Touching The Infinite: A Foreigner In Japan, 1988

THE INFINITE LAND: ARRIVALS

Tʜᴇ ғɪʀsᴛ ɴᴏᴛɪᴏɴ ᴛʜᴀᴛ I ᴄᴏᴜʟᴅ ɢᴇᴛ ɪɴᴛᴏ ʀᴇᴀʟ ᴛʀᴏᴜʙʟᴇ was the uniformed officer who was waving people forward to enter the security line for the boarding gate area at Seoul's Kimpo airport. I couldn't tell if he was military or regular police, but he was wearing a gun,

so I decided not to chance it.

Turning around as if I'd forgotten something, I went back and to the men's restroom, where I entered a stall and did all the remaining coke. There wasn't much—about a quarter gram—but I snorted it all, licked the paper and then flushed it. And flushed with new enthusiasm, I proceeded to the gate and boarded the KAL flight to Osaka.

It was the evening of November 25th, 1988, and I was about to start my new life in Japan.

The flight to Osaka was pretty short, and I passed the time by downing a couple of double Bloody Marys and chatting with a Korean businessman. He'd made this trip many times before. "Look me up when you get settled," he said. Maybe I should have. It would have been a possible job alternative to what was my inevitable fate, but I didn't know that at the time.

It had all been a lark, at first. A girl I'd met at a party back home a year earlier had breathlessly described her life as a JET in Japan, and I was infected by her enthusiasm. "Come out for a visit!" she gushed. I was intrigued. It was all so exotic. I was working at a dead-end job in a photo lab, spending my days listening to the radio in the dim red light and sliding sheets of film positives and negatives through viscid chemical baths, sometimes sharing a beer and a toot with one of the bosses. It was an easy life, but I was going nowhere fast.

I followed up with Sarah, writing letters and making the occasional phone call. Things Japanese began to take on a new significance, as I saw the possibility of actually going there. Sushi became more than sushi—I now wanted to know the etymology of the names of all the makis. A customer at the copy shop—perhaps Miyuki—became an ethereal creature who now knew, maddeningly, something I didn't. The calls to Sarah reinforced these feelings of repressed memories of Samurai-ness and before you could say "Shogun" I was repeating "Sumimasen" several times a day in the shaving mirror.

I lived for the phone calls. Just the sound of the ring on the other end of the phone line was compelling: a deep, melodious purr instead of the usual high-pitched stridor of American phones. "Moshi-moshi," would come the sultry voice on the other end, and there was no denying the frisson of excitement at the strangeness of it all. I would sometimes spend an hour on the phone to Sarah, damning the cost and drinking endless glasses of white wine.

Weeks turned into months, and at last I had a date for my departure in mind: November, the month in which I would turn 26. I began learning as much as I could about Japan and bought some tapes and textbooks to help me learn at least a smattering of the language before I went.

My friend Jeff, an air-traffic controller, questioned my sanity during an all-night tootski session. "Dude, cup of coffee costs three dollars, man. You'll never survive. Why don't you stay here and become an air-traffic controller? It's easy. I'll show you how." Most of my friends echoed his reservations about the cost of living. I shrugged it all off. Fuck 'em, I thought. They're all wrapped up in their insular little bubble-worlds and they couldn't for the life of them consider actually going out on a limb and taking a RISK. They would stay there forever, in their self- imposed monospheres, where they would remain until they died. Not me.

Sarah came back that summer, and though she was only there for two days there was a definite, palpable spark between us. However, it was not acted upon due to time and location restraints. After several hours of impassioned conversation and vows of toasts to be consumed the day I arrived, she went back to Japan and I began to get my affairs in order. I sold everything in my apartment, then sold my car, to be effective the day I left. I wouldn't be rich after all this, but I might scrape up two or three grand. I gave notice to the landlord and my boss. I went to the Japanese consulate in San Francisco and got my shiny new 90-day tourist visa. I actually bought my plane ticket and had some cash left over. Every day after the buying of the plane ticket was just a countdown. I was already putting my present aside and putting my whole future being into Japan. I ate, breathed and slept Japan, subsumed my entire existence to the arrival of that one day upon which I would board that plane.

November was an excruciatingly long time in coming.

I figured I'd get there, stay with Sarah and get acclimatized for about a month, while looking for a job. She sent me classifieds from the Japan Times and various other newspapers to let me know what sorts of jobs were available. So far, so good. I was bringing about a grand in cash. I figured it would tide me over for a month at least. I was to be wrong, but I didn't have a clue about that, or anything else then.

The day came, and I was off, via Los Angeles and Seoul. I brought the clothes on my back plus a couple more, my Ovation acoustic guitar and my Mac Plus, in a big, fuzzy custom case..

At LAX I was met by a former roommate from when I'd been living in Alameda. Carlton was an ex-fireman, ace racquetball player and party lunatic. I'd stowed about 2 grams of good coke for this occasion, and we took turns doing it up in the airport bar bathroom while we tossed back double Bloody Marys (only a dollar extra for a double), my flight to Seoul a few hours down the line. When the time came, we patted each other solemnly on the back and said "See you, man." It would never happen.

The flight across the vast Pacific had been an 11-hour eternity of thoughts and second thoughts, of fear and anticipation. And now past Seoul,

finally, here I was, 20 minutes out from Osaka's Itami airport, with a buzz I was sure everyone could hear two seats away.

I was met outside baggage claim by Sarah, and we hopped a strange cab where the door opened by itself and the driver wore white gloves and the seats were trimmed in lace. It was raining mildly, and as we hissed down the highway the lights of the city spangled in day-glo neon colors, gaining in lurid intensity as we crossed an immense river and entered Osaka. Everywhere were the spider-like, angular Chinese pictograms, their meanings a complete and delightful mystery. And the people: black hair, darker eyes, hurrying here and there in absurdly formal dress; ties, skirts, flowery umbrellas, the occasional flash of a kimono and sandals. Bicycles swarmed everywhere like angry metallic bees. It was like landing on Mars. I knew I was home.

I didn't know, however, that Mars would hold a few surprises . . .

THE SANDS OF MARS

My first port of call on that stimulating evening was a cafe with televisions in the ceiling in Tenmabashi. I sat back and absorbed without processing, with no preconditions to be processing upon, while someone I later knew as Miyazawa Rie danced and giggled above my head and I mused over servings of spicy shrimp in some kind of tomato sauce and chilled Kirin beer and listened to Sarah's running commentary in a jet- lag-cocaine-alcohol induced haze. Don't ask me what happened to my bags; I only remember this upside-down television cafe and the rods- and-cones overdose that was full-bore Osaka to my jet-lagged self.

My senses strained. The mellifluous sound of Japanese alone was an aphrodisiac. The sheer mystery of the possible meanings brought about by the unintelligible mouthings of the incredibly sexy young waitress as she waited for our order made me melt in twelve different ways. She knew what she was saying, but why didn't I? It was incredibly arousing.

After an eon, we returned to Sarah's apartment overlooking the Tosabori river. I was struck by the Lilliputian door to her apartment, and its metal rigidity reminded me of a nuclear blast door. What were these Japanese living in fear from that they'd be building their doors out of reinforced metal? I was impressed.

That night, we made love, but that was the first and last time. I had a new mistress called Japan, and it took her less than 24 hours to claim my soul and lock my heart into her all-encompassing embrace. I didn't know it that night, but I was to remain there for five full years.

SARAH

Sarah started getting on my nerves right away. She worked during the day, so I was on my own past 8 a.m. I awoke that first morning and listened to the muted sounds of Japanese life through the shut-tight windows as I lay in my sleeping bag, or what seemed to be one, on the soft surface of a tatami floor. I'd never heard the steady "katan-katan" of trains before, but it was to become a signature sound of life in Japan. There was never any shortage of those regular rumblings while I was at the apartment in Temmabashi, as we were just a few blocks from the main Keihan Osaka-Kyoto train station.

That sound of trains wasn't the only reminder that I was not at home any more; during the day there would be puzzling blasts of voices on what sounded like mobile speakers every so often, echoing across the Tosabori, or other times sounding just under my window, making me think of Orwell's 1984 and its protagonist, Winston Smith.

Who was bellowing these cryptic commands to the general populace? Why didn't anyone stop them? I didn't know that one day I'd be yelling from my balcony in perfect Japanese to "Please shut the fuck up."

My first foray on my first day was in search of food. Japan, after all, was known for all manners of rice and fresh fish, and I'd brought with me a love of sushi and sake, so I figured I was in the right place for the best of both.

I walked across a weird footbridge across a river that first afternoon, not paying attention to where I was going. I just wanted to see.

There was a small grocery store there, somewhere across the river, and I went in, marvelling at all the bizarre packaging and odd designs. What on earth was "Let's Happy?" I spotted some rice, and thought "Yes, I'll buy rice, because that'll be the cheapest thing here in Japan, a country whose staple food is rice. I'll make some makis and surprise Sarah." The small bag of rice read "Y10,000." I thought it must be a misprint, but I didn't have the language to ask anything. I left with some packaged spaghetti sauce and some pasta. Maybe I'd surprise Sarah with some Italian food instead.

She was nonplussed when she returned from work that evening. "Yeah, rice is expensive. They only want Japanese rice in Japan, so they charge whatever they want for it." I was boggled.

