Tune In Tokyo:The Gaijin Diaries

by Tim Anderson

  “Ever since my husband and I were married, we’ve agreed never to fart. In front of each other.”

  My God. She said fart. This is soooo not an answer to the question.

  Kayoko’s face tilts questioningly. “Fart?” she says, with the same blissfully innocent tone a young girl might use to say the words “flower petals?” or “Reese’s Pieces?” “What’s fart’s meaning?”

  I’m paralyzed. I know I should perhaps intervene and suggest to Naomi that her answer is kind of inappropriate. But I don’t wish to anger her. Plus, I’m desperate to see where this is all going. I bow my head and hope for the best. As the other students’ conversations continue to fill the classroom, I listen as Naomi tries to explain to Kayoko in English what a fart is.

  “It’s a noise we make. When we eat some foods, especially Mexican food.”

  In American middle schools this would’ve done the trick, but Kayoko still isn’t clear.

  “Shout?” she guesses.

  “No.”

  “Clap?”

  “No.”

  “Laugh?”

  “No.”

  This goes on for far too long, until finally Naomi has mercy and whispers the word in Japanese into Kayoko’s ear. Kayoko promptly turns an impressive shade of red and looks as if she wishes she were dead.

  So let’s recap. Naomi is grateful that her husband has never farted in her presence, and this is the inspirational story she has chosen to tell her partner, the poor, quivering Kayoko.

  Naomi is an enigma. Everything that comes out of her mouth is meant to rile people, to stir them up and make them wriggle in their seats. So far she has used every opportunity she has been given to force us to see the world as she sees it. It’s a dirty, blood-red piece of fleshy, sexually violated pulp. I want to see more.

  In the second hour of the lesson, I ask for someone to give me an example of a restrictive relative clause (because I have no idea what one is), and she quickly chimes in with, “My mother-in-law, who is very particular about housekeeping, drives me crazy and makes me want to vomit.”

  At the end of class I ask if anyone has any questions. She raises her hand and utters the words I’ve now begun to simultaneously dread and hope for: “Anything OK?”

  “Sure, why not?” I say.

  “Well, is it true that when men go into the toilet for the purpose of performing a bowel movement, they first spit into the bowl?”

  Tomo looks at her wide-eyed, like maybe, just maybe, Naomi’s not a phony at all. She might just be the real thing.

  Up until this point I’ve pretty much gotten off scot-free, but now I’m the target. Obviously Naomi wants her teacher to share in the atmosphere of unease that she’s created in the room. What does she want me to say, I wonder. I really don’t think she cares about the answer. She just wanted to ask the question, to just toss the sludge against the wall and see what would happen. Should I just laugh and say, “Oh, Naomi, you’re so funny. OK, see you all next week!” and then run away? Something tells me this won’t let me off the hook.

  “Yes, it is true,” I say. “Sometimes twice. You know, depending.”

  I begin to look forward to my Wednesday afternoons with Naomi. Without fail, I am shocked, embarrassed, and mortified at the things she comes out with. But I am never bored. And that, in the end, is the bottom line. After teaching for so long, I am nothing if not bored stupid. And just when my fire was about to expire, Naomi came into my life. She is giving me what I am in desperate need of: fear.

  The next week Takehiro and Shizue are both absent from class. The rest of the students file in, Tomo sitting next to Naomi, Kayoko choosing a seat over in the corner, Kumiko between them.

  “So, hello everyone. Let’s get started. Someone give me a topic.”

  Ever since Naomi reared her tawdry head in my class, I’ve noticed the other students are much more eager to suggest a topic at the beginning of class. This is probably so they can avoid discussing anal warts or assisted suicide at the suggestion of Naomi, but it’s progress nonetheless.

  “How about difference of Japanese and American culture?” Kayoko says.

  “OK, that’s a great suggestion. Thank you, Kayoko. Everyone, please get together with your partner and let’s talk about it!” Good Lord, I’m turning into Oprah.

  As usual, I allow the students to do their talking while I go write the grammar points we’ll be covering on the board. When I’m finished, I pull my chair up to Kumiko and Kayoko to have a listen. They are both giggling and covering their mouths with their hands.

