It was quite an interesting weekend for me. After getting off work at 4:15 on Saturday, I immediately went home and changed and got ready for party-mode. Trey picked me up shortly after 4:30 and drove us to Tateyama, a city near the southern end of Chiba prefecture. I was surprised at how big Chiba is, as the trip took almost two hours. The second half was littered with tunnels, revealing that the south of Chiba is far more mountainous than the north where I live.
After some minor logistical difficulties we met up with Victor—Trey’s friend from New Years’ Eve—and his friend, an Indian-Canadian guy named Anand. All three of them are JET ALTs, and Victor was stationed in Tateyama. He was very lucky in terms of the residence they put him in, a giant house he has all to himself, but unlucky in terms of its location, about a 20-minute drive outside of town. The plan was to go to a Valentine’s Day party in Tateyama that was being thrown by some friends of Trey and Victor, then invite a bunch of people back (and by “people” I mean “women”) to Victor’s place for an after-party. Victor and one of the guys in one of the bands at the party had spent the whole day getting his place prepared for the after-party, getting the place spotless, rearranging furniture, re-working the lighting, and even setting up a beer-pong table. We were quite impressed, and found ourselves looking forward to the after-party even more than the party itself.
Trey wasn’t drinking because he’s losing weight for an upcoming fight (he does kick-boxing) so he was the designated driver. We took two cars there, which meant we could bring two back-seats full of people back as long as there was another designated driver. But Trey was very skeptical about the distance-issue, thinking Victor’s place might be just a bit too far away to bring people back to. He said the general rule-of-thumb is that an after-party should be close enough to the main party to stumble to—not take a 20-minute drive. Victor refused to get discouraged, so determined was he to make the night a success.
We got to the place, a club called Bliss, shortly before 9:00. It cost 2000 yen to get in, which was a heavy price to pay but at least not as much as clubs in Tokyo. It was a Valentine’s Day party, a repeat of an event they’d done last year which had drawn a good crowd of singles there for mingling, which is why Trey was so enthusiastic about going. Upon entering you had to choose between a red or blue bracelet depending on whether or not you were available. Red meant “stop, don’t bother flirting with me because I’m taken,” while blue meant, “I’m single and looking for love.” I would have preferred another color signifying “I’m single but not sure I’m looking for anything” but I had to go with the blue like the rest of the guys.
On the drive down, Trey had given me some advice for when it comes to the ladies. The main gist was that I shouldn’t just talk to and focus on one girl, but divide my attention as much as possible. Girls want attention, he said, so if you pay exclusive attention to them they’re satisfied, they got what they want from you, and they have the power because they feel like they can have you if they want you, and that leads to them not wanting you. You have to keep them guessing, give them some attention but always leave them wanting more. As much as I hate these stupid games, that’s just how it is. It’s a totally different matter once you get to know the person and your real personality takes over, but at a first meeting it’s all just animal instinct and you have to project coolness and confidence—two qualities that I’ve always lacked in social situations.
Upon entering the club Trey immediately spotted a group of six female ALTs standing in a circle on the dance floor and drinking, all of them equipped with blue bracelets. I was introduced to all of them and the mingling began. The fact that none of them were particularly beautiful put me at ease right away. The other guys were free to work their game on any of these girls—I’d much prefer someone a little more…Japanese.
I ordered myself a whiskey on the rocks and proceeded to loosen myself up a bit, lightly dancing in the circle with the girls and guys. I glanced around the room and took note that currently, nearly all of the Japanese people there were sitting at the benches and tables along the wall, just talking amongst themselves. I noticed one very cute Japanese girl who seemed a little tipsy, and when the first band started playing she was up on the dance floor. Trey pointed her out to me and told me to get in there and “do my thing”. What thing? I don’t have a thing.
I was supposed to dance with her, but I wasn’t nearly loose enough for that yet so I settled for dancing near her. Early on at one point she turned toward me for a split second and I used the opportunity to clink my cup of whiskey with her cup on whatever-it-was and say “kampai” so that “broke the ice”.
The first band was all Japanese guys, the lead singer a small guy who took his shirt off apparently to show off his abs. His whole thing was to get up there with the mike and shout things like “Say what” and hold the mike out to the audience to repeat “what!” and then “Say what what” for us to go “what what” and “Say what what what” for us to go…you get the idea. This seemed to go on for eternity, and it wasn’t just one song, so that whole “what what what” thing seems to be the band’s entire signature, and I certainly don’t remember anything else about them.
As I was dancing near that girl she’d occasionally lose her balance a bit so I’d use my free arm to keep her on her feet, and she’d turn and thank me when I did. So it felt nice to actually make physical contact with her and I definitely got vibes of friendliness and possible interest, but after a short while I noticed a red bracelet on her arm. So much for that possibility.
But I heeded Trey’s advice and went around talking to a whole bunch of people, both male and female. One of the girls helping with the event, upon hearing I’d lived in Germany for awhile, pointed out a guy sitting at one of the tables and told me he was German. So I went and sat by him and started a conversation in German, which reverted to English after a few sentences but he definitely wasn’t expecting to hear any German that night. His name was Timo and he was there with his friend Stephen who is Canadian but “born and raised” in Japan. They were both really nice guys and I talked to them on and off throughout the night.
I also turned to a Japanese girl sitting at the seat next to me and spoke to her in Japanese. I was able to do my whole self-introduction, as well as ask her basic personal questions about herself like where she was from and what her job is. I couldn’t have taken it much farther than that, and I didn’t have to anyway because she was wearing a red bracelet. When her boyfriend came back I met him too.
The night got later, I got drunker and looser, and I was as resolved as it gets to have a good time and enjoy myself no matter what. I hadn’t been expecting to succeed with a girl so I felt good enough just interacting with as many of them as I could. Once I was loose enough I even got a few of them to dance with me, even though they all had red bracelets.
It being a Japanese party, there of course had to be a round of Bingo. We’d all got a Bingo card on our way in and whoever won would get a chance to draw a random prize from a bag, among which was a pair of tickets to Disneyland. I didn’t even come close to winning, but near the beginning of the game I noticed the really cute red-bracelet-wearing drunk girl also not getting any numbers called, and I pointed out with hand-gestures that we were both having terrible luck. She came over and stood by me for a few minutes then as we listened to the number-drawings together and waited for one of us to finally get one called. That felt nice, but she didn’t stick around for too long. She was pretty drunk at that point and might have had to throw up or something.
I later found her nearly passed out on a bench in another room, her boyfriend tending to her. I met him and he turned out to be friendly enough. I even remember his name—Akishiro, who happened to be the “what what what” guy from the first band.
The second band of the night was a Red Hot Chili Peppers tribute band, and as I happen to love the Red Hot Chili Peppers and happened to be pretty buzzed at that point, I really enjoyed the hell out of them. I’d dance and sing along with everyone else, getting lots of smiles and high-fives and whatnot from the Japanese guys in the crowd who were also digging it.
But unfortunately, the rest of my party was not on the same page at all. Trey had gotten discouraged from the very beginning when the only available girls there were those female ALTs, only two or three of which were somewhat desirable and even then not particularly so. There had apparently been a lot more single Japanese women there last time, but this time there didn’t seem to be any. The only girls at the whole party who were wearing the blue bracelets were the ALTs, and they were—as Trey later put it—“not conducive to having a good time.” They were standing around talking among themselves for the most part, and they seemed to deliberately keep away from the four of us as though we were a group of predators who couldn’t wait to take them back to our lair and have our way with them.
Of course they were invited to the after-party, but the main reason was to give it legitimacy to try and draw other people—perhaps some Japanese girls—there as well. But they refused to come so nobody else wanted to come either, with the exception of Timo and Stephen whom I mentioned earlier. They didn’t care that their wouldn’t be any women there and I certainly didn’t care either, but it was Victor’s place and he told them not to bother coming, that we were all just going to go home and pass out and try not to think about this utter failure.
And that’s all we talked about for the rest of the night. Victor could not stop going on about how much work he’d put into the preparation for the after-party and how pitiful it was that absolutely nobody—not one single solitary girl—had come to it. Trey kept explaining in perfectly logical detail all the reasons why that was the case and why it wasn’t really our fault.
If we’d done anything wrong it was to not get a solid group of people—male and female—to agree to go to the after-party beforehand. By just going and expecting it to all work out, we’d opened up the door for failure. But we had no way of knowing there would be so many fewer people there than last year and that the only single girls at the party would be foreigners like us who—to be brutally honest—sucked at having a good time. I didn’t waste much time on them, but they gave off the impression that they were actively trying not to enjoy themselves.
I, on the other hand, steadfastly refused not to enjoy myself, and I’d had a great time. One of the major advantages to being so woefully unexperienced when it comes to women is that I’m now virtually immune to disappointment. Those guys had been expecting to bring some ladies home and get some action. I had expected to be politely shot-down numerous times. What actually transpired fell far short of their expectations, whereas I greatly exceeded mine. I’d been loose and happy the whole time, projecting all the coolness and confidence I could muster and discovering there’s a lot more there than there used to be.
And while it didn’t actually pay off in any concrete sense, the few minor successes I had were enough to put me in good spirits. That really cute drunk girl definitely liked me. So what that it couldn’t’ have gone anywhere because of her “what what what” boyfriend? I successfully introduced myself and carried out small-talk in Japanese with several girls, all of whom were as friendly as can be and gave off no vibe that I was imposing on them at all. I even danced with a handful of girls, almost all of whom seemed to enjoy it (the ALT chicks were the only ones who didn’t). Having done that and seen how easily I can do it, it’ll be that much easier to do next time and the time after that. My confidence shot up a few degrees from that experience. Perhaps in a few years (or decades) I might actually be confident enough to succeed. Perhaps.
As for those guys, they were not happy about what had (or rather, what hadn’t) gone down. When we got back to Victor’s place we hung out for a couple more hours, ate some of the snacks that had been prepared, and continued to talk about the night’s disappointments. Well, Trey and Victor did. Anand and I mostly just listened and laughed. The discussion wasn’t morose or depressing—it was actually pretty light-hearted and full of humor. The group wasn’t brooding over our failure but laughing about it, though inside we all knew Victor was genuinely upset and Trey was a little angry too. But Anand and I had a good time anyway. He struck me as the kind of guy who also doesn’t have much experience with women. His expectations had probably been almost as low as mine, and so he too was shielded from disappointment.
I tried to tell Victor that he needed to stop focusing on what could have been and just appreciate what is—here we were, a good group of guys who enjoy each others’ company just hanging out and having a good time. His only response was yeah, but it could have been a much much better time.
Perhaps, but probably not for me. In any case, it was ultimately decided that the fatal flaw in the plan had been to make Victor’s place the after-party as opposed to the party itself. He stands a much better chance of attracting a crowd if he has the party in warm-weather, making use of his large yard for a barbecue, or his close-proximity to the beach for a beach-party. It the party was to take place elsewhere, it would have to start at his place, relocate there, and then end up back where it started. He’s got a great place with great party-potential, but the stars were just not aligned properly that night.
Trey and I drove back to Togane the next morning, him telling me that the next time we do this we’ll do it right. That basically means going clubbing in Tokyo, where if one place is dead there are eight hundred other places to choose from. (In my case, it also means there’s no pressure to bring a girl home—you just get her contact info and take it from there).
But he said he was glad he brought me because I had a good time and that made it a good enough time for him. He said he feels like we may have a budding friendship, and we’ll probably actually start hanging out more often instead of just talking about hanging out more often.
I hope so because he’ll be a valuable friend to have. He’s only 23 now so he’s just starting out his life. He was just accepted into Vanderbilt law school and has applications at places like Stanford and Yale pending. His plan is to get his Master’s or Ph.D. in law and then go into politics and probably run for office one day. He’s already got connections in Tennessee politics, having met both the mayor of Nashville and the governor. Of all the people I’ve ever met in my life, he’s the most likely person to become President of the United States. That’s not a job I would ever want, but maybe he could make me his ambassador to Germany or something.
Anyway, that was this past weekend, an experience from which I drew two valuable lessons: 1- I’m waaaaay more confident than I used to be, and 2- It still works to my advantage to keep my expectations low.
My birthday was this past Thursday, and while there was nothing particularly special or interesting about the day I might as well document what I did.
I’d invited about ten or twelve people out to dinner on Thursday evening at a place called Dohtonbori, the okinomiyaki restaurant near Ben’s apartment that a bunch of us ate together at a couple of months ago. Only a few people could make it, so it just turned out to be five of us: me, Ben, Fred, Jack and Lily.
Fred and I met Ben at his place an hour earlier to have a couple of beers, get caught up on the month-and-a-half it’s been since we’ve seen each other (the Christmas party was the last time), and shoot some darts on Ben’s new dart-board. I had some serious amateur’s luck, as I not only shot a perfect bull’s-eye on my very first throw, but I ended up winning the entire game of cut-throat.
