So You Don’t Know How to Use a Japanese Bathroom

Japanese bathrooms have been an object of American fascination for as long as I can remember, whether it was that scene in Mr. Baseball where Tom Selleck needs someone to teach him how to shit, the Simpsons classic episode, or one of the thirteen sitcoms in the past three years to make fun of super-advanced Japanese toilets (also known as the reason that my students all insist that Japan is “like Minority Report”). Even Cracked.com, the site that I have openly and notoriously stolen this format from, has recently had an article about the horrors of Japanese toilets, which made it clear that the author had never taken a shit in his life, let alone one on a Japanese toilet.

But, quite frankly, these depictions of Japanese bathrooms really only go after the low hanging fruit of Japanese toilet humor. In my grand tradition of taking things to the lowest possible common denominator, this post will examine the greatness, the horrors, and general stench of Japanese bathrooms. For, you know, (social) science.

The Benzyou, or “that hole in the ground that you squat over in public parks”

There are probably dozens words for bathrooms and toilets in Japanese because, I theorize, it is the most scatological of all languages. Hell, there are two different words for bathrooms in Zen holy place, one for temples and another monasteries; obviously the word differs based on whether it’s a temple or a monastery because the poo of monks and parishioners have clearly different theological implications, since one is open to parishioners and the other only receives holy shit.

Important pro tip: this is not kitty litter.

Source: dragosroua.com

Many of these terms have different nuisance and levels of politeness. The two you’ll hear most often are otearai (literally “hand washing”) and otoire (a tortured Japanese version of the word “toilet”), either of which you can use openly in polite society. I tend to prefer otearai because I find it needlessly coy, but if there were a Japanese term for “water closet” I would totally use that. The other term which always hovers in the back of my mind is benjyou, which has the good grace to literally mean “shit place.” I like to translate to “shit house” because the term is just as coarse and generally unacceptable in Japanese as it is in English.

Toilets in Japan come in three variations: Western, sentient, and hole in the ground. We’ll get to each of them in turn, but we’ll start with the hole in the ground because it’s the one that I find most baffling and it’s the one form of toilet that I exclusively refer to as a benjyou.

These holes in the ground are obviously used by sitting on them with your genitals mashed into that raise portion.

I was actively sad when I discovered these directions.

The way one uses a benjyou is to squat over it and evacuate the bowels, a maneuver that I have never attempted and pray to a merciless God that I will never have to. I’m told that the best way to do it without making a mess of your pants is to take them right the fuck off because the one thing you don’t want to do while shitting is worry whether the state of your clothing will allow you to reenter society once you’re done. I have also heard it posited that you could use the benjyou on the buddy system with the bonus bathroom attendee helping the shitter by holding her hands and bracing her over the toilet.

“I swear by all that is holy, I will haunt your nightmares if you let go!” “Common! I wouldn’t do that… again.”

The advantage of the benjyou, I’m told, is that it’s hygienic (after all, there is no ass to toilet contact) and, according to science, it puts you in the optimal shitting position. That may all be true, but I’m still not going to ever, ever, ever try it because I have awful balance and the roughly two million gods of Japan do not need to be so sorely tempted to humiliate me. My portly visage and lack of attention are more than enough on their own, thank you very much.

Despite the popularity of Western style toilets, benjyou continue to be fairly common in Tokyo. They are almost always the only option found in bathrooms in parks and in every single train station where I have had to use the bathroom, but they also haunt random public bathrooms even in the most modern, upscale buildings. As a rule of thumb, if a public bathroom has more than three toilets, one of them will be a benjyou. An unfortunate corollary to this rule is that a benjyou will always stink disproportionately because the floor around them will be liberally seasoned with urine and because only people over the age of 50 use them, and there’s something inherently foul about the digestive systems of old Japanese people.

Super Toilets that Approach Sentience

Most Western jokes about Japanese toilets revolve around the idea that they’re full of computer chips and do amazing things (this clip is in German because… News Corp is terrible?). To set the record straight, I have never seen a Japanese toilet with lit fountain display, a camera, or a blow dryer. Well, I’ve seen plenty with blow dryers, but not a single one of them have worked, so I can’t attest to their effectiveness or their existence in a functional capacity. The super toilets have all had a couple of neat features: electronic bidet (always anal, sometimes a bonus vaginal one for vaginas), heated seats, and a fake flush button so that women can take a crap without anyone coming to suspect that they might be human. They also sometimes have horrifying names like the Shower Toilet, which just gives you the wrong mental image about everything.

Just so that we’re all clear here, if it’s sentient, the fact that it lacks any rights is a crime against everything.

For some reason, Americans get really freaked out about the idea of a bidet, but I have always found them positive comment that is purposely nondescript. For those of you who are still apprehensive, I just have a couple of tips. These toilets are sometimes labeled in English as well as Japanese, but usually they’re not. To this end, most toilets have pictures and color coding. For the vaginal bidet, look for the pink button with a picture of a woman in a dress on a toilet, which should be confusing for a couple of reasons, none of which can be addressed in pictogram form. For the pooper power wash, as it’s totally not playfully known here, look for the blue or green picture of a butt. I’m sure this button is unisex, but I like to think it’s using an ass as synecdoche for men.

It’s important to note that you can control the strength of the flow of the bidet, but if you do not understand even simple characters, do not play with the goddamn buttons because this can lead to a very nasty surprise. Regardless of the strength used, I do NOT recommend bracing oneself for impact, as that gets real with a serious prison sex vibe rather quickly. Before pressing any the buttons, I like to give a little prayer to the god that lives in every toilet that the bidet does not use ice cold water, which totally happened to me once and it was not fun. The red button is always stop. I like to think of it as the “oh God, no more!” button. You must press this button otherwise the bidet will not stop until the city runs out of water or electricity. Whatever you do, do not stand up while the bidet is on, for what I feel are fairly obvious reasons, especially if it’s to take a bow.

