Nihon, Victor-style
[see "Brett Easton Ellis"]
In the states:
Trying to pack everything you need to move to another country in three bags. Two boxes of books sitting on your friends floor. No time. Takes fifteen minutes, he can do it. Leave a check. (Fast forward to now: two boxes of books still sitting on your friend's floor.) Driving a circuit between LA, Irvine, and Moreno Valley basically every day. Trying to get your VISA taken care of. Spend a day lost in a part of LA I've never been, with the wrong address for the consulate. I end up underground, find my way topside again, streets don't correspond to normal space and time here. Finally find the consulate, and have to come back in two days for the VISA. Before this, dropping Ash off on a train to Portland, where she gives me a pill of ecstasy she's afraid to take with her. See sherriffs and drug dogs, and I think the pill is in my pocket at this point, in a small plastic bubble like those rings you get at grocery stores for twenty-five cents. Before this, moving boxes and boxes out of my apartment, mostly books, and scattering them to the four winds, mostly to Moreno Valley. Throw away tons of stuff I've carried around O.C. for years.
In my last days, I try to get together with several people, mostly failing...a phone conversation with Silver. Every time I talk to her she asks if I'm all right. At this point, as at all previous points in question, the answer is definitely "no," but what's the difference? I don't quite understand what she thinks this question accomplishes, since she knows the answer, or she wouldn't keep asking, and she can't do anything about it anyway. Her concern is genuine though. Then I'm in a strip club for my last hurrah in LA with Sumista...her friends are going and she invites me along. This is such a male tribal rite, I'm almost embarrassed to say I'm bored. I see no blood; my interest wans. Kind of want to just talk to Sumista alone, maybe do the E, but kind of know this isn't going to happen. Sitting alone with her finally at four or so in the morning until seven, we talk, but it's about nothing, because I'm tired and bored, enhancing my depression and anxiety, and I'd much rather shut her up with a kiss, which should be about perfect, as we're both single and openly flirtatious, but tonight hasn't gone well that direction. Blame recent break up. And I'm leaving the country anyway. Toss the E at some point. Try to hook up with the guys from the old armored job, but by the time they work it out I don't want to anymore and see Sumista one more time instead. This goes rather coldly. Can't operate on necessary social levels with this kind of anxiety. It's a kind of background panic, the only function of which is apparently to numb my interaction with the world. I've had more than enough of that, thank you.
Fuck the States, jump to the airport: I'm late, of course, though I try not to be. Have to cash some bonds, which takes too long, and I don't make check in. They get my bags on at the last second. The weight limit is 50 lbs. not 60, so I shell out more cash. All this is typical. Calling my name by the time I get to my dock. Once I'm on the plane, things are better. I've always been good at handling inevitability. Sitting here, there's really nothing more to do. I'm about to fly to Japan. The panic rises to the surface at intervals, but more the way gases dissipate into the air, until I'm left empty. Start reading Narnia. Finish most of the first two books before landing, and both books I brought with me are done by the end of the month. The flight is mostly harmless. Mostly ocean. My first sight of Tokyo on landing: rice fields, roadways, tiny people. On the train to training, there is a group of college kids tripping around the world. I want to say they were from Peru, but that can't be true...every other foreigner here is from Peru for some reason. I tell my escort that it's strange, I come to Japan and start hearing Spanish. This is a running theme: I've used far more Spanish than Japanese since arriving.
Training:
Meet some lovely people. Our group consists of William (me), William (England), Becky (England), Red Becky (England), Lucinda (Australia), Marcelle (Australia), and Mandy (Australia). Will vanishes after training. There can be only one, apparently...the William at my interview didn't make it either. Red Becky gets her name for the bright red, very English dress she wears to training. She looks and acts a little like Ms. Moneypenny. Tall, blond, attractive. Afraid of Japanese food (she's gotten better.) I spend a good deal of time flirting with her, competing with the other William. They are all such stereotypes of different parts of their countries that I feel rather left out...of all the things that can be said of me, stereotypical Californian is not one. Have a great time...have trouble keeping my accent from slipping towards the British. Mandy and Becky are victims of reverse culture shock, returned to the Empire of the Sun. This is a very real danger. Marcelle curses like an Australian...even in training exercises. William takes bets how many times she'll curse in her mock-lesson, but she pulls it off without a one. I think I've already begun organizing my Fuji trip.