At 7:00 we took the five-minute walk to the restaurant, got a table inside (one of those deals where you have to sit on the floor) and Jack and Lily arrived a few minutes later to join us. They were nice enough to bring me a present: a pen and an empty journal for me to write about my experiences. I appreciated the thought, but for someone who already writes about all his experiences by typing them up in an online journal (and who can type about 67 times faster than he can write), a paper journal is somewhat superfluous. But blank paper is never useless—it can be my next Japanese-writing-practice notebook.
What’s to say? The okinomiyaki was delicious and the conversation was fun and interesting. Jack and Lily are on a two-month semester break from college starting next week, and they’ll first be visiting Thailand followed by a month in Jack’s hometown of Boston. Ben lived in Thailand for six months so he gave them a bunch of useful tips. It sucks that I won’t see them again for a full two months, but I’m sure we’ll see a lot of each other when they get back.
When we parted ways after dinner I told both Ben and Fred that I hope another two months doesn’t go by before I see either of them again, and they said we’ll try to hang out more often.
But there’s plenty of socialization to come, starting with tonight. Trey, who couldn’t make it to dinner on Thursday, has invited me to a party one of his friends is throwing in the south of Chiba tonight. When I get off work (yes, my school was open on Saturday instead of Friday this week—welcome to Japan) he’s going to pick me up and drive us down there, where we will presumably be drinking and flirting with women, then spending the night and driving back tomorrow morning. I’m as apprehensive as ever about the flirting-aspect, but whatever happens it should be interesting.
In other news, I decided to spend the money required to join my Dad on his bi-annual sailing trip in the Caribbean this year. I was able to go four years ago as a Christmas/birthday present during my brief transition-phase from California to Germany, and it was pretty clear that that was the last time my parents were going to pay for me. I haven’t really been able to afford to pay my own way until this year. They’re covering my share of the boat-rental as a birthday present, but I have to pay for the flight and all the expenses while we’re down there. The flight is the real killer, but since this opportunity only comes once every two years and it’s unlikely I’ll be living anywhere closer to that part of the world in 2014, I figured I might as well go this year. It’ll be in the British Virgin Islands, which I haven’t been to in ten years (for my second trip, a graduation present in 2002) because the trip four years ago was in Antigua. I can’t express how excited I am to be able to go again, but suffice it to say I’m really looking forward to it. Plus, as an added bonus I’ll have a 16-hour stopover in Newark on both the flight over and back, which means I’ll get to spend those two nights at my parents’ home in Glen Gardner. It’ll be extremely weird to see my Mom for just a couple of nights and a week apart like that, but I’m looking forward to that too.
On the school-front, I’m back in the normal swing of things. The past two weeks have been pretty fun as it’s almost been exclusively full-class review games, including my personal favorite—Jeopardy—which never fails to get every last student involved and excited.
On turning 28, it has a bit more of a psychological impact than I’d expected. At 27 I was in my mid-twenties, but now I’m officially “pushing 30”. My youth is almost over. What the hell have I been doing all this time? Oh yeah—stuff I love.
Some nights are weirder than others. I got a text from Trey last night inviting me to a little party at his place which I went to at 10:30. It was mostly students from Josai and a couple of his Japanese friends. It was a good time, but a detailed description is both unnecessary and inappropriate.
Morten, the guy with whom I flirted with those Japanese girls on New Years’ Eve, was there, and I got to hear the rest of the story: that guy who stepped in to take my place when I decided I wasn’t too into the girl I was talking to apparently had some success with her. Good for him. But I had a very nice talk with Morten and got to know him better. He’s a good guy.
I also did my fair share of chatting with girls, and it helped raise my confidence a notch. I actually even brought one back to my place, a really nice Hungarian girl, but it went as far as my doorstep and she decided she’d rather sleep in her own bed so I walked her home. Not that it would have gone anywhere anyway. She probably would have been a little surprised when I just set up the couch for her and plopped down in my bed to pass out. I was not ready to break any barriers last night.
But all in all it was a good experience and I’m glad it happened. My future with women seems slightly less hopeless than it did a day ago, but I’ve still got a long way to go.
This was the first normal week of school since the winter break, and it was a busy one. I found out last Friday to my great disappointment that this week my only teaching task would be to prompt the students to write about their winter vacation. That was the lesson for the first, second, and third-graders, so I’d have to do the same thing 18 times. My instruction was to talk about my winter vacation, then have the students write about theirs. That’s it. A less fun class-period could not be imagined.
Naturally, I’d have to do something to make it bearable, so I came up with a plan. The actual story of my actual winter vacation, while interesting enough to me to write pages and pages about in a journal, would be extremely dull when condensed to middle-school language-lesson-form, so I decided to toss in some fiction. And since naturally any presentation requires pictures, I’d need to somehow depict these fictional scenes from my imaginary winter vacation in visual form.
So on Sunday I downloaded a trial-run of Photoshop and got to work on my project. I took a bunch of pictures of myself with the timer function of my camera, often having to do it at least a dozen times before I got it right, then proceeded to Photoshop myself into images I found online. This was no easy task, as I’ve never used Photoshop before and found it to be a much less intuitive program than I’d assumed. I had to actually read help files and sort through online tutorial videos just to figure out how to properly cut, resize, and paste images from one picture onto another. And even once I had it figured out, there was a great deal of trial and error and the touching-up of minute details just to get something decent. The whole process took between four and five hours (with a lunch break included) but in the end I finally had something I was satisfied with.
Some might consider this a useless endeavor, too much time spent on something completely unnecessary. The JTEs were only expecting me to talk about my winter vacation, and I could have easily just gone up there, read a short paragraph, and spent the next 45 minutes walking around correcting students who typically finish these writing prompts in less than 20. But I have a reputation to maintain, damn it, and when Kairu-sensei comes to class the students are expecting something fun to happen and fun is what they were going to get.
The hours spent on the task turned out to be completely worth it. As I went about the story of my winter vacation and brought the pictures around the class to give each student a closer look, it was delightful to watch all their eager faces (nearly all of them anyway) transform into a smile and outright laughter from most. Here are the pictures along with what I basically said about each of them. I kept it very simple for the first-graders and threw in more details with the second- and third-graders.
I had a lot of fun on my winter vacation.
On Christmas, I helped Santa Claus deliver presents to boys and girls around the world. It was very exciting.
After Christmas, I took a Shinkansen to Kyoto and saw many things, like the Golden Temple.
In Kyoto I met friends and we went sight-seeing.
When I came back from Kyoto I stopped at Mount Fuji, and I climbed up Mount Fuji. Mount Fuji is very small—I was surprised.
On New Years’ Eve I went to a big party in Tokyo. There was a count-down, we all said “Happy New Year!” and danced all night long.
But I had to get up very early in the morning, because Tokyo was under attack by a giant robot. I had to defend Tokyo from the robot.
[These pictures are from the anime series “Neon Genesis Evangelion” which Mike from Interac recommended I watch because it is supposedly very philosophical. I’m 10 out of 26 episodes into it and it still hasn’t gotten philosophical but I’m surprised to find myself enjoying it anyway. It’s an old show so I didn’t know how many students would recognize it, but almost all of them did and this image went over extremely well.]
It was very scary, but I defeated the robot. I got to visit Prime Minister Noda and he said, “Thank you, Kairu-san, for saving Tokyo.” [This image got the biggest laugh, as apparently the photo of Obama’s handshake with Noda upon which I superimposed my face is now a famous picture in Japan.]
After all that I was very tired, so I stayed home and played video games. [While the students were amused to recognize the game I was pretending to play as Mario Kart, none of them seemed to think it silly that I was wearing a suit at home.]
The students took notes as I made the speech, which they had plenty of time to do as I walked around the room showing the pictures. When I was done I split them into teams and played the same game I had them play for my introduction lesson, where they get a point for everything they remember about my speech. “Kyoto” would be a point, “Noda” would be a point, and so on. Once they started struggling to come up with more things, I’d begin counting down from 5 and stop them if I got to 0 but reset the count-down if they shouted another word in the mean-time. I was extremely generous, even giving them points for repeating words I said like “exciting” or “very small” (regarding Mt. Fuji). The scores ranged anywhere from 9 points to 36. Teams build on each others’ answers so each team usually gets a few more than the previous team, usually in the midst of the count-down which keeps things exciting for everyone. The final team to go almost always wins, but everyone has fun anyway.
Then there’s the major let-down as the game ends and they all have to put their desk back in place and set about the task of writing about their own winter vacation. I walk around and gently correct the students as they do this, and learn a bit about Japanese New Years’ traditions in the process.
They usually go to a shrine or a temple and ring the bells and pray. They eat “New Year dishes” which include mochi, apparently some kind of rice-cake. They send New Years’ cards to just about everybody they know (it’s by far the busiest time of year for the Japanese post office). And their families give them o-toshidama, which literally means “year coins” but nowadays is always paper bills, anywhere from 1000 to 10,000 yen. So Japanese kids always start the year off with a boat-load of cash. I’m a little jealous, but I can’t complain too much because I’m pretty sure we get more for Christmas.
Many third-graders wrote that when they went to temple on New Years’ Day they prayed to pass the high school entrance exams, which were this week from Tuesday to Thursday (during which the third-grade classes were half-empty). It’s interesting that in Japan, not only is high-school not mandatory, but you have to actually pass an entrance exam to get in. And while I would think such exams would be a piece of cake because I heard that something like 90% of Japanese kids go to high school, it would appear that they’re kind of a big deal because so many kids wrote that they spent their entire winter vacation studying for them, not to mention praying to pass (though I’m not sure whom their praying to, and I’m not sure they know either).
Mrs. S- used her entire third-grade class-periods on Monday to help them prepare for the English section, so she postponed the winter vacation lesson until this upcoming Monday. After going through it sixteen times I’m pretty sick of it by now but I’ve got to do it two more times. But it could be worse—I could have just followed the JTEs’ instructions exactly.
I’m back at school now and back to the standard routine. Tuesday was the first day of school but it wasn’t a normal day. It was only a half-day for students, and as far as I can tell no actual classes were held. I had no lessons to teach, and all I did was attend the opening ceremony in the school gym, which was similar to the opening ceremony on the first day of school in September, only a million times less stressful because I didn’t have to do anything. I just stood in the back and greeted the students who acknowledged me as they entered. It was nice to see everyone again at the same time. I missed them over the long holiday.
The ceremony itself lasted for only about an hour, and consisted of the singing of the school song, a speech by the principal and one by a student whom I assume is the third-grade class president, and the presentation of posters made by each class in the school. There was a lot of bowing involved.
It’s been a very light schedule for the rest of the week, consisting of only two classes yesterday, one today, and one tomorrow. I’m doing a lesson on comparatives for the second-grade classes, two of which I already covered in the last week of school before the holiday. But I changed the lesson quite significantly as the ideas I’d taken from the Interac lesson-plan book for the first two classes didn’t work well at all. The book suggested we have each row of students line up from tallest to shortest and oldest to youngest and teach “taller” and “shorter” and “younger” and “older” that way. They’re supposed to use language like, “Are you older than me?” when they do it, but that’s woefully unrealistic. And even though they cheat by using Japanese, it still takes them far longer to do it than it’s worth.
So I revamped the plan and made the entire lesson a game from beginning to end, splitting the class into two teams and pitting them against each other. Even the greetings were a game, as I’d have one team ask the other team each of the five questions, “How are you?”, “How’s the weather?” etc. and award 10 points to the team that spoke more enthusiastically and 5 points to the less enthusiastic team (or 0 if they were truly awful). Usually one side would dominate so I’d have to cheat a little.
Then it was on to comparatives. I’d write “Which team is_____?” on the board and then a word like “fast”. They’d have to fill in the blank: “Which team is faster?” and then I’d have them all stand up, count to three, and see which team could seat themselves back down faster. If Team A was the winner I’d write “A is faster than B” on the board, have everyone repeat it, and give Team A 10 points and Team B 5. I’d repeat this process for a number of adjectives including “loud” and “big” the latter of which I simply had each team count how many students were in their team. I’d then write the word “excited” and introduce the fact that sometimes we have to use the word “more” instead of just adding –er. When I’d get to “Which team is more beautiful?” the students would laugh, wondering how I was going to determine that, but I just had each team count the number of girls and whichever side had more would be the “more beautiful” team. I did the same for “handsome”. Finally I went through three emotions: happy, sad, and angry, and had each team make faces to act like those emotions and give the win to the more convincing side (or the side that needed more points).
That was supposed to be the “warm-up” phase but it was more like a presentation phase. The next phase was the original presentation phase, where I’d put up two flashcards like the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty and ask the students to vote on which they thought was taller (surprisingly, the vast majority of them know it’s the Eiffel Tower), then write a sentence with missing words: “The Eiffel Tower is _____ ____ the Statue of Liberty” and ask a volunteer from one team to come up and fill in the blanks. If no one volunteered I’d start counting down from five and if I reached zero I’d give the chance to the other team. If even they didn’t volunteer (which only happened once) I’d start subtracting points. In the end, I’d always get a volunteer and they’d always get it right and I’d praise them with a new word I just learned: subarashi, which means “superb!” The students seem to like that a lot.