The part of the electronic toilet that has always bothered me most may seem the most innocuous and welcoming features: the heated seats. It’s true that everyone hates a cold toilet seat, and I’m pretty sure cold toilets have started wars in the past. I couldn’t say which ones, but I’m guessing not many in the tropics. Christopher Titus, a comedian that absolutely no one has ever heard of, even had a routine about how his father would force him to sit on the toilet until it was warm so that he wouldn’t have to sit on porcelain from the ice planet Hoth. Personally, I find a warm toilet seat to be an uncomfortable reminder that other people use the bathroom, which is something I prefer to know as little about as possible. But here’s the problem with the electronically heated seat: in my experience, they don’t actually stop heating up. Maybe I’m profoundly misunderstanding the controls or every single Japanese toilet I have ever used has gone rogue, but they just get warmer and warmer. With frightening rapidity, there’s an unfortunate ass sweat situation that isn’t going to get any better because the damn seat is still getting warmer! This isn’t really a problem in the winter, but Japan gets very hot and humid during the summer, and… well, I don’t want to talk about it.

Toilets with a Hand Sink That Totally Don’t Use Toilet Water, but You Can’t Stop Thinking It Does

In Japan, even fairly typical Western style toilets tend to have a somewhat unique twist (at least to Americans): there is a faucet that pours water into a washbasin that drains into the toilet’s tank.

Essentially, the toilet gives you an opportunity to wash your hands with the water that will eventually be used to flush your excrement down the drain. It’s a pretty good idea because it conserves water by reusing it and flushing gives you an immediate opportunity to wash your hands with water that, and I can’t stress this enough, has yet to go in a toilet. This scheme largely eliminates that awkward moment when you wonder if your hands are clean enough to turn the tap so that you can clean your hands, the most scatological of all the Catch-22s.

Or maybe I’m the only one who feels like this?

The toilet sink, which still feels really gross to say, is not without its drawbacks. Japanese bathrooms, like many things in Japan, tend to be very, very small, leaving little room to maneuver. You have to lean across the toilet, which is not always possible to do gracefully without straddling it, something that cannot possibly be done gracefully, though some of the less stable people might contend it can be done sexily. Plus, it’s hard to do without looking like you’re AC Slatering the toilet.

I was going to make a joke about Mario Lopez, but I can’t let the shoddiness of this Photoshop job go without comment. Get a guy to Slater a toilet and Photoshop in the face or take a picture of Slater and add the toilet, but not both. Never both!

There are further issues of what to do with soap and a hand towel. I have seen maybe a handful of these toilets that actually had some place to put the soap. At least the next time you flush the toilet it will be full of hand soap, something that doesn’t actually make the toilet any cleaner if you listen to the fascists I used to live with. No matter what you do, though, you are absolutely going to get water all over the toilet seat while you reach for a towel, I promise you because I’ve never seen a towel rack in a reasonable place in a Japanese bathroom. Although you will see this kind of toilet in public bathrooms, the whole part about washing your hands is kind of irrelevant because I’ve never seen one that actually had soap or a towel nearby so, good fucking luck with that.

The Old People Are Seriously Trying to Kill Me

The fact that there are three different types of toilets is irrelevant because you will never be able to use one. Every single old person who has ever used a public bathroom in Japan will take twenty minutes using a toilet of any variety. Only five minutes of this will produce… bathroom noises. The other fifteen minutes are spent lingering, possibly even malingering, with the only outward signs that they’re in there being a locked door and series of coat rustlings and flushes that makes it sound as though they’re just about done. When waiting for an old person to exit a toilet stall, however, it’s very important that you not be taken in by anything that makes it seem as though the wait will ever end. It is, after all, a well-established fact that, at any given point in time, 125% toilet stalls in Japan are occupied by old people doing something that has nothing to do with using the bathroom; this figure infinitely approaches an infinity of toilets if there’s a line.

I’m not trying to imply they’re doing something nefarious in there; I simply don’t know what could possibly take that long. It’s my theory that Japanese people don’t age linearly, but rather save it up and do all of their aging at once in public bathrooms while young, toilet hungry people go wanting. It’s like Benjamin Button only aging forward in such a way that it keeps me from shitting. It’s possible that this is all a form of payback for the fact that they had to go through the war. Further research is necessary, but is difficult to conduct because old people in public toilets are like subatomic particles, except it’s not mere observation that determines their behavior so much as it is the desperation of the observer to occupy a toilet stall. They only way you could possibly test it under laboratory conditions is to have a nearly endless supply of people who need toilets now, but the difficulty of conducting these experiments in Japan is compounded by the lack of Mexican food in Tokyo.

Japanese Bathrooms Hate Towels and Hand Dryers

Once you’ve actually used of the three types of toilets available in public bathrooms (I’m not going to comment on Japanese urinals except to point out this unfortunate trend), it’s time to wash your hands. Good fucking luck getting through that one alive. First off, Japanese bathrooms do not universally have hand soap. Not, like, they occasionally run out, but rather some straight up don’t have it. Those that do often have these weird bulbous dispensers that always contain a pink, viscous liquid that I imagine someone thinks is soap, except that I honest to God have yet to actually get anything out of there. The “dispensers” don’t twist or pump. They’re like a tank of red goo in a J.J. Abrams project: they raise more questions than they answer. It’s possible you’re supposed to squeeze them but that’s just too dumb and I’m not going to do that.

If there even is soap, you still face the problem of how to dry your hands. Most (and I am not making this up to be fucking hyperbolic; most, goddammit!) Japanese public bathrooms do not have paper towels or hand dryers. What you’re supposed to do is carry around a small hand towel or handkerchief around with you wherever you go. The official reason, or so I’m told, is that paper towels and hand dryers waste precious resources, which sounds like a libertarian dystopian way of telling everyone who ever lived to fuck right off and take personal responsibility by pulling a full on Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and carry a fucking towel with you wherever you go. I’m pretty sure at this point that some of you are saying to yourself that the only reason I’m bitter about this disgraceful reality is because I’m too lazy, stupid, and incompetent to carry a handkerchief with me like a big boy, and right you fucking are! I am absolutely incapable of remembering to put one in my pocket every morning, and I’m not going to apologize for it. Where I fucking come from, establishments put a hand blow dryer in the bathroom that doesn’t fucking work and no one pretends it will, so that when you walk out of there, drying your hands on your pants and muttering about how you miss paper towels, you feel exploited in such a way that you can at least take comfort in the fact that someone literally did the very least they could possibly do to satisfy your bathroom needs. And that’s the way we like it!