Gotenba:
My first real memory of Gotenba is Casual. I happen to arrive around Salsa night, which is the second Saturday of every month (missed this one, dammit, because I'm supposed to be in Osaka). It is packed, there are tons of Peruvians, one of them an extremely amicable drunk who is insisting on people taking Tequila shots. This is a mistake for everyone...we were fine with the beer at the izikaya, but this is too much. There is dancing, my first introduction to my student Yoshino, who is ridiculously nice, and the two girls who speak perfect British English: Risa, who moves to Osaka immediately, and Missy. Also, of course, getting to know Lauren (now touring Thailand and bound for France) and Brendan and Kieran (Gotenba's one and only Irish, bound for Tokyo in a couple of weeks) and Chris. The basic Gotenba eigo no sensei gang. Andrew pretends to pass out while Missy and Yoshino try to revive him, more and more scared. Oh, Andrew is the substitute teacher I replace. When he finally sits up laughing Yoshino is so mad she literally attacks him for ten minutes while I take pictures with someone's phone. There are a lot of pictures on people's phones the next day they don't remember. Most of the participants are missing pieces of that night. I was apparently slightly less drunk, because I remember everything. I speak broken Spanish to a number of Peruvians, talk to Lily, the girl who runs the club, apologizing for being too drunk to speak proper Spanish. As I'm leaving, I somehow get invited into a car with a bunch of Peruvians who drunkenly maneuver their way to their various houses. Nervous about drunk and reckless drivers (for some reason), I keep saying "cuidado," but this is pointless and annoying drunken repetition. I get a ride home, anyway, and it's already light out.
I can see Fuji from my front door. I find a Shinto graveyard the next weekend and, powerfully moved, I sit down for two hours to write my first poem in Japan. Small red bugs filled with blood try to eat me. On the other side are hills where a broken down windmill sits. Getting to that windmill becomes my preoccupation for the first month. I start running. On my way to the windmill, I find a tiny jin-jya, a shrine, hidden amongst the trees, totally secluded. I find the windmill. I go to Kamakura with Red Becky, and see the ocean from the other side for the first time. It is strangely disorienting, as the ocean has *always* been west for me. See a giant sea turtle, with a spiky yellow shell. Pull a dead shark about a foot long out of the water so Becky can see it, and get soaked in the process. See a giant Buddha and some beautiful temples and gardens. The Buddha has giant rope sandals some monk made for him in case he wants to take a walk. It's there I learn how to purify yourself and pray at the temples and shrines (wash left hand, wash right hand, rinse mouth...hands together twice near your forehead and bow). I practice this at my hidden shrine when I go running to the windmill. I have a propensity for wandering into every shrine I find. Increasing interest in Shinto. Visit Becky in Tokyo one weekend and we see Spiderman3, we eat at a fairly expensive Italian restaurant with amazing service, we see the Imperial Palace, which everyone should see at least once. It is breathtaking. None of this is in strict chronological order. I also spend days wandering Gotenba on foot, memorizing the layout. There are no street signs in Japan, really, everything is by area and very local. You just have to know where everything is. So I explore. I buy a DVD player, after searching and searching and getting typically vague directions from a guy who I tried to speak to in Japanese while he tried to speak to me in English (his was definitely the better of the two). Thought about getting a rental card, which I still haven't managed. Bought two movies so far: Die Hard 2, because I just really felt like buying a movie (this is before I had much in the way of TV...network TV is even worse here than in America), and Complicity...because they made it!! This is based on my favorite book by Scottish author Iain Banks, an English film and rather well done...but I have to come to Japan to find out they made it! Very excited to find this out. Also there is a movie version of Murakami Ryu's 69 (that's 1969, you sickos, though I have a feeling the pun may be intended, knowing him), but it's in Japanese, of course, and I doubt an English version will ever be made. It's an old movie, and even my manager, who is a Murakami fan (yay!), had never heard of it. My manager speaks only a little English, and she communicates mostly through notes, using her dictionary to very creatively get her message across. This is one of her letters, about me getting sick:
"To William,
"There are many moisture in Gotenba. Many students catch a cold recently. If you find the condition of a patient concretely, you should take medicine.