Interesting tid-bit: I’d have the students vote on which is more delicious—sushi or hamburgers—and hamburgers would usually win. They also think science is more interesting than math, and puppies are cuter than babies.
Finally, I went to the most fun part of the lesson which was the “Which person is____?” round and ask for a volunteer from each team for words like taller, shorter, older, and younger and see which team had the taller person, which team had the older person, and so on. But I really enjoyed “smarter” for which I’d put up a math problem on the board and get two volunteers to come solve it (16 x 12 = 192), and if one person made a mistake he’d have the misfortune of getting a sentence written on the board about how the person from the other team is smarter than him. Finally, the best round and the one the kids really get into was “Which person is stronger?” and I’d have each team send their strongest boy to compete in an arm-wrestling match with the other.
I made up a whole practice worksheet too but all of the above takes plenty of time and lasts right up to the end of the period, so I just give the worksheet for the JTEs to have the students do the next time they meet with the class.
It feels great to be teaching again and I’m looking forward to next week when I’ll hopefully get to see the first and third-graders as well.
In other news, I had an interesting experience yesterday afternoon when I came home from school and discovered to my dismay that I had no running water. The toilet flushed but the tank didn’t refill, and no water was coming from the kitchen sink or the shower. I couldn’t call the company that owns my building because they don’t speak English, so I called Kono at the Interac Chiba office and explained my problem to her. She made the necessary phone calls and determined that as we expected my water had been shut off because I hadn’t paid the bill. I still had those bills but I hadn’t paid them because they have no bar-code. Normally to pay a bill you take it to a convenience store and they scan the barcode and you pay it right there, but when I tried to pay this kind of bill they pointed out the lack of barcode to me and explained something I couldn’t understand. Sometimes you get things that look like bills in the mail but which are actually just statements of how much of some utility you’ve been using and the bill is to come later, but apparently that wasn’t the case with these.
I was worried I’d have to wait until tomorrow to be able to flush the toilet or even run the sink, and that I’d have to go into work without a shower. But Kono said that if I just paid the bill for September they’d turn my water back on right away, and not only that but someone from the water company could be there within thirty minutes. I could hardly believe the convenience, and fifteen minutes later someone indeed came to my door, took my payment, and about twenty seconds later I heard my toilet tank start to refill itself.
So that’s MAJOR points for Japan in my book. In America I don’t think you could get that kind of issue resolved nearly so quickly, and I doubt you could in Germany either. If the electric company or water company shuts you off for lack of payment, you’re usually screwed for a day or two, and there’s no way in hell they would actually send someone to you to take your payment. You’d have to go to their building and probably fill out a bunch of forms. In Japan they take care of it for you within a half-hour, and you don’t have to do anything but make a phone call and answer your door. Subarashi!
A wild New Years’ Eve party was hoped for and a wild New Years’ Eve party was delivered. While we didn’t end up going Ageha—the place with the acrobats—because admission was too expensive, we did end up at a club that turned out to be quite good. There’s really no need to go into much detail about the night. It was just a plain and simple good time filled with friends, drinking, and dancing, as the pictures will show.
The night began with a small “pre-game” party at Trey’s apartment with Trey’s friends Victor and Andre, Andre’s fiancé, and Cinty, the Hungarian girl. After getting warmed up there for about an hour and a half, we ventured out and took the bus into Tokyo. Andre and his fiancé are not drinkers so they opted not to come with us.
When we got to Tokyo we had to navigate through the subway system to get to where we were going, a place called Muse in the area known as Roppongi. Trey was in charge of leading the way, and while he made a few mistakes he sternly told us “not to question the leader”. I joked that this is also his policy when it comes to Obama. Trey was happy to take on the role of Obama for the night.
While on our way to the club we ran into a group of four Josai students, one of whom I recognized as Ollie, the guy I met at the Family Music Festival at Sanmunobori park a couple months ago. We were both amazed at the coincidence of bumping into each other again, and for a moment it seemed that he and his friends would be joining our group for the night. But while Trey and the others stopped into McDonald’s to fill their stomachs before the night of heavy drinking (I’d eaten earlier so I only got water), they went off in search of an ATM and we never saw them again.
When we got to the club it was just after 11:00 and the place looked virtually empty. Our first impression was that we’d made a terrible mistake and this place totally sucked. Trey kept turning to me and saying “don’t look at me like that!” as the parallel to Obama was clear to both of us. He had promised so much and raised my expectations so high, and now it appeared as though he’d failed to deliver.
But the place was filling up incredibly quickly, and more people we know were on the way. After ordering some Jack and coke with our first drink-ticket (entry was 4000 yen for men and 2000 for women, but everyone got two drink-tickets) we headed to the dance floor and decided to just make the best of the situation. We almost decided to leave and go to Ageha and screw the price, but we knew it was too late and if we left now we’d probably be standing in a line outside during the count-down.
To my pleasant surprise, Jack, Lily, and the French guys whom I’d told to meet us there arrived just in time for midnight, with ten minutes to spare. One of the workers at the club came around and handed a shot and a noise-making thingy to everyone in the club in preparation for the count-down.
The DJ stopped the music with just a minute to spare, and the whole place—now completely jam-packed—erupted with a count-down from juu to ichi, and with a loud cheer and the sound of popping noisemakers 2011 officially came to an end and 2012 got started.
There were three floors to this place altogether and after the midnight count-down we decided to head downstairs to the lowest floor where we’d remain for the rest of the night. There we did more drinking and dancing until some of us found our way to a nice little seating-area in the back where we’d sit and chat whenever we were tired of dancing.
I bumped into Stephen at one of the bars about fifteen minutes after midnight, knowing he’d intended to come but sad that he hadn’t been there for midnight. So with him, Jack and the French crowd, Trey, Victor and Cinty, and a few other ALTs and Josai students I’d never met before, we were a pretty decent crowd. Ben couldn’t be there because he’s back in the states now and I’m not sure where Fred is, but other than that it was about as good a crowd as I could have asked for. We didn’t get to see acrobats or the sunrise over Tokyo bay, but the people are much more important than the place.
Even before midnight started, Trey and Victor were trying to get me to join them in their hunt for Japanese girls to work game on, but I was not in that state of mind at all. I felt bad because Victor kept asking me to come and help back him up, but at that point all I wanted to do was just relax and enjoy myself and not get my mind all jammed up with thoughts of my perpetual sexual inadequacy.
But later in the night, one of the guys I’d just met—a guy from Finland named Morten—told me to go up to two Japanese girls who were sitting at a nearby table and give them a message in Japanese for him. I had no reservations at that point so I just went up and said “Sumimasen, my friend wanted me to tell you…um…” I forgot the Japanese phrase so I quickly ran back over to him and got it again, then attempted to say it for the girls who found the whole thing quite amusing and helped me get the pronunciation right. Suddenly I’m engaged in a chat with these girls and I ask to sit down and they gladly let me. Morten comes over and talks in Japanese with the girl on the left who doesn’t speak good English, and I have a nice conversation with the girl on the right whose English is good enough for small-talk. She seems genuinely interested in me and the whole thing is very encouraging, but while she was definitely attractive I just felt no desire for her and didn’t want to go too far down a path that I had no intention of going all the way down, so I gave up my seat and another guy moved in and picked up where I left off. I felt slightly annoyed with myself for giving up what was probably my first real chance of picking up a girl in Japan (or any country for that matter) but I’m okay with the fact that I didn’t. I’m not the kind of guy who goes for something just because it appears doable.
At another point I found myself wandering around in search of the elusive bathroom, and I couldn’t find it on the ground floor so I ended up using the one upstairs on the second floor. I stopped at the second-floor bar on my way back down to get some water and a beer, and was just completely dumbstruck by the bartendress who got me my drink. She was easily, hands-down, the cutest person to ever serve me a drink and I could not help but stick around and admire her gorgeous face for awhile. Not only was she as beautiful as they come, but she was a fantastic bartendress, always completely aware of everyone at her bar and getting everyone served as rapidly as possible. That gorgeous smile was obviously a mask worn as part of her job but she wore it skillfully. It never once left her face the entire time she was working. We exchanged glances a few times and eventually I did start talking to her, complimenting her on her bartending skills, but she just told me in Japanese that she doesn’t understand English. I knew it was a hopeless cause anyway. That girl must get hit on at least eight hundred times a night. I was just one more schmoe in a million.
Luckily the whole women-aspect of things was not dominating my mind the whole night. I was able to just sit downstairs and enjoy the company of the others for most of the time, though of course much of the conversation had to do with women. But there was plenty of fun to be had too, most memorably with a Japanese guy who’d wandered onto our couch and gone to sleep while none of us had been sitting there. We all got plenty of good pictures from that situation, though I suppose it makes us assholes.
At about 5:00 the club workers were very efficient in getting everyone out the door, and soon enough we were back out in the freezing cold Tokyo streets, which were as jam-packed and full of people at 5:00 in the morning as Shibuya was at 5:00 in the evening. By now everyone was hungry again and the McDonald’s was right there, so in we went and sadly McDonald’s became my first meal of 2012. But it was also my first time eating at McDonald’s in Japan and it was shockingly good, both the taste and the quality of my fish-sandwich and chicken tenders far superior to how I remember them tasting in America and even in Germany. Of course being drunk probably helped with that.
Jack and Lily and those guys had hostel reservations for the night, and I think Stephen did too, so the four of us who’d come from Togane together said goodbye to them at the McDonald’s and we began the long and frustrating journey home. Because the busses don’t start until 8:00 and it was just before 7:00 when we got back to Tokyo station, we knew we’d get back sooner if we took the train. We all trusted Trey to lead the way again, and again he managed to get us there with just a few minor errors.
We had to transfer three times but due to mistakes we ended up changing trains about 4 or 5 times, but that’s to be expected when you’re attempting to navigate the Japanese railway system after 12 straight hours of drinking. But I’d been doing a pretty good job of pacing myself the whole time and drinking lots of water, so I had no sign of an encroaching hangover and just felt more exhausted than anything. I was extremely glad when I finally got back to my apartment at 9:00 and curled up in bed, though I was only able to sleep until 12:00. At least that meant I was able to call home before 2012 began in America, and at 2:00 p.m. here I watched the ball drop in Times Square on an online livestream.
So that was New Years’ Eve 2011-12. It was vastly different from the Marxist-Leninist-German-Turkish New Years’ Eve party of 2010-11, but both were enjoyable in their own way. As I keep writing, 2011 was a hell of a year, possibly the best of my life, and while I did get worried for a moment it did end up going out with an appropriate bang. I don’t imagine it’s possible for 2012 to top 2011, but you never know what could happen…
Without a doubt, I’ve been to more places and more kinds of places this year than any other year in my life. To close out the year, I’ll compose a list of every city or town I was in this year in alphabetical order.
Of course if I were to include every single town I passed through by car or by train the list would be enormous, so I’ll make the cut-off time one hour. If I spent at least one hour in the city, it goes on the list. That means my 1:15 flight layover in Chicago counts (I did see the skyline so that city was a part of my experiences for the year) but my 15-minute train changeover in Baden-Baden does not.
I returned last night from my last major travel adventure of a year chock full of them. I’d been itching to see another part of Japan ever since I arrived in August, but working five days a week makes that somewhat difficult, not to mention the fact that I haven’t had much time to save up a great deal of money yet so the spending-sprees must be kept to a minimum. It was a costly trip, but worth every yen.
Kyoto is like the Rome of Japan in that thousands of years of history are all right next to each other with the ancient and the modern meshed together wherever you go. It was the capital of Japan from the 800s to the 1800s, so there is a great deal of history to be found. Unfortunately, I’m not nearly as familiar with Japanese history as I was with Roman history when I went to Rome, so I couldn’t appreciate it as much. The overall feeling was simply one of profound satisfaction: This is it. I did it. I came to Japan and now I’m experiencing what it has to offer.
So I won’t go into quite as much detail as I did with the Rome trip, but I will post a great deal of photos as I snapped several hundred. The pictures will tell as much of the story as my words. [Don’t forget to let your mouse-pointer hover over the images to read the captions.]
Day 1
After taking the bus from Togane to Tokyo I got my first taste of another uniquely Japanese experience: a ride on the Shinkansen (or bullet train). While expensive, the price is comparable to the Deutsche Bahn, but with the DB you can buy tickets at a major discount if you purchase well in advance of your trip, which doesn’t seem to be the case with the Shinkansen. Fare from Tokyo to Kyoto is 11,000 yen (about 140 USD), and the distance is 372 km. Coincidentally, the distance from Hannover to Offenburg is very close—about 412—and the non-discounted price on the Deutsche Bahn is 110 Euros, about 140 USD. But the Shinkansen is much, much faster than the ICE trains in Germany. It took me 4.5 hours to get from Hannover to Offenburg (if there were no delays) whereas it took less than 2.5 to get from Tokyo to Kyoto. Maximum speed of the Shinkansen is 300 km/hr (186 mph). Once the thing gets going you really feel like you’re riding a bullet.
