Tune In Tokyo:The Gaijin Diaries

Like everyone, I was deeply saddened by the tragic events that took place in northern Japan in March 2011. In communication with my Japanese friends during the weeks afterward, one sentiment that many of them expressed was the need to have a diversion from the horror and the fear. One friend said, in imperfect but beautiful English, “we shouldn’t forget victims, but we need to release our mind apart from this sometime. Otherwise we are stifled with the sadness…”
Tune in Tokyo
is a light-hearted romp through Japan’s capital, my love letter to the city and its people. I hope in some small way it can, perhaps, provide a silly diversion for those Japanese folks who happen upon it. And for all those other readers, that it will leave them with a smile on their face when they think of Japan.

I got the style but not the grace,

I got the clothes but not the face,

I got the bread but not the butter,

I got the winda but not the shutter,

But I’m big in Japan.

—Tom Waits

Q and A; or, I’m So Bored with the USA

gaijin,
n. 1. foreigner, outsider

2. pest, big fat alien, one who must be stared at on trains

Why do I to be being here?

This question comes to me one evening when I am in the midst of a two-hour class with two extremely low-level students at the English conversation school where I teach in central Tokyo. Hiromi, Kiyomi, and I are concentrating on question formation: “when,” “where,” and, of course, “what.” They practice asking each other questions in a get-to-know-you kind of exercise, with results like, “What is your sports do you like?” and, “When is month on your birthday?” Then we come to the why.

“Can you think of a ‘why’ question to ask Kiyomi?” I ask Hiromi slowly, doubtfully. She stares at me with fear and trauma, as if I’ve just asked her to implicate her mother in the murder of her father.

I’ve had my share of shit-scared students today, and now I have two more. It’s like spending two hours trying to coax a cat out from under the bed: she may take a few steps, but one careless move on your part will have her scurrying out of reach once again, leaving you to pull your hair out.

Staring out the window at the electric Tokyo sky and the Sapporo beer advertisement on a neighboring building—an ad featuring two be-suited Japanese tough guys looking directly at me and asking the pivotal question in English, “Like Beer?”—I come up with a why question of my own:

Why would a college graduate with such impeccable credentials as a BA in English, diabetes, credit card debt, Roman nose, and a fierce and unstoppable homosexuality want to leave the boundless opportunities available to him in the USA (temping, waiting tables, getting shot by high school students) for a tiny, overcrowded island heaving with clever, sensibly proportioned people who make him look fat?

Before I left the U.S., I couldn’t figure out what path I wished to tread, like every other lazy, listless Libran of my generation. I was “American by birth, Southern by the grace of God,” living in my hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina.

I had three part-time jobs and one boyfriend (the reverse of which being far preferable).
Brightleaf
, a Southern literary journal, was great work experience, Southern fiction being the hot literary genre of the moment, with most of the country only recently realizing that most Southerners can actually read and write without the aid of a spittoon. Here I had the opportunity to read and edit some truly inspired writing. The main problem with this job was the wage: slightly less than that earned by American Heart Association volunteers.

Job #2 was at the Rockford, a downtown restaurant, waiting tables a few nights a week. Here I was nothing if not a jaded waitperson, kind of like Flo on
Alice
, minus the exceptional hairstyle and the long line of trucker boyfriends. (
Sigh
.) Whenever I found myself encouraging my customers to have a nice day, I had to stop and ask myself, “Do they deserve such kindness after giving me just eleven percent?”

Thankfully, the restaurant was as laid-back as they come: no uniform, no split checks, and, praise be to God, no baby chairs. Still, I didn’t like the person waiting tables was turning me into. When I bid farewell to my customers as they walked down the stairs to the street below, I didn’t see people; I saw walking, talking digestive tracts. I saw beer, veggie burgers, and strawberry cheesecakes sloshing around in stomachs. I saw innards. And I didn’t like what I saw.