I slept in my own room. Sarah slept in the next one, separated only by the thin foam core sliding partitions I learned were called fusuma. After that first intense night, I suddenly had no desire to sleep with Sarah any more. Maybe it was the incredible awakening I'd had just walking around the neighbourhood that first day-the realization that Japanese girls were incredibly pretty, far beyond all my previous yardsticks of "pretty." With inescapable and instinctive logic, I immediately determined I wasn't going to waste any more time in a "relationship" that I knew would ultimately go nowhere.

It didn't help that Sarah almost immediately adopted a Jewish mother posture towards me. I was not to eat this because "it wasn't good" for me. I wasn't to go out without a coat because I'd "catch a chill." I drank too much. This kind of mundane Western domesticity felt incredibly

stifling. I hadn't come halfway across the world to live in some American microcosm. I wanted to live, breathe and osmose Japan, to feel it burning in my veins, 24 hours a day.

I passed the first few surprisingly chilly November afternoons a few blocks away in a coffee shop that I'd discovered in those first wanderings, named Ai Cafe—Cafe of Love. I bought bottles of Suntory beer at 500 yen a pop—a lot of money for my budget—and wrote letters at the counter. I felt like I was an astronaut reporting to Mission Control. I tried ineffectually to communicate with the bemused staff, who eventually began to accept my presence and not startle at every sound I made, like lowland gorillas. I drank and wrote, trying to make sense of the immense flow of throughput my brain was trying to deal with and translate it in a manner that the people back in "the world" would understand.

I got the worst cold I'd ever had on my 26th birthday, three days into Japan. Everything was yellow, with accompanying chills. Sarah was useful, with lots of soup and comfort. While she was gone I drank her Amaretto and brooded. I began to play my guitar intensely, waking up, having coffee and then sometimes spending three hours a day doing just scales. Then I went to Ai Cafe and wrote letters and drank beer. Sarah would come home at about 7 and we would chat desultorily. She never tried to persuade me to share her bed again. I suppose my indifferent air discouraged her.

I began to wake up at 2 a.m., get dressed, and go to Ai Cafe. Beer was only 450 yen at that hour, and a flood of taxi drivers invaded the place every night at around midnight. They'd sit around smoking cigarettes and reading Japanese comics and babbling in their incomprehensible babble. I began to stay until 4 a.m., absorbing the smoke, drinking beer and occasionally playing PacMan at one of the video game tables. No one paid me any mind. Eventually I became part of the wallpaper. The "Master," a no-nonsense middle-aged fellow, quickly grasped what food I liked and what I didn't like on it, like bonito flakes. He cooked a mean soba, a buckwheat noodle dish.

One night at around 2 a.m. the master motioned me over to a taxi driver who was sitting at the counter. It turned out that this taxi driver spoke some English. Thus began the Great Learning. From that day on, I always woke up at 2 a.m. and went to Ai Cafe. Nakamura-san began to teach me Japanese. I drank beer and made notes. I was now able to flirt with the girl who worked the late shift, through Nakamura-san. "One important thing at a time" was my mantra. No sense in overextending yourself.

I met Hatsumi at an informal gathering Sarah had chosen to host at her place.

HATSUMI

Hatsumi, the girl I'd met at Sarah's party, was a willowy, quietly intriguingly sly creature who winnowed her way into my affections within minutes, that night at Sarah's. And within minutes, we were off to the sake machine around the corner to fetch a "last-call" sake before the automatic shutoff at 11.

We hit it off pretty much immediately. She was tall for a Japanese girl, lanky and demure. She laughed at my jokes, encouraged my poor Japanese. I was smitten.

Hatsumi lived in Tenjinbashi-suji Roku Choume, a town whose name was so long you'd be able to gulp down a Takara Can Chu-hai before you were finished deciphering the characters on the subway sign.

Within a week, I was at her apartment, a characterless metal-and-wood box on the seventh floor of some Kaidan (housing tract) building, but it was away from Sarah and it was my first Japanese girlfriend.

I loved Hatsumi. She was going to rescue me from Sarah. I had called her on Christmas day of that year, getting her number from Sarah's phone book while Sarah was at work.

"Hah-loh," came the soft, lilting voice at the other end of the line. I introduced myself as "that guy from the party" and Hatsumi smiled through the phone and said "Maybe we should, how you say? Getting together?" I wilted like a late-summer begonia.

After that first trip to her tract-housing flat, I was in business. I even developed a routine; Hatsumi worked out of the house during the week as a freelance artist, and she didn't feel comfortable with me around on the weekdays, so I'd go over on Friday night and leave Monday morning.

Hatsumi was great but quite firm about my being around; it disturbed her during the week, when she had to answer the phone as a freelance illustrator and talk to clients. But we worked out a weekend ritual in which she would meet me at Tenjinbashi-suji Roku-chôme station every Friday evening, we'd go to the nearest Friendly for dinner and then back to her house for maybe a video and sex, or Bill Evans and sex.

Sarah immediately noticed the absence, explained as "I'm staying at Hiroshi's house." Who was Hiroshi? "My new friend."

She didn't press me too hard, but my unexplained weekend absences were beginning to wear out our shield of civility. It soon became obvious to both of us that our relationship was quickly deteriorating. Here and there, signs of overt hostility began emerging.

In January, Sarah's work called her to Hiroshima, so I went along. By this time, I was almost penniless, but Sarah had the grace to front me and not make me feel miserable about it.

The first crack in her "nice girl" facade was to appear one morning in Hiroshima and would make me begin to despise her.

Arriving in that historic city, boggling as the Shinkansen pulled into the vast crater surrounded by towering hills, I was struck dumb by the ingrown memory I had created for myself surrounding the word "Hiroshima."

After settling into the Hiroshima Hilton that evening, Sarah safely gone to some meeting, I wrote a letter to my parents while gazing out the 24th-floor window at the verdant hills that had been blasted almost to glass not less than 47 years before. It was difficult to comprehend the magnitude of the disaster that had befallen this town so many years ago, and my accumulated mental baggage about the Bomb quckly led me into a profound gloom from which I could not quickly withdraw. I quaffed a few room-service sakes and occupied myself reading John Hersey's "Hiroshima," a somewhat perverse reading choice that I had packed the day before.

The "Incident" happened the next morning, as we were looking for the street car to the local subway, our final destination being Miyajima, a scenic island to the south. It was a Sunday, before seven a.m., and there were not many people about.

Sarah, losing her sense of direction, exasperatedly accosted a small, wizened old woman on the sidewalk and demanded where the streetcar was. I didn't speak any Japanese at this point, but Sarah's approach was to repeat the desired English word in katakana pronunciation until the poor recipient was beaten into understanding.

"Su-toh-rii-to-kaaa doko desu ka ," asked Sarah several times, and upon being met with incomprehension, her voice eventually peaked in an exasperated bellow. "SU-TOH RII-TO-KAA DOKO DESU KA?" she shrieked, frightening the old woman, whom I was already imagining as a “hibakusha”—one of the survivors.

I was incredibly embarrassed at her outburst. At this point, I didn't know Sarah very well as a person, but I was nonetheless quite pissed off. I jerked her aside by the arm and gritted "She doesn't understand." Sarah, astonished, could only stare at me, open-mouthed. How could I betray her in front of this little yellow monkey?

It was all downhill from there.

The Sarah horror-files continued that very same evening. We met a Japanese-American friend of hers who lived in Hiroshima and the three of us went out to eat. The room we were in was in a faux-train car, and while we were eating, a small group of Japanese children gathered outside

the doorway to gape, as children will sometimes do. Sarah seemed outraged, making exaggerated faces and yelling in English "Do I look like a monkey to you? Who are the monkeys around here? AM I A MONKEY TO YOU?"

I was appalled, but since I shared her living space, I said nothing. Also, it had a great deal to do with my lack of Japanese. I simply had to cede to the Japan veterans--they knew more than I did and I simply had no choice in the matter, as far as I was concerned.

Still, our return to Osaka brought new tensions. I was sick to death of Sarah, and I wanted to move out. Nothing was available, however, in my spending category, that is.

At this point, the money was running out, quite seriously. I had to get a job.

DAN KOBAYASHI

I finally interviewed with a school south of Sakai--way south. I'd gotten the number from an ad in Kansai Time Out magazine.

I had to take several trains and subways from Temmabashi to get there. Sakai Language Institute was an end-of-the-line destination no matter how you cut it. It was at least an hour and a half, one way.

The owner was a Hawaii-educated Japanese guy named Don Kobayashi. Standing six feet-two inches, behind his affable tatemae mask, Kobayashi was to turn out to be a verifiable Nazi.

He told me I'd be getting my sponsorship—meaning my work visa-one month after a "probationary" period. Fine and dandy. The pay was around Y200,000 a month, for lessons five days a week. I'd have about two hours of lessons in the morning, then about two hours in the evening. This left about five hours every day that I had free--an hour and a half from home and at least 45 minutes from Tennoji, the nearest major station. I couldn't quite wrap my mind around this concept of "work," but I smiled and nodded my way through the interview. "You won't be sorry that you hired me, Dan," I assured Kobayashi, unconsciously adjusting my necktie knot to reflect my self-hanging skills. Dan hired me on the spot, and thus began my initiation into teaching English in Japan.