I got another unexpected treat during the journey—I didn’t know this but the rain rides right by Mount Fuji, so I got to see the most recognizable landmark in Japan. It was tricky but I managed to get a photo. That was truly awesome.
I’d left Tokyo at 12:30 so I arrived in Kyoto at 3:00. The sun sets now at about 4:30 so I knew there wouldn’t be much time for sight-seeing on the first day, and my only plan was to find my hotel and check-in, then have dinner and walk around the city. Thanks to my I-phone I was able to orient myself towards the hotel without much trouble, and even check the internet to reassure myself that I knew exactly where it was.
Along the way I kept passing by interesting sights. I came across my first shrine within five minutes of leaving the station, just a tiny little thing on a side-street. The people passing by must have thought it curious that I was even bothering to take a photo when there must be thousands more just like it in the city.
I discovered to my dismay that my camera’s battery was nearly dead. I’d charged it before the bonenkei but apparently I’d drained it far more than I thought on that occasion. I hadn’t brought my charger, but I noticed an electronic shop on the way and considered stopping in to buy a new one but I also had my I-phone which can take pictures so I thought I could just settle for that.
About a block north of the electronics store I came to the first major Buddhist temple I’d see on the trip. Unable to resist, I walked through the gate and went inside to check it out and take sub-par I-phone pictures of the stuff there. I went inside the main temple (removing my shoes beforehand of course) and took in the awesomeness within, which unfortunately you are banned from taking pictures of. I got there just in time too, because they were closing the doors to the shrine with all the golden statues and artwork just when I got in, so I was able to catch the last glimpse of it.
I’d come to find that Buddhist temples in Kyoto are like churches in Rome. They’re everywhere, but when you go inside you can’t help but be overwhelmed with their aesthetic magnificence every time. But it’s more than just aesthetics—something essential about the spirit of the culture can be felt there. In those churches you just feel like this is distinctly Europe. In the temples it is distinctly Japan.
I went out the side entrance and circled back around to head out the main gate where I came in. As I was exiting an old Japanese man came right up to me with a smile, saying “Hello! Welcome to Japan!” This guy was just radiating friendliness, so I warmly greeted him and we got into a conversation. He wanted to know my impressions of Japan and what I thought were the differences between American and Japanese culture. He says he likes Americans because they are very honest and direct, unlike the Japanese. He also said that he doesn’t like British because they’re not direct either and often can be rude. But he agreed that these are just generalizations and there are very nice British people as well as rude Americans.
He said he’s learning English by attempting to translate sentences from novels, and he busted out three sheets of paper with translated sentences and asked me if I wouldn’t mind telling him if he got them right. I was slightly wary, worried that he might keep me all evening, but I agreed and sat next to him on the steps to the temple as he went through each sentence and asked me if they were correct. Most of them were perfect, but I was able to make a few corrections for him. It is my specialty after all, though I didn’t tell him I was an English teacher because he never asked. Occasionally he’d ask me what the meaning of a word was, and he seemed to get a little annoyed when it had the same meaning as a word he already knew. He knew the word “figurative” already, and asked me why English had to be so complicated and why we always had to use one word to mean something else. In English one word can mean many things, but he said that in Japanese one word just means one thing. I realized later that that’s not true at all—for example the word kami can mean paper, hair, or god—but I didn’t disagree with him at the time.
He had a very jolly laugh, which I heard frequently especially when explaining words like “lewd” or “cannibal”. He asked me if women can run around naked in America because he’d been to Miami Beach and there were lots of topless women but the police didn’t arrest them, and I explained that Miami Beach is just an exception. And he asked me if there are people in America who eat people, and while I said there weren’t he reminded me of Native Americans, some tribes of which did indeed practice cannibalism.
When we’d gone through all three sheets of seemingly random sentences from random novels, he thanked me and said goodbye, apparently not unaware of the rudeness of keeping someone locked in a conversation for too long. I got his name: Shoji, which I assume is one of those words with multiple meanings because I know it as “sliding door”.
Evening was turning to twilight as I headed up the road in the direction of the hotel, and in spite of the help of my I-phone it still took some doing to finally find it, by which time it was fully dark. I was staying at the “First Cabin” which I’d booked online beforehand. It was a “capsule hotel” but apparently much more upscale than most such hotels as I discovered later. The sleeping capsules were all relatively spacious, and while they had only magnetized curtains to open and close there was a lock-box under the bed to keep your valuables. The restroom and shower rooms were communal, but everyone got their own capsule (at least if you’d booked a single-room). The male and female sleeping areas were segregated, and the sleeping areas themselves were behind thick doors beyond which you were supposed to keep quiet. It being the middle of the week and probably an off-season, there were only a handful of other occupied capsules, so it was indeed very quiet except for the occasional ruckus on the street outside. There were no windows, so day was exactly the same as night in terms of lighting, which turned out to be very helpful in not waking up early.
But I didn’t stay too long when I first arrived. I just emptied my back-pack of the excessive clothes and went back outside and into the night. I walked around the block looking for a place to eat, and settled on an udon restaurant nearby. In Europe I always felt weird eating at a restaurant alone, but not at these places. There were five other men there when I sat down, also eating alone. It would seem that dining-out solo is extremely common in Japan, at least for men.
When I finished eating I decided I would head back to the electronics store and just see if they had a camera charger, because I wasn’t satisfied at all with the photos my I-phone was taking and figured it would be worth the price of a new charger to be able to take quality pictures of Kyoto. The photos would last forever, after all.
I went inside and showed my camera and battery to one of the people who worked there, and he knew exactly what he was doing as within five minutes he’d taken me to the counter where his colleague handed me the exact charger I needed and got me checked out. It was 3400 yen, but I did not regret the price. The charger I currently have is actually from Germany so I’ve needed to use both the charger and a bulky adapter up to this point, but this is small and much more conducive to travel.
I didn’t want to go out drinking because I wanted to be fresh for tomorrow, but I didn’t want to just go back to the hotel and go to bed so early (it was only 6:30) so I checked my I-phone map and planned a long route back to the hotel which would take me along the river. Along the way I was texting back and forth with Lily, the French girl I’d met at Ben’s Christmas Party who would be coming with her boyfriend Jack and two of her friends from France the next day. They were considering stopping at Nara first (Nara was the very first capital of Japan but for less than a hundred years) but I convinced them to do that on their way back because otherwise I’d barely get to see them. She said they could probably arrive about 1:00 the next day.
It was a lovely walk along the river and I took a few night photos, but my good camera was still dead so I had to take them with the I-phone and they didn’t come out well. But I was feeling very good, experiencing that old familiar buzz of being in a new city for the first time. I got back to the main road leading back to the hotel far sooner than I’d imagined, so I busted out the I-phone map again and decided to walk a good distance north to Nijo castle and then circle back around.
That turned out to be a very long walk indeed, and by the time I got there my legs were hurting and I’d already worked up another appetite. The castle itself looked very impressive but it was hard to tell in the dark. I figured I’d go back there the next day, then headed back to the hotel, stopping at a Chinese restaurant for a second dinner along the way.
I got back to the hotel at a respectable late hour of 9:00, and spent the next two hours in my capsule reading a book on Japanese history I’d downloaded to my Kindle a few weeks ago. I got to the part where they moved the capital to Kyoto while I was in Kyoto, so that was pretty cool. At about 11:00 I turned out the lights and had a nice long sleep.
Day 2
Included in the price of my hotel stay was a breakfast, and while I was expecting little more than the standard continental breakfast-buffet, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that they actually prepare a bona-fide genuine Japanese breakfast for you including soup, a bowl of rice, some vegetables, and a strip of delicious fish. That filled me up quite nicely and fueled me for the whole first half of the day.
Before leaving I took advantage of the hotel’s wireless internet to boost the speed of my I-phone and do a little internet research on things to do in Kyoto. I had a week-old Facebook message from a girl named Yuki who lives in Kyoto and whom I’d asked for recommendations. She was a colleague of mine at the Doubletree in Santa Barbara before moving back to Japan, and while I would have really liked to have met up with her while I was there she said she had other plans. Though she’s always been nothing but friendly to me, I don’t think she likes me all that much but being Japanese she would almost certainly never come right and out and just tell me flatly that she has no desire to see me.
But she did give me a bunch of recommendations, one of which was just a block away from the hotel: Nishiki Market, a five-block stretch of shops where you can supposedly find every kind of food you can imagine and a whole lot that you can’t. I also looked up the “palace of the squeaking floor” which my Grandpa said was a must-see, and while nothing matching that exact phrase came up I believe I found what he meant and that it was actually in Nijo castle. So my plan for the morning was to head to Nishiki Market and then back to Nijo castle, which would hopefully take me to about 1 p.m.
I found the market quickly enough, and proceeded to walk through it and behave like a reverse-Japanese tourist by taking photos all along the way. It was indeed a phenomenon, but I’m afraid pictures can’t adequately capture in any more than words can. The most distinct thing about this place was the smell—a very fishy aroma but mixed with other things, altering slightly between this and that as you walked along.
At the end of the market I came to an intersection with another enclosed street filled with shops of different kinds. But straight ahead was a Buddhist shrine so naturally I had to go in and take pictures, the most curious thing about it (other than the location) being a mechanical animal that moved around whenever someone put a coin in the slot. That’s one way to solicit donations.
I walked north through the shopping area, surprised to find another two Buddhist shrines along the way. The juxtaposition of commercial area and Holy Ground was alarming—one of the shrines was literally directly across from a sporting goods store. It would be like having a church in a shopping mall. But that particular shrine had a very amusing sign, as apparently its location does lead some tourists to believe they can shop there too.
I finally got out onto another main road and checked the I-phone to confirm if I just headed due west I’d eventually get to Nijo castle. It’s a wonder that I ever managed to travel without an I-phone. Before I got it I might as well have lived in the Dark Ages. Every time I was unsure of my location I’d have to unfold this giant and unwieldy map and stand there like an idiot looking around me for some street signs to hopefully match up with the streets on the map. In Japan that would be extremely difficult because most of the street signs—when there were any—are in Kanji. But with the I-phone you just open the map app, wait for a satellite to pinpoint your location, and bam you know exactly where you are. If you’re not sure which direction you’re pointing, just open the compass app and bam you know where you’re going. God bless technology!
When I was approaching the castle I noticed a lot of disappointed-looking tourists walking back in the other direction, and I grew apprehensive. There was a line at the ticket counter, so I didn’t lose all hope immediately, but I soon spotted a sign that said the castle was closed from December 26 to January 2. The most convenient possible dates! It turned out the line at the counter was for tourists to go up to the unfortunate lady there and get the news directly from her mouth that one of the most must-see sites in Kyoto just happened to be closed during the exact dates they were there, but can we at least get an information pamphlet?
I’d gotten a text from Lily saying they were running late and probably wouldn’t arrive until 3:00, and it was 11:30 now so I had much more time to kill. One of the other sites recommended by Yuki as well as the teachers at my school was the Kinkakuji, or “Golden Pavillion”. I-phone time. I checked the map and saw that it was quite a ways away to the north, probably at least an hour of up-hill walking to get there. And there were no subway stations anywhere near it. There was, however, a taxi right there outside the castle. I went up and asked the driver in Japanese how much it would cost to get there, and he answered me in English “about one thousand seven hundred”. In my mind I’d been thinking it would be at least three thousand, so this sounded pretty good to me and I decided to go for it. The ten-minute ride actually ended up only costing 1,530 making this the first time a cab-driver has ever over-quoted me. It only occurred to me a few minutes later that this was the same basic price as the much longer trip from Togane to Tokyo, and while my mind had been dwelling on the lack of a nearby subway station I’d forgotten the existence of busses.
But there was no use dwelling on it. Just another twenty bucks spent, and it wasn’t a complete waste as I got there much quicker and easier than if I’d had to figure out the bus situation.
So I headed up to the temple and paid the admission price (less than the cab fare) to go inside. It was a whole complex like most Buddhist temples with multiple buildings and shrines galore, but the main feature and the reason it’s such a popular tourist attraction is the pavilion out on the pond, an absolutely gorgeous building in the loveliest setting imaginable. According to the info pamphlet, the pavilion was originally built in 1220 though it’s since undergone several restorations. It’s three stories tall and each story is a different type of architecture, the 1st floor being “palace style”, the 2nd “samurai style” and the 3rd “Zen temple style”. If I knew anything about Japanese architecture I’d probably find that fascinating.
I got my obligatory pictures of me in front of the temple and posted one to Facebook (another super-awesome thing you can do with an I-phone). The guy I asked to take my picture was a white guy and I assumed he was American so I spoke English to him, but he didn’t actually say anything to me but communicated with only facial expressions. On the other side of the pavilion I heard him and the people he was with speaking German.
