Tune in Tokio

by Tim Anderson

  I have a free period and decide I’ll pop in on Bob, a gigantically tall teacher from Wales who is in what we call the free-con room with about ten students.

  I open the door and hear him saying, “Yeah, I really don’t like the taste; it just doesn’t appeal to me.”

  I put on a smile as I look around at the students, all of whom have a look of utter horror on their faces.

  Bob turns to me. “Tim, do you like manko?”

  “Manko…manko…,” I think aloud. “Oh, manko! Isn’t that that bean paste stuff?”

  He nods, looking around and wondering what the students find so horrifying about someone not liking manko.

  “Yeah, I don’t like that either. The first time I ate manko I was expecting it to taste like chocolate, and it just didn’t at all.” I screw my face up into a look of distaste. “I was so disappointed. Because, really, what’s more delicious than a creamy, chocolate-filled doughnut?”

  The students are still in shock about something, and a few of the ladies cover their mouths and giggle, red-faced. Things are clearly getting a little uncomfortable, so I do what I usually do when this happens. I walk out of the room and let the other person deal with it.

  A few minutes later the bell rings and Bob comes into the teachers’ room looking redder than any Welshman I’ve ever seen.

  “Oh my God, oh my God!!” he bellows in his resonant baritone. “I’ve just made an awful, terrible, horrible mistake! I can never go back into that room again! I want to die and be buried immediately. Immediately! Shit! Fuck!”

  Between his exclamations of “Oooooooooh, I wish I were invisible” and “Aaaaaaaaah, I want to go back to Wales,” we get his story.

  In class, they’d been discussing Japanese food, and the students had asked Bob what food he really doesn’t like. Bob answered that he really doesn’t care for bean paste, a perfectly reasonable answer. It’s the answer I would have given and, in fact, had given when I’d stuck my head in. Unfortunately, he’d used the wrong word for bean paste. Instead of “anko,” which means bean paste, he’d said “manko.” Manko means pussy. He’d just told the class he really didn’t like eating pussy.

  And I had too.

  All the teachers squeal and cover their mouths.

  Right on cue, in walks Jill with a smirk on her face, oblivious to the atmosphere of confusion and despair engulfing us all and still intent on bringing the American empire down, colloquialism by colloquialism.

  “You know my least favorite American word?” she squeaks. We are dying to know, absolutely can’t wait for her to tell us.

  “Mom. Why don’t you just say mum?”

  I wrack my brain trying to think of a good reason why we Americans refer to our mothers in such a venomous and disrespectful way. But I’m too appalled right now to take this bait.

  I flop into a chair and look sadly at my Japanese book, wondering if there’s a handy way to politely apologize not only for saying the word “pussy” at least four times in a ten-second period, but also for expressing that I don’t really like eating it.

  I decide maybe I should go down to Burger King and get some fries. I’ve got a really horrible taste in my mouth.

  # of kanji characters studied: 40

  # of kanji characters forgotten: 34

  # of sexually inappropriate things said to Tokyo’s cashiers when just trying to be nice:?

  3

  In which a small prayer is offered to the God of Large Things.

  I wake up in my neighbor Julia’s apartment with the taste of moldy vodka and tonkotsu ramen on my breath. I’m not usually much of a drinker, but I make special exceptions when everyone else is doing it. Last night everyone else was doing it.

  I rise up and see Ruth, Julia’s roommate, passed out on the floor perpendicular to me. Turning left I see Julia in the kitchen heating the kettle and looking like she would very much prefer to be dead.

  Last night we’d made our very first entrance into the kaleidoscope of Tokyo nightlife. We’d felt we deserved it. Collectively we have taught hundreds of lessons at MOBA over the first few weeks. We were tired of being polite and encouraging, tired of speaking broken English. We wanted to speak dirty English. Nasty English. Get-your-booty-on-the-dance-floor-baby-and-shake-that-ass English. It was time to make our way into the city for some booze and boogie.

  It was off to Tokyo, to the neon-soaked streets and the sake-soaked locals. While getting dressed and lubing ourselves up with cocktails, we’d made a modest list of things we wanted to accomplish during our evening out:

  1. Drinks with some kogyaru (“cool girls”) in some DJ bar in Shibuya. They should have bleached hair, fake tans, boots that give a whole new meaning to the word “platform,” sparkly, raccoon-style eye makeup, and bright white lipstick making their lips look frozen to their burnt faces.