To begin with, at Sakai Eigakuin, the staff wore nametags. Not nametags of their own Japanese names, but contrived English ones, such as "Mary" and "Liz." I felt slightly uncomfortable addressing the secretary as "Mary," but she seemed to like the role-playing, so I shrugged it off and went along with the charade. I noticed that even the Japanese students would address her as "Meaari-san." I knew that there was something not quite right here, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I just assumed that all English schools in Japan were a bit eccentric.

The head teacher at Sakai Eigakuin was a stuffed-up, 27-year-old red-headed Nazi from middle America, who saw his munificent role in Japan as a somewhat philanthropic condescension-based task of "educating the natives." He employed his limited Japanese (which was at the time far better than mine) loudly, and often. He was an officious little prick. I was pathetically polite to him, an attitude which I now regret.

The first days were a nightmare. Waking after a 2 a.m. session at Ai Cafe and finding the apartment deserted after Sarah had gone to work, I would gulp a coffee and rush out the door to catch the subway at Temmabashi station at 7 or so. I arrived at the school at about 8:45 and was teaching by nine. The first shift was housewives, only some of whom spoke English. I privately debated whether some of them spoke Japanese.

After the morning lesson I had to twiddle my thumbs until five o'clock--an astonishing five hours away. Then, I had lessons until 8, mostly

groups of high-school-aged girls and a few juku-inducted boys. The lessons were from some dwarf-minded book that no one, including me, understood, but that was the school text and we were ordered to abide by it.

Back in the world of Sarah and Temmabashi, things were heating up--she'd had enough of me and I'd had enough of her. I had to move out.

I found a place in Sakai, a small suburb about an hour away from central Osaka by train. It was the Rinkai Hotel, a place that advertised itself as "Foreigners welcome!" in the Kansai Time Out. I called them.

"It's a hovel" was the consensus of the few foreigners I knew, and that was what was going through my mind as I arrived in front of the hotel after walking from the train station at 10:30 p.m., one early January night.

The receptionist, working behind the small, isolated counter in a drab, industrially colorless room, was friendly and spoke English. "It's 1500 yen a night," she said (approximately $15 US at the time.)

Great, I thought, I'm finally officially homeless.

And I was. Marooned, with next to no money in my pocket and a dodgy job for the future, I drowned my sorrows in cheap 1.18-liter "milk cartons" of sake that could be bought at the corner machine.

Foreigners came and went from the Rinkai, but I mostly passed them as I came in or went out. There were no murmured greetings or pleasantries; everyone pretty much kept to themselves. The Face of the World away from work for me was the receptionist who toiled at the reception desk in the dingy lobby.

I spent my evenings lying on my bunk, the lights off, drinking sake and listening to the same Japanese pop tape on headphones, over and over. For some odd reason I was attracted to the predictable, slick music with the indecipherable lyrics. Besides, it had been given to me by a cook at Ai Cafe. I was missing a world within a world.

Sometimes, when I was edging into maudlin sentimentality, tears would begin to seep as I contemplated my somewhat precarious situation. I was alone in a cheap hotel 7,000 miles away from anything I could call home. I was surrounded by hordes of gibberish-talking strangers who really couldn't give a fuck whether I lived or died.

It was at least worth another drink.

BEING FIRED

The first few days at the Language Institute were the most tedious of my life so far. To fill up the noxious five-hour gap, there was only one remedy as far as I could see: find a good bar to drink beer and write letters at or study Japanese between sessions, a logical extension of my 2 a.m. assignations at Ai Cafe with the taxi driver, Nakamura-san.

In Sakai, there were precious few kissatens (coffee-shop-bars), but I was able to find one about half a mile away that was almost always empty. The bemused mama-san would serve me hot sake on a small floor-level table, often bringing unasked-for goodies such as deep-fried squid and raw green beans, since I hardly ever ate, just drinking sake and writing letters, and she must have felt sorry for me.

During those times, as I scratched away on my letter paper and sipped my sake in solitude, I would sometimes pause and look around at the worn shojis, the tan-yellow tatamis and the shuffling mama-san who would spirit in and out of the room like an old ghost, and in these moments I felt that I was truly in Japan, the old Japan, not the new one, and somehow I felt serenity as I never had before.

I couldn't quite get a handle on my role as an English teacher at the Sakai Eigakuin. For one, the students' range in ages was vast. One moment, I'd be teaching a gaggle of giggling high school kids, and the next, a group of somber housewives.

One thing I knew, however, was that the Japanese girls (or women), no matter what age, were outrageously pretty; squeaky-clean and almost obsequiously polite. They were as opposite to my conception of females as I'd ever encountered. At least, that's the way it seemed to my then Japan-addled brain. In reality, there was extreme treachery lurking behind those beguiling masks.

I was very glad to get away from Sarah. The weekdays, however, were desolate; I went from the Rinkai to work, then back to the Rinkai. I'd pause in the evenings at the little convenience store near the station and buy a packet of spaghetti sauce, some pasta and maybe some milk, and head home in the train-thudding gloom. I warmed myself beneath the bare bulb above my bed, staring at the indecipherable images on the wall- hinged television while I waited for my pasta water to heat up in the Y400 saucepan, sipping sake from a porcelain cup lent to me by Hatsumi.

If I wanted to make a phone call, I had to leave the building and go to a booth downstairs next to the train tracks.

The atmosphere at the Rinkai was muted. It was a transient congerie, foreigners mired within the desperation of lonely travellers everywhere, interacting soulessly with the accompanying parasites from a host community that profited from their solitude.

It rained often, cold and thin small drops that hardly warranted an umbrella yet were relentless enough to cause thoughts of aquacide. I watched incomprehensible game shows and heated foil-packaged spaghetti sauce on the small hotplate on the formica counter.

My nights usually ended with oblivion and the days usually opened with the taste of metal and the realisation that I was close to being late for work.

At first, the classes were fun. I'd make as much from the prescribed textbook as I could, trying to expand with vocabulary exercises or idiom practice. My English was good for a non-English major, and I took pride in my abilities to communicate my language without being boring or overly pedantic.

However, it soon became obvious to me that the extra effort was wasted. The morning group of housewives dutifully repeated the required sentences, but would come back the next day looking at the text as if for the first time.

The evening group of high school students mostly went through the motions, at first staring at me bug-eyed as I taught but quickly lagging upon being confronted by the alien runes I carved in the whiteboard with a magenta marker, and finally nodding off in their seats.

No matter how awkward the lessons were, my "free" time among the denizens of Sakai Eigakuin workers was worse.

The secretaries were vapid, almost exaggeratedly so. The word "robot" bobbed to the surface of consciousness continuously.

Dan, the owner, was sarcastically cordial. He had a collection of "jokes," which one was expected to laugh at. Either laugh, or shake your head with a forced smile, pretending to say "That Dan . . . such a kidder," under your breath. The atmosphere around him was tense. His comments were usually of the "We run a tight ship here" variety. I didn't listen very much.

It was an ordinary evening on the day of the incident that led to my firing from my first job in Japan.

I had been teaching yet another group of tired high school students and they were filing out of the room. Turning off the light, I ushered the last girl out with a hand to her back (and accompanying mane of hair), with the comment "Nice hair."

In retrospect, this was not a very intelligent thing to do. In Japan, no one touches another without an extremely good reason. Fathers do not touch daughters. Mothers do not touch sons. No one touches each other in public, unless they are male co-workers on a bender.

I did not know this at the time, and for that, I was axed. The girl complained to her parents, who complained to the school. I was busy calling in sick one day after a particularly troublesome night of despair when, at the phone booth next to the train tracks, the secretary said "No, no, you can't call in sick. Dan wants to talk to you."

And that was that. They were having a grand teachers' meeting that day, and I dutifully filed in, hungover as fuck. "What's with the drinking?" Dan asked me later, in his ready-room.

"I hate you, Dan, and I hate this fuckwad shit-hole you call a school, and I hate the scorpion-eyed housewives and the brain-dead high school students and I hate the zombie secretaries in this hovel you call an educational institution," wouldn't have washed. I had no explanation.

I was devastated. I had failed at my very first job in Japan. Hatsumi was unimpressed. "Many jobs," she said. "Just pick."

Now my three-month visa was in danger of running out. I pored over old cuttings of classified ads, looking at previously rejected jobs as new opportunities.

This time, I decided to take the easy way out: a job at the chain-school Atoni Language Institute. They were huge. I'd seen their ads in the subway. They promised an instant visa and work beginning basically the next day. I called head office and was talking to the boss within seconds.

Ellen sounded over the phone like a tough New Yorker. It was only later that I learned she was half-Japanese and had been born and raised in Japan.

I had a job, if I wanted it. Having not much choice, I went in to the head branch at Umeda for an interview.

It was a sprawling operation, from what I could see. There were at least 60 desks behind the main counter filled with bureaucratic types of every sort. Phones were constantly ringing and workers were bustling. The actual teaching portion of the vast room only occupied six booths, in the front section.

I went in to see Ellen, who turned out to be a rather vamplike 30-year old, and came out waving a contract.
Looking back, I can see reasons for my instant hiring. I was young, American, reasonably good-looking, eager, and full of shit.