Of course, I’m not being fair to the Japanese because many places put out a single hand towel for those who are too useless to have their own. I like to believe that this is how they punish sanitation-conscious serial killers in prisons that are overly progressive in their methods of torture. The sheer audacity of the idea that bathroom patrons should all share the same towel is enough to stagger not just the mind or even a team of oxen, but large portions of the Western hemisphere.  I once picked up the common rag out of a morbid (and, if my greater fears turn out to be true, possibly moribund) sense of curiosity, and the other guy in the bathroom looked at me as if I just ate something out of trash and declared it superior to sushi in Tsukiji. So, if the Japanese are also terrified at the practice, why, exactly, is the towel still there? Are these all just towels that various people have abandoned and everyone is too afraid to touch them to get rid of them? The worst part is that I’m pretty sure this is none of my goddamn business.

There Are No Toilets in the Bathroom

Most of the discussion thus far has focused on public bathrooms, but it might surprise some readers at this point to discover that the Japanese have bathrooms in their homes as well! It will quickly become clear, however, I have been using the term “bathroom” in the colloquial American sense in which a bathroom need not contain an actual bath or even a shower. In Japan, the common practice in homes is to spread out what an American would consider a bathroom into two rooms, and it often spills out into the hallway. These rooms consist of a toilet contained in a very small room that is roughly large enough for a toilet and a person using said toilet, and a bathroom where the bath is kept. Often, there will be more than one sink, frequently with one in the hallway.

This is the bathroom in my apartment. 

Note the conspicuous absence of anything other than a bathtub.

When you think about it, this arrangement makes a hell of a lot more sense than the American fashion. Why, precisely, is the toilet in the same room as the bath, other than plumbing issues that are easily dealt with in the construction of a new home? This practice is objectively gross (for example, even though there’s no clip on youtube, see the episode of Mythbusters when they showed that there is feces on everything in the bathroom) and has caused more arguments with my sister over the years we lived together than the number of times I’ve grossed myself out writing this post (which is to say, a lot). There’s no reason that I shouldn’t be able to take a piss while my roommate showers, and the fact that he is consistently not cool with that when the toilet and bath are in the same room is all the evidence I need to separate them. Having a sink in the hallway is also quite useful, as every single person who has ever stayed at a reasonably nice hotel has discovered.

The division of toilet and bath also allows for another nice feature of most Japanese bathrooms: there’s a drain right in the middle of the floor, so it doesn’t matter if you splash when you’re in the shower and overfilling the tub is not the end of the goddamn world. For this reason, I have only seen two shower curtains in all of Japan, and they were both so covered in mildew that no one wanted to be within twenty feet of them. The only downside is that my bathroom floor is always covered in water and, since I don’t have a hallway sink, I have to take my slippers and socks off to use the bathroom sink to brush my teeth. I could just use the kitchen sink, but I’m not a barbarian.

My Bathroom, like Dylan, Has Gone Electric and It’s Ruining Everything

A Japanese room wouldn’t be complete without a series of needless electronic gadgets and the bathroom is no exception. My apartment has a tankless water heater that I have to turn on whenever I want to use hot water. For the most part, this means I press one button before taking a shower and another when I get out, and I save electricity. Yay all around. It’s only a little annoying that, though I can vary the water temperature with control pad, my bathroom water maxes out at 40C, which is not quite where I want it but close enough.

The electric experience reached a whole new level, however, when I realized that my bathroom has a bath button. It’s a button that, with a single press, draws a bath, with water reaching a preset height without the need to monitor it as if that was a major issue in anyone’s life. It’s useful enough, however, that it makes up for its complete lack of necessity, and it does have one very interesting: the bath will periodically heat the water without adding more, thus keeping the level of the bath steady. Of course, this is a fucking trap because the bath will wait until I’ve just decided to get out to heat the water, thus keeping me in the tub well past the point when pruning sets in. I’m trying to decide if the tub is deriving nourishment or pleasure from keeping me in it or if this is all part of a conspiracy to lull me into complacency until the bath makes its final move.  Considering the fact that my apartment has a half bathtub (it’s half the length with twice the depth, thus assuring that no one is happy about any part of it), it might just be its way of apologizing for just being fucking awful.

Four Reasons Japan Freaks My Shit Out

As hard as I’ve tried to obscure this fact, not everything about graduate school is terrible. Unlike our health care coverage, there are some nice perks that go with the job. Although some people are insufferable and will say that the satisfaction of teaching the next generation of leaders is the most rewarding part, I would have to say that the opportunity to travel at someone else’s expense beats that harder than the internet hits a dead horse.

No, icanhazcheezburger.com, it’s not.

My research has taken me to some fascinating places: New York, where I stayed on someone’s couch; Columbus, where I stayed on someone’s floor while their cat tried to sleep on my face; Toronto, where I stayed on an international couch and didn’t actually do any research; Abilene, Kansas, which I have as yet studiously avoided but is where Dwight Eisenhower had the bad grace to be born and eventually place his presidential library; and Hawaii, where I researched whether it was better to fly straight from Newark to Tokyo or to stay on someone’s futon for a week before going to Tokyo.

As it turns out, the answer is always yes.

But most of my research is done in Tokyo because I am a Japanese historian, a decision I made despite the fact that I will be asked why I do that for the rest of my life. Seriously, I cannot stress how often people ask me why chose to be a Japanese historian. I have never seen, for instance, a German historian face the sheer shock and disbelief that greets me whenever I announce my profession, including ones who dedicate their lives to studying the Holocaust. Despite the fact that it is totally true, people just laugh when I tell them that I chose my profession when I played Final Fantasy VII for the first time when I was sixteen, most people just laugh this off and develop their own theories as to why I chose Japan. An astonishingly large majority concludes that I must do it because I want to stick it to Asian women, or, more poetically put, I have “yellow fever” (the shocking part that is people actually say this to me, often while pulling their eye lids so that they look “slanty”). Everyone else just insists that I should have studied Chinese history because soon they will “own us,” a delusion that you can’t dissuade Americans of no matter how many macroeconomic lectures and demographic studies you show them.

"Now, if you compare this graph to a pie graph of per capita.  Let’s try a different tack: I will give you a pie if you just believe me.”