  2. More drinks, maybe some dancing to irritating house music?

  3. Street performers! Let’s see some street performers!

  4. Drugs? Yeah, should try to find drugs.

  5. Random dance floor groping.

  6. House party on the top floor of the Park Hyatt Hotel in Shinjuku; green tea slammers; handstand contest, which we will win.

  7. Our prize: a four-hour access ticket to penthouse suite on the fifty-ninth floor; pillow fight.

  8. Trannies, clowns, geishas, geisha trannies, Jaeger shots, Red Rover.

  9. Pie.

  Yes, we’d figured it would go something like that.

  To our complete and utter amazement, it didn’t. Julia and Ruth got wasted before we even left Fujisawa and had to be dragged up to Tokyo by Charlie and me, who were a half hour more sober. It was an epic journey that involved falling down train station staircases (and being stepped on and over by impatient commuters), many emergency trips to the nearest bathroom, and much drunken apologizing to people for being in the way, being loud and Western, and being too tall.

  We ended up dancing (kind of) at a club in Shibuya that was hosting a hip-hop night where the crowd and the dress code were a good five to ten years our junior.

  “Yeeeahhh!” a disembodied MC shouted into a mic, doing his best impression of Chuck D, as we headed to the dance floor. It must be said, it is exceedingly difficult to dance to hip-hop with any credibility when you’re a white guy weaned on New Wave and Euro-pop like I am. I lack the swagger, the confidence, the massive low-swinging balls to pull off successful hip-hop moves. Amid all the oversized hoodies, giant sneakers, and sideways baseball caps, we all felt more like chaperones at a dance than young kids out for the night. So we hit the bar and drank more to make ourselves feel younger. Once we were walking and stumbling into walls like three-year-olds, we figured we were young enough and, after a few more attempts at dancing, left.

  We finished our evening at a ramen shop, Julia and Ruth passed out with their heads on the counters, Charlie trying to eat with one chopstick, and me sitting and waxing on and on about how cute the shop employees were behind the counter.

  “Look at them, oh my God, kawaii city! Look!! With their little hats and their giant ladles. See? He’s holding that giant ladle in his tiny, adorable little hand! Charlie! Ruth! I want one of those hats! Julia! Don’t you want a hat?! Oh my God, I just wanna eat them up!!”

  I can still taste the ramen in my nasty mouth as I hear a muffled attempt at speaking.

  “Large night, eh?” I hear Charlie mumble from the corner, where he’s been sleeping rolled up like a cat. He is right. It was a large, large night. Rubbing my eyes, I see Julia has the scars on her legs to prove it.

  I peel myself off the floor and walk over to the kitchen table, damning the daylight, damning vodka, damning ramen, and, most passionately, damning hip-hop to hell. I try not to open my eyes too wide for fear that the birds fluttering their wings inside my head might get antsy and flap harder.

  Magazines, yesterday’s newspaper, and photos are strewn about on the kitchen table. I pick up the pictures to have a look. There’s Ruth in front of a beautiful
Japanese garden. There’s Ruth ladling water over her hands, presumably at a shrine of some sort. There’s a blurry Ruth in close-up squinting to cover up her nasty case of red-eye and holding a hand out toward the camera. There’s Ruth standing and smiling in front of a giant Buddha statue. Upon seeing this last one, my heart skips a beat: I do so love humongous statues.

  “Wow, what is this?”

  “It’s the Big Buddha in Kamakura,” Julia strains to say as she sits down and lowers her head onto the table. “Close to here,” she mumbles.

  “Really?! Where?” I demand.

  “That way.” She points out the window.

  Wow. The Big Buddha. A giant, glorious statue offering the promise of enlightenment and inner peace, sitting among the beauty and languor of a lush and reassuringly symmetrical Japanese temple ground. The perfect antidote to last night’s asymmetrical booze opera.

  Mankind has had a long and storied obsession with creating giant structures of humans, gods, and mythical beasts to pass the time. You have your Sphinx, you’ve got your Statue of Liberty, your Christ the Redeemer, and your Michelangelo’s David, all of which are testament to man’s endless desire to painstakingly construct and then sit back and gaze upon giant representations of the mythic, the massive, the messianic, and the supple and drop-dead gorgeous.