My guitar was at Sarah's. It was being held hostage; I owed Sarah two months' rent. I missed my daily practice sessions, but Hatsumi had an old shamisen, and I amused myself with that for the time being, even though the strings were all wrong.

From the Rinkai, infused with new hope, I plotted the future. In the local English-language monthly, Kansai Time Out, I had put an ad for a guitarist seeking a band, about a month before. I had received a couple of calls while at Sarah's, but had not acted on them. Now, I gave one of the numbers a ring, from the phone box next to the train tracks.

Yes, came the answer, there was a band looking for a foreign bass player. The fellow was British. I arranged to meet him on Dotonbori bridge at noon the next day.

The following day, I showed up as promised and met David, a rangy Brit with a Northern accent. He was a guitarist, he explained, and would I care to meet the rest of the band? The rest of the band was eating greasy hamburgers nearby at yet another McDonald's-imitation joint.

THE BAND

Brian was the most obnoxious fuck I'd ever met. About 5 foot 10 and 200 pounds, he swung his weight around like a sumo wrestler, and obviously fancied himself as such.

"Hi, I'm Nick," I said, holding out my hand. He wore heavy gold chains, had the sides of his head shaved in a ridiculous attempt to look hip- hop, and capped it all off by wearing knee-length cowboy boots.

"We rented a room a couple blocks away," he said, ignoring my outstretched palm. "You a bass player, huh?" A whiny nasal New York accent completed the picture. "Well, you'd better be better than David-he can't play worth shit." David was standing next to me.

I disliked him immediately, and was about to head for the subway for a train to work. David somehow managed to smooth things over and we all walked to the rehearsal space. It was a typical large room a couple of floors up with a few amps and a drum set.

I plugged in my bass and David plugged in his guitar and the British guy, Terry, who I gathered to be the lead singer, set up his microphone.

It was a typically haphazard garage-type jam. "You know this?" followed by "Born to Be Wild" or some shit. Things all cover-band musicians would know.

One thing that was immediately apparent to me was that David was awful. He couldn't string two chords together. Luckily, after about half an hour, he called it quits, having to go to work. I picked up the guitar, and the rest was history.

Terry was quite good, in a shrieking, flailing sort of way. Brian managed to keep a beat fairly well. But I didn't want to join this band.

As we packed up, our time expired, Brian began to hassle me. "So, you joining or what?"

I prevaricated. "Let me think about it. I'll get back to you later on in the week." I didn't like this fat fuck and his boundless arrogance.

He wouldn't accept that. With behaviour I'd later learn was Brian's hallmark, he hustled me relentlessly. "You'll never find a bunch of guys this motivated," he said, as he packed up his kit. "Either you're in or we start looking for another guitarist."

"Well, why don't you look around a bit," I said, looking for the exit, "and give me a call if you can't find anyone."

Brian stopped what he was doing. "Look, David's shit. You're good. We can make good music. Either you agree to join right now or just forget the whole thing."

I just stared at him. I'd barely met these people an hour ago and this fat guy was giving me ultimatums.

"We've rented this space tomorrow, same time. Don't be an asshole. Join the band," Brian said. "Fuckin' A, Terry, we get the perfect guitar player and he doesn't want to join the fuckin' band," Brian called in a loud voice over his shoulder. Terry was silent as he wrapped up his microphone.

"What about David?" I asked.

"Fuck David," came the answer. "Forget about David."

We parted company and I went to work. I didn't know it that day, but Brian was to be the gust that brought my whole house of cards in Japan tumbling to the ground. Drugs, sex, crime and other urban temptations were to become part of my hitherto-placid existence and would end up almost being my total undoing. However, the collapse was going to take three years.

DAVID

I couldn't forget about David. I met him the next day outside Big Man, the huge flatscreen TV at Umeda station. "I guess I'm playing with those guys," I said, trying not to be evasive.

He was surprisingly forgiving. "Listen," he said, "I hate to change the subject, but I have a place south of Tennoji and I need a roommate. Any interest?"

I was interested. Anything was better than the Rinkai. I had a new home, a band, and a paycheck.

Hatsumi was shocked when she came to help me move from the Rinkai. Her dainty fingers were soiled the moment she had to turn the handle of the door to my room. "It's so dirty," she said. "This is horrible." I said nothing. Her Japanese sensibilities were already too offended.

I effected the move in one day. That night, I was living with David in a place called Suminoe, a spot on the map a few stops from the Abeno subway station on the JR line.

My new room was small, but far more of a welcoming place than the Rinkai. I was able to prop my computer up in a corner of my 6"Jo," or tatami-mat, bedroom. David's was separated from mine by the ubiquitous cardboard sliding doors, or "fusuma."

I had arrived.

Sarah began to thankfully fade from memory. The only thing I regretted was leaving my acoustic guitar at her place. Characteristically, she held it hostage, telling me that I'd get it when I showed up with back rent: 100,000 yen.

My first day at Atoni was an eye-opener. I was at the head office in Umeda. It was a bizarre but stimulating place. Six or seven teachers hung

around a central lounge area and were dispatched like stormtroopers from Central Command every 50 minutes to tackle another lesson, which lasted 40 minutes.

The students, who ranged from 12-year-old schoolchildren to elderly grandmothers, businessmen and office ladies, assembled quietly in the lounge area between lessons, blinking like sheep.

The teaching material was at least 10 years old, but they seemed to like it. There were housewives, salarymen, high school kids, retirees, insurance brokers, doctors, painters, engineers, manga artists and scuba divers. Sometimes you'd get three students in the same lesson who were completely different: a salaryman, a high school kid and a doctor.

There were seven lessons a day. When there were no-shows, you got a break. I studied Japanese. I enjoyed the lessons. I really wanted to find out what the Japanese were all about, and the vast spread of ages and experiences made for great anthropological studies.

The days blended together. I was kept at head office for about a month. Work ended at 8:15 and I'd hop the subway back to Suminoe. I had to change to JR at Tennoji, and that was where I scored a couple of can chu-hais (a vodka-like based fizzy lemon drink) for the final leg home.

David worked at another school and had a different schedule, although we frequently found ourselves leaving and arriving at roughly the same time. I'd pick up a carton of sake at the train station, drop by the convenience store for sandwich materials and change into my yukata

(nightgown or housecoat) the moment I got in the door. There was no television, so if David was there we usually sat around all evening desultorily discussing our day and listening to music.

Every Friday I'd pack a little extra in my work bag and prepare for a weekend at Hatsumi's. I'd go to work, then race to the subway and catch the train, packed with purple-faced drunken salarymen and office ladies, and get off at Ten-roku, the nearest station to Hatsumi, but 15- minutes’ walk away. There would be an obligatory stop at the sake machine for a "One-Cup" and then it would be the long walk to Hatsumi's apartment, stopping off at a fast food place called Mos Burger for a couple of chili dogs. They had good chili dogs. I would pack them up and bring them to Hatsumi's, where I would change into sweats and pour some cold sake and eat microwaved chili dogs while Hatsumi finished off some project.

Usually she'd have a sake and then become red-faced and giggly, and sex would usually be the result. She had a disturbing habit of using explicit language, hilariously incongrous utterances coming from that sweetly innocent face. "Fuck my tits," she would declare suddenly, eyes twinkling mischievously, removing her top.

It was a lesson I would learn over and over again in Japan: things were not as they seemed.

BRIAN

"This is where I like to sit and watch the musky minxes go by. Mwwaaah!" Brian chewed on a fast-food burger and gazed intently at the parading traffic of pedestrians a few feet in front of the car we were sitting in, near a shotengai in Shinsaibashi. Office ladies in short, tight skirts were mincing by in small flocks, and Brian was indulging in his favorite activity, next to stealing CDs from Tower Records.

I had now been in the band for three weeks, and already Brian had gigs. "20,000 yen each for two sets at the opening for a housing complex!" he crowed about the first one. I had no idea where he found these jobs, but $200 for playing for forty minutes was a very welcome addition to my language-school pay.

Our material was culled from a ragged democracy: there were tunes from vintage rock like Chuck Berry and the Who from Terry, the heavy- drinking Brit lead singer, and more modern stuff like the Police and Dire Straits from Brian and myself, with token metal-rockers from the longhair of the band, Japanese guitarist-thudbrain Itoh.

My days off from Atoni began to be permanently spent with Brian. Today was such a day. "Oooh, check it out!" Brian warbled as a particularly juicy office lady sauntered by. "This is why I'll never leave Japan."

You'll never leave Japan because you'd never survive back in New York, you fat fuck, I said to myself. Sometimes Brian himself seemed to agree with me. "There's nothing for me back there, Nick. If I go back I'll just be another fat schmoe looking for a job. Here, I'm a king."

And I had no choice but to agree. Brian was that rarest of creatures outside of a federal prison: completely adaptable, opportunistic and without a shred of integrity. In my early dealings with him I observed that his interaction with the people around him, Japanese or not, was guided by a total disregard for rank, position or social standing. He strutted through most situations and bluffed his way through the rest.

Most of all, Brian liked to drink.

About a month after I joined the band, Hatsumi called me on the telephone, breathless with excitement. "You have an apartment!" I was puzzled. "You're kidding. I always thought of this as a cubicle."

"No, I'm not kidding! I entered you in the public housing lottery and you have an apartment if you want it. It's in Bentencho."