Having said that traveling is my favorite part of the job, it can be a little stressful Japan is an amazing place, full of culture, natural beauty, and vitality, but I’ve never quite managed to be comfortable here, at least over a long period. These are my own hang-ups that most people probably don't even think about and I should just get over. None of this should in anyway be considered an attempt to discourage anyone from going to Japan because, unlike grad school, I think everyone should go to Japan. But I can’t help the fact that:

1. Japanese culture freaks my shit out

There’s so much going on in Tokyo that it actually takes a concerted effort to be bored here. Studies that I have just made up demonstrate that the most common ailment for tourists is a repetitive motion stress injury from the continuous slacking of the jaw in wonderment, followed by foot and ankle injuries caused by wandering around in a daze, staring at all the befuddling things going on. I’ve spent about four months in Japan, and I can’t remember the last time I actually spent money on entertainment because there’s always something amazing to do for free (though you do have to pay what I feel is an outrageous rate to ride the subway crosstown). On the weekends, I just chose a part of the city with which I’m not familiar and walk around for a couple of hours. This has proved to be an endless source of amusement, from the freaks that inhabit Yoyogi Park to the freaks that hang around Ueno Park.

motifake.com

This happens more than you’d think because parks in Tokyo are full of 

freaks and the most polite vagrants you’ll ever meet.

If you think it’s rude to gawk at the people who dress up and do bizarre things just to be seen being weird, you can always enjoy the shows put on by people who are professionally weird. Just last month I saw a juggler in Ueno Park performing an elaborate juggling act where he did voices, developed personalities for his juggling implements, and forced the audience to applaud to revive his “dead” ball a la Tinkerbell.

See, it wasn’t what you thought it’d be. For the record, I would like to know how large the cross-section 

of people who read this blog and get this joke is. I’m guessing it’s just Scott and Jim.

There was even a section when he did a mime routine and for the finale, well, what else could he do? He fucking played Amazing Grace on the goddamn bagpipe. It happened right after the part where he dropped one of his balls and it “died”; I’m pretty sure it was a Wrath of Khan reference and it was amazing! You can’t pay for entertainment like that! Well, the juggler encouraged the audience to pay him in a number of ways, but I refused on the basis that it would just encourage the proliferation of mimes.

While we’re talking about it, why is it okay 

for Juggalos to do whiteface?

 As much as I dress it up, though, the main reason that I walk around all the time instead of watching TV or taking in a show is because I am terrified of Japanese popular culture. It’s a common misconception that Japanese popular culture is tentacle rape porn all the way down, and I know that. In reality, it’s lurking just under the surface, waiting to be discovered by the unwary. Japan has a celebrated history of tentacle rape, with woodblock images dating at least back to the early 19^th century when one of Japan’s most celebrated artists of all time explored the question of what fishermen’s wives dream about and concluded, as any man would, that they think about turning their twats into octopus traps.

Hokusai, the artist who painted this iconic wave, also pioneered tentacle fantasy. 

Now try to live the rest of your life without imagining that each part of that wave is a tentacle. Sleep tight!

Modern tentacle rape porn is derived from 20^th century censorship laws which forbade the display of a penis entering a vagina, also known as the “porn” portion of the word pornography. What started as an artist giving the legal system the finger (naturally, replacing the finger in question with a tentacle), went on to become a mature study of the love that can only exist between an unwilling underage girl and a somewhat misguided, albeit delightfully curious, octopus.

Aw, he just wants to know what’s in there! Holy shit is that what she said!

Even though I know there’s no tentacle porn on television (at least not on the broadcast networks…), just knowing that this is the culture that invented tentacle porn, gave it a home, and nurtured it into the unwholesome filth that it is makes me too afraid to turn the television on without my finger hovering over the power button. When I do watch TV, it produces some of the most bizarre images I have ever seen. For instance, my second day in Tokyo, after I awoke from my jet-lag coma, I flipped on the TV, only to be greeted by a concert where a man in a flower costume danced around while playing the keytar, with backup singers dressed as snowflakes and a woman on roller skates (not roller blades, mind) pretending to be a dog wandering around the stage seemingly at random. Upon seeing this, I promptly walked across the room and unplugged the television. After a moment of thought, I turned the TV around so that it faced the wall in case the girl from The Ring came out of it. I’m not afraid to admit that I’m afraid of everything in this country because I’m one commercial for dish soap away from being convinced I developed a nasty case of schizophrenia. Sometimes even going to get my mail convinces me I had a stroke if it’s new political poster day.

2. It’s lonely out in space, and Japan

Being white in Japan is like being a minor celebrity is the US, you know, one that everyone has seen before but no one remembers where or whether they’re any good. A lot of people get really excited to see you, and sometimes people will come right up to you in the street and start talking to you, usually in something that approaches, but never quite reaches, English. They never seem to have anything to actually say, but they like to talk to foreigners because… well, I’m not really sure why. I’m working on a theory that all the people who approach me on the street are all in it together, working on a really long con and they’re just bad at it. But, then again, I think I might have schizophrenia.

"Why do you keep saying, 'This is a pen?' What is your game, friend?"

If you happen to know even a single word of Japanese, however, watch out. The Japanese seem especially to revel in the idea of foreigners learning their language. When a foreigner speaks Japanese with a native, the Japanese will invariably praise the visitor to their shores for any incomprehensible utterance they manage to summon. The actual degree to which this praise is authentic varies widely. The same admiration of one’s skill (ojyouzu desu ne!) will meet a recitation of Heian era poetry and a fumbling  attempt to say “thank you”, which many Westerners will recognize as being domo arigato, regardless of whether one is speaking to Mr. Roboto or not. 

I swear to God I saw a train conductor doing the Robot, but no one believes me, possibly because it’s too awesome to be true.

In fact, the Japanese seem to be so enamored with the idea of foreigners trying to speak their language that the very act of saying something in Japanese to, for instance, a waitress is considered a proper form of flirting. A typical example goes as such: “I’m here studying history,” you say in Japanese. Even at this early stage in the game, you have a 50/50 chance of getting lucky, or so I’m told. Since I have been riding the short end of that probability bell curve for the past 5 years, I am not a particularly reliable witness. As often as not, the waitress will respond in immaculate English, “Eh, good enough. I get off work in about ten minutes and plan on getting off again shortly after that, whether you’re there or not.”

Service is much better in Japan than in America, is what I’m saying.

