Tune in Tokio

by Tim Anderson

  I slide open his door and tiptoe in, my socked feet enjoying the tickle of the woven tatami underneath. From the bare-bones look of the room, it appears Ewan has really thrown himself into capturing the minimalist Japanese decorating style. There’s no furniture except for a folded futon on the floor and a small bookcase in the corner. Since I’m a snoop, I pad over to the closet space and start sliding open doors. Each cabinet holds absolutely nothing interesting. There are folded sweaters. Folded pants. Socks. A crate of underwear. A box of envelopes. Some pens. A disposable camera. I close the doors so I don’t collapse on the floor and plummet into a deep sleep, and then I turn and step lightly toward the bookshelf, hoping for the best. Since Ewan’s a bookish fellow, I figure he’ll have a respectable collection of titles to choose from. Maybe I’ll finally read The Brothers Karamazov, Look Homeward, Angel, or Dianetics.

  Unfortunately, it turns out that his are the books I would read only if I had a gun to my head. Titles like If Lions Could Talk, Third World Geology, and The Psychology of Rabbits abound. My eyes brighten when I see the word “sex” in one of the titles, but it turns out to be The Sex Life of Plants.

  I search and search his room looking for something, anything, readable. The most exciting thing I come across is a map of Yokohama, which I promptly swipe and have a read through. (It doesn’t hold my interest for long, too bogged down with details, unrealistic plot contrivances, soulless narrative…) Then I see a book about learning Japanese kanji characters, and I nearly run away screaming.

  Though I planned to take some emergency Japanese lessons at Berlitz before arriving in Tokyo, I never actually got around to it, what with all the emergency CD shopping, emergency bar hopping, emergency beachgoing, emergency Internet surfing, emergency lying around, and emergency last-minute freaking out. I did buy a language book called Japanese the Fast and Fun Way and a Japanese-English dictionary, but the extent of my study has so far been a few perfunctory looks at their back covers (very nice: simple, colorful, practical).

  Though I learned the two phonetic alphabets without too much trouble, I’m deathly afraid of the kanji symbols that make up the bulk of the written language. Not just because there are twenty thousand of them, each with two pronunciations. Not even because each symbol must also be written in a certain stroke order. (To a guy who mixes his cursive and printed script, and upper-and lowercase letters when he writes-KinD oF LikE this-this is absolutely out of the question.)

  The last straw is the fact that kanji symbols are listed in dictionaries according to the number of strokes, so to find a specific kanji I must know that it has twelve strokes and not ten or fourteen. I’m not prepared for that kind of life.

  Lying on Ewan’s futon is a workbook filled with his, er, stroke practice. I’m impressed. Sure, it looks like they were done by a three-year-old, but at least he’s trying, and that’s more than I can say for me. Seeing how Ewan is so hard at work learning his letters, I start thinking maybe it’s time I finally make that leap into the linguistic unknown. I came here, after all, to shock my system, to give myself over to new and even scary possibilities. So far it’s been very easy to live here knowing only a few phrases and hand signals. Some teachers have actually been here upwards of five years and still struggle to understand train announcements. Sure, it might seem incredibly lazy, but if your job is to speak English, then the need for fluency in Japanese isn’t so desperate on a day-to-day basis.

  Ignorance may sometimes be bliss, but not when you’re wondering whether or not you’re on the right train or if what you’re about to eat is filled with bean paste and not chocolate. Besides, it’s my God-given right as an American to speak my mind and fill others’ ears with my thoughts, my opinions, my innermost feelings, and my repressed childhood memories. It seems a shame that I should let a tiny thing like a complete ignorance of the language keep me from doing it. I now know only a few more words than most Americans learned from that Styx song “Mr. Roboto.” This absolutely must change.

  Yes, my honeymoon period is officially over. I am settled. I am working. It is time to hit the books and prepare myself for my future career in Japanese films, television, infomercials, music videos, car shows, or Internet porn, whatever. I decide I’ll ask around at work for a good teacher.

  I work in the Kamiooka school of Yokohama, situated on a big shopping street across from the gigantic Kamiooka Station/Bus Terminal/Shopping Center, and above a Burger King, which means that the smell of french fries pervades the entire school and I must eat at least one large order every day.

  The pace here, like that at a Burger King, is manic. Every day I teach about seven forty-five-minute lessons and then spend another forty-five minutes in the free conversation room, where students of all levels discuss whatever topic is suggested or move from topic to topic according to interest level. (Mostly the students just sit and stare at the teacher until the teacher says something.) The classes generally consist of three people, unless a student pays extra to have individual instruction. We have ten minutes between classes, during which we’re meant to grade each student on a number of points (listening, grammar, confidence, pronunciation, poise, dress sense, etc.), make recommendations, pass the file on to the next teacher, then get the files for our next class, open them up, and quickly choose a lesson that each hasn’t done yet or needs to do again based on comments written by a previous teacher.

  It’s all very stressful and crowded in the tiny teachers’ room as we scramble for the limited number of seats, sometimes ending up writing our files while leaning against the file cabinet that other teachers keep needing to use or sitting on someone’s lap. This sense of pandemonium coupled with the smell of burgers, fries, and chicken fingers wafting through the room sometimes makes me feel as if I’m not actually an English teacher at all, but a fry cook.

  Needless to say, we teachers have been forced to become intimate with one another, much like actors and actresses filming a love scene. Except our love scenes are every forty-five minutes and generally involve not two people, but ten.

  And to make our lives that much more exciting, there’s the persistent presence of Jill, our head teacher from Australia, a woman who, in spite of her fondness for brightly colored blazers and hair bleach, possesses all the warmth and approachability of a Salem, Massachusetts, prosecutor circa 1654.

  Jill likes to lord it over us minions with a firm hand and a furrowed brow. And, sometimes, a hot pink pantsuit. Her most pronounced personality trait, besides a tendency to dribble ketchup and mayonnaise all over herself while eating BK Flame Broilers, is her staunch Australian patriotism, coupled with a similarly staunch dislike of Americans. She’s surely the proudest, most irrationally nationalistic person from Australia I’ve ever met. Of course, most Australians are proud of their country and generally get a massive kick out of being Australian, it’s just that their pronouncements about their homeland don’t sound like government-sponsored propaganda the way Jill’s do.

  I’d recently overheard her chiding a student in one of her classes in her high-pitched Betty Boop squeal: “Why do you want to go to America? America is dangerous. Australia is much prettier, and the people are so much nicer.” Apparently she also works for the Australian Tourism Board.

  In Jill’s mind, she’s not doing her job as an English teacher in Japan if she’s not riffing on the international nightmare that is the USA.

  A few days ago I’d heard her say to a class of three stern-looking businessmen, “Americans are soooo lazy!” Which is fine, we are, fair enough, whatever. Sure, statistically we work longer days than anyone else in the world, but we also, statistically, probably ingest more kinds of fried potatoes while sitting on the couch for hours on end than any other country. But the fact that this statement is coming from a woman of about five feet eight inches and surely no less than 180 pounds somehow annoys me. She may hate Americans, but she sure as hell seems to love our Ben and Jerry’s New York Fudge Chunk Swirl.

  During these chaotic breaks between
classes, when we teachers are using one another’s backs as makeshift writing surfaces so we can recommend that Hiro work on his pronunciation and sentence production or that Masako give up studying English and perhaps take up a more suitable hobby like hang gliding or miming, Jill likes to barge into the teachers’ room and pick a playful fight with any available American in the room-like, for example, me-and ask inane questions like, “Why do you people refer to fringe as bangs? That’s so annoying.”

  Though her outrage at America’s total lack of respect for such a mainstay of the English language as the word fringe is certainly understandable, I am at a loss as to how exactly we are meant to answer such a charge to her satisfaction. I have no idea how the word bangs came into being. Maybe it has something to do with Americans’ love of guns and the noises they make?

  All I can think to say to this is, “Why do you say cunt instead of can’t?” but I don’t say it, because it would bring the conversation down to a level that no one is likely comfortable stooping to just yet. So I keep my comments to myself, look her in the eye, shrug my shoulders, and speak the only Japanese I have learned so far: “Wakarimasen.” (“I don’t know.”)

  MOBA is the most popular language school in a country that has as many language schools as the U.S. has places to buy coffee milkshakes, and the students have many reasons for wanting to study English. Some are businessmen and women who do a lot of traveling abroad and need English so they can move up that ladder a little faster or chat people up in hotel bars more easily. Many are housewives with kids in school (or no kids at all) and money and time to kill. There are also a lot of high school and college-aged kids who want to travel, want to be able to speak to the foreigners they see, think “English is cool,” or simply want to know what Kanye West is going on and on and on about.

  There are also a few people learning English because they’re movie buffs and want to be able to watch American movies without reading the subtitles. By far the best justification I’ve heard for studying English, though, was given by an extremely low-level fifty-something woman named Keiko, who says she is learning English because she wants to teach her son. This I regard as a triumph of convoluted logic. I don’t know how old her son is, but surely he’s at least a teenager by now. Why doesn’t she send him to the school? Really, at the rate she’s going, she’s going to be on her deathbed and her son is still going to be saying things like “This is a pen” and “I enjoy to surfing.”

  I ask around about Japanese lessons, and everyone says I should talk to Joy, an excitable Latina from New York who seems to have an insatiable appetite for new hobbies.

  “Well, I tried at this one school near Yokohama Station that’s got a really convenient schedule and everyone seems really nice and you can get private lessons,” she said.

  “And how did it go?”

  “Oh, I didn’t go with them because they were too expensive.”

  “Oh.”

  “But I heard the community center across the street has really cheap lessons.”

  “Oh, cheap would be nice.”

  “Yeah, but all the classes take place in the same room at the same time. It’s really loud and hard to hear the teachers.”

  “Uh-huh. So…”

  “So anyway,” she continues, “I’m thinking I just won’t take lessons right now because I kind of want to join a gym, and I’ve got my life drawing classes, and I want to study that flower arranging stuff. And learn how to kabuki.”

  Thankfully, soon after this spirited but useless exchange, I meet Yoko Ojima, an intermediate-level student who takes private lessons. She’s about fifty years old and has wispy gold and purple streaks in her short hair. Her face is always immaculately made up, her lips a dramatic dark crimson, her eye shadow echoing the purple in her hair, her skin painted powder white. An active and busy woman, she runs a medical clinic that she co-owns with a male physician, whom she hates. Understandably, she is always at least five minutes late for her lessons, rushing in breathlessly with a few shopping bags, a leather bag overflowing with folders overflowing with papers, and a sheepish smile overflowing with many apologies.

  Teaching Yoko is always a nice break from the shy, low-level pupils who make up the bulk of our student population at Kamiooka MOBA. Since she’s not a beginner, she can thankfully talk about her life beyond what her hobbies are, how many people there are in her family, what she ate for breakfast, and what her favorite movie is. And she doesn’t mess around. The first day I taught her I’d learned that she’d separated from her husband because he’d had an affair and later shacked up with his secretary. We discuss her marital situation at length during each lesson-how he stops by her business every week to drop off money, how his secretary just wants his money, how Yoko won’t divorce because if she does, she’ll have no legal right to his money due to Japan’s weird divorce laws that service the men and screw the women. I begin to feel more like a therapist, who, in addition to offering emotional support and acting as a beacon among the rocks, corrects his patients’ grammar and pronunciation.

  I mention to her how clearly backwards these divorce laws are to an American.

  “Oh my God, Yoko, if you divorced him in the U.S., you could take him for every sorry yen he has.”

  She furrows her brow and tilts her head to indicate she doesn’t understand.

  “I mean, in America, you would be able to get his money,” I try again, this time adding some hand motions. “He was screwing around on you, right?”

  A nod, then another furrow and tilt.

  “He was…uh…having sex with his secretary, right?”

  “Yes,” she says with a roll of her eyes. She obviously feels the same way I do about this. Really, an affair with a secretary? That is about as imaginative as dipping your french fries in ketchup. I would have given the guy a few points if he’d strayed for the love of a trapeze artist or a bass player, but come on, a secretary is just a slap in the face.

  “Well,” I continue, “all that you would need to do is get a private investigator to follow him around and take pictures of them necking in the park during lunch.”

  Furrow. Tilt. Nervous smile.

  I repeat what I’d said slowly in more basic terminology and act out the parts about the taking of the pictures and the necking. Her eyes widen.

  “Then, you take the pictures, text them to your lawyer, and BAM! Money.” Here I rub three fingers across my thumb in the international signal for “mucho dinero.”

  Her brow unfurrows, her head untilts, and she sighs, wishing desperately she could litigate a divorce in New York City. As it stands, they just live separately from each other and Yoko does what she can to bleed him dry of his and his secretary’s funds.

  She lives in Kamiooka with her twenty-eight-year-old daughter, Fumiko. Both of them are currently studying to be Japanese language instructors, and they are nearing the completion of their course.

  “Oh, reeeeally?” I think.

  I feel like I’ve started to develop a special closeness with Yoko, one that transcends the confines of our cramped classroom. We’ve discussed her marriage, her business, and Fumiko, whom she fears is too awkward to ever marry and will live with her forever. Could I maybe take things to the next level and ask her to be my Japanese teacher?

  “You know, I am very interested in studying the language.”

  She says, “

  ” reverting back to Japanese. “Really?” She pauses. “We can to teach you.”

  Yessssss. And, better yet:

  “We do for free, because these days we cannot charge for to teaching. Not yet get certificate.”

  Now, if I were the uncertified teacher, I wouldn’t likely be paying much attention to such an inconvenient rule, but this is a good example of the tendency of many Japanese towards being honest and law-abiding. There are, of course, exceptions, like, I don’t know, the Japanese mafia, whose hobbies include getting ungainly tattoos, carrying automatic weapons, and using their chopsticks to put a person’s eyes
out, but generally, the Japanese respect the rules, as opposed to Westerners who would cheat their own mothers if it meant turning a profit.

  So on a Wednesday evening a few weeks later, I meet Yoko and Fumiko out on the street in front of the school, and they lead me to their home behind the Keikyu plaza, high up on top of a very, very steep hill. For the first time since my arrival here, I realize how deeply disappointed I am that my fantasy of traveling hither and yon (mainly yon) upon a moving sidewalk conveyor has not been realized.

  They live on the fifth floor of a giant condominium complex with a lot of security cameras and electronic checkpoints. The little area outside their door is full of Disney garden figurines: the Seven Dwarves, Bambi, Thumper, Daisy, Cinderella’s mice, and, inexplicably, the Tasmanian Devil. We go inside, relieve ourselves of our footwear, and Yoko leads me to the dining room table, where we will be doing our studying.

  It’s a cozy condo. The hallway leads to a tiny kitchen on the left, opening into a dining area straight ahead with a finished wooden table and flanked by a china cabinet full of tiny Japanese bowls and cutlery and a few muted watercolors decorated with swirls of calligraphy. Beyond this is a small sitting room. And the Disney theme continues. A piano stands on the left wall, and next to it is a large shelf full of Disney sheet music and Seven Dwarves tea tins. A big framed puzzle of Cinderella, the Fairy Godmother, and the newly transmogrified pumpkin coach hangs above the piano.

  On the dining table are two books: 500 Basic Kanji and Japanese for Busy People. They are shiny and new, and seemingly purchased just for me. The prices for both are scribbled on a piece of paper and placed bookmark style in the Kanji book, so while Yoko and Fumiko begin furiously to prepare a meal, I get some yens out of my wallet to pay them back.