"Please take good care of yourself.
"Mayuko."
I like her and hope she doesn't leave, but they work the managers to death, and they make less than we do. We also communicate through media...we share music: she loves concerts and used to listen to hard rock kind of stuff when in college, but now prefers mellow music...so I've introduced her to Vashti Bunyan and Mogwai. She's given me some classical stuff to listen to, and a movie called the Grand Hotel (she likes old black and white classics) with Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford. An amazing movie, in fact.
Hashigo [club hopping]:
On to last weekend. 4 pm: arrive at Aoyama Hachi off Roppongi St. in Shibuya. Meet up with DJ student Yasafumi, who is moving to Irvine for work the end of August. Introduced to some DJs, but it's quiet and I keep mostly to myself, stick to the dance room while Yasafumi djs House. Then Yasafumi introduces me to Kanako, an office girl who speaks plus or minus zero English, about my age, with no boyfriend. I buy her a drink and chat about nothing, with Yasafumi acting translator for me. Very cute. The only way I've come up with to describe her, though, is "cute in that nondescript Japanese way." Nothing that stands out, just Tokyo-stylish, but subdued, cute, but nothing in particular, shy but not too shy. She likes Amelie, and J-pop, and I try to keep her interested as best I can. Buy her a drink. Club ends at 8 pm: go to meet Becky at the station, and we meet up with Yasafumi and Kanako again to go to an izikaya at the station. Flirting more difficult now...dividing my time between Becky and Kanako. For someone with no social skills, I've been getting fairly good at this interacting with people thing.
We drop Kanako off, sadly, at another club to meet a friend. Then the three of us head to another club where Yasafumi sometimes djs, something like Ore maybe. A little bigger than the other one, we spend most of the time drinking and dancing to Japanese hip hop often incorporating songs like Teen Spirit and I Am the Walrus, which for some reason doesn't bug me. Have a great time. See all the people (this is in Shinjuku) waiting for the first train at 5 am, all dressed up and doro-doro (drunk; this is a slang apparently reserved to a certain alcoholic segment of society with which I am acquainted: many Japanese will not know it). Make our way to WOMB, which I think is back to Shibuya, and this is the most massive club I have ever seen, three stories high, with an underground bar to boot. There are bars on every floor. Spend a while dancing...pounding drum & bass, which I'm told is from England...a kind of tribal version of techno...drinking shochu and oolong...reminded a little of that scene in the second matrix movie...Becky has a lovely smile...Yasafumi dances with no expression, as though concentrating too hard...I can imagine that expression on my face most of the time...This is very much a gaijin attraction, and I see lots of groups with their Japanese guide, like ours...did I mention the laser-light show? My god. 4 am: we head to the second floor to relax a bit. Becky is barely conscious, so we decide to head out. Becky is unconscious practically the moment we get in the car, and Yasafumi gets lost trying to find Oimachi, but we make it eventually. Becky and I stumble to her place and collapse about 5 am. I'm on the couch, but my knee starts aching like hell because of the angle and I have to move to the floor. I hurt my knees running the downhill from the windmill and I need some weights to work them out.