Given the ready availability of street friends and random hookups that everyone but me is making, you would imagine that it’d be hard to be lonely.  Although you can easily find someone to cohabitate space with, I, at least, find it very difficult to develop meaningful relationships in Japan because of the language barrier that my brain steadfastly refuses to overcome. I’ve heard a number of people express similar sentiments, explaining that unless you join some organization (e.g., church, hard drinking regulars down at the pub, tentacle rape porn appreciation club, etc.), Japanese tend not to really open up to foreigners. Although there’s always the random strangers and linguistically inspired hookups that I never seem to be able to wrangle, ultimately, I have never found them fulfilling.

I dearly hope that’s not what she said.

Of course, there’s always the vibrant expat community that thrives in Tokyo…

3. The expats in Tokyo are fucking crazy

I can only really base this off of my own experience, but I will say, at the risk of offending everyone who has ever lived, that there is something seriously mentally wrong with every person who has ever decided to move to and live in Japan for extended periods of time. Take, for instance, my closest and dearest friend in Tokyo, and one of my favorite people in the world. For the purposes of this post I shall call her Emily, mostly because I don’t think I know anyone named Emily who reads this blog and because everyone has parents.

When I met Emily, she was a Japanese hostess, a profession that is basically a geisha, and stripping it of its history, tradition, and various art forms and replacing it with Jägerbombs and men in ill-fitting suits. Hostesses keep men company, get them drinks, and entertain them with their charm, wit, and other feminine wiles. All told, it’s similar to the way that way that a waitress might use her sexuality to get a larger tip than she would get if her cleavage weren’t spilling out like a waterfall… a beautiful breast waterfall.

Upon returning to Japan, I got in touch with Emily, who now manages a bar. She invited me down for a visit, and, upon seeing her for the first time in a year and a half, I was promptly chided for missing nerds and strippers night. It turns out that her bar had a special night for Japanese super nerds who spend all of their time playing obscure video games, but took a night off to play obscure video games in a bar presumably because their mothers told them to. Emily, charged with a convention of nerds and a case of social incontinence, decided to call up some old friends and “have some strippers in.” In what must have been an uncomfortable reversal of the expected norms, the strippers stripped one of the nerds down to his underwear.

Worst. Strip show. Ever.

 Upon hearing about this, Emily, some of her friends, and I (because I’m mentally ill too) decided that Jell-O wrestling was the next logical event. Ideas were thrown around until it was generally agreed that the wrestlers should wear Baywatch bathing suits (alternative: mankinis for the women); they would run in slow motion toward the Jell-O pool, and the loser would “drown” in the Jell-O until rescued by a lifeguard who was sitting nearby (at one point, I questioned whether the significance of this little play would be lost on the Japanese crowd, but I was reliably told to shut my goddam mouth). Eventually it was decided that the wrestling Jell-O should be full of vodka (because there’s always room for vodka) and that Jell-O shots could be sold for an outrageous markup after women had been wrestling in it.

First off, I hardly think I need to point out the intuitively obvious fact that the Jell-O shots with essence of woman would make the bar $7 million in one night, which just reaffirms my argument that Japanese culture is openly horrifying. Second, though this anecdotal evidence of the instability of foreigners living in Japan proves absolutely nothing, I find it telling that everyone I have told this story was in no way surprised that such a thing happened in Japan. It takes a certain something special to come to Japan, look around at all the magnificent weirdness, and say, “I want to be a part of this. I feel like I have something to contribute.” The downside, if you choose to view it that was is that these are the people you have to make friends with. If at any point you want to have a quiet night in watching a movie, I give even odds that someone will decide it’s time “to have some strippers in.”

4. Shopping in Japan is just awful

Tokyo is one of the great shopping capitals of the world. Much like New York, London, and Paris, Tokyo has every single high end store there is, and the latest world fashions often emerge from here. Fashion pilgrims make the trek to Tokyo (much like nerds to Riverside, Iowa and frat boys to Palm Springs), with the Prada store on Omotesando serving as some sort of giant glass Kaaba, which is probably such an insensitive metaphor that I should not follow with a picture.

As my Muslim brothers and sisters say, “Prada akbar.”

My problem with shopping in Tokyo has nothing to do with fashionistas because I could not care less about them. Perhaps the most annoying thing about living in Japan is that all the stores are tiny shops, irregularly spaced along major roads, but also down side streets that are really shopping arcades. These stores are kind of neat, but you can never actually find one that has what you want/need. For example, once I decided to buy an accordion file to organize my research. In the US, I'd head to Staples or Target, whichever was closer, but in Japan, I had to find a stationary store (convenience stores all contain three notebooks and the exact same selection of pens no matter which chain you go to). I've been to a number of stationary stores in Japan, but God help me, I couldn't think of one within half an hour of my apartment. I asked around and was greeted by surprisingly elaborate discussions of how there used to be one just down the street which was run by the nicest man, but he had closed because he hurt his back, which is a real shame because now there wasn’t a stationary store in the neighborhood… it went on for a while.

Eventually I decided to go two subway stops south where I had found extensive shopping arcades, most of which I walked along, not finding a single stationary store in spite of the fact that Google told me there were five of them in the immediate vicinity. My wanderings took me to what amounts to a mile long strip mall, where I saw: two shops that sold nothing but clocks (no watches), one shop that sold nothing but watches (no clocks or jewelry), three florists, two rival Hyaku-en shops (equivalent of a dollar store, but with nicer stuff) across the street from one another, a knife shop next to a place that sold pots and pans but no knives (they did not seem to be connected by a common owner or even some confusing form of collusion), and no less than five drug stores (because, sure, by the time you got to the end of the mall, you were going to need a new bottle of aspirin). Despite the three book stores and two places that sold nothing but magazines (but were not newsstands), there was no stationary store.

Finally I went to Don Quixote, the unlikely name of Japan's answer to the big box store, except with a jingle and high end booze because every major store in Japan has a jingle and high end booze. I found an accordion file pretty quickly, but as I was leaving I noticed that they had socks. Since the ones I was actually wearing were actively full of holes (which is to say that the holes seemed to be growing and reproducing), I decided to pick some up. For some reason, prices in Japan don’t make any sense. Pretty much everything is a bit more expensive than in the US, but sometimes things are ridiculously more expensive than they have any reason to be. I have spent a month, on and off, trying to find a pillow that costs less than $40. At Target, it’d be two minutes and $5, but in Japan… oh in Japan. Socks, too, should be cheap and easy. Six pairs of Hanes white gym socks should be a couple of bucks, but, again, Japan astonishes.