  “I so surprised! I no understand why they say!” Kumiko manages to say through tears and quiet chuckling.

  “I know!” says Kayoko. “I go to post office in New York and lady was talking so fast I,, can’t understand, so I say, ‘Please speak slowly,’ and she scream at me and I still not understanding, so she calls next person and not talk to me again!”

  Confident they are enjoying their conversation, I stand and carry my chair over to Naomi and Tomo. Naomi, of course, is speaking, while a wide-eyed Tomo, who has never looked so engaged, hangs on her every probably disgusting word.

  “I just think it is very stupid, don’t you, Tomo-kun?”

  Tomo doesn’t answer. He smiles uncomfortably and then looks at me, desperate for me to help him say the right thing.

  “What are you guys talking about?” I ask, desperate to know the reasons behind Tomo’s horror/arousal.

  “I was talking about the difference between Japanese and America pornography,” Naomi begins. “I explain to him about how in the America they show everything, but in Japan, they cover the private parts with those little blocks, you know Timsensei?”

  “Yes, pixels,” I say a little too quickly.

  “Pixels,” she says, writing the new word down in her notebook. “They cover with pixels, and you can’t see very well unless you look careful. It stupid. Japan treat us like children. Don’t you think that, Tim-sensei?”

  I do think that. I’ve said this before. I’ll say it again. The pixelation of Japanese pornography goes against the very thing that makes pornography great. But should I say it now? In class? In front of impressionable Tomo, who is looking more and more like he wants Naomi to walk him home on a leash?

  “Yes, it’s strange, but…”

  “So you have seen Japanese porn movie?” she asks, her lips curling into a smile on one side.

  I look over at Kayoko and Kumiko, still laughing about being completely shat on by cranky New Yorkers, and look back at Tomo, who is composing his marriage proposal to Naomi in his head, and I think, “Oh, screw it.”

  “Yes, of course. Hasn’t everybody?”

  Naomi nods her head and smiles. Tomo makes a mental note to educate himself about the world of American porn. Kayoko and Kumiko laugh and snort.

  And as mysteriously as she appeared in my life, Naomi was gone. Was she just a vision? A figment of my desperate imagination? A guardian angel sent from heaven’s red-light district to do the community service she was sentenced to for flashing Jesus and the Buddha at last year’s Christmas party? Nah, she was promoted to the next level, which I don’t teach. The next week, when I look down at my class roster and her name is not there, I die a little inside.

  But though I’m saddened by her departure, I know that her legacy will live on. Naomi changed the atmosphere forever with her constant indecent proposals. She stirred things up and made seemingly straightforward questions like “What’s the best drink to have with ramen?” dangerous.

  Now there will be no more talk of menstrual cycles and their effect on one’s cooking; no more impromptu speeches like the one about that country in Africa that, allegedly, had outlawed sex for two years because of the AIDS epidemic (“I think it would be impossible,” she said); no more sexual harassment; and no more manipulation of the text for her own nefarious ends. No more piss, no more vinegar.

  And just like that, it’s back to conversations about Japanese society, vacations, and dreary
answers to appalling opening questions like “If today were your birthday, where would you be, who would you be with, what would you be doing, and why?” Of course, I could follow Naomi’s example, throw caution to the wind, and offer questions like “Why is it that in Japan, it is horribly rude to blow your nose in public, yet sniffing, snorting, chewing, and swallowing, or spitting out one’s own snot with the forcefulness and volume of a morning radio DJ is perfectly all right?” But that would cause more problems than it would solve. And I’d probably be asked to repeat the question more slowly.

  So my classes have gone back to being placid affairs, with the occasional bit of accidental rude language. (“My son is a really good cock,” Shizue would say, meaning, of course, “cook.”) Tomo has lost his innocence and has probably moved on from Salinger to The Story of O. Kayoko comes to class unafraid, knowing that, until she herself is promoted to the next level, she won’t find herself on the wrong end of Naomi’s sadistic gaze. Kumiko still checks herself in her mirror six times per class.