I figured “what the hell?” and went up to them. “Entschuldigung,” I said. “Sind Sie Deutsch?” Ja, apparently they were. “Woher kommen Sie?” Apparently they kommen from München, but they spoke High German well enough. So I got into a nice little chat with them and got to know what they were doing here and they got to know about what I was doing here. Apparently the girl is studying in Kyoto and her brother and parents were just there for the holidays to visit. How nice that they would do that even with all the radiation-phobia in Germany. They were going to Tokyo for New Years’ but didn’t know if there would be anything going on there, and I informed them that there would be fireworks at the Tokyo Sky Tree. When I told them that was in Asakusa they got excited because that’s where their hotel is, so that’s what they’ll be doing for New Years’. I hope I’m right about those fireworks—I only heard about it through Stephen so if I’m mistaken they’re going to be thinking bad things about me on New Years’ Eve.
But it was a pleasant little chat and I was pleased with myself for still being able to hold my own in German. It’s much much easier than Japanese anyway. The only problem is that now that I am speaking Japanese much more than German, the whole foreign-language part of my brain gets a little mixed up and I want to say a Japanese word like muzukashi (difficult) when I should say schwer, and I could not prevent myself from saying hai instead of ja, which I noticed them chuckling at. But still, I had to give myself a pat on the back.
A bit further up the pathway I was stopped by an Asian guy with a big fancy camera who asked me to take a photo of him with the pavilion in the background. I happily obliged, and afterwards when I started to walk away he came up to me and asked me if I was travelling alone. I said that I was alone until 3:00 at which point I’d be meeting some friends at the station. He was from Korea and travelling through Japan with friends but he’d told them to go on ahead as he wanted to visit Kyoto alone, apparently preferring solo travel because—among other advantages—you meet more people. I love solo travel too both for that reason and the fact that you get to plan your own itinerary and take in everything all on your own.
I asked him for his name and he said, “English name or Korean name?” as apparently it’s popular in Asia to have one of each. His English name was John and his Korean name was something very hard to pronounce and which I forgot, so I’ll refer to him as John. We ended up spending the next hour or so together, as I had no other plan until my friends came. After leaving the pavilion area we decided to just walk down the road and stop at the two or three temples along the way. I learned a bit about Korea from him and he learned a bit about America—as well as a little about Japan because this was his first time visiting—from me. He was a great guy and luckily appreciated my American sense of humor, which I found interesting because the Asian sense of humor is so different. But he even likes shows like South Park which is about as American as it gets.
The first temple we came across was small but beautiful, and absolutely no other tourists were there. They were all up at the Golden Pavilion, and this place was tucked away nice and secret. We could have gone inside for 500 yen but he’s a student and therefore has to pinch every penny so we didn’t.
While there I got a text from Lily saying they’d actually be arriving at 2:00, and since it was now 1:15 and we were as far away from the station as it gets I figured I had to start heading back. A cab ride would be just too expensive so we found the nearest bus-stop and asked the people there to help us figure out which busses to take. To do the next thing on his list, John had to take the bus before mine, so I bid him farewell and that was the last I saw of him. I typed up my name on his I-phone and told him to find me on Facebook though, so I’ll probably be hearing from him soon. God bless technology.
The bus ride was about 40 minutes and I ended up arriving at the station at about 2:15, which was perfect timing because Lily and the others arrived at the same time. After some texts and phone calls back and forth we finally found each other at the entrance, and for the rest of the day it was no longer solo travel.
Lily’s boyfriend Jack is American and her two other friends are from France: Hugo and Gauthier (pronounced like ‘Gucchi’). They were nice guys and spoke surprisingly good English though not as good as Lily who speaks perfectly.
The first thing we did was find a place to eat, and settled on a Chinese restaurant of the same chain as the one I’d eaten at the night before. I’d only ever hung out with Jack and Lily at the party two weeks ago and then it was only briefly, so I got a much better sense of the dynamic of how this group would be during our meal. The two guys kept pretty quiet, while Jack pretty much constantly cracked jokes, most of which were quite funny. Lily and Jack were very affectionate and playful, but not so much so that it was annoying. It was a nice group overall.
It was after 3:00 by the time we finished eating so most of the tourist things would be closing, and I suggested we head to the Nene no michi (the path of Nene) which is something Yuki recommended and which sounded awesome when I looked it up in the morning. They had a French guidebook for Kyoto but it wasn’t in there, but I showed Jack the description of it on my I-phone and he agreed that it sounded very cool. It’s basically a long strip of road in East Kyoto, starting with a shrine and ending a temple, where modern architecture is banned so it’s all old-style buildings. I figured it would be perfectly for an evening stroll.
One thing I quickly discovered about this group is that they don’t like to walk, so we found the nearest tram station and rode it two stops to the road leading up the Yasaka Shrine where the Nene no michi begins. Another thing about the group is that it gets easily distracted, but that’s mostly due to Lily who not only likes to shop but likes to check out all the cute little souvenirs she comes across. There being a large number of souvenir shops leading up the shrine, it took us a little while to get there.
But we got there by 4:00, giving us a half-hour of sunlight and half-hour of twilight for the walk. The Yasaka shrine was pretty cool, but from there I wasn’t exactly sure which way to go so I asked some of the Japanese workers there to point us in the right direction whenever I wasn’t sure.
One of the curious differences between Kyoto and Tokyo is that the people in Kyoto actually speak English whereas in Tokyo they almost never do. Even though I always asked for directions in Japanese, nearly every single one of them responded in English, even if their English was poor. The Japanese people in Tokyo probably speak just as well as in Kyoto, but for whatever reason the Kyoto people are less shy about putting their English to use.
We eventually found the path and headed down it, also turning off to head up some stairs to a temple at the top of a hill with a giant statue against the mountainside and very awesome view of the city below. It would have been nicer if there had been a bit more light, but it was still pretty breathtaking. The coolest part was seeing all of the old-style roofs in the foreground and all the modern architecture in the background.
We headed back down and to the final stretch of the Nene no michi just as twilight was turning to night, and Lily stopped at more souvenir shops and Gauthier stopped at a place selling some interesting food called mitarashi dango, which Jack explained were balls of rice meal drenched in a sweet sauce. They smelled delicious and Gautheir said there were good so I got some as well. They were okay but nothing spectacular.
We were very close to the Kiyomizu, which Jack said was Kyoto’s most famous temple. He’s only 24 but he’s lived in Japan for 5 years and has been to Kyoto once before so he knew the most about it out of all of us. He said it was a big temple on stilts and very impressive, but as there was no sunlight left we decided not to go. I put that on my list of things to see the next time I come to Kyoto, along with Nijo castle.
After some discussion it was decided that the next destination would be a place called Loft, which was just a department store but apparently with a lot of crazy things to see. The deciding factor in going there was the fact that it was open until 9:00.
We took the subway to the center of town and then started heading toward the store, Jack discovering along the way that it was actually closer to the subway station we’d departed from, but we got to see plenty of cool things along the way. We were back at the same enclosed shopping-space that I’d been to in the morning after passing from Nishiki market.
Jack was shocked to come across a Shakey’s Pizza there, as that’s an American pizza chain you can’t even find on the East coast, but the group decided we’d eat there after the Loft. I’d already eaten Japanese food in Kyoto and I like pizza, so I didn’t argue. At least it wasn’t McDonalds, though apparently their group had eaten at McDonald’s several times throughout their travels.
We got to Loft at 7:00 and to me it looked like just another department store, but I was having fun so I didn’t care. Lily wanted to do some shopping so we agreed we could split up and meet back downstairs at 7:45. Lily wanted to make it 8:00 but I couldn’t imagine spending a whole hour at a department store. It turned out we did anyway.
But it actually was a lot of fun. I hung out with Jack the whole time and we just made amusing comments about all the things we came across, like at the section of diaries where they had a specific diary for everything, including a wine journal. I like wine as much as the next guy, but the idea of recording every type of wine you drink in a journal just seems like the quintessence of snobbery to me.
At any rate, Lily found a few things to buy and Hugo got something as well, and by 8:00 we were out the door and on our way to Shakey’s. There you paid about 900 yen for all-you-can-eat, going up to get fresh slices of pizza whenever they put out a new pie, as well as spaghetti or—probably unique to the Japanese Shakey’s—curry rice. Gauthier made the mistake of going for some curry rice, which fills you up much faster than pizza and is undoubtedly the reason they include it. But I stuffed myself with mediocre pizza (thankfully most of it was meat-free) and got my money’s worth. The conversation was pleasant and filled with Jack’s humor, and before we knew it we’d spent an hour and forty-five minutes there.
At 9:45 we were back outside, and the next thing the group decided to do was go into an arcade. There were about seventeen arcades spread throughout that shopping area so we had no trouble finding one (called “Game Panic”) and we went in and played some racing games. Only four people could play at a time so I opted out of the first one but tried my hand at Mario Kart, which I’m an expert at on Wii but which is much much different at an arcade so I only came in 3rd. The only other money I spent was on one round of Pachinko, which I’d never tried before so figured I had to at least once. I found it to be just as stupid as I’d thought it would be when I heard it described—just shooting dozens of little marbles into the game area and hoping they bounce of the pegs just the right way to earn you points. Its cousin pinball is only ten-thousand times more fun.
One of the Japanese workers approached Lily and told her she wasn’t allowed to take pictures, so I got away with the ones I took.
After that they decided to start working on getting to their hotel which was on the other side of town. All their bags were in lockers at the station so it was going to be quite a slog and full of subway-riding, and it was late enough for me so we parted ways and I headed back to the hotel to get in one more hour of reading before passing out.
Day 3
There were a few more people at the hotel on my second night, and much to my dismay one of them was a snorer. But I turned the air vent on in my room and covered my ears with the headphones they have for TV-watching and that was enough to drown out the sound and get me to pass out.
I tried to sleep as late as possible as Jack and Lily warned me they’re late-sleepers and might not be up until 10:00. Ah, the young ‘uns. That’s how I was at 24 as well, but somehow in the last three years I’ve completely transformed from a night-person to a morning-person and now I can hardly sleep past 7:00 let alone 10:00. If I’m tired enough I can sleep until 8:00 but that’s it, and that’s how late I slept that morning but I stayed in bed until 8:45.
I shaved, showered, and had breakfast and was ready to check-out of the hotel at 9:45. One of the things we said we’d be doing in the morning was going to the Geisha village, and I tried to figure out where that was with the internet on my I-phone and found the road that was mentioned. It was directly west of where I was, and I knew their hotel was west, so I figured I’d just walk there and hopefully they’d wake up and meet me there with good timing.
It was a very pleasant walk through the cold, clear, Kyoto morning. Naturally I planned my route to take me by some temples and shrines along the way. These were smaller ones with no tourists at all, so I felt self-conscious taking pictures while the faithful went there to drop their coin, ring the bell, and say their prayer (lord only knows to whom), but I did anyway. I dropped a coin in myself in compensation.
I arrived at the stretch of road that the internet had led me to believe was the Geisha district but there was nary a Geisha in sight. It was now 10:45 and there’d been no word from Lily & Co. yet so I decided I’d better just make plans without them. There was a nearby train station so I went there and figured out how to use the train and subway to get back to the eastern part of town where I’d walk south through a park with a bunch of temples and eventually get back to the Nene no michi and the Kiyomizu. Once I’d seen the Kiyomizu I’d be finished and then head home, whether or not I met up with the group again.
While I was on the train, Lily texted me at 11:00 informing me they’d overslept and it would be at least another hour before they were ready. I said I was heading to the Kiyomizu but to let me know their plans and maybe I’d change mine and meet up with them if it wasn’t too much trouble.
I somehow got to where I wanted to go without any trouble at all, proud of myself for figuring out the Kyoto public transportation system all on my own, and I headed from there up a hill where I quickly came across another temple complex. Obviously, I had to go inside and take a bunch of pictures, so that’s exactly what I did. I took off my shoes, went in and paid the 500 yen entry fee, then went inside to the awesome Japanese-as-can-be building and read the information sheet I’d received with my ticket.
The place is called Sho-ren-in which belongs to the Enryaku Temple in Mt. Hiei, which is apparently the main temple of the Tendai Buddhist sect. There was no date of construction on the sheet but luckily we live in the age of Wikipedia so I could find out it was constructed around the year 800. So yeah—damn, that’s old.
You could walk in and out and around this place, which was as lovely as can be with gorgeous Zen gardens complete with waterfalls and koi. You had to keep taking your shoes off and putting them back on again, but that was a small price to pay to take in this scenery.
I got my fill of that and then continued up the hill, getting another text from Lily informing me that they’d be going to Pontocho, the Geisha village, which was very close to me. Apparently I’d researched the wrong Geisha village that morning. I checked and it was indeed just a 15-minute walk from where I was, but at that point I had arrived at the top of the hill and there was a gigantic gate with a freakin’ stairway to heaven beyond it just beckoning me in. I called Jack and said I had to check this out and he said to take my time because it would probably take them awhile to get there as well.
