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