Melancholy

I just had my first last day of teaching.

I started off strong. I imparted my wisdom to my replacement and reigned myself in when I tried to tell her how to teach my — her — students. My first class was spectacularly upbeat — my two little boy students zooming back and forth across the room, swiping color words off the board and collapsing to the floor giggling when one of them made a mistake.  Another class wizzed through their final test, bringing a proud tear to my eye when they both scored above 90.

And then came my adult classes; open, talkative students struck quiet and abashed by the presence of a stranger.  I joked and mocked and cajoled them until they relaxed and spoke normally.  We laughed together like always as they told me their weekend activities and plans for the future.

And then my classes ended. And my little 7 year old boys selected their stickers, crammed their belongings into their bags, and scampered out of the room like they did every other day — without a backwards glance. The older girls thanked me in their shy, quiet voices after they’d prepared to leave.  The adults thanked me awkwardly and wished me good luck as they left.

I spent a year with these students, hearing all about their lives; laughing and being silly and talking — talking about everything.  And then it ended, and there were no hugs. Not even a handshake. No physical contact at all. Just a wave goodbye and it was over.

A City of Tofu Skin

When you first come to Japan, you’re excited about eating new exotic foods, and scoff at the idea of consuming anything remotely American.  Forget burgers! Forget steak! I will drown in sushi and okonomiyaki and pocky, eating all the delectable foods of this marvelous country until I explode.  And then as the weeks roll by, and you’ve eaten so much white rice that your teeth start to rot, you hallucinate dancing burgers, macaroni and cheese, juicy 12 oz steaks with mountains of mashed potatoes, and endless streams of burritos and tacos.

I like Japanese food in general.  I like tonkatsu and unagi and sushi and feel something akin to sexual desire for okonomiyaki.  But the endless cycle of rice and fried foods and ramen gets very old.  And in the end, the Japanese like their food to be tasteless.  They call it 隠し味 — literally “hidden flavor.”  And when you’ve blasted your tastebuds with aji so spicy it makes you cry, and buffalo wings that make you sweat, and curry that makes your scalp tingle, subtle flavors just don’t cut it, not to mention the gnawing, desperate need for thick slabs of meat and the ever present craving for tart cheese.  And every once in a while, I encounter something like natto or fried cartilage and I wonder who the hell allowed the Japanese to cook.

The specialty in Nikko is yuba, which I’d often seen at conveyor belt sushi places — a long yellowish strip of what looked like hollowed intestines.  According to a sign we saw at a restaurant, yuba is “tofu scum.”  Tofu is boiled, and the film that forms is scooped up, dried, and put into sheets. Appetizing.

I’d actually eaten yuba before I encountered it in Nikko; the Ninja in Akasaka served us sushi wrapped in yuba.  Yuba is, ultimately, entirely tasteless, so it did no damage to the sushi, but it adds nothing, which offends me, and is occasionally eaten plain, which revolts me.  And it was almost the only thing to be found in Nikko.  Riding a bus down the main street away from the station, we passed restaurant after restaurant emblazoned with “Yuba Dishes,” “Yuba Udon,” “Yuba Soba,” “Yuba Dishes,” on and on; entire blocks with nothing to offer but yuba in various forms.  The okonomiyaki restaurant we passed had yuba monja.  The sushi shop had yuba sashimi.  The Ryuzu falls’ gift shop offered yuba soft-serve ice-cream. The Indian restaurant even served a yuba curry set. Yuba everywhere we turned.

Nikko’s other specialty, incidentally, is whole fish — skewered, salted, roasted, and eaten whole.

Having read the descriptions and seen the limp sheets of it, we were determined to avoid the stuff.    We hoarded snacks and rolls purchased on our twice daily trips to the nearest convenience store, and ate twice at the ramen shop near our hostel — entirely unremarkable, but serviceable and yuba-free. We also visited the yakitori place next door to our hostel, in spite of the looming owner who blocked our entrance to the shop and laughed at our requests for water. “It’s barbeque,” he mocked, refusing to take our food order until we’d ordered a beverage.