Which was why I’d sought out job #3. Since I wasn’t making enough money at the magazine and couldn’t bear the thought of working more than a few shifts a week at the restaurant, I found myself teaching English at the local Berlitz Language Center. A few days a week, I instructed Japanese businessmen on how to communicate effectively (more or less) and confidently (kind of) in a language they feared more than Godzilla.

“We don’t just want the best teachers in Raleigh at our school,” the head instructor at the school told me during my interview. “We want the best teachers in the
world
.” A bold statement, and a bizarre one, since their pay rate was on par with the checkout girls at the local Food Lion, and God knows they weren’t the best in the world. If Berlitz expected me to rate with inspirational teachers across the globe, shouldn’t they look into paying me more than seven dollars for a forty-five-minute lesson?

Still, it was a job I was happy doing, so I didn’t much care about pay. I was getting to know people from all over the place: Mexico, Puerto Rico, Japan, France, Italy, Brazil, Korea. For a few hours a few days a week, I was able to relieve myself of my homegrown ennui and make contact with the outside world.

Because contact with the outside world was what I desperately needed. Somehow, over the years, I had devolved from a social, reasonably charismatic soul who thrived on meeting new people into an introverted, cloistered, and feckless pothead approaching the ripe old age of thirty who rarely explored the world beyond his television screen. Once an attention-whoring child of the stage—with a résumé that included major bit parts in many local Little Theater productions—and an excitable, if music theory–challenged, violin and viola player in school and music camp orchestras, I was now a hopeless recluse with absolutely no confidence, too shy to even pick up my viola and play it for close friends for fear of hitting a wrong note and driving them into the arms of another gay who would better serve their entertainment needs. How had this happened? If the thirteen-year-old me could see me now, he would shake his head, tut-tut, and launch into a wispy rendition of some minuet or other. Then he would look me up and down and slap me in my face.

I looked at my viola, listlessly leaning against its case in my bedroom, aching to be touched, caressed, and gripped forcefully yet lovingly by expert hands. I hadn’t picked it up in many months, and the last time I had, I’d gotten the distinct impression that the viola was trying to tell me it would really rather I put it down and find a nice young five-year-old music student to sell it to.

“You really need to get the hell out of this house,” my boyfriend Jimmy would tell me as I sucked in my twentieth bong hit of the day and exhaled a plume of smoke out of every orifice in my head. “You’re
languishing
.”

Now, I take notice when Jimmy uses words with more than two syllables (he generally doesn’t care to take the time), and he got me thinking. Maybe he was right: I wasn’t just bored, or directionless, or lazy, or confused, or stoned, or scared, or paranoid, or worried about being brutally murdered on the street tomorrow without having accomplished anything in my life. I was
languishing
, like Miss Havisham in
Great Expectations
or Rosanna Arquette in
Desperately Seeking Susan
. (Who will be my Madonna?) When was the last time I’d actively engaged with the world, followed a confused path of my own making, did something remarkable, maybe threatened to stir up some trouble?

Well, let’s see. There was that time about a year ago when, in search of a fourth job, I’d visited the temp agency and gotten the highest score they’d seen in months—months!—on the typing test. (I’m a really good typist.) Also, that time last week that I’d woken up, gotten high, and watched a
Today Show
interview with Ann Coulter, marveled aloud at how much her neck looks like the shaft of an erect penis, and then shouted at that squawking blonde dick-head until Jimmy set a plate of cinnamon buns down in front of me to shut me up. But surely there was more to life than that.

Then it came to me: the last time I’d felt totally wide awake and alive was the last time I lived outside the country. After graduating from college, I’d jetted off to London, a city I’d fallen in love with a few years before during a year abroad in Manchester. I’d stayed as long as I was legally able (Americans are only allowed six-month worker visas for the good of the country), living it up in Jack the Ripper’s old neighborhood. When I was kicked out by the Home Office, I’d gone home, gotten one job, then another, and then another, and five years later I was neck-deep in the rut from which I was now desperately in need of extrication.