Akihabara:
Get up at 11, and slowly make our way out of the apartment. Murder some eggs in Becky's horrible frying pan...no spatula, have to make do with a spoon...not in any hurry with Becky lounging around in her underwear. What to do with this lovely British girl who replaces modesty with innocence? Her intentions are terribly hard to read, because she really does have that infuriating innocence about her, but for a second I thought she might have been jealous of Kanako. This is probably not true, and she is probably just comfortable around me. She seems like the type who has had a lot of guy friends, and people have that annoying tendency to trust me anyway. I'm sure I'm similarly confusing, since I'm fairly flirtatious in my way, but don't really know that I want to get involved in anything myself. For one thing, getting involved in Japan with a white girl seems almost wrong, even if she is British. Still, she is pretty hot...
One suggestion: "Sleep with her and maintain friendship." I love how simply these sorts of things work in your world, dear. I've tried it, and it never works out.
Akki is weird. Maids everywhere, and the anime-worshipping otaku, who are downright creepy. Women generally do not venture into Akki alone. Girls singing in anime voices while otaku dance to some strange choreography they all seem to know. "Moe." Girls dressed in anime-style wear posing for pictures. This is sexual interaction at very nearly its most abstract: men fetishizing an outfit/persona, while the women somehow fetishize being an outfit/persona. Sorry I can't put that better, it works out in my head. Like all fetishes proper (I don't mean behaviors/scenarios, but actual object-worship), it's sex at one remove, but this one seems particularly abstract, since both the men and women seem to be sexualizing different aspects of the same thing, while the actual men and women on either side of the fetish cease to have any substance in the act. It is like shared narcissism.
Anyway, it is also the electronic capital, and I finally purchace my lovely Toshiba after many trials and tribulations at Yodobashi Camera. We have curry for lunch and fish and chips for dinner (Brit/Aussie cravings, what can I say?). Oh, yes, our group consisted of myself, Becky, Mandy, and Mandy's bf Hideki, who did the translating. Because none of the Gotenba people I invited came along, there was no way to get back in time for my Japanese class, so I stayed another night with Becky, had another breakfast where I ended up cooking eggs again, a task I specifically relegated to Becky but which somehow came back to me, and relunctantly left Becky still in her underwear to catch my bus. I missed the 11, so I was 15 minutes late to work. Whatever.
Today:
And by now I should be in Osaka. I bought the ticket and arranged everything, then fucked up the bus time. Usually I'm fine with the 24 hour times they use most of the time, but for some reason I saw 2130 as 11 o'clock, and I even had my phone alarm set for the right time (my phone is 24 hour time as well), but realized that 2100 wasn't 11, it was 9! So I changed my alarm without checking my ticket. Walked through the typhoon rains (I'm being serious, though we hardly got the worst of the typhoon...still, it was more like swimming than walking), found some keys someone dropped, and left it next to the side walk on a brick planter, feeling sorry for whoever lost those on a night like this. Realized my mistake at the station and stood around depressed for a while, knowing there wasn't anything I could do now. I could take the Shinkansen, but it would have cost me the price of my round trip just to get there. Fuck it...walk back, not really any wetter, having reach saturation. Contemplating the questionable usefulness of kasa [umbrellas]. Depressed, drinking shochu and mizu [water; traditional way to drink shochu], finishing the first season of Prison Break, given me by Becky. So this weekend is apparently now devoted to catching up on my writing. Shoganai [it can't be helped, there is no way].
Final Note on Gotenba:
Never lived in such a rural place before. The only thing faster than gossip is succession [see Pratchett, Terry, on torturing small monarchs]. Chatting with one of the girls at the Gotenba school about my hashigo experience, and Friday one of my Mishima students asks me about it. They're friends of course. Have to be careful what you say in a place like this...They really do see everything you do, especially the gaijin. We kind of stick out. I need to be careful with my Japanese vocabulary, too, since I've learned a number of alcoholic and otaku words, which I like to show off jokingly. My manager is very concerned that I keep my "gentlemanly" appearance and not scare off women with such coarse language. Getting made fun of as an otaku is not terribly amusing either. Anyway, shoganai. I've only got so many words to work with right now!