In the end, though, I couldn’t leave without having tasted yuba.  Having gotten over my initial indignation about the yuba infested ice cream, I decided I must try it, but searched high and low to no avail.  In the end, I purchased a box of yuba mochi with anko filling — three vile substances in one tiny lump.  I gifted some of my coworkers with some before venturing a taste of my own.

Tasteless pounded white rice mixed with tasteless tofu scum wrapped around vaguely sweet bean paste.  Delicious.

And then I burned Tobu to the ground using only the power of my rage

I checked hyperdia.  I studied the transfers.  I’d agreed to meet BJ at Nikko station at 1.  I was informed and ready for my vacation to begin.  And then I arrived early, which was The Wrong Thing to Do.

Just days after I mocked my brother for his ignorance of foreign cities and boasted that I could navigate trains and buses in countries all over the world, I boarded the wrong train, a special express that skipped the station I wanted, which I didn’t realize until I’d already passed it.  I got off at the next stop and went back to the stop I wanted, which took just enough time to put me behind schedule.  Then, in the unfamiliar station with the unfamiliar Tobu layout, I couldn’t figure out which track my train was arriving at, and I ended up missing it.  I jumped on a random train I hoped was heading in the appropriate direction, but apparently there’s a tremendous difference between a special express Tobu train heading directly for my destination, and an express train heading in the same direction.

My train stopped every three stations, making me get off and wait 10 to 20 minutes for the next train.  At one stop, two different lines used the same track, so when I boarded a train coming to the track marked, “Nikko,” I actually boarded a train going a completely different direction, into the armpit of Tochigi prefecture.  I realized my mistake four stops in, and got off immediately — in a podunk station with only two tracks, even smaller I think than Saijo station — and had to wait a half hour for the next train in the heat, with sweat dripping from my nose.  Then the slow return to the station where I’d made my mistake, a rush to the appropriate train, and then, three hours later than my schedule arrival, I finally made it to Nikko.

The moral: mock not thy brother lest you receive a karmic bitch-slap.  Or at least not in public.

Shibuya

Anchan recently asked me, “Do you know where Shibuya is?” a question that elicited mirth and mocking from me.

I stood for the first time in front of the Hachiko exit, reeling from the rush of people swarming through the enormous intersection, over three years ago, trailing behind Poot, his jacket clutched in my hand in a desperate attempt not to lose him in the crush of humanity.  I followed him through the crowded street, past the neon lit stores — familiar Western ones made foreign by the unfamiliar city — my head thrown back and my eyes wide as I tried to take it all in while I coughed on the toxic smell wafting up from the sewers.  Having been so long confined to the Japanese amenities of rural Japan, we reveled in the Tower Records and gorged ourselves on steak and fried greasy appetizers at TGI Fridays, gulping chocolate cocktails and spending more on one meal than we usually spent in a week on food.

When I lived in Hiroshima, I seldom made it to Tokyo.  The price of a shinkansen ticket made the distance insurmountable for a poor college student.  That one trip with Poot and Mike lasted only two days, as its primary purpose was to collect my mother from the airport.  We saw only Shibuya and Tokyo Tower, and I blindly followed Poot with no idea where I was or what I wanted to see, as was my custom then. My trip with my mom was aborted when we made the last minute decision that I would accompany her home for medical reasons, and I headed instead back to Hiroshima to fill out paperwork.  My most successful trip was with BJ and Bunchan several months later, but again, I was content to follow my friends, never knowing quite where I was or where I was headed.  The JR and subway maps made my head swim with unfamiliar kanji, and it took all the competence I possessed at the time to get myself to our hostel, a herculean endeavor that left me wiped and my shoulder raw from my duffel.

Since then, I’ve visited half a dozen or more unfamiliar cities, many with languages I didn’t even remotely speak, and I managed to navigate trains and subways and buses, and Tokyo now seems like cake.  I know the areas and can read the place names on the tangled mass of lines on the map.  I can figure out where I’m going with a glance rather than squinting and puzzling over it for twenty minutes without being able to crack the code.

Now, I know Tokyo.  I know Shibuya.

