typhoons aren't all that bad anyway.  They bring in fresh air from the ocean and take all the crappy polluted air out of the city with them.

I would take violence over depression any day. 

Yes, this is why I have so many issues.

 

What I DON'T Want for Christmas!

I bought myself a Nintendo DS last January, after completing my first week in sobriety.  My instant addiction to the newfangled Super Mario World turned out to be a very useful distraction.  New versions of retro video games sell pretty well among people in their 20S and 30S here in Japan, if only because they make us feel natsukashii, or nostalgic as we play them.  I was last seduced by Super Mario when I was between the ages of seven and ten, I think.

Since saving the princess this time around, I mostly use my DS for studying kanji.  I don't know about the US, but the Japanese market is flooded by educational programs for the DS.  Aside from the programs that teach history and mathematics, there is also software that teaches its owner to cook, to garden, to practice yoga and to care for the eerily cute "nintendogs". 

However, just when I start to believe the Nintendo DS is the best thing to hit Japan since white rice, a new series of software appears.

The game below is designed to teach Japanese salarymen (white collar workers) to mind their manners.   

 

Users are assisted in their etiquette courses  by "manner man," a game hero who comes complete with yellow spandex, a cowboy hat and barnyard animal companion.  If you ask me, "manner man's" attire doesn't seem to embody the conservative behavior that the software encourages.  But I'm not very important, so nobody ever asks me.   

To make matters even more ridiculous, "Manner Man" also has a female counterpart.  An entirely different game is so obviously needed in this case, because social expectations of women differ so greatly in this society.

 

Because, you know, everybody wants to be like that (literally!) robotic chick with her nose stuck up in the air.  The back of the cartridge even displays lessons on proper table manners:

 

Who would actually want to receive these games as gifts?  Talk about getting socks for Christmas! There is only one game that I would loathe to open even more than I would the 'feminine manner' game, and this is it:

 

The calorie counting software!!  If ever misused as a present to me, the "calorie game" is enough to terminate any supposed friendship at first glance.  Consider yourselves warned.

Trust Your Eyes and Cover Your Ears

I was just reading some English coverage of yesterday's earthquake, when I became amazed by this photograph.  Though it's from a Japanese broadcast of a fire at the Kashiwazaki nuclear power plant, it's not the image itself that grabbed my attention.  There exist far more graphic photos of the blaze.

Instead, it is the text at the bottom of the screen.  It says: houshanou morenashi, or "there are no radiation leaks."  It was a pretty ironic heading to see on a picture that illustrated an article about the leakage of nuclear waste at at Kashiwazaki during the quake.

"There are no radiation leaks."  This is precisely what we were told ad-nauseum yesterday, as we watched the fire at the nuclear plant on TV. And despite the very disturbing images of billowing flames right in front of us, we believed as we were told.  We took comfort in the caption on the screen.  At least I did.

I went to a meeting last night where a Japanese man spoke about his mother's five-year battle with cancer.  I was especially taken aback by the fact that both the hospital and this woman's family kept the real nature of her disease from her (they told her she had an ulcer, I think) until the last months of her life.  I've heard over and over again that such practices are the tradition here, yet the clash in values across cultures always amazes me.

By extension, his story made me think about the extent to which Japanese authorities are experts in covering up scandals.  Here in Japan the general public is on a strict need-to-know basis, under a system that generally assumes that we don't need to know most things.  The realization really made me second-guess the official take on the nuclear accident.

Sure enough, I woke up this morning to developing news that some radiation may have actually leaked from the plant due to the earthquake.  I don't feel this way often, but I hate being right just now.