Getting Back On the Horse

It's been my long-standing policy that the worst thing one can say while living abroad is 'no'. With the obvious exceptions of situations that endanger life or threaten deep rooted moral principles I think that's largely good advice. I'm going to revise that after recent events, however: the new advice is “the worst thing you can say while living abroad is 'no' to new experiences.”See what I did there? Doesn't say anything about saying 'no' to old experiences that you know are going to be total bullshit wastes of time.

Having said that let me just jump into the heart of the matter and say that I'm sick and tired of Japanese company parties, and my god are there a hell of a lot of them around the end/start of the year! They come in two varieties: the bounenkai, literally meaning “forget the year party”; and the shinnenkai, “start of the year party”. If they're held nearby to the workplace as they usually are they can cost between 3000-5000 J-bucks, but if they're out of town, and even worse out of town with only other men....Watch. The. Hell. Out.

The guy on my right here is one of the few people I had a good convo with this night that didn't involve the ways in which American and Japanese coitus differ. Wish I could remember his name...

They're very near mandatory events, though I was able to shrug one off last week when I was feeling under the weather and didn't want to get three sheets to the wind so soon after almost jumping drunkenly into the Kusu River the week before. Anyways, when my supervisor #4, Goto, sprung it on me at the town hall while surrounded by coworkers I couldn't think of a feint quick enough to throw him off and ended up signing up for an over night shinnenkai in Kumamoto City, one of my favorite places in Kyushu. The trip didn't start too well when we met with our two carpool partners and Goto made a snide comment to them about my Japanese comprehension level, which I did comprehend, thank you very much dickwad. There's a time when I would have called him a friend, but he's been making a poor impression on me lately. Oh well, things cleared up when we drove through a very rural town on the border of Kumamoto Prefecture and I saw a barber called the “Spic Salon”...ahhh, unintentional racism through Engrish lifts the spirits.

"Please sir, may I have some more?" Then, the feast is over and the House Elves wait behind the paper screens to do the cleaning up.

It's strange what about 120km of driving will do to the weather in Kyushu—Kumamoto was hot! Well, comparatively to Kusu. I shed the winter jacket and scarf and pranced about gaily in just a short sleeve until the sun went down and we headed off for dinner. About thirty men, every guy between the ages of 21-30 who works at the Kusu town hall, was in attendance. The stench of shenanigans was strong in the izakaya air already, but things really took off after the drinks began to take hold. The subject of Kumamoto women and how apparently “easy” they are already came up on the drive over, but someone else regurgitated the topic and off they went with the sex talk. “Here it comes,” I thought, “time to pick the gaijin's brain about sex in exotic North America.” And so they did. Do you make noises while having sex? How loud and what kind? Do you have sex in fields ever? Parks? How about the bonnet of your cars? The strangest line of questioning was about how much I pay for sex. Uh, nothing, I responded. They weren't talking about hookers either, trust me. I told them sex is pretty much free and widely available in the USA for anyone determined to find it. They cracked up over this; they couldn't believe sex could be free. What a world...

The bill payed we moved on to the next venue, which I thought was going to be a member's bar judging by the 2000 J-bucks that was collected from everyone including me. These bars are where you purchase booze by the bottle and have really nothing to do with being a “member”, but they will store the bottle on the premises if you don't finish it that time around. When we entered the place I knew instantly my assumption was mistaken by the line of young women in gaudy cocktail dresses and layers of caked makeup. They had brought me to a hostess bar.

I won't make any bones about what I think about the typical Japanese hostess bar: these places have got to be one of the more pathetic aspects of human culture I've ever witnessed. No wonder these guys think you have to pay for intimate contact with members of the opposite sex when they're paying just to talk to them! If you didn't click the link above let me run down a hostess bar briefly. These are bars you pay a cover charge at for a semi-private booth and time with a woman who has your undivided attention. She'll light your smokes, pour your drinks, laugh at your jokes and praise your work no matter how degrading or debased it may be. Don't get me wrong, I can see the appeal in that, sure, but it doesn't take Freud to know it's socially unhealthy to frequent these places.