I found a set of three pairs selling for $16. Three pairs. They were white socks. I feel I should add they were, in fact, made out of cotton, not gold thread spun by Rumpelstiltskin himself. It took me a minute to realize that they were Timberland socks, thus possibly accounting for the unseemly price. I put them back and tried to find a brand that had no cachet, like Hanes or Fruit of the Loom. Finally found the Hanes, and they were $4 PER PAIR and they only had ankle length, and fuck that shit, it was winter at the time.

At this point, I was way too invested in socks, so I kept looking, only to stumble upon the underwear section. I can now conclude that the epitaph of grace and style was carved into the face of the founder of Don Quixote and he held a grudge against those things for the rest of his life. Their selection of underwear was split into two warring camps that hate one another so fiercely that they have to be placed on opposite sides of the socks, so that snapping gang fights don't erupt day long. One camp is "stylish" designer underwear, invariably based around the Calvin Klein collection, the poster boy of spending too much on underwear, while the other was novelty underwear that was dedicated solely to humiliating the penis of the wearer.

Description of many of these pieces of clothing defy description in written language, but let it suffice to say that no small number of the pictures on the packages show a disturbing amount of male pubic hair (read: any) and several of them are designed so that you stick your penis in a windsock that dangles down the front.

Which brings up the question no one should ever have to ask:

 hilarious or insulting to humanity?

I should, at this point, remind you that Don Quixote is the place where I found what I feel is fairly racist underwear.

There's a whole line of Black Man underwear, but for some reason, 

I chose to focus on this model. I wonder why...

I don’t know if this is supposed to poison black men or if their dicks are supposed to be poison, but either way I’m crippled by a dozen generations of racial guilt.

I left Don Quixote without buying any socks, and now I’m trying to figure out how to smuggle a six pack in without it going through customs because, I don’t know, maybe that’s why they’re so expensive. All of this is a long way around to say that for expats, Tokyo is a city that never sleeps, but largely because we’re all too afraid to close our eyes.

To be continued with discussions of transportation and telecommunications in Japan

Your first semester/quarter of graduate school will suck

In an earlier post, I argued that you shouldn’t go to grad school. Assuming some of you assholes completely ignored my advice, in this installment I will explain what happens when you do go to grad school because it’s never too late to decline an offer of acceptance.

Everything is different, and that is terrible

I should start by saying that I like first year grad students. They’re shiny and new and they don’t know what they’ve done to themselves. They’ll often talk about post-modern theory and how excited they are to be among their intellectual peers or some bullshit that everyone else just silently judges them about. Some of them are shy and downright Bambi-esque, which, I add in the most condescending manner possible, is adorable. Every year, I meet the first years and give them some advice that they never listen to, and then I wait about seven weeks. At that point, I walk around my department, just looking for the looks of panic. Around then, there’s always someone at the end of their rope, completely overwhelmed because grad school sucks, especially at the beginning.

Starting at a new school sucks because everything is different, particularly when you first make the transition from undergrad to graduate work. I can only provide examples from my own experience, but I’m sure you’ll find that your first year in grad school will be unhappy for its own reasons.

My university is on the quarter system, which means that everything is ten weeks long and does not correspond well with the schedule of any other students in the world. To begin with, this is why my grandmother will never, ever, ever understand why I don’t visit home until June or why I’m still sitting on my ass in September.

“I’m not sure what you’re doing with your life, but I’m pretty sure it’s because you hate me.”

– the subtext of every phone conversation I’ve ever had with my grandmother

Effectively, we do everything that classes at normal universities do in sixteen weeks, but we have to do in ten. But it’s okay because our classes are longer and we meet more often! This means that there’s no time for adjustment because you begin a quarter and by the time you notice, it’s halfway done and you haven’t started working on your term paper. All the research and writing that most students would have to do is suddenly crunched into a space so short that there’s no time to actually think about it, you just do it.

It’s difficult for anyone to adjust to the quarter system, especially grad students who have to do ten times more work than undergrads. This is particularly true because many new grad students have been at the top of their classes their entire career and may have never had to put in serious hours to get top grades. In fact, that's why they're in grad school. But there’s a bit of a shock when a new grad student discovers that they have to read a book or two a week for each of their classes, which they have trouble doing because they literally don’t know how to read.

I imagine every discipline has a different way of approaching reading, but in history, typically all we’re interested in is the argument the author is making, the evidence they use, and how this argument fits with other arguments in the field. If a history grad student is doing their job correctly, they will read the introduction, conclusion, a review of a book, and then look at a bit of the evidence that the author uses. The whole middle part, you know, where all the history is? Yeah, we ignore that. There are about seven people who want to read any particularly book in its entirety and soak in all the detail that the historian who wrote it spent their life collecting, while the rest of us casually decide whether we buy the argument without actually reading the book. It's our little contribution to making dedicated professionals feel like they've wasted their lives.

This approach feels deeply wrong to new students and anyone who isn’t jaded by years in the academy, so they rebel and actually try to read the whole thing. First off, everyone hates the guy who read the whole book because they’ll bring up an obscure point that no one cares about, so don’t be that guy. Second, first years drive themselves mad trying to slug through all of that material and it will do them precious little good because most professors don’t care about that crap. But if you happen to have one who does, just quit because it’s not worth it.

Perhaps the biggest adjustment that many graduate students have to make, unless they’ve prostituted their souls to the Devil, is that they have to learn to teach. Suddenly, after years of being the smartest kid in the class, who always had something to contribute and was oh-so-self-assure about their cleverness (Jeremy!), new grad students have to stand in front of a class and actually spew forth some crap about their subject matter in a way that tricks new students into feeling like they're learning something. After spending a dozen years watching other people teach and lecture, you’d think that they would have some idea about how to teach. You would, of course, be mistaken.

I distinctly remember standing in front of a class for the first time and having no idea what I was supposed to do. To be fair, I had received a bit of training from the university, which required me to attend three days of instruction on teaching prior to being in a classroom. Each day consisted of four sessions of about an hour each where, I swear to God, something was said about pedagogy, but I have no idea what and I didn’t really care at the time either. At least two hours of that was spent informing me that I was not to sleep with my students, which would have been a complete waste of time, except that I got to hear someone from HR say, “You shouldn’t have a relationship with any of your students, but if you do, wait until the quarter is over. And if you can’t wait, inform HR immediately.” That is literally the only thing I remember about all of the training I received before I started teaching. Almost all teacher training is done in the field, which is a euphemism for "they send you out into the wild with no idea what you're doing and hope that you won't kill someone while they're legally liable for your actions," which, of course, why most pedagogical instruction is on how not to get (the university) sued.