I had well and truly been blessed. Hatsumi, who lived in public housing herself (koudan), had entered my name into a public lottery for housing, and somehow I had been chosen. This was an incredible windfall for a foreigner.

However, there were a couple of catches: I wouldn't be able to see the place until the day I moved in, and the rent was 100,000 yen.

THINGS TO COME

I was watching "The Deer Hunter" from a rental video in my bedroom. There was a scene in which the director had focused in on the whirling blades of a helicopter, and since all the lights in the room were out, it was like being inside a giant stroboscope.

As I watched the screen, I saw an extremely bright twinkling object developing in the center. It started to expand, like the lights of a subway train pulling into a station. Puzzled, realising suddenly that this was not part of the movie, I began to pull myself to a seated position.

The twinkling object then began to lurch towards me, becoming a meteor of light. Like that episode on Star Trek: The Lights of Zetar, I thought, weirdly. Just like the Lights of Zetar. The light expanded, becoming bigger than the TV screen.

I now jerked upright, trying to shout; but no words came out of my mouth. I desperately grabbed at my companion, and then in an instant everything went completely dark. Darker than the darkest sleep I have ever had. I now think it was the true darkness of oblivion.

I woke up, very, very slowly, and I found myself on a gurney, being wheeled under bright lights. Voices were babbling, in a kind of high- pitched hysterical urgency. I couldn't understand what they were saying. That's when it hit me: I was being taken prisoner by the Vietcong. My mind instantly clamped down. I would never tell them anything. But what were they going to do to me?

I was loaded into some sort of vehicle. In a haze, I heard the "Piiii-pon piii-pon" of a siren. It was coming from the roof. Slowly, like molasses, the tendrils of consciousness began to invade my brain—but very slowly. I found myself being pulled out somewhat roughly, metallic clanging and slamming all around me, and then I was being hurried along a vast corridor of fluorescent lights. I began to count them as they passed.

I was a prisoner of the Vietcong, but why had I been captured? I went over and over this question almost absent-mindedly as cognitive function began to lazily replenish my brain cells.

I suddenly realised that the voices were in a language I recognized, and it wasn't Vietnamese. It was definitely Japanese. I didn't know how I knew that, but I did. Then why were they pretending to be Vietnamese?

Finally, like the old metaphor of the clouds being parted by the sun, true consciousness began to creep back. I was now lying still on some kind of bed or stretcher, in a shadowless room. I couldn't get my eyes to focus properly.

Then it hit me: something very bad had happened to me. I felt dampness between my thighs. I had "peed my pants." I must have moaned then, but I don't recall. I felt like I had been hit by a freight train. Every breath was an exercise in agony, as if I'd cracked all my ribs.

"Keiren ya. Keiren ya. Wake up!" came a frantic voice, which I finally recognised was that of my companion, not a Vietnamese jailer.

I mumbled something thickly to tell her I could hear her. I heard the riffling of pages and an urgent male voice. There was a brief discussion, then my companion: "You had a—a sei-zure."

How had it come to this?

SETTLING IN

"Summer nights in Japan. Lying on a futon just inside the balcony on tatamis, the TV babbling on mute. Ricardo Silveira playing on the boom box as I type on my Mac Plus and sip a lemon Takara Can Chu-hai.

"Masticating peanuts as the humid south wind suffocates me in the summer heat. A distant siren wails at midnight on a Saturday. The weight of Japan settles on me like a heavy, moist blanket."

These were the words I typed into my diary in early June, 1989.

Life had finally become good again. The magic of Japan was reworking itself. There was optimism.

I loved my apartment, my "mansion." It really was a mansion, too: far, far bigger than any others I'd seen so far. It dwarfed Hatsumi's place. The bedroom alone was about eight tatami mats in size. The living room was at least twice that. There was a separate ofuro—not a "unit bath"—and a space for laundry machines, and a sink to wash up in and separate toilet. The kitchen lined the entire back wall of the living room. It was vast. It was also on the tenth and top floor. My view from the prodigious balcony was of Osaka port, a landscape frequently reminiscent of the opening scene from the movie Blade Runner.

The apartment was also completely devoid of furniture, but I didn't care at all. I loved empty space, especially in Japan. There was no air conditioner, though, something I lived to quickly regret.

Things were good at Atoni. They moved me around a bit, but it kept things fresh. I got to know, and sometimes love, the various schools. Each one had its own character. The Abeno branch was shabby and rundown, but the head teacher there, Peter, was a crusty old English guy reminiscent of a wizened Michael Palin. Kyobashi was bright and modern, in a high-tech office building. There were lots of upscale students there: doctors from nearby Kansai Idai Hospital, architects working on the massive projects at Tempôzan, even a couple of flight attendants. Kita-Osaka was rough-and-tumble: the students were pretty much working-class, and the main teachers were hard drinkers who spoke great Japanese.

But my favorite school was in Namba, and this was the place where I ended up working the most. It was here that I was to meet my future wife, and also where I met a pair of Englishmen who would have great effects upon my life in Japan, one by punching me in the face.

The students at Namba frequently came from distant points around Osaka's compass, as the station nearby was only rivalled by Osaka's main Umeda hub. People from Nara, Sakai and Wakayama would make the hours-long trek to sit in my booth and be regaled by the sound of my voice.

Meanwhile, the band had turned out to be a major preoccupation as well as a conduit to meeting some of the less mainstream denizens of the city.

We practiced in a studio in Shinsaibashi. I would lug my bass and my Nautilus bag of books and study materials, often hungover from revelries with the teachers from Namba the night before, and trek down to the studio for a 10 a.m. session. Our repertoire was a mixed bag, but it was fun to play, and there were immediately gigs.

One of the first turned out to be at one of those typically illogical "festivals" that the Japanese put on from time to time to prove their worldliness. This one was called, inexplicably, "American Train." The only train there was was about two carriages long and stationary, and we were the only Americans, but it was in the heart of Umeda and there was lots of free beer written into the contract.

The deal was that we would play the festival twice a day for its five-day run and make Y200,000 each. This was a lot of money.

We decided on an all-Beatles set for the first set of the day and our regular, hard-rocking set for the evening gig. In the interim, we worked hard at depleting the kegs at the beer tent and meeting some of the girls who flocked like leather-skirted pigeons, giggling behind raised palms.

I had gotten to know Brian somewhat by this time, and although we got along well on the surface, I still couldn't help but despise him, mainly because he couldn't keep time on the drums. He'd always attempt some ridiculous roll and would end up confusing the fuck out of everyone else, at which point, usually, the song would come to an abrupt standstill. At American Train, he actually stopped in the middle of a song, apologised to the crowd, adjusted his hi-hat microphone, and counted the song off again from the beginning. The rest of us just bewilderedly followed along.

On the third day, our second set ended up with a shouting match between Brian and me. Everyone had played like shit, Terry forgetting entire blocks of words, Itoh/Thudbrain playing whole leads in a different key, Brian just generally singing badly and me breaking a bass string (difficult to do) in the middle of a song. I screamed, Brian screamed, and we all went home unhappy.

The next day we played like Led Zeppelin. It would go like that for the rest of the gig.

That was the life in the first half of 1989. It was my first full year of Japan's seasons, and when tsuyu (monsoon) hit, it was my foretaste of the all-encompassing horror of a Japanese summer.

Everything was heating up. The pressures of dealing with constant invitations from female students, while amusing, threatened my hitherto- monogamous outlook. "The girls here are amazing," reads a diary entry. "They might as well be round, flat, painted red and standing at intersections."

Hatsumi and I were doing fine, but there was a curious standoffishness within our relationship that I couldn't quite get past. Her parents lived in Wakayama, a couple of hours south by train, but she never even brought up the idea of my accompanying her on a visit. She seemed content to have our weekend relationship, and to tell the truth, so was I. She never did come over to my new apartment, other than the one cursory inspection, but we talked on the phone every evening, sometimes for hours. On the weekend I would go to her place. We would rent a video or I would cook something, or we'd just hang out and listen to Kate Bush or David Sylvian. It was an oasis in my hectic weekday mayhem.

I gradually became busier, imperceptibly, than I had ever been in my life. Practice was at 10 a.m. most mornings. School started at 1, and at 8:30 when it finished, I would invariably go to a yakitori joint with the teachers (and students) and party till the last train.

I started drinking at the 4:45 break a couple of months into teaching at Namba school. We had forty minutes, so I'd head up to the park around the corner, buy a couple of can chu-hais from the machine, and hang around in the park sitting on a stone stool arranged in the middle of a miniature Stonehenge, usually bringing a Japanese book to study with in the dying light.

At first I did this alone, but when a fellow teacher named Jonathan, a former rowing-team champion from England, showed up, I invited him along most nights. It was a nice break from the growing tedium of teaching English.

The summer grew oppressive. One morning I awoke at 5 a.m. wearing nothing and being covered by nothing, all the windows wide open, but I was so hot that I had to go to the ofuro and fill the tub with cold water. I sat in it for about an hour. The rest of the time, I had a spray bottle which I used to spray myself, usually completely in the nude. Just wearing a T-shirt or going to the living room sparked a torrent of sweat. Sanctuary was in the trains on the Chuo-line, the subway I used to get to Namba. I'd bask in their air conditioners, ignoring the stares as I thrust my face up to the grates of the cooling fans.