So I went up the stairs and into yet another giant temple-complex—this one called Chion-in—and it was the most impressive one I’ve seen by far. There were giant shrines everywhere and at least three temples spread throughout the area. I heard chanting coming from one of them so I took off my shoes and walked up the steps to peek inside. There was a giant golden Buddha and a monk sitting off to the side chanting and striking something with a mallet every couple of minutes, and a few faithful knelt at the altar getting their Zen on. As tempting as it was to take a picture, I decided not to be disrespectful.
I circled around the main building which looked like a palace made completely of wood, and when I got to the back I noticed an entrance similar to the other temples with boxes for people to take off their shoes. I didn’t see any tourists walking around there so I wasn’t sure I could go in, but there were no signs in English telling me I couldn’t so I decided to go for it.
I managed to walk around for a good five minutes, even stealing one very nice photo of the place, before a monk spotted me and made an X with his hands and said “No”. I immediately launched into ignorant-tourist-mode, giving him the sumimasen and gomen nasai and even using the word deguchi for exit, which he gladly showed me to. He showed no anger but I’m sure he was annoyed. But seriously—that must happen a hundred times a day. If they don’t want tourists entering they really ought to put up English signs.
In any case, I walked back to the main area and down some steps, ready to start heading to Pontocho, but there was an entrance to a Zen garden right there and I couldn’t resist. So I paid the 300 yen for entry and went inside. There were a couple of Japanese women on a bridge looking down at the water and remarking at the size of the enormous fish in the pond. They were indeed the largest fish I’ve ever seen in such a pond, which was appropriate as it was part of the largest temple.
The pamphlet I got from the Zen garden (was I supposed to pay for entry to the other part?) is what informed me the place was called Chion-in, built to honor Honen (1133-1212) the founder of the Jodo Buddhist sect. It’s the main temple of Jodo Buddhism (which I’d never heard of before).
The Zen garden was quite lovely, but somehow not as charming as the one at Sho-ren-in. I got my pictures and then stood at the pond for a moment, attempting to get some Zen going but distracted by all the other tourists taking pictures, and then my phone buzzed informing me that the others were almost at the Sanjo station near Pontocho.
From where I was it would take me about 20 minutes to walk there, but there were taxis right at the bottom of the temple steps and fare to the station was ‘only’ 640 yen so I took one and met the others just shortly after they got there.
From there we had to head back across the river and then through some side-streets to get to Pontocho, where supposedly there would be Geishas doing their whole Geisha-thing. We were slow to get across the river because everyone—myself included—wanted to take pictures. We definitely took our fair share.
We got across the river and found ourselves walking down a very nice road where we again had to stop and take pictures.
Finally, we found our way to the street where the Geisha village was supposed to be, and—you guessed it—took pictures.
We continued to walk down along the street but just like for me in the morning, there was not a Geisha in sight. It must not be Geisha season. What we did find were cats. Cute little cats and kittens in a little opening between two buildings with stairs that led down to the river. Naturally, photos were obligatory.
We got to the end of the whole road without spotting a single Geisha, but it was still a nice road so it wasn’t like it was a waste. It was about 1:30 now and I was getting hungry. They hadn’t eaten breakfast so they could eat too, and while we’d just passed about two dozen Japanese restaurants on that road we’d been walking down, the others wanted to go to Burger King. Having never been to a Burger King in Japan before (they are just as rare here as they are in Germany) I figured I wouldn’t argue—it’s still a new experience.
Turns out Burger King in Japan is a lot like Burger King anywhere else, only according to the others it tastes better. I had a spicy chicken sandwich with teriyaki which I’ve never had in any other Burger King so I couldn’t compare, but it was definitely very tasty. Better than the Chinese food from before anyway.
It was 2:20 when we were finished, and the next item on their list was the Manga Museum. Not being into manga at all and wanting to get home at a reasonable hour, I bid them farewell and began my long journey back to Togane. I’ll see them again soon, if not on New Years’ Eve then on January 2, when they’ll be back in Togane and I’m invited to come out to eat with them.
And that was pretty much the end of my first trip to Kyoto. I took the subway back to the main station, and when I asked one of the workers there where to go to buy Shinkansen tickets he just dropped everything he was doing and took me to a machine where he completely walked me through the process. Not only that, but he pointed me in the exact direction of the track I needed to go to and wished me a pleasant journey. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but the Japanese people are extremely friendly, helpful people.
The Shinkansen ride through the sunset was a pleasant experience, and after a quick and painless changeover to the bus in Tokyo (which I made by exactly 3 minutes before I would have had to wait another hour) I was on the way back to Togane. I left Kyoto at 2:52. I arrived back in Togane at 6:17. You can go places fast in Japan.
And that was the last big journey of 2011, though not the last adventure. That will come tomorrow night when I go with Trey and a whole bunch of others back to Tokyo to a giant party at a place overlooking the bay that apparently has acrobats and will be raging all night long until the first sunrise of 2012 rises over the land of the rising sun. I’m not sure what I did to deserve a year this incredible, but an incredible year it has most certainly been.
I wrote to my boss at Interac yesterday to find out if it was okay to take pictures at my school’s bonenkai (end-of-the-year party) and got the go-ahead, so I’m pleased to present you with a rare opportunity to actually see the people I work with!
In spite of the mild cold that’s been lingering all week, I was very much looking forward to the bonenkai. The last party with colleagues I went to had been a bit of a disappointment, but because this was the special end-of-the-year party and we were having it at a hotel in Narita where anyone who wanted could spend the night and thus not have to worry about driving home, I knew there was much more potential for some serious loosening-up on the part of my normally always very serious and professional colleagues.
I got a ride to the hotel with one of the teachers who was at my welcome party back in September, and he also drove the school groundskeeper who is an extraordinarily nice and friendly person, and whom I learned on the ride also loves to travel. When he found out I was from New York he got very excited because that one place he really wants to go. Apparently he’s a big Yankees fan and wants to see a game at Yankees Stadium, though unfortunately for him that’s probably almost as expensive as flying to New York at this point.
It was strange to be back in Narita for the first time since orientation week, but at least it wasn’t the same hotel. But the ratio of Japanese-to-foreigners in the town of the international airport, especially in a hotel, is almost one-to-one so it’s like a completely different world. But in the room where the party was held, the ratio was the same as ever: about fifty to one.
Seating was determined by random draw, which I’m now learning is usually how it’s done in Japan, and I got seated at the end of a table right next to where all the top administrators were sitting (though I doubt that happened at random) and coincidentally next to Mrs. S- which made communication much easier. We waited for everyone to get there and at about 6:30 it was time to pour drinks and do the kampai.
Almost immediately after the toast, we all filed out to the hotel buffet to fix ourselves plates for dinner. Unlike at the last party the food selection was decidedly un-Japanese, and I ended up eating some salmon, rizzoto, and broccoli and cauliflower. Maybe it’s the cold, but the food was terribly bland and flavorless, and somehow the broccoli and cauliflower was the best part.
As with the other party, not everyone was drinking because not everyone was spending the night at the hotel. But a lot more of the men were getting a lot more drunk than the other time and the mood was considerably more jovial. There were the tiny glasses like before that every few minutes someone would come to top off my beer, but after dinner one of the school administrators offered me a glass of whiskey so I switched to that.
It being a Japanese party, there naturally had to be some special events. The first was a game of Bingo in which the winners would come to the front and draw a number from a box to determine which of the presents every teacher had bought and wrapped for the party they would get. Unfortunately no one remembered to tell me about this so I hadn’t brought a present, but apparently that didn’t exclude me from the Bingo game. They had an actual electronic random number generator for the Bingo and the teacher who drove me was the one who operated it. It took awhile but eventually people started winning and going up to get their presents, many of them kind enough to pose for me when they did.
I got my Bingo late in the game, at the same time as four other people, but I made sure to get my victory picture taken as well. My present was a little piggy-bank in the shape of what looks like a Pokemon character. Other people got things as random as a pillow, some kind of cooking-set and an umbrella.
The second event of the night was a competition between the first, second, and third grade teachers. One teacher from each grade would come to the front and answer a few questions determined by each of the school’s departments, so there would be a math round, a history round, and so on. For the music round, the teachers would be shown a picture of a famous composer and had to write down who it was. I actually knew the first one—Bach—when none of the competing teachers did, but I didn’t recognize any of the others. Every few rounds, new teachers would come to the front.
For the English round, Mrs. T- had asked me to do something I did for the Jeopardy game with the students. All three teachers would be given the second-grade English textbook and I’d read a sentence from the chapter on Mother Theresa (yes, Japanese students apparently learn about Mother Theresa in English class), and they’d have to find the sentence and read the next one. The hard part was that they’d have to understand my directions in English, and then pronounce the English words properly. I had Mrs. S- take a video of that part.
The most interesting round to me was the Japanese round, as the teachers would all be shown a rare kanji and have to write what they thought it was in hiragana. It hadn’t occurred to me because I’m so illiterate in Japanese, but even native Japanese people don’t know all the kanji.
I think the first-grade teachers won the competition but I’m not sure. After that, there was some time for just plain and simple drinking and mingling. One of the women who had been running the competition, the one with the glasses in the santa-hat, sat down next to me and did her very best to strike up a conversation with me about music. She did very well and we had a nice chat. Apparently her favorite musician in Michael Jackson (at this point it’s pretty clear he’s way more popular in Japan than in America) but she also likes rock music and told me she likes Green Day, apparently having noticed that they were on the mix CD I’d been giving the students as presents.
Incidentally, the super-cute secretary was there as well but her complete lack of English-speaking ability made it impossible to interact with her beyond asking her to snap a couple photos of me. (She’s the one whose head is in the foreground of the video).
Mr. I-, the teacher who had helped me out during the whole lost-key fiasco, had arrived late to the party and when he did was immediately poured a glass of beer and hovered over as he proceeded to drink a few sips and then have it topped up over and over again, apparently in an effort to get him caught up to the other drinkers. During the last part of the evening I and the aforementioned female-teacher got into a conversation with him about what our favorite and least favorite classes were. It’s interesting that we all basically have the same impression.
Eventually it was time for the single hand-clap to signify the end of the party, but apparently it wasn’t over yet. Mrs. T- explained to me that this was just the end of the “first party” but the “second party” would continue for everyone who stayed. Most of the teachers went home (mostly the women) but those of us who were drinking and planning to spend the night stayed behind, including the top administrators. I went out to the lobby to say goodbye to those who were leaving, but got distracted by the giant plastic Santa.
Back in the party room, things were finally getting to where I’d hoped they would from the first time I heard about the concept of an enkai. Almost everyone who remained was drinking and by this point they all had a nice buzz. One of the two vice principals in particular was incredibly loose and jovial, such a radical departure from his normally serious-demeanor. He even shared a glass of whiskey with me. This was what I’d been hoping for: to see my colleagues with the mask fully off.
But it wasn’t too long before everyone started heading up to their rooms to go to sleep for the night. It was only about midnight and I wasn’t tired at all, but luckily Mr. I- and one of the other teachers, Mr. T-, were willing to consider possibly going out for more drinks somewhere in Narita.
After putting my things in the room we went down to the lobby and tried to get a few others to come join us, but it would just be the three of us. I looked up the word “adventure” in the Japanese dictionary on my I-phone—it’s adobencha.
We got in a taxi and told him to drive to the Narita train station. Oddly enough, I was actually the most familiar with Narita out of all of us thanks to the orientation week. I told them we could go to a karaoke bar (that would be the infamous “The Cage” that I didn’t end up going to) or to a British Pub (the infamous “The Barge Inn” where I had my first unsuccessful attempt at flirting with Japanese girls on the last night of training). They decided on the British Pub and I knew exactly how to get there from the station.
So there I was once again at The Barge, a place full of memories that I never expected I’d return to, but being there again was really cool. Naturally I had my eye open for Ame, Yuka, and the other two girls from that momentous night, but they were nowhere to be found. I bought a round of drinks for the three of us and sat down at an empty table.
Mr. T- was so tired that he was passing out after just one beer, but Mr. I- stuck it out with me for two beers, having a very easy time communicating as we chatted about various topics including women. As we haven’t said two words to each other since the welcome party, it was nice to be socializing with him again and to confirm that we’re still on good terms.
I was pretty drunk at this point and loose enough to go up to other tables of people and invite them to join us, including one group of three Japanese girls and one guy, but they just said they were come “later”. Translated into Japanese and then back to English that actually means “never”.
Mr. I- explained that it’s just Japanese culture—people like to stick with their own groups and are not so inclined to want to meet new people. Another one of the negative cultural qualities they share with Germans. But it didn’t bother me that no one would join us—I was proud of myself for even being outgoing enough to try.
At the end we found a group of guys who were willing to chat with us but by then it was late, we were very drunk, and the bar was closing soon. We exchanged a few words that I can no longer remember and got some nice drunken photos with them and that was that.
Mr. I- generously paid for the cab ride back to the hotel and we promptly passed out once we got back to the room. Not having drunk any water the whole night I had a nasty hangover which is still lingering, but it was a great night and worth the price I’m paying now. As we left the hotel room Mr. I- asked me to check if I had everything, and I took out my key and showed it to him. He got a good laugh out of that.