My hostess tonight was Madoka, a lanky fake blonde with heels so vertical they'd make a ballerina wince. Let me talk about that blonde hair for a second here, because it was astounding. Hostess hair ranges from au natural straight black to massive 1950-esque beehives. Madoka's was the closest I've seen hair come to being a Klein Bottle as the thing was a maze of arcing strands that seemed to feed back into itself for the next geometric shape. Amazing work, whoever did it. Madoka's hobbies include shopping and, ummm, actually that's all. Shockingly that's even more vapid than the normal J-gal whose top hobbies, I've discovered, are 1) watching movies, 2) listening to music 3) shopping 4) getting makeovers/manicure/pedicure/aesthetic and 5) traveling to Korea...for makeovers/manicure/pedicure/aesthetic. Madoka is a native of Kumamoto and graduated from college four years prior, only joining as a hostess this past November. What was she doing before hostessing? BEING A GODDAMN NURSE! I guess I've been wrong this whole time in thinking that saving lives is more important than talking to socially inept businessmen. Sorry, trying my damnedest not to judge. Geez...where's the door?

I'm channeling Roger Moore on this one. Not Connery, Moore.

Hearing that the next venue involved Chinese massages I excused myself, backtracked to the hotel, grabbed my latest, errr, novel and fled to Starbucks for a latte and a window seat, content with the total sum of adventure tonight. Maybe I'm not a “fun” guy by male Japanese standards. Maybe I'd have more fun if we went hiking or camping or did something other than drinking and paying women for their attention. Fine, I'll take the hit. Now, will you please stop having me throw my money away on these things please?

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A wiser man than I once said “sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you.” OK, The Dude said that in The Big Lebowski who got it from the cowboy-narrator guy who got it from Daniel Boone, but it's wisdom of the ages as far as I'm concerned, especially since I haven't written anything for about two weeks on this blog and feel like the bear finally got me after such a long stint of the opposite being true. The term “down in the dumps” hardly begins to describe it—this past holiday season has been the most miserable of my life and it's high time to snap out of it.

The first step I suppose would be to stop lying about certain things to myself and, I suppose, you too. For example, it must be noted that Kusu is a shit place to be in the winter as it magnifies the already bleak lack of a nightlife—or much of any life for that matter. The cold shuts down any notion of a festival to look forward to and the snow or rain every day rules out most outdoor physical activities (like my mainstay of cycling). Unrelated to winter doldrums and moving to normal ones, I'm quickly discovering that there's nobody in Kusu around my age that is on the same “wavelength”, so to speak. I don't blame them of course, as this is a farming town after all. I guess I'm discovering there's too much city in me for this small town to handle, which is why I've been heading to Hita more and more lately to hang out with Lindsey from Lake Tahoe, my musician/artist friend, Chizuru, and Luchie, the man who lived in Morocco for a few years and organized the solstice party. The English Circle folks here in town are nice and all, but the one closest to my age has almost twenty years on me and all are enmeshed in their own careers, families, etc. Can't exactly call them up on a lazy Friday to come over for beers and a movie at 11PM.

It quite literally disgusts me to virtually abandon Kusu on these winter weekends for the greener grass of Hita and elsewhere considering what I've said in the past about this matter, but I feel like I'm fighting for my very sanity now. If it's just for one season perhaps it can be excused. Of course, next winter will be a different, damn it. First, I'm coming back to The States for Christmas, hell or high water. One doesn't normally long for long hours with the misfits we call extended family, but then again one doesn't normally spend December 25^th in a lifeless concrete office building reading a history book about post-WWII Japan and sketching an interpretation of a dream. Next is that I will travel as much as possible around Kyushu and within the prefecture to take my mind off the dulling winter grays and whites of life here at this time. If that doesn't work then the thought of leaving, transferring to an urban school district, is on the table.

I want to thank my friend Sara especially for (remotely) being my shoulder to bitch on in the past month of so. I hope my incoherent ramblings didn't damage my rep and solid, umm, street cred that you held of me.

--Matt