One day in the early summer, I was in Temmabashi hooking up with David after a weekend with Hatsumi. He had moved out of our old place after I left and was now living with a girlfriend, but we had stayed in touch. For some reason while strolling the Temma Shôtengai, we decided to get our hair cut at one of the ubiquitous salons that thronged amongst the endless coffee shops and CD rental places.

It turned out that the girl cutting both our hair spoke some English, something that was extremely rare at the time. She was a twenty- something named Hiroko, and she was also extremely attractive, at least to me. In retrospect, she was just another Japanese girl enamored of foreigners, but at the time I was stricken. I left my phone number and we were soon hooking up for English lessons. She lived in Nishi-Kujo, a couple of stops away from me on the JR line.

It was to be an exercise in misunderstanding. Not much was said on my part about Hatsumi, but then again, Hiroko never asked. Yet I never pushed, and Hiroko never pushed either, because she was so damned Japanese. Brian kidded me. "Rip her fucking clothes off, Nick! It's obvious she wants it."

But I couldn't. I was committed to Hatsumi and I couldn't bring myself to make any moves, simply because I had never (rarely) done it before Stateside and I wasn't about to start now—though I had no idea at the time that I wouldn't be able to hold onto my prudish values for much longer.

The Japanese-ness that was Hiroko was the first crack in the facade of perfection and likeability that I had created in my mind about the Japanese; the first indication to me that things were not what they seemed in Japan.

She kept calling me and arranging lessons. She cut my hair. She had me teach her younger sister, even meet her parents. One day, as I poured sweat standing outside Nishi-Kujo station waiting for her, a car pulled up. It was her father, alone. "Hiroko couldn't come," he apologised. "She had to cut a customer's hair."

I had met the father. It was a fait accompli. But Hiroko couldn't bring herself to break out of her Japanese reserve and I couldn't break out of my piggish faithfulness to Hatsumi, although she was never, ever mentioned in conversations between Hiroko and me.

One day in the middling summer of 1989, Hiroko invited me to take a cruise with her on a paddleboat named Michigan on Lake Biwa (Biwako). It was another of those faux foreign-themed amusements that the Japanese love so much: a New-Orleans-style steamboat that cruised the lake for a couple of hours, complete with a foreign dinner crew. Hiroko drove and paid for everything, and it was a great evening. We ordered a bottle of wine and I downed most of it.

On the drive back to Osaka—about two hours—I became almost bold. "Hiroko, how come you don't have a boyfriend? Men would kill for someone like you. Pretty. Rich. Smart." The ball was in her court. I touched her arm for emphasis. This was it.

But it was not to be. Out came the hand to the mouth and the flustered giggle and the "Heeeehhhh?" It was really my first inkling that all was not right with the Japanese.

UNPLEASANT PEOPLE

At Namba school there was a new face. He was from Liverpool, and his name was Garry Burns. He was young, maybe in his early twenties, lanky, over six feet, and looked a bit like David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, except with a slight Neanderthal-like bulge of his forehead.

The first day he worked there I invited him out for lunch at a neighbourhood coffee shop. It was interesting to have someone new at the branch and he seemed pretty sociable. We talked idly of the weirdness of life in Japan over a couple of beers, and he seemed a cheery, if somewhat unpredictable fellow, something I chalked up to his youth and North-England upbringing. He seemed unsure of himself, not comfortable with his new occupation. I sympathized. I was now a "veteran," though in-country less than a year, and he was the newbie. He had a heavy Mersey brogue that I at first found charming. Later I was to find it ominous.

He became a regular teacher at Namba and became good friends with the "main" teacher (the longest-running at that particular school), Ben, a guy from San Diego.

At first, the arrangement worked out well. On breaks, we would chat about various things and it was not unheard of for all three of us to stop off at a stand-up bar after work, sometimes even with a student or staff member. But then things began to change.

Garry and Ben began to morph into a sort of Heckle and Jeckle-like team, doing everything together, and as there were only the three of us, I quickly became the odd man out. They were both years younger than me, so I suppose it was a natural evolution. But then I began to hear snickers of derision and whispered comments during their lessons, about me and my lessons. It wasn't a secret: you could hear every word of everyone else's lessons unless you wore earplugs. Garry and Ben became the Terrible Two.

I got along well with one of the vapid staff drones named Yuko, and Garry seemed to subsequently derive pleasure in flirting with her. I later found out from Garry himself that "I was shagging the shite out of her the whole time, Nick! You was a fockin' patsy, weren't you, flirtin' an' carryin' on like you was while I was doin' the wench, yeah?"

All this didn't really bother me too much at the time, but imperceptibly and without any particular outward signs the workplace atmosphere gradually became poisonous. Tiny, cordial differences of opinion on how to teach became hushed conspiriatorial murmurs and progressed to open criticisms, always with me on one side and Garry and Ben on the other, finally leading to a general falling-out. Word had it that they didn't like the fact that I spoke Japanese in lessons and that some students were requesting my lessons because of it. I was puzzled. Who wanted extra lessons?

There was a confrontation in the latrine one Saturday afternoon in June. I stood there after a lesson in which Garry had been criticizing me in a loud voice to a student I'd just taught. I had mentioned Garry's name during my lesson in a conversation, and he didn't like it. He stood just a few urinals away, a smirk on his face. "If you don't watch it someone's going to beat the shite out of you one day, boy," he intoned. "You're fockin' Jap-happy."

He wasn't a very smart guy, but I wasn't very big, either, and I knew from his background that he had broken many a head. It wasn't worth the hassle. I shrugged it off and stopped speaking to him and Ben. Shortly afterwards I requested a transfer from Ellen. I was beginning, in addition to learning about Japanese behaviour, to realise that some of my foreign compadres weren't like the folks I'd left at home.

I was posted away from Namba for a couple of weeks, but then I learned that Garry had been shipped far, far away due to student complaints. Apparently excess flirting and inappropriate comments had had something to do with it. At the same time, Ben was transferred out as well. Obviously someone besides me had twigged to the increasingly erratic behaviour of both. The Bobbsey Twins had been focked in the ass.

So I went back to Namba. In their place, there were two Brits, Jon Cross and Chris Page. They were very amiable fellows, Chris married to a Japanese despite his youth, and we all got along very well. Things became normal again.

For a while.

LEARNING JAPANESE

Some of the students were quite aggressive. While it was against "company policy" to fraternize with students or staff outside of work, literally upon pain of dismissal, no one really seemed to care. Atoni was a school in name only. In reality, it was a cattle-herding operation, with the teachers being the herders and the staff being the corallers and branding agents. The shadowy bosses at head office were never to be seen.

There would be "blitz" test lessons between our regular lessons for potential new customers. We couldn't refuse these "lessons," but we were told that we could profit if we ended up signing up a new fish. It was usually in the range of $20 or so. Still, we had nothing else to do.

I enjoyed teaching English immensely. I felt I was born to do it. I bought "The Story Of English" and many grammar books, trying to come to terms with my own language all over again, even though I had done very well at the subject during my school days. And I tried to make it at least a bit of fun for these rigidly regular people who were being confronted by a language system so irregularly alien to their own.

I struggled to come up with ideas that would make it easier for my students to learn, and I was inspired greatly by another struggle: my own, to learn Japanese. I wanted to know what worked for me to learn Japanese and then apply it to how to teach English. Over time, it's difficult to say whether this approach was any good. But it made many friends. I impressed my students in my eagerness to learn their language, mainly because they couldn't understand what the fuck else I was talking about the rest of the time, anyway.

And I wasn't kidding about learning Japanese. I figured at the outset that I'd be there at least a year, and I was determined that I'd at least go away with a good grasp of the language. I had already seen 5-year veterans who still had trouble ordering in a coffee shop and I was determined not to be one of them.

The students seemed to be fascinated by my approach. All the rest of the teachers would usually just pick up the book and start reading from whatever lesson was indicated in the 10-year old text, but I would toss the book aside and say something like "Today, we learn 'get, take and put.'" Or, the student would be such a fascinating subject unto himself that I'd just goad him into talking. Examples of these kinds of people were multinational company execs who talked about their vegetable gardens, neurosurgeons who described med-school rat decapitations, and even a kamikaze who dispassionately talked about being disappointed at not being scheduled for a mission because he was too good a pilot.

These people became my Japanese teachers. I studied every chance I got. I would always scribble new English vocabulary on the board and write down the Japanese equivalent underneath—in the roman alphabet, of course, which amused the students to no end. At the end of the day, I would write all the newly-gleaned vocabulary down in my notebook, for further study in the train on the way to work the next day. I never studied at home, feeling I should just take the time off and devote myself to television-as-learning device. I would just leave it on all the time and try to improve my listening skills from the mostly idiotic chaff that was on—cheesy dramas, endless celebrity quiz shows and badly- dubbed twenty-year-old American TV series.

I brought eight or ten books to school every day if I was moving around, or would leave a nine-inch stack of textbooks inside my teaching booth if I knew I was going to be there for a while.

I usually showed up about two hours before my shift at any school I was working at, and studied from one of my books. I used the staff for any questions. It was a huge, free-floating Japanese lesson. I never had any formal training. The staff were generally bemused and happy to help.