In the states:
Trying to pack everything you need to move to another country in three bags. Two boxes of books sitting on your friends floor. No time. Takes fifteen minutes, he can do it. Leave a check. (Fast forward to now: two boxes of books still sitting on your friend's floor.) Driving a circuit between LA, Irvine, and Moreno Valley basically every day. Trying to get your VISA taken care of. Spend a day lost in a part of LA I've never been, with the wrong address for the consulate. I end up underground, find my way topside again, streets don't correspond to normal space and time here. Finally find the consulate, and have to come back in two days for the VISA. Before this, dropping Ash off on a train to Portland, where she gives me a pill of ecstasy she's afraid to take with her. See sherriffs and drug dogs, and I think the pill is in my pocket at this point, in a small plastic bubble like those rings you get at grocery stores for twenty-five cents. Before this, moving boxes and boxes out of my apartment, mostly books, and scattering them to the four winds, mostly to Moreno Valley. Throw away tons of stuff I've carried around O.C. for years.
In my last days, I try to get together with several people, mostly failing...a phone conversation with Silver. Every time I talk to her she asks if I'm all right. At this point, as at all previous points in question, the answer is definitely "no," but what's the difference? I don't quite understand what she thinks this question accomplishes, since she knows the answer, or she wouldn't keep asking, and she can't do anything about it anyway. Her concern is genuine though. Then I'm in a strip club for my last hurrah in LA with Sumista...her friends are going and she invites me along. This is such a male tribal rite, I'm almost embarrassed to say I'm bored. I see no blood; my interest wans. Kind of want to just talk to Sumista alone, maybe do the E, but kind of know this isn't going to happen. Sitting alone with her finally at four or so in the morning until seven, we talk, but it's about nothing, because I'm tired and bored, enhancing my depression and anxiety, and I'd much rather shut her up with a kiss, which should be about perfect, as we're both single and openly flirtatious, but tonight hasn't gone well that direction. Blame recent break up. And I'm leaving the country anyway. Toss the E at some point. Try to hook up with the guys from the old armored job, but by the time they work it out I don't want to anymore and see Sumista one more time instead. This goes rather coldly. Can't operate on necessary social levels with this kind of anxiety. It's a kind of background panic, the only function of which is apparently to numb my interaction with the world. I've had more than enough of that, thank you.
Fuck the States, jump to the airport: I'm late, of course, though I try not to be. Have to cash some bonds, which takes too long, and I don't make check in. They get my bags on at the last second. The weight limit is 50 lbs. not 60, so I shell out more cash. All this is typical. Calling my name by the time I get to my dock. Once I'm on the plane, things are better. I've always been good at handling inevitability. Sitting here, there's really nothing more to do. I'm about to fly to Japan. The panic rises to the surface at intervals, but more the way gases dissipate into the air, until I'm left empty. Start reading Narnia. Finish most of the first two books before landing, and both books I brought with me are done by the end of the month. The flight is mostly harmless. Mostly ocean. My first sight of Tokyo on landing: rice fields, roadways, tiny people. On the train to training, there is a group of college kids tripping around the world. I want to say they were from Peru, but that can't be true...every other foreigner here is from Peru for some reason. I tell my escort that it's strange, I come to Japan and start hearing Spanish. This is a running theme: I've used far more Spanish than Japanese since arriving.
Training:
Meet some lovely people. Our group consists of William (me), William (England), Becky (England), Red Becky (England), Lucinda (Australia), Marcelle (Australia), and Mandy (Australia). Will vanishes after training. There can be only one, apparently...the William at my interview didn't make it either. Red Becky gets her name for the bright red, very English dress she wears to training. She looks and acts a little like Ms. Moneypenny. Tall, blond, attractive. Afraid of Japanese food (she's gotten better.) I spend a good deal of time flirting with her, competing with the other William. They are all such stereotypes of different parts of their countries that I feel rather left out...of all the things that can be said of me, stereotypical Californian is not one. Have a great time...have trouble keeping my accent from slipping towards the British. Mandy and Becky are victims of reverse culture shock, returned to the Empire of the Sun. This is a very real danger. Marcelle curses like an Australian...even in training exercises. William takes bets how many times she'll curse in her mock-lesson, but she pulls it off without a one. I think I've already begun organizing my Fuji trip.