One night, after following a pod of foreigners around Shibuya for two hours looking for a specific drinking place, we headed back to Shibuya station and found a line of Japanese people holding up Free Hugs signs.  BJ and I squealed and rushed to claim our hugs, as hugs from the Japanese are scarce and treasured.

After one of our nights spent clubbing at Seiya’s live performance, we waited at the Hachiko exit for the station to open, and we witnessed a near fight — an Englishman and an African man arguing in ever louder and angrier tones a few feet from where we stood.  The Englishman kept getting into the African’s face shouting, “Don’t touch me! Don’t fucking touch me!” before backing up at least four steps.  The African guy would respond with, “Fuck your mother!” and move towards the Englishman, occasionally shoving him.  When he ripped off his jacket and threw it on the ground, we booked it for the inside of the station, fearing bloodshed.

Last night, we headed into Shibuya for an event — a screening of a movie that Sen’s favorite idol, Kato Kazuki, starred in called Kamisama Help! (God, help!) It was sort of a comedic horror film that was far more amusing than I expected it to be, although far from genuinely good.  The plot, as I understand it, was that a man had been killed by an enraged and overly protective father when he’d asked for the daughter’s hand in marriage.  Somehow, he hadn’t died and instead had become a demon who swore revenge against the family.  He attacked several years later, possessing a descendant of his killer and making the descendant — a high school teacher — go on a killing spree.  Eventually, the teacher’s real spirit managed to separate himself from the possessed shell of his body moments before committing suicide. Or something.  The event is somehow repeated every year on the same day, the ghosts of the victims going through the bloody night over and over again until a random unrelated man who looks exactly like the teacher shows up, and the good spirit of the teacher possesses him and battles the demon with the help of an exorcist girl. Unfortunately, all of these plot points are revealed within 10 minutes of the end of a 2 hour long movie, so I spent the entirety of the movie trying to determine if my Japanese has spontaneously gotten way, way shittier, or if they had in fact left out even a semblance of an explanation for the events.  Oh, also there was an unexplained/unrelated thief or criminal or something wandering about the premises wearing Joker-esque makeup and trying to scare everyone into leaving.  He was probably the best part of the movie, and he had no real function or relation to the plot whatsoever, if that tells you anything. The one good thing about the movie is that it was perhaps the first time ever that I attended a movie in Japan where the audience actually responded in any way to what was happening on the screen.  They laughed with us, sometimes as loudly as we did, unheard of in this country.  Since it was a very small, limited showing, I assume that all of the attendants were hardcore fans of Kato Kazuki, and everyone knows that otaku don’t adhere to social norms.

After the movie, we had 5 hours to kill before the trains started running (the last train to Ushiku leaves at 11:30).  We hopped from restaurant to restaurant, trying to keep our spirits up, but getting more and more exhausted and bleary eyed with each hour.  Around three, we decided to take a walk to wake ourselves up, and found our new adorable musician friend.  When he’d finished playing, we headed back to the station with a half hour until the trains started.

While Japan is almost always unthreatening and safe, the station at night is one of my least favorite places.  It’s not exactly unsafe, just incredibly sketchy.  Homeless men lay sprawled on cardboard pads, while clumps of club hoppers huddle in groups in a ring around the station entrance.  We staked out a spot in a well lit area in full view of the police box adjacent to the station and waited. Near us, a group of three “fashionable” Japanese boys stood around, glancing at us often and inching nearer. One detached himself from the pack and moved a little closer to us.  He had the standard orangey-brown mullet with copious amounts of Gatsby Moving Rubber keeping it carefully pointed in all directions.  He wore white designer jeans that had been artistically ripped all up and down the front and the pointy shoes that I love, which are twice as long as his feet, like “fashionable” leather clown shoes.  He would walk in a little circle, first towards his group and then towards us, finally coming to a stop with his back half to us.  Each circle got bigger, bringing him ever so slightly closer to us, and we monitored his progress, commenting to each other when he aborted each approach.

Eventually, he made his move, catching eye contact with me and coming lazily in towards us.

“Are you waiting for the train?” he asked in English.

“Yes, we are,” we answered.