It was a Utopian ideal that every word of the lesson should be in English, but it wasn't much use with 80-year-old grandmothers and 8-year- old children. I learned that there was always a compromise. How much can you learn in a 40-minute span if you don't understand a word of what's being said? I always gave out homework, mostly vocabulary lists. Most students never studied them, but it was a laugh to "pretend" test them the next time they were there. And some actually worked on their English.

So they should have: it was costing them a fortune. Most students were paying in excess of $50 for 40 minutes of lessons. Atoni was an English-teaching ant farm. At the time, during the Bubble Economy of the late 80s, it was the epitome of chic to be learning English, and most spared no expense. They were sending in their 3-year-old kids for private lessons.

No matter. I was happy to entertain little 4 year-old Miyuki-chan as well as 45-year-old power-broker Shimada-san. Their English was

equally as bad.

It was a languid summer, my first in Japan. I had been born in Calcutta, India, to airline parents and had lived in two different African countries, so one would have expected that the heat and humidity would have little effect on me, but it was just the opposite. The heat sapped all my strength and reduced my days to head games devoted to avoiding any possibility of being out in the sun, or spending as much time in air-conditioned rooms. I quickly realised during this time that—savings be screwed—I had to get an air conditioner. They installed it while I was at work. I left them the key. I rarely left my room after that except to go to the bathroom.

Things were happening faster and faster. I was cut completely off from America; since I didn't own an international phone line, I rarely talked to anyone back home. I received perhaps a letter every three weeks from my mother, but that was about it.

In late 1988, when I had come to Japan, it was going through the last gasps of something that is now referred to as “The Bubble.” It was truly a time, although no one seemed to realise it yet, of the climax of a Japan that had been been rising steadily from the ashes of World War Two,

going through several distinct phases: occupation by a foreign power, the US under Douglas MacArthur, then a slow, laborious transition from a military-dominated, still semi-feudal class-based society into a heavily industrialised, Western-aping regional power that had started out by copying technology from the West and making it cheaper, to becoming industry leaders in innovation and technological breakthroughs.

What is now referred to as the Japanese Asset Price Bubble, or “bubble economy” had begun just shortly before I arrived and was beginning to implode just about a year or so into my stay. None of this was noticeable from street level, although I had indeed arrived at a propitious time for foreigners wishing to teach English; the Japanese had lots of money to burn and it was in high fashion to be taking English classes. No matter that the act of being seen taking English classes was an end all by itself; whether or not the taker of the lessons learned any English was of little or no importance.

In Osaka, the largest city in the Kansai region, which sat roughly in the girdle of the Japanese island complex, although there was a fairly large transient foreigner population, it was minuscule in comparison to the hordes of foreigners occupying the Kanto region, in which the sprawling megacity of Tokyo-Yokohama sat like a benign yokozuna, or Sumo champion, lording over the rest of Japan just by sheer size alone.

Osaka was generally regarded as a city of merchants, a population with working-class ethics and a down-to-earth approach to life that manifested itself in a large entertainment industry and a Japan-wide wildly famous regional cusine. Osaka had its own dialect, as did all the regions of Japan, which, in its purest form, could be all but unintelligible to speakers of the dominant form of Japanese, referred to as “Standard Japanese” which emanated from the prestigious mouths of the broadcasters of NHK, the Japanese version of the BBC.

The language of the Osaka-Kobe region was also the language of a somewhat sinister subset of Japanese society, the “yakuza,” or Japanese mafia, who indeed called Kobe headquarters at the time I was there. The dominant faction of the yakuza at the time was the Yamaguchi-gumi, or Yamaguchi “family.” These gansters went about their business in a similar fashion to gangster groups worldwide, but with various twists that could only have been created in Japan, such as the tactic of buying shares in a large, well-regarded company and then threatening to disrupt the next shareholders’ meeting unless paid off in substantial amounts. Very, very substantial amounts.

In fact, the very school at which I taught was rumored to be a front for the activities of the Yamaguchi clan, and I was treated at head office to the occasional whispers of “That’s him!” among the staff and students when the Big Boss, the owner of the school, deigned to come in and inspect his lucrative side-business. Because lucrative it was. I never knew for sure, but some students were paying tens of thousands of dollars to attend the school. They were sending their children, for whom a 40-minute lesson cannot have cost less than $50. That’s fifty 80s dollars, which is about $95 today.

My friends and acquaintances were truly astonished at the size of my apartment. I empathized, because I’d been in theirs. Most young, single people lived in what I can only call a box, because that’s what it usually was. You’d enter through the low metal doorway and you’d be in a mnuscule hallway, the “genkan,” which was where you were supposed to leave your shoes. After the genkan was usually the main room, which was approximately ten by fourteen feet. In this room, most of the living was done. The television was there, as was the low table where one always sat. 

There were no chairs; one sat on cushions with one’s legs outsretched beneath the table, or one knelt, as did most Japanese. This position became exceedingly uncomfortable after about ten minutes, so there was usually a lot of position shifting during a visit. If the occupant was lucky, he or she would have a separate room in which the sleeping was done; often, there was no bedroom at all and the occupant simply moved the table aside and spread a futon on the floor. There would usually be something called a “unit bath” and a separate toilet. The unit bath consisted of a large, deep tub called an ofuro, surrounded by a waterproof floor with a drain to one side. There was usually a small stool upon which one would sit and shower the “dirt” off before getting into the tub. 

In the case of more than one occupant, the tub was generally kept full for the next bather, as it would be considered “clean,” the previous bather having cleansed themselves before entering the bath. This saved water for the water bill and heat from the heating bill. Since these bills could add substantially to the cost of the monthly rent, most Japanese families, even those with three or more individuals, would only use one bath’s worth of water for the day. Bathing was always done at night before retiring. No one ever showered or bathed before going out in the morning. Ever. During my entire five years in Japan I never once met a Japanese who bathed in the morning.

The usual Japanese apartment had a wall-hung air conditioner/heater, called a ”cooler.” As these could run up considerable bills there were some unfortunates who somehow managed to survive without one. Needless to say, this was hell in summer and hell in winter. There was no such thing as central heating. One made do in the winter with small, portable electric space heaters, or occasionally ones powered with fuel oil, which rendered the air almost unbreathable. Under the small, square tables called “kotatsu” that were the centerpiece of most Japanese living rooms, there were built-in electric heaters under the removable top. In the wintertime, a large square quilt-like blanket was sandwiched between the top and the table frame, the idea being that one would sit with one’s legs beneath the quilt and stay warm that way. There were also electric carpets, called, unsurprisingly, “denki-kaapetto.”

Thus, through tradition and necessity, the Japanese developed these tools for survival that only by the addition of electricity differed from age- old methods of staying warm in winter or cool in summer.

My apartment, in grand contrast to the ordinary, consisted of a large living room — about 14 tatamis in size, tatamis being the unit of measure — and a six-tatami bedroom. There was also a separate ofuro and toilet, and the “kitchen” ran along the short side of one wall in the living room. A large balcony ran the length of both the living room and bedroom, and I was on the topmost floor of the ten-storey building which in itself was an unheard of luxury. My view was not that of another building mere yards away but of the panorama of Osaka’s port area. Never mind the continual brown haze that cast a pall over everything and left a thin layer of grime on all surfaces that remained unwiped for more than a few days — this was incredible luxury for a single person living in one of Japan’s most crowded cities.

My rent, correspondingly, was quite high, when one considered that there was a monthly phone and electricity bill to be paid separately. In 2012 dollars the grand monthly total was probably the equivalent of about $1,800. The problem was, I rarely had $1,800 lying around; at least, not for rent. I was continually short. My salary barely came to $1,800 and on top of that I had transportation expenses, which could be quite high, plus a drinking habit that required at least $400 a month. 

Then there was the going-out expenses, the constant bang-up gtherings with my workmates at tachinomiyas (stand-up drinking places), yakitoriyas (chicken on skewer places that involved massive amounts of chuu-hais or beer) or the venerable robata-yakis, which were immense taverns that seated up to a thousand people who sat in split-level tables and consumed large amounts of alcohol in addition to every kind of food known to be consumed in Japan, Germany and Italy combined. 

Here one could pile one’s plate with sushi, German sausages, deep-fried squid and French fries all in one spot while downing tankards of Japan’s finest insipid ales, Sapporo or Asahi, which we referred to as recycled, since one pissed them out as fast as one drank them and we presumed the river was the source of the water for the beer.

To make a pathetic attempt to save money, I tried to avoid these “piss-ups,” as my British friends called them, and drank alone at home. My usual quota was a 1.18 liter “milk carton” of 16-proof Japan’s finest: the lowest grade of sake available, which invariably came from vending machines at about 700 yen a carton (about fifteen of today’s dollars).

Needless to say, the morning after drinking one of these was never a happy one, but it became such a normal state of affairs that I barely noticed the stench of alcohol clinging to me every morning when I breathed on some unsuspecting secretary at work (“Nikorasu!” she would hiss, “sake kusai!” — “You stink of alcohol”). I’d jerk open my pack of gum and go on with the day. At that point I didn’t particularly care what I smelled like. And after travelling many a train late at night and seeing the legions of purple-faced businessmen slumped in their seats or lolling half-conscious on a ceiling strap, the entire car liable to burst into flame at the strike of a match due to the sake and whisky fumes — I absolutely couldn’t have given a flying fuck what I looked or smelled like. This was to prove to be a mistake, because as I soon found out, there were two standards in Japan: one for them and one for us.