Gotenba:
My first real memory of Gotenba is Casual. I happen to arrive around Salsa night, which is the second Saturday of every month (missed this one, dammit, because I'm supposed to be in Osaka). It is packed, there are tons of Peruvians, one of them an extremely amicable drunk who is insisting on people taking Tequila shots. This is a mistake for everyone...we were fine with the beer at the izikaya, but this is too much. There is dancing, my first introduction to my student Yoshino, who is ridiculously nice, and the two girls who speak perfect British English: Risa, who moves to Osaka immediately, and Missy. Also, of course, getting to know Lauren (now touring Thailand and bound for France) and Brendan and Kieran (Gotenba's one and only Irish, bound for Tokyo in a couple of weeks) and Chris. The basic Gotenba eigo no sensei gang. Andrew pretends to pass out while Missy and Yoshino try to revive him, more and more scared. Oh, Andrew is the substitute teacher I replace. When he finally sits up laughing Yoshino is so mad she literally attacks him for ten minutes while I take pictures with someone's phone. There are a lot of pictures on people's phones the next day they don't remember. Most of the participants are missing pieces of that night. I was apparently slightly less drunk, because I remember everything. I speak broken Spanish to a number of Peruvians, talk to Lily, the girl who runs the club, apologizing for being too drunk to speak proper Spanish. As I'm leaving, I somehow get invited into a car with a bunch of Peruvians who drunkenly maneuver their way to their various houses. Nervous about drunk and reckless drivers (for some reason), I keep saying "cuidado," but this is pointless and annoying drunken repetition. I get a ride home, anyway, and it's already light out.
I can see Fuji from my front door. I find a Shinto graveyard the next weekend and, powerfully moved, I sit down for two hours to write my first poem in Japan. Small red bugs filled with blood try to eat me. On the other side are hills where a broken down windmill sits. Getting to that windmill becomes my preoccupation for the first month. I start running. On my way to the windmill, I find a tiny jin-jya, a shrine, hidden amongst the trees, totally secluded. I find the windmill. I go to Kamakura with Red Becky, and see the ocean from the other side for the first time. It is strangely disorienting, as the ocean has *always* been west for me. See a giant sea turtle, with a spiky yellow shell. Pull a dead shark about a foot long out of the water so Becky can see it, and get soaked in the process. See a giant Buddha and some beautiful temples and gardens. The Buddha has giant rope sandals some monk made for him in case he wants to take a walk. It's there I learn how to purify yourself and pray at the temples and shrines (wash left hand, wash right hand, rinse mouth...hands together twice near your forehead and bow). I practice this at my hidden shrine when I go running to the windmill. I have a propensity for wandering into every shrine I find. Increasing interest in Shinto. Visit Becky in Tokyo one weekend and we see Spiderman3, we eat at a fairly expensive Italian restaurant with amazing service, we see the Imperial Palace, which everyone should see at least once. It is breathtaking. None of this is in strict chronological order. I also spend days wandering Gotenba on foot, memorizing the layout. There are no street signs in Japan, really, everything is by area and very local. You just have to know where everything is. So I explore. I buy a DVD player, after searching and searching and getting typically vague directions from a guy who I tried to speak to in Japanese while he tried to speak to me in English (his was definitely the better of the two). Thought about getting a rental card, which I still haven't managed. Bought two movies so far: Die Hard 2, because I just really felt like buying a movie (this is before I had much in the way of TV...network TV is even worse here than in America), and Complicity...because they made it!! This is based on my favorite book by Scottish author Iain Banks, an English film and rather well done...but I have to come to Japan to find out they made it! Very excited to find this out. Also there is a movie version of Murakami Ryu's 69 (that's 1969, you sickos, though I have a feeling the pun may be intended, knowing him), but it's in Japanese, of course, and I doubt an English version will ever be made. It's an old movie, and even my manager, who is a Murakami fan (yay!), had never heard of it. My manager speaks only a little English, and she communicates mostly through notes, using her dictionary to very creatively get her message across. This is one of her letters, about me getting sick:
"To William,
"There are many moisture in Gotenba. Many students catch a cold recently. If you find the condition of a patient concretely, you should take medicine.