  It’s this obsession I share with generations of humans before me that makes me feel most connected to my ancient antecedents. Or something. In any case, plunk down a giant statue, building, stone pillar, lighthouse, or fire-breathing monster, and I will buy a ticket, stand in front of it, gawk, and maybe even tear up; if it’s big and famous, I want to see it.

  I used to have dreams in which I was standing on the crown of the Statue of Liberty looking out over the city. In the dreams, Lady Liberty did not have her own island. No, she lived in Mid-town. Her spiky crown afforded me a convenient little bridge to the roof of any number of the other city skyscrapers. The wind would rip through my tousled blond hair and push me ever closer to the edge of that tiara as Juice Newton’s “The Sweetest Thing (I’ve Ever Known)” filled my eardrums. I would lift my head towards the sky and spread my arms out like a member of the Von Trapp family. Then usually the vertigo would get to me and I’d lose my balance, plummeting headlong towards the pavement.

  As a child, I would visit my aunt and grandmother in Jamestown, New York, every summer, and one of the highlights of the trip was always the frequent drives into the tiny downtown area. To get there, we would have to drive over a bridge connecting the neighborhoods to the city center, and off to the right, on top of a factory building, was a massive, twenty-five-foot statue of a shirtless Indian brave. He stood at attention, one arm by his side, the other lifted high above his head, palm facing the sky. In his palm, also standing at attention, was a big bottle of Stroh’s beer.

  I was devoted body and soul to that Indian brave, and I looked forward to seeing him every year. My sister Laurie never cared for him, preferring the much more approachable and friendly looking Mr. Donut figure situated downtown. This meant I didn’t have to share him with anyone. I should note that I didn’t love him only for his massive muscles, his stern and manly expression, and his alluring headdress. It wasn’t his rippled stomach, his tight-fitting calfskin trousers, his bulging pectorals, or his erect, brick-red nipples.

  It was that he was damn huge. I was afraid of him and drawn to him at the same time. He sent chills down my back. He was dangerous and unattainable, a perfect object of desire.

  Yes, for many of my preteen years, I was in love with a twenty-five-foot statue of a beer-swilling Native American.

  Of course, the Indian is only famous in the greater Jamestown area, but since him I’ve seen many big and famous things: Big Ben, the world’s most celebrated gilded phallus; Stonehenge; Seattle’s Space Needle; the Empire State Building; the Metronome in Prague; my own North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras Lighthouse; the seven-foot penis in Amsterdam. Most importantly, I saw Michelangelo’s David in Florence, which turned my knees to Jell-O and gave me the sweats for days. He inspired a euphoria I hadn’t known since my old red friend. But where the Indian stood defensive and defiant, David stands blithe and somnambulant. Where the Indian seemed to forbid anything more than a casually appreciative glance, David the attention whore coaxes you into looking more closely. Where the Indian wore calfskin trousers, David is stark naked. I’d stared at him for what seemed like hours, from every conceivable angle.

  So, needless to say, I’m very excited about seeing the next big thing, this so-called Daibutsu, or Great Buddha, and I’m happy to hear that he sits just down the road from us by train, perched cross-legged among the trees in the innermost area of a temple in nearby Kamakura. And while I know the Big Buddha may not excite me in the same way Big Red and Big Dave did (it would be wrong to become aroused by a statue of the Buddha; it would be wrong to become aroused by a statue of the Buddha), he still has sheer size to offer.

  “Oh, let’s go! Let’s go!” I demand of my friends at Hangover House. After all, there’s nothing to help a hangover more than stepping out into the white light of morning, hopping a train that weaves and buckles through several tiny towns, and walking a few winding uphill roads to see a big holy tub of bronze.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Julia manages to say without hugging her temples. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Charlie has fallen back asleep leaning against the wall, and Ruth had never come to to begin with, so I figure this sojourn will be a solitary one. That’s OK, I think. I’ll come back the most enlightened one on my floor.