“Well, it comes in thirty minutes.”

“Oh good,” I answered.  Sen answered in Japanese, indicating that there wasn’t actually a language barrier.  I looked over to the pile of trash nearby and saw a huge rat scurry past.  I pointed.  ”OMG RAT!”

He stood for a moment, silent and nodding, and then made a slow indirect retreat back to his friends.

Sen and I spent the rest of the half hour alternately Street Fighter-ing each other and squealing about the pigeons that swooped in past our heads and the rats that haunted the outskirts of the lit area.

Musicians

When LED Seiya started friend wooing us with invitations to concerts and free tempura and bags of potatoes, slipping us his contact info on a scrap of paper amidst repeated requests for emails, I thought it was unusual.  I thought it was something that only our adorable little ninja-monkey would do, and that his enthusiasm was born from our frequent visits to his place of work and the knowledge that we had a mutual friend.

Turns out that foreign friends or fans are a hot commodity and an endless bragging right.  Any time that Sen or I go to one of Seiya’s performances, he proudly claims us and boasts to the other performers that we’re there to see him and no one else. And the other performers gasp in wonder and envy and try to woo us away from him when he isn’t looking.

Last night, while wandering the streets of Shibuya waiting for the first train to start running, we kept passing by a side street where a musician was performing, singing at the top of his lungs into a mic with a tiny but powerful speaker behind him.  At about 3 am, we had decided to try to walk to Yoyogi so that we could avoid the Yamanote line, and we passed by his side street again.

“I want to high five that guy,” I told Sen.

“Do it!”

“No…I don’t really want to. I just…want to.”

My tepid feelings aside, we turned down the street and leaned against the railing in front of him to listen.  When he finished his song, he stopped and addressed us.  Do you understand Japanese? Wow that’s awesome.  Where are you from? Are you English teachers?  English sure is cool. I want to learn but I suck at English. After a brief exchange, he asked if he could give us his card.  Please email me. Can we maybe be friends?  It would be so cool if you emailed me. Really?  You’ll email me? Wow. That would be cool. Please email me.

Because he genuinely didn’t seem to believe that we would, we emailed him while he played his next song. When he finished his song, Sen told him that she’d emailed him, so he pulled out his cell and read our emails.  You can type in Japanese? Oh wow you used so much kanji! You guys are amazing! Your Japanese is so great! Wow. Then he fell silent and fiddled with his cell phone some more before going on to his next song.  While he played, we both felt our cell phones go off and found a message each from him.

And so passed an hour of the night, sitting on the ground in front a street musician on a deserted Shibuya street.  When he hit high notes, he would squeeze his eyes shut and throw his head back, putting all of himself into the note.  With each song, he became more energetic, swaying and tapping his foot and almost dancing as he played.  We clapped after each song, and Sen even whooped and shouted, making him grin, and then she shamed me into shouting too, and he grinned even harder.  He would draw out the end of each song, pausing dramatically before the last cord, and then looked at us waiting for our enthusiastic response.  What kind of music do you like? he asked us. I bet you guys like Arashi, don’t you?  Oh Kato Kazuki? Yeah, I know him. The hot actor guy, right?  What American stuff?  Avril?  No? Oh you like Queen? Oh. I can’t sing Queen. Do you like British music? No? Oh… (We didn’t realize until later that his disappointment stemmed from his intense love of the Beatles.  On his website, he has many pictures of himself in round Lennon glasses.)

Eventually, he told us that he could only sing one more song because if he sang after 4 am the cops would come.  He sang a song I knew then, and we applauded and whooped and approached his guitar case.  I asked if I could buy his CD, and instead he insisted on giving them to us for free.  The cover of the case is covered with doodles that he apparently drew himself — a Japanese man with an afro that’s deflating from an arrow that’s punctured it, an afro that is apparently also a parachute to a tiny man floating off the side.  Fuji erupts in the background while dinosaurs wander past.  It’s a little bit magnificent.

In the end, I forgot to high five him.  Instead, after he gifted us with free CDs, even though he could clearly benefit from the CD sale, we each hugged him, which is a lot better than a high five.