  But even though Naomi is gone from my class, her spirit can sometimes still be felt. One day, Shizue suggests we discuss our thoughts on Japanese tabloid newspapers, and another time, Kumiko proposes the topic of “sexiest Hollywood actors,” neither of which would have been possible pre-Naomi.

  Naomi is now wreaking havoc in the next level, no doubt trying to get people to discuss the prime minister’s favorite sexual positions or whether or not adult incest is a victimless crime. I envy the teacher of that class and would kill to be sitting there as he or she naïvely replies, “Sure, why not?” to those two magical words that are guaranteed to open up a world of smut and disorder: “Anything OK?”

  # of teriyaki burgers eaten: 13

  # of Saturday nights spent on mushrooms watching the three competing giant TV screens at Shibuya Crossing: 1

  In which our hero/Christ figure realizes with a shudder that Hello Kitty could be spending her nights stalking and anally raping Disney characters with baseball bats and no one would care as long as she still wore a wide-eyed expression of pure innocence and a cute pink dress the next morning.

  It’s early morning, and the sun is only just beginning to consider poking its way above the jagged Tokyo horizon. Giant black pterodactyls scavenge for scraps from the trash bags lining the concrete outside, dwarfing the trash collectors who are doing their best to remove the millions of pounds of waste and sludge left for them the night before. And me, I’m on my bed shivering, having just woken up from a horrible, horrible early-morning dream in which I was being brutally attacked in my bed by Tare Panda, the wide-eyed, oval-faced character from the Hello Kitty School of Aggressive Cuteness who’s weaseled his way into every corner of Japanese popular culture, from advertisements to greeting cards to cell phone accessories, threatening to usurp Miss Kitty as the national mascot. It was trying to cute me to death.

  Admittedly, I’m not just irked because of the panda attack. It’s that it happened to occur simultaneously with an early-morning earthquake tremor deep beneath the city. I wake to the bed shaking. Also the bureau, the television, the sliding wooden door that opens out on the kitchen, and the walls. And since Tokyoites are expecting “the big one” any day now, I quickly jump to the conclusion that that day is today and the panda in my dream was just an adorable li’l angel of death.

  I sit frozen on the shaking bed for a few moments, praying for everything to stop wobbling, hoping there isn’t a bigger tremor to come. After a few minutes, I stop writing goodbye e-mails to friends and family in my head and start to calm down. I’ve experienced these tremors before, and it’s always the calm after the shaking stops that is the eeriest; it’s still within the realm of possibility that something has been jiggled loose (a nearby house, a telephone pole, Tokyo Tower), something that will soon come crashing down on my bed without warning.

  I gather myself together, clamber out of bed, and slide into the chair at my desk. I figure I may as well watch television while I’m waiting to be crushed, so I switch it on and go out to the kitchen to make some tea and toast. When I return to my room, I’m greeted with a horrifying image on the television screen, one that will emblazon itself on my memory for weeks, maybe years, to come.

  It’s a commercial for the Japanese language version of Annie currently running in Tokyo, complete with a freckle-faced, curly wig-wearing Japanese girl squeaking out the words to “Tomorrow” in Japanese.

  I. Am. Aghast. There are many things that should never be allowed to leave America’s borders. Adam Sandler movies, for example. Fox News. The McRib Sandwich. But number one on the list, I feel sure of it, is the musical story of that nauseatingly precocious and cherubic red-haired orphan who, whenever she has a problem, is bored, or just has some time to kill, thinks it necessary to sing songs through her nose in a voice that could wilt plants, crash airplanes, and bring about worldwide famine.

  “The horror…the horror,” I murmur, convinced I will never fall asleep again.

  Later, on the train on my way to Shibuya to do some record shopping, I am still feeling the aftereffects of unprotected exposure to Jap-Annie. As it happens, I’m sitting across from a young office lady holding in her lap a tiny blue purse with a pastel drawing of two dancing bunnies, a chicken, a strawberry, some flowers, and the words “Something Pretty” on it. I think of Tare Panda. I think of little orphan Jap-Annie. I want to vomit.