  Construction of the Great Buddha was finished in 1252. He’s cast in bronze and weighs nearly 850 tons. Most importantly, my guidebook tells me, he is 11.4 meters tall. He sits out in the open surrounded by the beautiful greenery of Kamakura. It was not always so. He was once housed in a great hall, until 1495 when a tsunami washed it away. So after a good five hundred years of sitting outside, he’s understandably a bit weathered and blotchy. Who wouldn’t be?

  The Daibutsu is a stunning sight: a giant figure blissfully hunched in a pose of poetic reflection; a symmetrical, robust giant clad in a loose robe, with lowered eyes and bare feet. He is the picture of serenity. And he is B-I-G. But where David and the Indian had both seemed well aware they were being watched, Buddha, if he knows, doesn’t appear to give a damn. He is in his own world, his massive head slightly lowered, his robe falling open in the center, revealing the midsection of his chest and curved belly, his eyelids hanging low over his shadowed eyes, eyes that might be looking down, might be looking straight at you, might not even be there.

  The atmosphere of the temple grounds is serene and reverential. Out-of-towner Japanese folks bow and pray, write out prayer wishes and attach them to the prayer board, and do the ritualistic cleansing of the hands and mouth using the bamboo ladle at the entrance. A few Buddhist Westerners sit off to the side in the lotus position. Children chase each other around the statue.

  Meanwhile, I take pictures from all sides, circling him from the left and slowly winding my way around, trying to avoid the speeding kids, capturing every angle of his greatness. As I make my way to the right side, I see a little entryway where you can go inside for a mere twenty yen. There’s no saying no to an offer like that, so I pay my twenty yen, lower my head, and cross the threshold. As soon as I alight, on the first step there in the darkness, I experience an emotional spasm, like when you realize your boyfriend’s birthday was yesterday and you’d completely forgotten. I realize that not only have I found the Buddha with the help of the good Lonely Planet people, but I now stand inside him. I am in the Buddha’s belly. My God, I think, I should be having a real existential experience right now, shouldn’t I? If only I were Buddhist. Were I Catholic and standing at the foot of the giant Jesus in Rio de Janeiro, I’d surely be weeping, crossing myself, and feeling really guilty about what I’d gotten up to at the bar the previous evening. Alas, I haven’t found my particular religious path yet, so my
reaction to stone embodiments of the divine is aesthetic and wholly secular. Contemplating the existence of God while gazing at a religious sculpture never leaves me with questions answered, convictions affirmed, or fears assuaged. I may leave wanting to be a better human, but I’m at a loss as to how I go about it.

  I will say this, though. Walking around the Great Buddha so many times, examining every curve and swoop of his robe, staring fixedly at the way his hands perfectly meet each other as they lay in his lap, makes me feel even more asymmetrical than usual. Thanks a lot, Buddha.

  Though I don’t have a spiritual awakening, we do share a moment, and my hangover feels tons better. Also, I swear, as I exit out around the right side and emerge back around the front, I look up to his mysteriously guarded eyes and they meet mine as he murmurs, “Big enough?”

  “Yes,” I reply, clasping my hands together in a bid for symmetry. “Big enough.”

  # of times since arrival I’ve said

  “thank you”: 5,423

  “I’m so sorry”: 5,424

  “It’s a shame about that baby”: 2

  4

  In which our hero’s new roommate becomes an international metaphor for something god-awful.

  People have all sorts of reasons for leaving their home country to live in a completely foreign land where they stick out like sore thumbs. Some are good reasons (personal fulfillment, sobering up, wanderlust, cultural curiosity), and some are questionable (avoiding the law, drug smuggling, sex tourism). MOBA, one of the most popular language schools in Japan, doesn’t care what the reason is, as long as you can pretend to know how to speak English.

  I’ve had my doubts about MOBA’s hiring practices from the very beginning, and not just due to the fact that my roommate Sean only has a high school education, has never met a double negative he didn’t like, and had no problem getting a job as an instructor. I’ve also noticed a tenuous command of the English language on the part of a few of my coworkers who can barely string a sentence together correctly without breaking into a cold sweat. Like Stanley from New Zealand, who brings a briefcase the size of a tuba case to work and says things like, “Yeah, but he didn’t play like do that right down the middle without your mum crickety bum licker.” Or Pete from Pennsylvania, whom I recently overheard in a class explaining what the word broke means like this: