Harajuku Sunday

by S. Michael Choi

  “Tell your friend that he's very rude.”

  Had I known then what I knew just months later; had I had some inkling or prior warning about past history at the company or even just an especially perceptive and friendly ally from the domestic side, I would have been able, at the time of the initial assault, to have quickly turned the tables on the factory foreman and disarmed all onlookers instantly, preventing the internecine struggle that followed, and that left both of our influences hopelessly diminished. But at the time, I am completely focused on my battle with LeFauve; Charis, of all people, has taken this week to show up at my workplace with a prepared lunch, drawings gasps from assembled onlookers; and as people point out—even my stride is different; even my very walk has a combative and dominant edge, the purposeful roll of a fighter and brawler.

  “That guy, you know, this is the first time he's ever talked to me in my eleven months here. I don't even know his name!”

  “Mmm. Maybe that's part of the problem?”

  For a second I look at my Japanese friend and remember the old saying-- you think you have a Japanese friend, until he enters a Japanese setting and you discover he's somebody else entirely. “You're taking his side?”

  Tak grimaces; a look of pain crosses his head. “It's like this—Japanese society is a bit more focused on age and a bit more patriarchal than you might realize...”

  But I'm already shutting my ears to this kind of talk; I hang them all with the same cord.

  “All right, I don't have time to deal with small dicked losers with inferiority complexes. We have a entire series of products to roll out in six months, and the team had best fall in.”

  Energia K.K. divides fairly predictably into two camps on either my or the foreman's side, or rather, most of the people seem to have some or other inclination although a noticeable minority remain aloof. As Tak says, Japanese culture still places a premium on the opinion of elders; the foreman is forty-five or older, and I am a freshly-minted university grad. But on the other hand, we are a new media technology company; our floor is filled with talents and design specialists, and these give me a little wink or nod, or otherwise indicate that they need a programming specialist more than a washed-up middle-aged son of an electrician. But then: Shimamura. And it takes me not months, but years to understand his play in this evolving little drama of ours.

  “Ah, Ritchie-san. You think we will achieve good results next year?”

  “Yes, sir, most definitely! We're all going to do our best, and totally wipe out the competition! Let's all do our very best, 'cuz I think we have a really cracker-jack outfit!”

  “Ritchie! Ritchie! Shut the hell up!”

  The last comment, of course, is the foreman's. I don't even remember until years later that it is Shimamura who brought on this moment; actually at the moment the most striking and painful realization is the entire room has fallen into silence. The entire company is watching at the end of the year banquet as the foreman stares at me with undisguised malice. I compose my face.

  “Yes, sir, understood, and thank you sir.”

  And conversation resumes.

  Man fights against nature, against fellow man, against society, family, nations, reality itself. In the race to divide the pie, certain pieces will go to some individuals; others will seize portions that differ slightly from what they expected, even at times more so than they ever deserved. But conflict in the workplace; the war that takes place in so controlled and polite a setting, is always all that more vicious because the stakes are real.

  "Okay this is the problem with foreman. If he had a problem with me, why didn't he come up to me one-on-one and explain what his gripe was. I take issue with the fact that he was talking to me for the first time--for the very first time--only when my friend is visiting the company, causing me to lose face with my friend, and that he is starting the battle only when he is surrounded by two of his friends. Talk about your total pussy!"

  My conversation partner, another expat from a different division of the company, nods sympathetically.

  "And his team! They don't even hold eye contact with me when we pass in the hall. This is basically your definition of total passive-aggressivity, 'snipe from afar' loser and weaklings are tigers when it's battle at a distance, but completely fall apart face to face! I have things at stake here, too. My IT specialty is only useful to three or four corporations in the world. I can't back off because one pencil-dicked washed-up loser can't manage his own insecurities. What an absolute worthless piece of garbage."

  As war breaks out, management and assorted big-picture types race to put out the fire, knowing the potential for open conflict to spread, infect the organization, and bring operations to a stand-still. But as time passes, the dawning realization is that trying to push the two of us together; trying to effect a friendship between the foreman and me, does only more harm rather than good.

  "Look Ritchie. Try to look at things from the foreman's point of view. He's a forty-five year old factory labor chief who will never earn more than four-point-five million yen a year. All his life he's wanted a desk in the headquarters, and now he finally gets one, only to immediately run into the hot-shot foreigner talent, brought in at a widely known cool six million a year. You're young; you have a beautiful girlfriend; all the Japanese girls coo at you on the street. Of course he's going to hate you!"

  "I understand this. I sympathize with this. But here, just take a look at this winter ski trip list... Sugiyama Daiichi, Nakayama Tomoko, Takahashi Yuuta.. and then, 'RIICHI.' It's like I get to be some parody of a human being; they walk around mockingly saying 'Riichi' 'Riichi' 'Riichi' like I'm some kind of TV entertainment talk show host while they get to be the real human beings."

  "That pisses me off, too. More than I care to admit."

  It lasts for months. I begin to get on guard, looking for fresh outrages; I know I'm causing stress to the foreman as well, but he has the advantage of numbers, and he is required, by his job, to frequently visit the actual factories; I never know when or where he will turn up. But finally I begin to slip; it's just too much to handle all at once. Sometimes good happens, and sometimes bad, but the trend is down-down-down. It becomes impossible to work; to think straight; and my results are slipping. But finally, finally, I begin to get leverage against the foreman.

  Winter hits that year with a special, crazed intensity. Just as conflict has been simmering for months before finally erupting into the open, so it seems that previous overly-warm years have been storing up some reservoir of cold weather that now breaks upon us with a strength and ferocity that is untold. A gigantic blizzard, a veritable winter hurricane, blasts into Kanto, snowing for days straight and bringing the city to an absolute standstill. But the snowhounds; the powder-freaks and winter sportsmen-- these are all giving little winks to each other, and despite all ongoing dialectics; despite the march of schedules and timetables and software release dates, this too is a private reality; a shared understanding against the debacles of the day.

  "Shan, I have no desire to hang out with you, but allow me to counsel you this far. You are handling the case completely wrong. I think Waseda would even have backed you up from the start had you just denied her charges without denying that you were in a relationshp with her. Your story holds no water, and so you have no credibility."

  "Oh yeah, big words now, Mr. Spectator! You know everything about law. Amazing you didn't solve my case already."

  "Look the idea is not to save yourself; your own reputation is clearly nonexistent. You have to dig up dirt on Dominique herself."

  The battle goes on, November, December, January. Finally January Shan is sent to court for the final hearing, and I'm not there; I only learn later through other means, the trial begins and Shan confronts a subdued, distant Dominique in the courtroom, and all charges are dropped. However, once more there is a technicality. Shan has not been in university sufficiently to be a "full-time student;" he has violated the terms of his visa, even though being found inno
cent of everything. With his head hanging low and thoughts of the eternal sea, he is led away in chains and LeFauve sneers in victory, his white teeth conspicuous on his dark brown face. At work, my white-hot intensity conflict with the foreman results in no progress and both of us are disgraced in a sense; me for fighting the working man, the foreman for fighting a twenty-four year old, but I am the one on a non-protected contract. Let there be one cautionary voice in my head. Let there be an advisor at this one point in the drama to put a restraining hand on my shoulder, saying ‘caution, caution.’ But there is no such thing. There is only the absolute zest of the ‘video-game existence.’ Every moment is pregnant with meaning; every decision is enripened with possibility, every random encounter is another chance to turn things around.

  “Hi, you must be new to Tokyo? My name’s Ritchie Ufuo. I work with events and the foreigner scene here. Here’s my business card. We’re doing a ski trip next month.”

  “Hello, you’re with the AEON group? I run a foreigner ski club. This is our flyer.”

  “Could you post this ski trip flyer in your break room? Thanks…”

  Who is this strange person, infinitely active, infinitely restless, infinitely energetic bouncing across Tokyo that last, final winter that decides everything? In recollection he seems scarcely me, somebody else, a caricature of a human being, so absolutely certain the next moment is the most important one, so absolutely convinced of the righteousness of his cause. He is brilliant, this Other Me. He is so close to being totally satisfied—but only the next moment count; only the next win, the next social victory, the next score of a ticket sold to a ski trip. I know it is me in truth. Even living that person, I am aware of a certain divergence of reality—and Charis, as well, trying to put the brakes on something, succeeding only in seeing the moment of perfect closure pass, only to sadly walk away, only to know how beautiful things are—if only they can be contained. But even the self-aware monster is self-knowingly charging ahead. The breakdown at work is just the final proximate cause; there is no more stopping things now.

  “How many you sold?”

  “Forty.”

  “Great. I unloaded thirty-three so far.”

  “We going to reach two hundred.”

  We are all of us—Soren, Tucker, me, maybe even Charis—superficial, immature, childish, perhaps even worthless people. Our superficial interactions reveal a life of total ease, one in which all problems are solved for us, and nothing really important can break through. But even this being the case, I can’t help but record that mad, bad winter. It’s mad and it’s bad, and things are really blowing up now and I can’t really be expected to destroy my life, reach some overwhelming poverty just to record genuinely deep things, am I? This is me. Hate me. Love me. Forget me. I don’t care. I am jumping around Tokyo selling ski trip tickets, and I am conferencing with Tucker, and I am the center of young Tokyo, take it or leave it. I didn’t ask to be born, and I didn’t ask for such overwhelming comfort and ease in my life. I was born to it. Everyone had to collapse so I could inherit. So I make the most of what I have, and despise the ugly, the poor, the diseased and infirm, because they do not belong to my circle, and if I don’t pull off this ski-trip, LeFauve will win; I will be swept away.

  “One hundred ten tickets. Net fifty bucks each, we will clear five grand.”

  “Not bad. But we can do better.”

  Let me burn into this paper how awesome we are. Let me write my name across the stars, Ritchie Ufuo, Tokyo events promoter, Tucker Black, club kid and sunglasses-wearer. We are so unbelievably cool that we do not even know your name.

  “How is the thing against the foreman going?”

  “He tried again to slap me down; end of year party. Went nowhere.”

  “Small dick!”

  “Typical Jap!”

  I know you do not like me. I know that I had a certain measure of good will that I have now exhausted, coming off superficial, trivial, pointless to exist. But I cannot lie about these conversations; I cannot record deep things as having been discussed when all we do is pose and blow smoke in other people’s eyes. I go from party to party; I am welcomed in thirty different apartment buildings merely by name. But that is all there is in this life, and your miseries and commonplace career moves; your feeble attempts to gain leverage when economies do not yield profits so easily do not impress me. I am me. I am God. I am Ritchie Ufuo.

  “So you just arrived Japan? You’re living in Chiba? Ah, god you gotta get out of this place.”

  “No, I like literature. I just want to read, not really party all the time in the city.”

  “Baby you can’t last in that place. It’s nowhere!”

  Everything that is to come in young twenty-something foreigner Tokyo gets built that winter. On the ashes of the foundation of the old Soren empire, I built a superstructure that takes Tucker to his highest degree, that integrates all the various currents of six thousand people who count into a perfect, beautiful whole. Maybe you know somebody who lives here during this time and doesn’t know me. But probably that person doesn’t count. Maybe you think this is all superficial childishness. Yes, this claim holds true.

  “Dude, how about talking about things that count? How about this world full of inequities and unfairness? How about reform and making the world a better place?”

  “Give me a freakin’ break!”

  Don’t hate; don’t judge. Realize that everything you enjoyed your time there came from me; that either me or somebody right reporting to me built it up. The freakin’ paperback exchange—sheesh—that was launched after a lazy Saturday coffee near Inokashiro. Yet the war is breaking apart at work; other-Ritchie comes home, sometimes fists clenched in rage, sometimes waking up at night with teeth gritting. All these passive passive passive Japanese, playing little games of pretending to be friendly and then slipping away. Offering fake little smiles and sarcastic bows, but hating the foreigner, hating especially the foreigner whose girlfriend shows up to work, hands out homecooked sweets. The smallest dicked, most insecure males in the world, the weakest least-liked of all the world’s nationalities. Japanese losers. I hate them.

  Finally the weekend of the company trip opens up with absolute clarity, a clear blue winter sky of limitless visibility; had the sky not been blue, it surely would have been a diamond carpet of stars stretching to the ends of the galaxy. Yet here already we are assembling at Shibuya station; already the cars of our caravan are lining up, and in the pleased relaxed anticipation of maximum physical exertion, we hang out, waiting for the full arrival, self-consciously cool in ski goggles and sunglasses.

  "So, ready?"

  "Yeah, let's go."

  "Uh, Nagai-kun, let me ride in your car..."

  We meet up in Shibuya on an early Saturday morning, the sun not quite up, and late night clubbers wasted and drunk stumbling to the main station to await the first train. As the morning fully breaks, our group assembles, and we load up the vehicles with our baggage, sunglasses on in crescendoing light, before finding the expressway and heading north to Tohoku. Our destination for the night is Fukushima, about halfway up to the real far north, but good enough to get real snow. To each side, the city falls away. At first, it’s just a matter of each conglomeration of tall buildings becoming less impressive and more far between, but by Inoshiro there are rice paddies to the roadsides and large green fields separating waterways and park walkways, distant elevated tracks the Shinkansen to Morioka. Then finally it’s genuine countryside: undeveloped land and the foothills of mountains—forested ridges that surround a highway that ascends inexorably to higher elevations. And here, like a shock, nature hits, like a blow to one's chest, a complete reversal of values; shocking tree movement, shocking sunlight between hillsides, such intense sensation that I feel as if I am a two-dimensional drawing, as unreal as a cinematic separation layer of meaning. Snow falling from a leaden sky! Mountains that rise up to meet us, tower up, into which we plunge! The incredible brilliance of sunlight glittering from a
n inland lake! Maybe it is because I have spent the last six years in the city, nature is almost tangible, frangible, almost a fist in my throat. Nobody else, however, seems to notice, and fearful of coming off as crazy, I keep my silence. And the driver, Imai, turns on the traffic radio; he is a bit concerned about being able to get physically back, but as for turning back, this won't happen; we won't let it. It isn't until we pass through a mountain pass that all of a sudden the wind shifts and we are immediately, irrecoverably bombarded with snow. The effect is of a total blizzard. The massive scale of the white-out is so intense, in fact, that out of concern our driver turns on the traffic radio, but of course the true powder-hounds in our caravan will hear nothing of turning back; this is unbelievably positive news for them as we are already two hundred kilometers out of the city. A heavy density of snow falling against a gray-white cloud sky with oncoming traffic providing headlights subdued by the weather and evergreen trees covered with blankets of this and previous snowfall. The roads are covered to the depth of four to six inches and traffic slows to 60 kph pace, evenly spaced out on the mountain highway.