"Please take good care of yourself.
"Mayuko."
I like her and hope she doesn't leave, but they work the managers to death, and they make less than we do. We also communicate through media...we share music: she loves concerts and used to listen to hard rock kind of stuff when in college, but now prefers mellow music...so I've introduced her to Vashti Bunyan and Mogwai. She's given me some classical stuff to listen to, and a movie called the Grand Hotel (she likes old black and white classics) with Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford. An amazing movie, in fact.
Hashigo [club hopping]:
On to last weekend. 4 pm: arrive at Aoyama Hachi off Roppongi St. in Shibuya. Meet up with DJ student Yasafumi, who is moving to Irvine for work the end of August. Introduced to some DJs, but it's quiet and I keep mostly to myself, stick to the dance room while Yasafumi djs House. Then Yasafumi introduces me to Kanako, an office girl who speaks plus or minus zero English, about my age, with no boyfriend. I buy her a drink and chat about nothing, with Yasafumi acting translator for me. Very cute. The only way I've come up with to describe her, though, is "cute in that nondescript Japanese way." Nothing that stands out, just Tokyo-stylish, but subdued, cute, but nothing in particular, shy but not too shy. She likes Amelie, and J-pop, and I try to keep her interested as best I can. Buy her a drink. Club ends at 8 pm: go to meet Becky at the station, and we meet up with Yasafumi and Kanako again to go to an izikaya at the station. Flirting more difficult now...dividing my time between Becky and Kanako. For someone with no social skills, I've been getting fairly good at this interacting with people thing.
We drop Kanako off, sadly, at another club to meet a friend. Then the three of us head to another club where Yasafumi sometimes djs, something like Ore maybe. A little bigger than the other one, we spend most of the time drinking and dancing to Japanese hip hop often incorporating songs like Teen Spirit and I Am the Walrus, which for some reason doesn't bug me. Have a great time. See all the people (this is in Shinjuku) waiting for the first train at 5 am, all dressed up and doro-doro (drunk; this is a slang apparently reserved to a certain alcoholic segment of society with which I am acquainted: many Japanese will not know it). Make our way to WOMB, which I think is back to Shibuya, and this is the most massive club I have ever seen, three stories high, with an underground bar to boot. There are bars on every floor. Spend a while dancing...pounding drum & bass, which I'm told is from England...a kind of tribal version of techno...drinking shochu and oolong...reminded a little of that scene in the second matrix movie...Becky has a lovely smile...Yasafumi dances with no expression, as though concentrating too hard...I can imagine that expression on my face most of the time...This is very much a gaijin attraction, and I see lots of groups with their Japanese guide, like ours...did I mention the laser-light show? My god. 4 am: we head to the second floor to relax a bit. Becky is barely conscious, so we decide to head out. Becky is unconscious practically the moment we get in the car, and Yasafumi gets lost trying to find Oimachi, but we make it eventually. Becky and I stumble to her place and collapse about 5 am. I'm on the couch, but my knee starts aching like hell because of the angle and I have to move to the floor. I hurt my knees running the downhill from the windmill and I need some weights to work them out.