GIRLS

The girls weren’t much of a problem to begin with in Japan. Naturally I deveoped crushes on whomever wandered through my sphere; any student, young or old, was fair game. But I had never been a ladies’ man. I never chased skirts and had no interest in doing so. To me, a beautiful girl was simply a beautiful girl. I treated them as I treated anyone else, mainly. I never flirted. Double-entendres were not for me, in any language. There were some students who would purposely request my classes. Sometimes I was flattered, but most of the time I was annoyed, because they would take my “break” lessons way from me: lessons where my student didn’t show up for some reason. They would be taking someone else’s lesson, and after that the staff, always angling to get the students to use up their lessons as fast as possible so as to have to sign up again, would happily point out that my next lesson was free. This did not endear me to these students.

I completely ignored the untouchable ones; the married, the too-young, the too old, the too needy. Occasionally I’d accept an invitation to dinner or something similar, which was totally against the rules, which were always ignored anyway, by everyone, staff included.

But sometimes the student would get to me. Not by flirting; not that any of them even knew how to flit, but any overt signs of wishing to become ”more familiar” with me outside lesson time were gently but firmly rebuffed. I was with Hatsumi and had no wish to complicate my life any further. For a while.

Then, as if by magic, some of the students were managing to worm their way into my affections. They would always be the oddball, the anti- Japanese Japanese, the independent, non-giggly microcephalics that most of my female students tended to be.

At first, I resisted, but a few contretemps with Hatsumi began to loosen my ties with her. Once I got to the point of realising that Hatsumi was not going to be The One, the gates opened, at first just a crack.

None of my female students ever asked if I had a girfriend. I never, ever volunteered, but didn’t go out of my way to declare that I was single. I wasn’t anyone’s picture of a good-looking man; I was endowed with a fairly ordinary face, one that would probably always be rated as a five on a ten-point “handsome” scale, but I was young and in fairly good shape. Plus, I was very interesting. I stood out from the rest of the gaijin crowd by being genuinely interested in my student’s progress in learning English. My stories were interesting. I can’t deny it; I’d had an extraordinary life and my being in Japan was just another chapter in it. The fact that I was a working musician didn’t dim my “attractiveness” quotient much, and I tried my best to be funny with all my students. I enjoyed making them laugh and they enjoyed laughing. I’d make it a mission to try to draw some of the more reserved people out of their Japanese shell, and some of them were buried very, very deeply inside it. Not a few absolutely didn’t want to be there for one reason or another; they were ordered to by their company or forced to by their parents. Some were so shy that they never, ever looked at me or spoke up unles they were ordered to.

I never wanted to be a psychiatrist but on many, many an occasion I found myself in that position. Salarymen unburdened themselves, as did housewives who were stuck in a Japanese merry-go-round that for them never stopped. I felt genuinely sorry for them and tried to relieve their burdens for those forty minutes that they were in my class, through one trick or another; usually humor.

And it was the oddball girls I was attracted to, and this obviously showed, because they seemed to reciprocate. Akiko Shimada was one of those girls: slightly shy but bursting with gales of unexpected laughter at a particularly good “dajare,” or wordplay that I would keep trying to come up with. For example, the word for :”Thank you” is “Arigatoh” but “ari” means “ant” in Japanese, and large animals are counted with the counter “toh”. So “Ther are four elephants” would be “Zou ga yon-toh.” Small animals were counted with the counter “hiki”; if you said “There are four ants” you would say “ari ga yonbiki.” (Sometimes the consonant changes according to the word preceding it, hence “hiki” becomes “biki.”) Anyway, instead of saying ”Thank you,” in the normal fashion, namely “Arigatoh,” I would say “Arigajuppiki” which means “There are ten ants.”

That would provoke no end of laughter, once they’d got the joke, and their surprise that a foreigner would know how to use it was quite flabbergasting to them. Akiko Shimada was one of those girls who loved my jokes. So I loved her back. She was an uncommom Japanese girl, simply nothing like your typical mouth-covering, interminably giggling mindless robots that seemed to constitute 90% of young Japanese femaledom.

One day I somehow invited her over to my house. I don’t know why I did. I don’t remember how I did, but I did. We ended up lying on my futon, watching some Japanese anime video that I had rented. It was a lazy Saturday afternoon and I had no obligations, and neither did
she . . . but it was one of those unplanned, mutually shallow relationships. I simply enjoyed her company, and she mine. But she had a life of her own and so did I. I returned to Hatsumi with no guilty feelings at all. By that time were had discovered some of the many, many points on which we didn’t see eye to eye; in other words, arguments began to be quite frequent.

To my mind, I was in a foreign country and under no obligation to adhere to a serious relationship. You might shake yor head in disbelief at this somehwat callous attitude, but spend enough time in a totally foreign country and, with the country’s denizens’ cooperation, you will begin to see yourself as what you are — a permanent foreigner. So you start to behave like one. I was no exception.

Once I had betrayed Hatsumi once, the floodgates were thrown open and I was now my own man, beholden to no one. Even now, I try my best to summon some sense of guilt, but the people i was ineracting with were using me equally as callously as I was using them; they all had their own reasons. Whether it be to be seen on the arm of a foreigner, or be able to permanently practice their English, or simply to be able to throw tradition to the winds and not have to deal with that specimen of complete uselessness, the typical Japanese male, these women would use me pretty much like the novelty that I was.

(As in our Caucasian-dominated society, in which one will find the black male who serially dates white females or the same in reverse, there would be Japanese women who would only date foreign men. They were slapped with the ignominious label “Gaijin lovers.”)

In Akiko Shimada’s case, the relationship faded when she moved to another school, but she was soon replaced with others.

Eventually, I stopped the façade with Hatsumi and we too faded. However, the girlfriend scene started going into overdrive. At one point I was seeing not less than five girls at the same time, which made for much hilarity at my apartment; a cozy Sunday afternoon with Kazumi would suddenly be interrupted by a ring at the doorbell by Keiko, who had dropped by “because she was in the neighbourhood.” Never mind that I lived a ten-minute bicycle ride from the nearest train station. I had to shift into overdrive, proclaiming from behind the locked steel door that I was “With a student.” To the unsuspecting Kazumi, relaxing on my futon with a glass of saké, I explained that a student had “Made a mistake in her lesson schedule.”

I quickly relised that I was not cut out for this “Alfie” kind of life and after about half a year of shenanigans settled in with the one who was to become my wife.

DRINKING

Japan is a country in which drinking is seen to be absolutely essential to functioning socially. The ironic aspects of this were that as a race, the Japanese, similarly to other Asian races, had a built-in gene that discouraged, if not downright disabled the over-consumption of alcohol. For the more unfortunate, one drink of any type of alcohol was enough to make their face flush and become shiny, and as more drinks were imbibed some of the most unfortunate among them would turn a startling purple color; their eyes would begin to bulge slightly and they would start to sweat, all indications of an allergy to ethanol, the main component of alcohol. Thus, most could not last more than two or three average-sized drinks; any more and they would become so drunk that they would be unable to stand upright; it was a progression that was so predictable you could almost see it develop like a photograph in front of your very eyes.

I recall in particular one Friday evening as I was returning home from work on one of the most crowded subway lines, the Midosuji, that ran the vertical length of Osaka’s core. At rush hour you could barely move; you would be swept along with the crowd almost unwillingly as they moved from platform to escalator like fish in a narrow stream.

On this occasion, I exited the train opposite a bench upon which lay a strikingly good-looking young woman, who was dressed in typical “office-lady” garb, with her Gucci purse on the floor next to her flaccid hand. There was a pool of watery vomit next to the bag and her face was the color of of a freshly baked brick. She was completely unconscious, and hordes of people passed her, gingerly stepping around the pool of vomit and continuing on their hurried way to their next destination, completely ignoring her. I was tempted for a few seconds to try to rouse her, to wake her from her semi-coma and guide her to whatever train she was headed for. But this urge only lasted three of four

seconds. To try to disturb her would have been at the least, unthinkable.

She would have awakened in incredible confusion and would have been astonished and shamed to be approached by a total stranger, let alone a foreigner, and furthermore, touching her in any fashion whatsoever was also utterly unthinkable.

So I just sighed and followed the crowd to the escalator. It’s possible a station attendant would have eventually have tried to awaken her, but most certainly, no other Japanese would have intervened for any reason. I wasn’t about to be the odd man out. I was already Japanese by this time. I thought like a Japanese and acted like a Japanese. And to a Japanese, anyone not part of one’s group might as well have been extraterrestrials.

So drinking alcohol was not only accepted, but enthusiastically encouraged. You could hardly walk the length of a city block without being confronted by a beer or sake machine. While no Japanese drank in public outside of a drinking establishment, I was certainly under no stricture whatever. I’d drink on trains, in buses, on a bicycle, in a hospital waiting room, in an elevator—it mattered not one whit to me or to anyone else. Not that I cared what anyone else thought—I was a foreigner in Japan and I could pretty much do anything I liked, whenever or wherever.

Here the story ends . . . uncompleted and forevermore beyond scrutiny—in inscrutability, to be precise—for Eternity. Except within the author's mind.