Jimmy was right: I needed to get out of the house, this much was clear. Wake myself up, splash my ashen, sallow face with some cold water, and force myself to at least meet the world halfway. This time, though, I wanted to go where I’d truly be appreciated. Not that England hated me, but it goes without saying that the English have a love-hate relationship with Americans. To your typical Briton, Americans are loud, hardly ever dressed properly, remain largely oblivious to most events that occur beyond our own borders, and, most importantly, have completely bastardized the English language and simultaneously, through the cultural imperialism of movies and television shows, made “American” the most widely spoken and recognized strain of English in the world. Plus, we use the word “quaint” to describe any house built before 1970. Me, I was ready to go where my status as a U.S. passport holder and card-carrying “American English” speaker was an asset rather than a liability (a list of countries that was shrinking by the second). Besides, I was craving positive vibes, and British people always sound pissed off about something.

Then one day at Berlitz, Hiro, one of my students who loves bluegrass music and playing the banjo, made a suggestion that had been staring me in the face for months: “You should come in Japan!”

And I thought, “You know, I really should.” It’s on the other side of the world, for one. Also, I wouldn’t be able to understand anything anyone said: another plus. Best of all, they don’t totally hate Americans there yet, do they?

Here was a race of people who not too long ago had been our enemy, yet now, in the popular American imagination, they seemed to love us—drinking our sodas, watching our movies, building their own copycat of Walt Disney World, sending their children to bed with Snoopy and Woodstock. Who were these people? What were their dreams, hopes, and fears? How the hell did they remember each other’s names? Most importantly, what would they think of me?

Japan was much more provocative than, say, Finland or New Guinea. Whenever Westerners speak of Japan and the Japanese, it seems every statement they make—whether it’s about their movies, television shows, rock bands, customs, pornography, or fondness for cutting their abdomens—includes the words
crazy
and some variation on
fucking
.

“I saw this crazy fucking Japanese movie about a homicidal videotape this weekend,” for example. Or maybe, “I got this crazy fucking Japanese digital camera,” or “Jesus Christ, that bukkake live-stream site is fucking
stupid
crazy.” I wanted to go behind all these knee-jerk statements and witness the mania myself.

Yes, I would go to Japan and do something insane of my own: I would play my viola on top of Tokyo Tower, write and perform my own haiku on early-morning rush-hour trains, find an unorthodox use for chopsticks, realize my dream of playing keyboards in an all-Japanese New Wave rock band. I would get out there, stomp the pavement, and leave my mark. (Would it be a bloodstain? Time would tell.)

I decided on Tokyo, throbbing heart of the nation, with its sci-fi architecture, kaleidoscopic electric lights, kimono-clad Betties talking on illuminated cell phones, spacepods, decent public transportation, and local celebrities like Yu-Gi-Oh, Mothra, and, yes, Hello Kitty.

Tokyo is a giant city of 5.3 bazillion people. Though it was largely decimated by American bombers during World War II, it has risen from the ashes and now boasts the highest number of giant television screens per square mile of any city in the world. The seat of the world’s second-largest economy, this gigantic humongous gargantuan extra-stupendously titanic megalopolis stands bravely in the face of typhoons, earth tremors, and Tom Cruise press junkets. And let’s not forget the constant barrage of giant lizards, arachnids, and flying insects that habitually wreak havoc on the public transportation system and, even worse, never ever take their shoes off when they enter a room, even when they’re asked nicely.

As a young boy, whenever I’d catch an episode of that old documentary series on the Tokyo Godzilla attacks, I was always struck by the thought that I could fit in there among those howling masses. After all, I’m really good at running away from things screaming, crawling into inaccessible areas, and using passersby as human shields.

And so now, almost a full-grown man, I would finally go there. The future was neon, and I’d bring my light switch.

Surely a utopian futuristic urban monstrosity awaited me: a place where people didn’t walk down the street but stood reading inscrutable newspapers on moving sidewalks. Where they talked to their friends on small, portable video screens. Where they didn’t sit in traffic, they simply levitated above the masses of pedestrians and bicyclists and blasted off in their CZX Toyota hovercrafts. A place where huge bronze statues of the Buddha sat happily alongside giant Day-Glo plastic Pokémon figurines.