Akihabara:
Get up at 11, and slowly make our way out of the apartment. Murder some eggs in Becky's horrible frying pan...no spatula, have to make do with a spoon...not in any hurry with Becky lounging around in her underwear. What to do with this lovely British girl who replaces modesty with innocence? Her intentions are terribly hard to read, because she really does have that infuriating innocence about her, but for a second I thought she might have been jealous of Kanako. This is probably not true, and she is probably just comfortable around me. She seems like the type who has had a lot of guy friends, and people have that annoying tendency to trust me anyway. I'm sure I'm similarly confusing, since I'm fairly flirtatious in my way, but don't really know that I want to get involved in anything myself. For one thing, getting involved in Japan with a white girl seems almost wrong, even if she is British. Still, she is pretty hot...
One suggestion: "Sleep with her and maintain friendship." I love how simply these sorts of things work in your world, dear. I've tried it, and it never works out.
Akki is weird. Maids everywhere, and the anime-worshipping otaku, who are downright creepy. Women generally do not venture into Akki alone. Girls singing in anime voices while otaku dance to some strange choreography they all seem to know. "Moe." Girls dressed in anime-style wear posing for pictures. This is sexual interaction at very nearly its most abstract: men fetishizing an outfit/persona, while the women somehow fetishize being an outfit/persona. Sorry I can't put that better, it works out in my head. Like all fetishes proper (I don't mean behaviors/scenarios, but actual object-worship), it's sex at one remove, but this one seems particularly abstract, since both the men and women seem to be sexualizing different aspects of the same thing, while the actual men and women on either side of the fetish cease to have any substance in the act. It is like shared narcissism.
Anyway, it is also the electronic capital, and I finally purchace my lovely Toshiba after many trials and tribulations at Yodobashi Camera. We have curry for lunch and fish and chips for dinner (Brit/Aussie cravings, what can I say?). Oh, yes, our group consisted of myself, Becky, Mandy, and Mandy's bf Hideki, who did the translating. Because none of the Gotenba people I invited came along, there was no way to get back in time for my Japanese class, so I stayed another night with Becky, had another breakfast where I ended up cooking eggs again, a task I specifically relegated to Becky but which somehow came back to me, and relunctantly left Becky still in her underwear to catch my bus. I missed the 11, so I was 15 minutes late to work. Whatever.
Today:
And by now I should be in Osaka. I bought the ticket and arranged everything, then fucked up the bus time. Usually I'm fine with the 24 hour times they use most of the time, but for some reason I saw 2130 as 11 o'clock, and I even had my phone alarm set for the right time (my phone is 24 hour time as well), but realized that 2100 wasn't 11, it was 9! So I changed my alarm without checking my ticket. Walked through the typhoon rains (I'm being serious, though we hardly got the worst of the typhoon...still, it was more like swimming than walking), found some keys someone dropped, and left it next to the side walk on a brick planter, feeling sorry for whoever lost those on a night like this. Realized my mistake at the station and stood around depressed for a while, knowing there wasn't anything I could do now. I could take the Shinkansen, but it would have cost me the price of my round trip just to get there. Fuck it...walk back, not really any wetter, having reach saturation. Contemplating the questionable usefulness of kasa [umbrellas]. Depressed, drinking shochu and mizu [water; traditional way to drink shochu], finishing the first season of Prison Break, given me by Becky. So this weekend is apparently now devoted to catching up on my writing. Shoganai [it can't be helped, there is no way].
Final Note on Gotenba:
Never lived in such a rural place before. The only thing faster than gossip is succession [see Pratchett, Terry, on torturing small monarchs]. Chatting with one of the girls at the Gotenba school about my hashigo experience, and Friday one of my Mishima students asks me about it. They're friends of course. Have to be careful what you say in a place like this...They really do see everything you do, especially the gaijin. We kind of stick out. I need to be careful with my Japanese vocabulary, too, since I've learned a number of alcoholic and otaku words, which I like to show off jokingly. My manager is very concerned that I keep my "gentlemanly" appearance and not scare off women with such coarse language. Getting made fun of as an otaku is not terribly amusing either. Anyway, shoganai. I've only got so many words to work with right now!