  Looking around me, I see the train is dense with commuters with their heads buried in a variety of reading material. Many read comics full of characters with glistening eyes half the size of their heads. Women read fashion magazines, like Cutie, one of the most popular. In its pages, young ladies can find useful tips on how to wear oversized bracelets, pink barrettes, fluffy scarves, tiny handbags, wacky hats, flowery shoes, pastel nail polish, futuristic headphones, bubble gum lip gloss, sparkly eye shadow, tight/bright T-shirts saying things like “Sweetheart” and “Kissypoo Sugar,” wide-eyed girl-next-door expressions, and countless other tried and tested ways to optimize their cuteness and make sure they’re never the last sweetie on their block to have that completely necessary YumYum brand, bunny rabbit-embossed makeup kit.

  Considering my panda dream again, I decide that my subconscious is desperately trying to tell me something. It is this: the Japanese obsession with all things cute is becoming a little more than I can handle.

  I think back to when I opened my first Japanese bank account. I had two choices of bankcard designs. The first one was a lovely drawing of a small boy on a fishing boat staring at the setting sun against a beautiful auburn sky. Elegiac and elegant. The other choice was a picture of a cartoon bunny named Miffy who looks like Hello Kitty with bunny ears and no nose. He was licensed as the bank’s mascot. The friendly bank teller told me it was the most popular choice. After a few moments of quiet reflection, I chose the fishing boat sunset one, ignoring the devil inside me screaming, “Give me that bunny!”

  “Tim, really,” I lectured myself. “Calm down. You don’t need the bunny. You want the bunny, but you don’t need the bunny. Yes, he’s cute. But is that really what you need in a bank card? Choose the sunset background and walk away.”

  Cuteness is of utmost importance in this country. It’s why the films of chipmunk-faced Meg Ryan have always been infinitely more popular than those of giant-jawed Julia Roberts. It’s why adorable Audrey Hepburn’s image is used to sell products from bottled jasmine tea to English lessons at Berlitz. It’s why Tokyo Disneyland exists, why there are giant Snoopy Stores in Tokyo and Yokohama, and it is, I will forever believe, why Cher never became a superstar in Japan. With her long narrow face, dour expression, Medusa-like tendrils of hair, and overactive serpentine tongue, she is the antithesis of cute. She’s the stuff of nightmares. The Japanese would much rather be entertained by Michael J. Fox.

  At the giant RECOFAN record store in Shibuya I go to the Japanese section to see what’s on offer. No shortage of cute over here. One of the most popular pop bands in the country in t
he past few years is an all-girl troupe going by the name of Morning Musume, which translates, worryingly, to Morning Daughters. They are the female Japanese Menudo, an ever-changing roster of pubescent—sometimes prepubescent—young ladies brought together by a record company to help satisfy the Japanese public’s demands for endless gallons of teenage squeakpop. They sing (off-key), dance in formation (like drunk beauty pageant contestants), and wear brightly colored costumes (the kind seen in Southern American parades). They’re horrendous. They sell millions. They’re fucking everywhere. And each one is probably set to embark on an equally cute solo career during which she will tour the country dressed in a tutu, holding a fluffy pink baton and singing nursery rhyme–like songs that will provide her with a bit of cash flow before it all comes to a crashing halt when she reaches the cutoff age of twenty-five. Because twenty-five, my friends, is not a cute number.

  There’s nothing like the sound of a group of Tokyo girls gathered around a store window display featuring whatever character is the It cutie of the moment and screaming their approval with a bloodcurdling “KAWAIIIIIII!” It means “cute,” but it also implies “in,” “we like,” and “that would look really good on a handbag, a T-shirt, a cell phone screen, and a pair of underwear!”

  “Kawaii!!” If you hear that word directed at you, you’re in there, man, you’re hot, you’ve really got it. You are officially cuddly. I’ve not had that word directed at me.

  Whereas in America the number-one preoccupation is being thin (eating french fries being a close second), in Japan, they don’t generally have to worry about the bloat factor. They do, however, have to worry about not being kawaii enough.

  Recently, while on my way to work, I ran into one of my students, Ryoko, a basic-level student in her late forties who was always a joy to teach, and though she was typically insecure about her English abilities, she was never shy about giving it a try. I saw she’d gotten a haircut, and I complimented her on it.