“OH! That’s why 90% of my professors were terrible at their jobs!”

With your newfound insight into how to teach at the university level, you'll start teaching your own class, or, more properly, you'll lead discussion sections wherein you're supposed to go over the readings that the real professor (the one who actually lectures) assigns. Now, having discovered that your own classes required a lot of reading, you will be shocked to discover how little your students will be willing to do given their miniscule workload.

I remember during my first quarter in grad school, a professor assigned a 1,500 page book that I had to read in a week and was only available on two hour closed reserve at the library. I had to spend half the night huddling in the basement of the library with a book large enough to kill a toddler during a tornado, and then turn around the next morning and try to coax toddlers to read 30 pages a week. The upside is that I remember both the Manchu conquest of China in the 17th century and the first time I killed a man just to watch him die very clearly. 

Very few students truly appreciate that their instructors have to do all the reading that they do, and do it ten times better. We have to read the same material for every class, but we read it more thoroughly and more times than they do; for every hour they spend writing a paper, we spend approximately ten trillion hours grading them. Every instructor has to figure out their own way to make it through stacks of papers. My first year, I decided to make a game of it: I kept track of every incompetent use of a rhetorical question. After filling up a sheet of paper, I gave up this game and took up my current grading technique: I keep a bottle of grading whiskey in my cupboard, and I never drink to remember.

That's a graduate student sized bottle of booze, but he's at a party, so clearly he's doing it wrong.

 But even with all of these adjustments, you can’t slack off because…

Your relationship with your professors actually matters this time

Remember undergrad when you did half the reading and then made one comment that kind of made sense and your professor was pleased because your semi-competence dulled the unending pain that is instructing undergrads? Yeah, that’s not going to work anymore. Part of the reason that ever worked is because professors tend to have a lot of students at the lower levels and they're willing to take the smallest accomplishment as a sign of competence. As you advance classes get smaller, so the professors will know everyone in their classes personally and have a better idea of the work they're doing day in and day out, especially because you will end up taking classes with the same four professors for most of your graduate career. These four professors will be on your generals/comprehensive exam committee, so you have to have a good relationship with them or you will never complete your PhD program.

It might not look like it, but this guy derives sustenance entirely from your tears.

 Sure you can sit in a graduate seminar and not say anything and beg off whenever the professor asks you a question. Unlike undergrad where you only needed to impress an instructor enough to give you a decent grade, however, in graduate school your committee members will become the basis of your career, and if you piss even one of them off by doing something stupid like never doing the reading, it can seriously hurt your entire career, or at least make your life sincerely miserable. These professors can actually refuse to sit on your committees (though it’s rare), which they can use as leverage to make you do almost anything they want. I have a friend who had written half a dissertation that his adviser disapproved of, so he had to scrap it and start again because his committee would never let him defend it. A grad student’s job is essentially to impress their committee members, which means that you’re going to try your damnedest to keep up with all the reading and think deep thoughts, but until you get used to the workload (and, more importantly, how to go about it), eventually you will be overwhelmed.

But no matter how overwhelmed you become, there’s one person you must never let down: your adviser. Your relationship with your adviser is one of the most important things in all of graduate school and maybe your entire career. Your adviser should be a wise, experienced hand who can help direct you through your program. They should be a leading expert in your field and specialization, and use their connections to make your entire life easier. Figuring out what your relationship with your adviser is going to be for the next twenty years is tough, but if you fuck it up, you might as well quit. I only know a handful of people who switched advisers during the middle of their degree: for one it went brilliantly and everything in his life was better; for another, things got better but it added half a decade to his completion time; but for a third the adviser divorce is still too painful to discuss. I don’t have a joke for that last one; it was just really terrible.

By the way, speaking of divorce…

Your spouse/partner will resent you

Of course, if you’re married or go to school with a significant other, you will have a companion who won’t challenge you intellectually (unless you’re into that sort of thing) or try to curb stomp you because they don’t like your face (presumably they already like your face otherwise you may have a problem unrelated to grad school). There is a downside, however. Unless your partner is also starting a graduate program or they have a job they instantly love, you’re going to resent the hell out of you.

Many universities are located in places where people specifically do not want to go, which is why the land was cheap enough to waste on high learning instead of corn. You might be willing to go to these places that civilization forgot, but is your partner? Really? No matter how supportive they seem to be of the move to begin with, eventually your spouse is going to resent the fuck out of you for dragging them all the way to Ithaca, New York where there’s nothing but colleges and water features. 

They have a world-class university and the best word play they could come up with is

“Ithaca is Gorges.” On the other hand, that sure is a pretty gorge.

                                               

 The worst part is that they’ll eventually realize that this is the first in a long series of relocations to places they don’t want to be based on where you can get a job. You might think you can hold out for an awesome post in New York or San Francisco, but your career options are limited and someone has to teach in Alabama, and knowing how well you plan your life, it'll probably be you. At least for a while, I should say, because as an academic you're going to have to relocate many times. You and your spouse are just going to have to figure out how to live in several of the many hellholes that 19^th century assholes decided would be a suitable place for a university.

Take Yale, for example. Its founders seem to have decided to locate their university at the intersection of beautiful architecture and surprisingly high street crime. I promise you, New York City is not as accessible as everyone told you at visitation day.

Or Dartmouth, which is an Ivy League school, even though you don’t think it is. Well-known fact: no one of any consequence has ever gone to Dartmouth. If they had been consequential, they wouldn’t have gone to Dartmouth. Some would argue that the previous statements are rhetorically begging the question, but if you're one of them, you probably didn't go to Dartmouth because Dartmouth alums don't know what that means.

If somehow you get over the stress of your first year and absolutely love graduate school, you'll still have to deal with a partner who hates the fact that they have to live in the middle of nowhere and who is essentially relying on you as a meal ticket when you seriously have no chance of making real money in academia. Just remember Doctor Strife’s Law: If you love something, something else will ruin it for you.

Or someone

Corollary to Doctor Strife’s Law: Even if something is ruined,

it probably won’t blow up because that’d be awesome.

 But at least those of you who are married have someone because otherwise…

You won’t know anyone

If you go to grad school stag, unless you stay at your undergrad or go to your hometown for grad school, you’re going to have to move to a new city and won’t know anyone. Sure, you've probably done that before for college, but there are two big differences: instead of an incoming class of thousands, there will be a small class of first years in your department and you’re old enough that you won’t want to put up with the bullshit involved in meeting new people. My university has a massive history department, with over a hundred grad students on campus any given year and an annual incoming class of about 25-30. So, I had two choices: meet new people somehow (no one ever manages to do this) or hope that I got along with my fellow first years.

Now, I absolutely fell in love with some of my starting class, and we remain close friends to this day, but maybe one of them is the type of person I would typically have hung out with in other circumstances. My friends consisted of: a former gymnast whose idea of a pick-up line was “So, can we just make out already;” a dynamic Ivy League go-getter who knew Paul Kennedy’s preferences for port (Paul Kennedy is a historian who no one has ever heard of, but is important because he wrote a book no one reads); a woman who, when I first met her, was talking about how much better the club scene was back home; and a nerd whose social activities consisted of playing board-based role playing games and claiming he had a girlfriend in Canada (they subsequently married, but you wouldn’t have heard about it because it was in Canada).

Our personalities were so diverse that we should have been able to summon a cartoon super-hero with our nerd powers (I would have called him Captain History, and I would have loved him best of all, but his existence would have gotten me beaten up, and deservedly so). I distinctly remember one night at a bar when my super-nerdy friend commented that we drank a lot in grad school, which prompted me to say, “Unless you’re going out without me, that is your second beer of the week.” It turned out, for him, that was a lot of drinking, whereas the rest of the table started wondering if he was a secret Mormon. We were all somewhat out of our social comfort zone, and aside from our unbearable whiteness, the only thing we had in common was our subject of study… though one of us was Spanish, which is kind of like the Olive Garden of diversity.

“Soup and non-offensive white bread for everyone!”

I feel like Olive Garden should be paying me for… something here.

At this point, I feel that I should explain how this group of people came together. At the beginning of the year, our department used to have a reception in the faculty club that everyone attended specific because there was an open bar (now we have a picnic where we can bring our families, which means I have to stand around with people I work with, but without booze and with small children). I literally walked up to a group of people because I had seen one of them once before. We spoke briefly (like ten minutes) and because it was the most fulfilling human contact I had had with other human beings in two weeks, I suggested we should all get lunch together because I was so desperately lonely. Random permutations of that group (based on who was in town) continued to meet for lunch once a week for five years and formed the backbone of my entire social circle. 

You pretty much have to make friends in your incoming class, but the adjustment to new types of people is stressful, particularly when you basically have to find a friend among a small group of people because you will not meet anyone outside your program unless you take classes in other department or have discernible social skills.

One of these is more likely than the other

Having friends in grad school, however, is essential to making it through any program, and, in some cases, it is literally the only thing keeping grad students from hanging themselves with their shower curtain.

This kid knows what I’m talking about

 Your very presence may cause tension

There are two ways for to attend grad school: either you teach for the university or you have a fellowship, which is when someone (the university, government, private foundation, etc.) pays your tuition and gives you money to study. Fellowships are great because they mean you won’t have to teach for a year and someone is giving you money for what you would have done anyway. For incoming students, fellowships are typically offered to the most promising students as a way of enticing them to a specific university.

 
Given that the university considers these students the best, you’d think they’d do better than all the schmucks who have to teach (we already discussed why that’s world-destroyingly soul-crushing), but year after year, in my department teaching assistants have a higher retention rate than the fellows. Pretty much everyone agrees that it’s because the TAs are required to spend time in the communal grad student offices, are forced to work with other grad students in their teaching duties, and are generally more socially connected. The fellows, on the other hand, sit alone in their apartments, reading and slowly descending to a pit of madness of their own creation.

The issue of who gets a fellowship and who has to teach can sometimes be tricky, especially because after five years of grad school, on the whole I'm not convinced that people coming in on fellowships are really any better than those who had to teach their first year. Ever year, amazing and deserving grad students get passed over for fellowships, but that doesn't make them any less deserving or lovable... I keep telling myself.

First years are almost no one is petty enough to make any distinction between these two groups and holds grudges against someone for getting an incoming fellowship when they didn't. It's not like TAs and fellows are the Jets and the Sharks, with the Sharks getting paid to do nothing while the Jets had to work their way through school. Sure, I've witnessed some snap-based combat in grad school, but it was almost always in the medium of "Yo' mamma" jokes.

"Yo' mamma is so dumb she went to a state school!" "This will not stand sir! To fisticuffs!" "Indeed! Now, how exactly do we go about this?"

 There are, naturally, exceptions, like me because I'm a bad person. When I first started, I couldn't figure out what fellowship students had that I didn't. Half of my friends in my first year had fellowships while I was stuck teaching, but one of them was not like the others. I met this one woman at the reception I mentioned above, and I commented that I hadn't met her before at any of the teaching orientations. She said she was on a "diversity enrichment fellowship," which is to say, a fellowship for minority students. I was perplexed because she was easily as white as I, so I mustered up the courage and asked what ethnicity she was, to which she cheerfully responded that she was Spanish.

Now, to be clear, I generally approve of affirmative action, and this woman proved to be brilliant and she absolutely deserved a fellowship, no question in my mind. But Spanish, as in from Western Europe, and minority did not go well together in my mind. Incredulous, I said, quite rudely, "Yes, well, in that case, I'm a minority as well, I'm Irish." My new friend became quite excited and exclaimed, "Me too!" At this point, I felt entirely cheated because, being Irish-German, I got screwed out of a fellowship because my father chose a woman from on the wrong side of France. By the way, my Spanish is better than my Spanish friend's.

These petty divisions abound in a place where funding decisions seem entirely arbitrary, and every new student that's added to the department essentially means that funding will not go to a more advanced student who just needs another quarter or two to finish their dissertation. In fact this is a large part of the reason that I say your choices of friends are largely limited to incoming students; the established students already have friends and kind of resent incoming students on general principle.

In other words, good luck because everyone already hates you before you even show up for your first day of class.