I managed to make it all the way back to Togane without throwing up in his car, so everything was a complete success.
And that was the last school-related event of 2011. It’s officially the winter holiday now, and as much as I love school it will be nice to have a break. Thanks to last Saturday’s party at Ben’s house I now have official plans for Christmas and the following week. Tomorrow and Sunday I’ll be in Tokyo with Lily and Jack and some of their friends, and I’ll be meeting them in Kyoto next week. Trey is throwing what promises to be a wild New Years’ Eve party that will start in Togane and head to Tokyo and presumably last straight through until the first sunrise of 2012. It’s been one hell of a year, and it looks like it’s coming to an appropriately awesome end.
Yesterday was epic. Now I’m faced with the task of writing about it in the level of detail it warrants while attempting not to step on the toes of any of the people involved, which in this case won’t be so easy. I could make this a private entry but the story is too good not to share and too significant not to include in the publicly-available narrative of my life, as these events will no doubt be referenced repeatedly for some time. I could give just a bare-bones account of what happened and avoid the risks of going into detail, but that would neither be true to myself nor to the original intent of this blog. I’m already editing myself much more than I was when I started, but I still feel as though I’m providing a deeply honest account of my life as I live it in my own unique style of aiming to making anyone who cares enough to read about my experiences feel as though they’re living through them with me. This entry will be no different, and in the unlikely event that any of the people involved read it and take issue with something I’ve written here, they need only confront me and I will remove the offending material.
Act I – Akibahara
I’ve had the intention of going to Akibahara, a district of Tokyo world-famous for its electronic shops, for several months. My external hard-drive needs at least 120 volts to run, but Japanese sockets have only a 100-volt output. Converters which reduce voltage are easy to come by, but converters which boost voltage are a bit harder to find. Neither of the electronic shops in Togane have them, but I’ve been told that if you’re looking for any piece of electrical equipment, you can find it in Akibahara. If it’s not there, it doesn’t exist.
The trip kept getting postponed week after week for various reasons, but that ultimately ended up working very much in my favor, as last week when I met Diana at the Togane International Friendship party and invited her to come to Tokyo, she couldn’t come the next day but she was able to make it the following weekend—yesterday—the day we finally went.
In keeping with my tradition of always getting sick at the worst possible times, I started coming down with a cold on Thursday. I called Diana on Friday evening to warn her that I might be contagious and if she decided not to come I would understand. She said that if I was going she would go, but thanked me for the courtesy of warning her about the germs.
Luckily the cold has been extremely mild, and my only symptom yesterday when I went to meet up with her at the train station was a sore throat. We greeted each other warmly and then walked together to the bus-stop where the direct bus to Tokyo stops. There was a little Christmas event happening across the street, and I couldn’t resist trying to take a shot of the man in the giant-head costume. Diana, super-outgoing person that she is, brought me across the street and talked to the people there, giving us a chance to get our picture taken with the guy.
We chatted while waiting for the bus, and when we got on I paid for both of us which she graciously accepted. On the 1 hour 15 minute ride, we listened to some music on her I-pod as I’d thought to bring one of those splitters that allows you to plug two sets of headphones into a single jack. It was some Japanese pop singer whose name I don’t remember, but it was surprisingly decent. Not something I would ever listen to on my own initiative, but enjoyable enough.
We were supposed to meet Stephen at the entrance to Tokyo station at 11:30 but he sent me a text saying he’d be late. Diana and I killed time by wandering around the station, but before we did we checked the schedule for when the busses would return. She suggested we shoot for the 7:35 bus but I said I’d rather leave an hour earlier because one of the other Togane ALTs, Ben, was having a Christmas Party that night which started at 6:00. Diana said that she’d heard people talking about the party and someone had asked her to come, so I said she should come and we could go together. So suddenly I’m not just spending the day with her but going to a party with her as well. Could the timing be any more fortuitous?
One of the things we had to bring to the party was a gift worth about 500 yen, and luckily the train station was full of gift-shops so Diana and I were able to take care of that very easily. After a bit of wandering, Stephen called me to announce he’d arrived, and we went to the exit to meet him. On the way, she remarked on how Japanese girls wear makeup all the time, but she thinks it takes too much time and only wears it on special occasions. She said she’ll wear it if she goes on a date. Um…don’t look now, Diana, but you’re kinda on one right now…even if you’re not aware of it. But at least that confirmed 100% that she isn’t married.
I was preparing for the hassle of figuring out how to get to Akibahara, but luckily Diana had been there once before and had a pretty good idea of what we needed to do. She double-checked with her I-phone but quickly determined that we just had to take one of the JR trains two stops and we’d be there.
When we got there the first thing we spotted was the AKB48 Café, which I was told by some people I should definitely check out and by some people that I should avoid at all costs. For those of you who’ve never heard of AKB48, they’re a Japanese pop-group consisting of forty-eight super-attractive young women who sing and dance in heavy makeup and skimpy outfits. Whoever came up with the idea is a very wealthy man, as they’re enormously popular and are likely to remain so for quite some time. Unlike other bands created purely for marketing purposes like N’Sync or the Spice Girls whose popularity fades as the members get older, AKB48 has enough members to be able to just kick the old ones out when their attractiveness fades and bring in younger ones, sort of like the Mickey Mouse club but with sex-appeal instead of cuteness. It’s a pretty disgusting concept if you ask me, but I don’t want to judge too harshly. Even the women who get booted will always be able to brag that they were in AKB48.
Incidentally, I finally learned what the AKB stands for: AKiBahara, where they do most of their shows in the theater beside the café.
So since we were there I figured we might as well go in and check out the place. We had to wait on a short line before a table opened up, and while we did Stephen and I discovered that Diana is actually a huge AKB48 fan. She was ridiculously excited to go inside, and when we got in she was grinning and gaping at everything, particularly the benches and tables autographed by real AKB48 members.
Aside from the TV-screens everywhere showing AKB48 videos and the incredibly-attractive waitresses dressed in the schoolgirl-like AKB48 uniform, it looked just like any normal café. But unlike most cafés, the clientele was almost exclusively male. Diana was one of only three or four females there, excluding the waitresses who were no doubt the reason most of the men came there. It was kind of like Hooters without the big boobs.
We each got a ridiculously over-priced beverage and chatted for awhile, mostly about AKB48. This was the first time I’d heard their music (at least while conscious of the fact that I was hearing it) and it was just as bad as I’d imagined. But I didn’t rain on Diana’s parade and just let her enjoy the videos, which I have to admit were at least quite pleasing to the eye. Stephen got a real kick out of just how happy she was to be there. Her girlish joy rubbed off on me as well, so in spite of the assault on my eardrums I was very glad to have come there.
After that it was finally time to go off in search of the elusive adapter that would allow me to use my German external hard-drive in Japan. Diana’s presence turned out to be invaluable in that regard, as she was able to explain what I needed in Japanese at every shop we went to, and translate to me what the workers there told her. This was quite the impressive feat considering her native language is Chinese, and while she confessed that it was hurting her brain a little, she held up very well.
Unfortunately, finding the required piece proved to be extremely difficult, even in the Electronics Capital of the World. Place after place just kept telling us they didn’t have it, though some helpfully pointed us in the direction of shops that might. We eventually came to a place that had all kind of voltage-adapters and it looked like we’d finally found the right part, but for some bizarre reason they wouldn’t let us test it before I bought it. It made no sense to me that the store would insist you buy something you couldn’t even be sure would work, but apparently that’s another element of Japanese culture I wasn’t aware of—they wouldn’t want to take the responsibility it didn’t work. They didn’t even want to sell me the thing because they were unsure if it would damage the hard-drive, but when I finally insisted that it would be my responsibility they let me buy it, but they still wouldn’t let me test it in their store.
We were all very hungry at this point, so we decided to find a place to eat and test it there. The first place we went to, it turned out didn’t have a single menu item other than soup or plain rice that didn’t have beef or pork in it, so we went to a sushi restaurant instead. That was delicious, and we had some very pleasant conversation there too. Once we’d had our fill of sushi I busted out the new adapter and gave it a test run on the electrical outlet in the wall, and for a moment it appeared to be working until the hard-drive shut itself off. I thought it might need a little while to get charged up, so I left it in the wall a bit longer, but it shut itself off again after the same amount of time.
So we went back to the shop and got a refund. Had we been allowed to test it there it would have saved everyone the extra hassle, but that’s just the way it goes.
We tried three more places, the last of which Diana made clear would be the last place we would try. She was getting tired of this and I couldn’t blame her. I had no idea it would be so difficult to find a particular electronic device in Akibahara. I’d assumed it would take a half-hour tops but we’d been searching for over two hours. When we came to the last place and the woman there said they didn’t have one, I decided to try something else and ask for just a basic voltage-converter which boosted the 100-volts from Japanese sockets up to what the hard-drive needed. Those were a lot more expensive than the adapter would have been, but after spending so much time on this I refused to go home empty-handed. The woman found a converter which boosted 100 Volts to 220 (the voltage in Germany) and I coughed up the dough and bought it. I hadn’t brought the cable I needed to test it, so I’d have to wait until I got home to test it.
It was now about 4:30 and we decided to start heading back. At the Akibahara station Stephen wanted to know if we were going back to Tokyo station or if he should just buy a ticket back home directly from there. Diana mentioned the Christmas Party and I said he was welcome to come if he wanted, and he said he was so we decided to go back to Tokyo station and all ride the bus to Togane together. I hadn’t thought he would want to come all the way to Togane for a Christmas Party but I was glad to have him along.
Intermission
I sat next to Diana on the bus ride back and she dozed off while listening to her music, and I listened to music of my own. I was feeling pretty neutral at that point. She’d been just as warm and friendly with Stephen as she was with me, so I figured I’d just been misreading her last week and perceiving signals of attraction when there were none. This was probably just the way she is with everybody. That didn’t mean I didn’t have a chance or that I should give up, but at that point it felt likelier than ever that a casual friendship is all this is going to amount to.
But as I wrote last week, that would be a perfectly valuable thing too. At the AKB48 café we discussed what we were all doing for New Years’ and none of us had any solid plans but Stephen said he was thinking about going to the Tokyo Sky Tree where there would be fireworks. That sounded like a good plan, so both of us decided to join him. Being in Tokyo with two great people sounds like a perfect way to ring in the New Year whether or not romance is involved. Plus, Diana is going home to China for a month this year and some of that time will coincide with the school vacation, so I could visit her in China and she’d be happy to show me around and take me anywhere.
There was reason to be happy.
Act II – The Christmas Party
We stopped at a convenience store on the way to the party to pick up drinks and snacks to bring, as well as a cheap gift for Stephen to enter in the gift-exchange. He picked a magnet of a Japanese anime character, but the clerk at the counter wouldn’t let him just buy it but instead insisted that he pick a card from a box she had and open the back to see what the prize was. Apparently you couldn’t just buy the magnet—you had to win it. And you had to pay for the ticket first so if you really wanted the magnet you’d have to keep buying tickets until you got lucky. I thought it was absurd. If a person wants to exchange money for a particular item, such a transaction should be perfectly allowable. What’s the point of capitalism if you can’t buy something you want even if you’re willing and able to pay for it? But Stephen bought the ticket and instead of the magnet he got a little head-pillow with a different Japanese anime character on it, and while it looked pretty crappy we just had to settle for it.
I navigated the three of us through the cold to Ben’s apartment, which was already hopping when we arrived. Trey was among the first to greet me, surprised to see I’d brought another black guy. He jokingly told Stephen to go away because now there were too many. I introduced Diana to people but most of them remembered her from last weekend, Ben included. I saw a lot of familiar faces and a couple of new ones. I met a guy named Dan and a guy named Will as soon as I walked in the kitchen.
I quickly noticed that the male-to-female ratio was about the same as it was at the AKB48 café. Other than Diana, there was only one other girl at the party: Zintia, the Hungarian girl from the International Friendship party last weekend (whom I now know likes to be called “Cinty”).
Diana and Stephen both went off and mingled as soon as we got in, and I poured myself a whiskey and coke and proceeded to mingle as well, saying hello to some of the Japanese guys I remembered from previous encounters: Kio from the two music festivals and Atsushi from the Okinomiyaki night. I found out that one of Atsushi’s judo students goes to my school, a kid whose name I actually recognized so I knew who he was talking about.
Trey busted out a deck of cards and got a drinking game going on the floor of what I’ll just call the “green room” because Ben had somehow managed to get the kitchen draped in red light and the other room in green. I sat down and joined the action, Stephen and Diana joining as well but sitting on the other side of the circle. But from where I was sitting I could see the next card in the dealer’s hand and I helped Diana cheat her way out of the drinking penalty whenever it came to her. Trey’s game started out well but fizzled after a few rounds as people kept leaving. Andrew, the guy from Alaska I’d met at the hippie music festival, tried to start up a drinking game of his own but by then only Stephen and I were left to play. It was a pity because his game was much more fun.
Before long it was time for the gift exchange, and Ben had about as difficult a time getting everyone to shut up while he explained the rules as I do getting my students to shut up while I explain the rules of a classroom game. But it was pretty clear—everyone got a number and each person would pick one of the wrapped presents on the floor when it got to their number. You could either pick a new present or steal somebody else’s but no gift could be stolen more than three times. I was number 18 so I had the advantage of going very late. The most popular gift in the bunch was a slingshot Ben had bought, and it had been stolen twice by the time it was up to me, so I got to steal it and keep it for good. I can think of a few fun ways to use it in class.
When the gift exchange was over I finally found an opportunity to sit down by Diana and talk to her some more, although at that point I had to share her company with Dan, one of the guys I’d just met that night who seemed really nice but clearly had eyes for her. But the three of us talked and had a nice chat until the need for another drink or bladder-relief naturally split us up.
Trey came up to me and said, “Dude, I don’t think your girl is married.” I told him I knew. He then proceeded to give me advice. “You need to be more aggressive, man. Saddle up to her, keep talking to her and at some point take her outside and kiss her. I think she’s definitely into you and really likes you, but you just need to go for it.”
Trey is a wise man. I took a deep breath and resolved to do just that. Hearing from him that he thought she was into me gave me the extra confidence I needed, and at that point I had just the right buzz going to pull off the move I’ve never been able to make before: the leap from casual-friends to more-than-friends.
But just as I was about to go find her again, a new group of people arrived and were introduced to me. There was a French girl from Paris, another Josai student, and her boyfriend Jack who was one of the only American students at that university. They were a really nice couple and I didn’t want to leave them right away. The French girl, Lily, was interesting to talk to and we could compare our impressions of Europe. Although she’s from Paris and loves the city, I was surprised to hear that she agrees that the people there are snobs and it’s ridiculous that even the people who work at the train station refuse to speak English. I parted from them with a promise to talk later.
Before I could find Diana, I somehow got sucked into a political discussion with Trey about Obama’s chances in next year’s election. It was more of a lecture than a discussion as I could barely get a rebuttal in edgewise, but Trey was very persuasive and convinced me that Obama has a much better chance of winning than I’ve been thinking. When he leaves Japan his plan is to go to Stanford and get a master’s degree in law, then go into politics himself and maybe even run for office in California. It’s always nice to have a chance to talk politics as those chances are rare, but I had to pry myself away because it was getting late and I’d barely talked to Diana all night.
Now that I had the sole purpose of finding her and engaging in actual no-holds-barred flirtation with her, she was nowhere to be found. I looked everywhere twice and couldn’t find her, then I went outside and called her cellphone. She didn’t pick up, so when I got her answering machine I just left a message. “Hey, it’s Kyle. I can’t find you here so I guess you left. Sorry I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. I’m glad you came tonight. I hope you had fun. I’ll talk to you soon. Goodnight.”
So I breathed a heavy sigh but figured it was for the best—I’d been spared the anxiety of having to actually try to make things happen with her—and there would be another chance another time. I walked through the foyer towards the main room when suddenly the door to the washroom swings open and who should emerge but Diana…and Dan.
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the story of my life.
They both acknowledge me like nothing significant has just happened and she walks into Ben’s room while he heads by me towards the party. I can’t help but stop him and ask, “Hey Dan, are you interested in Diana?”
He obviously has no idea that I’d been going for her as well. “Uh…yeah,” he admits, understanding immediately. “Is that a problem? I’m sorry.”
“No, I mean…” I stumble. What the fuck had I even wanted to say?
“Shit, I’m sorry,” he says. “You were trying to get with her?”
“Well, yeah, kinda, but…I honestly don’t know what I’m doing.” Keep talking. “But hey if you’re into her and she likes you than go for it.” My heart doth protest but my mouth pays no heed. My head knows that it’s the right course of action. I have no more of a right to Diana than he does. She isn’t mine and never was.
“Really?” he asks. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Because I don’t want to be that guy. I’ve been on the other side of this situation more times than I can count.”
He’s just won me over. He deserves her more than I do. After all, he was the one who went for it. I hadn’t been aggressive enough and I let her slip through my fingers. To the victor…
“Yeah,” I say. “You should go for it. Honestly, no hard feelings.” I mean, I’m still going to despise you and everything but that’s not your fault.
“Thank you,” he says. “I appreciate that.”
Diana emerges from Ben’s room. “What are you guys talking about?”
“Nothing,” I say reflexively. I think it’s pretty clear what our topic of conversation was.
“Basketball,” Dan says playfully, then moves in to playfully tickle her, thus diffusing the whole situation. Good man. I don’t think I’ve ever loathed a fellow less-deserving of it.
Diana asks me if I have a cellphone charger and it just so happens I do. I go into Ben’s room and find it in in my backpack for her, then she plugs in her phone. I don’t know if it was dead or just dying, if she’d heard my call while making out with Dan or listened to my voice message after. These are things I’ll never know.
The next few minutes are all kind of hazy. I head to the kitchen table in search of more booze. Ben asks me what I’m looking for and I just tell him I need something strong. There’s a little bit of whiskey left in the bottle. I just finish it off and then grab a fresh beer.
Before I know it, Dan is getting ready to walk Diana back to her place. I say goodnight to him and Diana walks right up to me and gives me a very long, very warm hug. Through her embrace I perceive a mixture of mild intoxication and guilt. Our first hug, and it’s also our last.
I walk away as they proceed to get ready to leave, and Trey comes up to me with serious news: “Dude, did you know your girl is leaving with another guy?”
“Yes,” I say without bothering to mask how that makes me feel at all. “Yes, I’m well aware of that.”
“What happened, man?”
“I got distracted. I got held up in other conversations and another guy swooped in.”
Knowing he was partially responsible for that, he runs to the foyer and grabs Diana as she’s trying to leave. What the hell are you doing, Trey? The damage is done. Leave it alone. I make sure I’m totally out of sight during whatever exchange goes on between them. When he gets back he just comes up to me and tells me I wasn’t aggressive enough.
I know. That’s always my problem.
He says I shouldn’t feel bad because she wasn’t worth it. He calls her a nasty name she doesn’t deserve and which I won’t repeat, but that’s the end of that. I go find a place to stand and think.
Oh, hello darkness, my old friend. It seems you’ve come to talk with me again.
As I stand there staring at the fish-tank and contemplating who I am, I feel that old familiar emptiness, the same aching in my gut I used to feel in high school often. Oh goldfish, how I envy you. If my brain were as small as yours I would have already forgotten the whole thing by now.
The question is whether I should stay or go. I’m so tempted to just gather my things and slip away quietly without saying goodbye to anyone, to just head home and toss on some brooding music and do some serious wallowing. But I promised Stephen a place to crash. Plus, fuck that. It’s too familiar a pattern. I’m sick of it. I’ll just stay and try not to let my gloomy presence suck the fun out of everyone else’s night.
There are a few surprises left in store. Cinty, the Hungarian girl, has been in the process of getting together with Ben all night, but somehow her attention turns to me. She asks me how I’m doing and I’m drunk enough at this point to tell her honestly that I’m not doing well and what the reason is. She takes pity on me and asks me if I’d like to join her on the balcony for a cigarette. You have cigarettes! God bless your cancer-spreading heart!
So I join her for a smoke and find myself engaged in an incredibly unexpected emotional conversation with this girl I’d had such a hard time communicating with last weekend at the Friendship Party. Thanks to the alcohol and the fact that we now actually had something real to talk about, things are going much more smoothly now. She’s not just sympathetic but complimentary, telling me I shouldn’t care about Diana and that I could have any girl because I’m smart and handsome and funny and all that. If she’s trying to make me feel better, she’s doing a pretty good job of it. She even has me laughing a little. Who would’ve thought. This girl actually does have a personality. A damned good one too.
Once I’m shaken out of my initial slump, things become a little easier. I find myself in another conversation with Jack and Lily, the French girl and her American boyfriend. We’re discussing plans for Christmas and New Years’ Eve. It turns out that they and a small group of other Josai students are also going to the Tokyo Sky Tree on New Years’ Eve so Stephen and I can join them. (Diana probably won’t be a part of that now). But not only that, they’re also going to Kyoto that week, though on the days after I’d been planning to go. But they’ll be in Tokyo for Christmas and I’m welcome to join them, so I think that’s what I’m doing. I’ll cancel my reservations at the hostel I made and spend the holidays with this awesome couple and their friends. I won’t be alone on Christmas and I’ll ring in the New Year properly.
Cinty and Ben are clearly bound to hook up tonight and nothing is going to stop that train, but I still find myself smoking and talking to her on the balcony frequently, not just the two of us but with Ben, Stephen, or other random people as well. I’m so astounded by how wrong my first impression of her was that I actually come right out and tell her.
Back inside and near the end of the night, Ai and Miko come to the party. Those are two of the three girls from the okinomiyaki night, the hip-hop dancer who speaks decent English and the really beautiful girl who speaks almost no English at all. I’m actually loose enough and—thanks to Cinty—confident enough to try and flirt with Miko now, and while her reaction seems promising the language barrier is just too great. We do make a genuine attempt to try and communicate with each other but it doesn’t work. Oh well.
Finally, at around 2:00 a.m. a large group of people from the party including three Japanese girls other than Ai and Miko (who leave after a relatively short time) are getting together to go to a karaoke bar and Stephen and I are welcome to join. Neither of us feels like going but something tells me I should. I ask Trey for guidance. He’s not coming because there’s a Japanese girl with a one-way ticket to his bedroom hanging onto him, but he talks me into going with the group that’s leaving. I didn’t need too much convincing. My inner hobbit almost always gets me to err on the side of adventure.
Stephen and I take too long to decide so the group is already gone by the time we leave. We wish a goodnight to the few who remain at Ben’s place, and I call one of the people who went and find out where they were going. He says it’s a place right across from the train station so I assume it’s the same place where the infamous lost-key welcome party took place, and Stephen and I head there.
While we’re walking Stephen mentions Diana and says, “That was really funny when she left with that guy. I wonder what they’re doing tonight.”
“Actually, I didn’t think that was funny at all,” I tell him, and he guesses right away that I’d been interested in her, which I thought he’d already figured out. So I explain what happened, and that leads to another conversation about confidence and not selling myself short and all that stuff I’ve heard a million times already but never hurts to hear a little more. Stephen’s got a good heart. I felt comfortable enough opening up to him completely, even confiding the fact that I’m a virgin when he asked me what my longest relationship ever was and I had to explain I’ve never had any relationship.
But we leave all that shit at the door to the karaoke place when we arrive. When we get inside I barely have to use any Japanese to explain to the waitress that we think our friends are here—she leads us right to the room full of foreigners.
And for the next two or three hours it’s just pure and simple beer-drinking, food-eating, and bad-singing. The Japanese girls there sing a bunch of songs I don’t know, and once I finally figure out how to work the song-selection device I and the other Westerners sing a bunch of songs they don’t know. Some of the guys know songs that the Japanese girls know but I don’t. I would totally try and rectify that if I didn’t find the music to be so bad.
It’s actually the first time I’ve ever done karaoke. It always seemed like something I’d never do unless I was really drunk, but last night certainly qualified. Stephen had never done it either, but both of us found it surprisingly fun. I never fully shook off my depression, but I was able to enjoy myself in spite of it.
In case you’re wondering about the girls there, they were as uninterested in me as I was in them. One of them was getting cuddly with Andrew, but the other two just seemed interested in talking to each other and singing the occasional song. At that point I really didn’t care. One of them was cute but she never held eye contact with me for more than a second and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because she couldn’t speak English.
We had our last call at around 4:30 a.m. and left shortly before 5:00. Luckily it’s just a five-minute walk back to my apartment, and this time I didn’t lose my key. Stephen crashed on my couch and we finished our conversation about women and relationships while passing out. I told him and he understands that I really don’t feel like I need a woman, that I love my life as it is, but it would be nice to have someone to share it with and it feels like I’m missing out on one of the most fundamental parts of human existence.
Curtains
This morning I walked Stephen to the train station and saw him on his way, but not before testing my voltage converter to see if the trip to Akibahara had at least paid off in that respect. All I could do was laugh when it didn’t work.
We only got four hours of sleep but somehow it was enough and somehow, miraculously, the hangover wasn’t that bad. Rather than immediately go back and write this journal entry, I decided to spend the morning going to the beach and doing some good old-fashioned staring at the ocean and pondering life.
That was very pleasant. I didn’t come to any new revelations or anything, but merely confirmed what I’d told Stephen the night before. My life is fantastic. I live in a wonderful place, I have an excellent job, I know lots and lots of fantastic people and I’m meeting more all the time. So I let one chance for romance slip away from me. So what? It seems there will be other chances. It’s just that if the story of my life is anything to go by, I’ll probably fuck those up too.
Just a guy sharing his thoughts and experiences as he wanders his way through life and the world. Here you'll find stories from the life of an American living overseas, politics from a liberal point of view, and philosophical thoughts about man's place in the universe.
