In the middle of editing/revising something I have been working on for a few years now. Should be out by early spring:
I often joke, self-deprecatingly, that I had three things I wanted to achieve in my first year in Japan: save a bit of money (and pay down those damned student loans), master the Japanese language, and—wink, wink—play with the geisha. Well, after twelve months, I was broke, spoke broken Japanese, and, most consequential of all, was heartbroken.
Indulge me.
When I arrived in Japan, I was for all intents and purposes penniless. Although my new boss had told me he would reimburse me the cost of my flight to Japan—or about ¥150,000—what he failed to clarify is that he would do so in installments over the course of a year, meaning I had about ¥10,000 to cover my living expenses for the next four weeks. Looking back, I suppose I could have made that last a bit longer had I known what the hell I was doing; but being the stupid, fresh-off-the-boat gaijin that I was, by the end of my first week in Japan, I was out of cash, quickly growing desperate and hungry.
For two weeks, all I had to live on was a box of Earl Grey tea I had brought with me from the States. I would make myself a cup of tea, dump several spoonsful of sugar and artificial creamer in it, and then nurse it during breaks to keep my stomach from growling.
One day—and I’ll never forget this—I was at work, starving. Literally starving. I had one tea bag left and about a week and a half until payday. I doubted I’d be able to make it that long. With luck, there would be a party somewhere, or someone might bring in a souvenir of sweets sustaining me for a day. Back then, gifts from students were like manna from heaven. One evening, I was given a bottle of whiskey. I never could drink the stuff before, but, let me tell you, that night it was ambrosia.
So, I was at my desk, swooning from malnutrition, when I went to the school’s kitchenette to make myself The Final Cup of Earl Grey Tea.
But the goddamn box was empty!
I turned around and eyed the others in the office. The secretary was busy doing her work behind the reception counter, another teacher was in class teaching. And then my fucking boss came out of his office with a mug in his hand. He looked at me then took a sip of the tea. His eyes widening, he said: “Oh, zis is vely good-do.”
“Yeah, it is, isn’t it?”
“Oh, was zis yours?”
“Um . . .”
“I yam solly.”
“Ah, no problem,” I said, bracing myself against the wall to keep from passing out. “I hope you like it.”
I don’t know how I managed to make it to payday. I do recall one night, though, that the hunger was so severe I couldn’t sleep. Lying on my futon, it occurred to me that there was a small vegetable garden up the street a way. There might be something to eat there. So, I got out of bed, and, dressed in black, went out into the cold dark night, walked up the road, and stole myself the biggest goddamn cabbage I could find.
Back home, I washed the cabbage in the sink. There were slugs and aomushi caterpillars in between the leaves, but as I told myself, laughing dementedly, “Beggars can’t be choosers! Nope! Can’t choose when you’re fucking starving.”
Payday eventually came and money problems that had dogged me for years were finally over (I hoped). Despite the lousy rate—¥134 to the dollar—I was earning over double what I had made at Oregon Health Science University, enough to save a little, have some fun, and still have some left over to send back to America.
In the U.S., you are force-fed the American Dream from a young age. Only in a country like America, you’re told, can a man start with little more than gumption, a good idea, and hard work to become a zillionaire. There were countless stories of immigrants arriving almost penniless—“I had ten bucks sewn into the waistband of my skivvies!”—and building a better life for themselves, if not an empire. Andrew Carnegie comes to mind. I wonder, though, if the steel magnate ever had to raid a cabbage patch in the middle of the night to stave off hunger. I suspect that the answer is no.
Even without the hunger, I doubt a person could have gotten off to a worse start than I did. The homesickness and culture shock were so severe that I doubted I would be able to make it the whole year. One evening, sitting in my sparse apartment, I was overcome with emotion. I flipped through a calendar and, finding June, circled my birthday. It was still three months off, which felt like an eternity, but I promised myself that I could go home then if I still hated the place. I still get a good laugh out of that today.
Once cash was flush and my belly full, things improved considerably. I was now able to get out and explore the city. I started dining and drinking out, discovering new foods and tipples that would become lifelong passions of mine, and I had fallen hard for a girl in the neighboring city of Fukuoka.
The best thing about that first year, though, were the friendships which developed between me and my coworkers. Now, I’ve never been in the military, so I can’t be too sure, but I think what we had was as close as civilians can come to being comrade-in-arms. I might not have taken a bullet for them, but I would have quickly told our boss off if he ever treated them unfairly.
The more entertaining episodes of that first year usually involved “Blad”, who was also my next-door neighbor.
Blad was the first in a long slew of people I would meet over the years who had a master’s in TESL/FL, yet couldn’t master a foreign language themselves even if their lives depended upon it.
In a sense it did: in those days, it was hard to find people who spoke English in Japan, especially in the working-class suburb we lived in. You really did need Japanese to survive.
The root of Blad’s struggle with the Japanese language was the fact that he was tone-deaf; he couldn’t, as the saying goes, have carried a tune even if he’d had a bucket.
While the Japanese can be polite and will encourage even the poorest of singers to finish their karaoke song, with Blad they threw their hands up: “Please, Bladorey,” they’d beg as he sang Killing Me Softly. “You are kirringu us!”
And thanks to his imperfect pitch, Blad could never quite get his tongue around Japanese words. The word for “toilet”, o-tearai, for instance, gave him a lot of grief.
“Why don’t you just say, ‘toiretto’ or ‘benjo’?” I suggested.
“No!”
Blad could be stubborn, too.
Some of our best times together were in the evenings after work. Since we lived next door to each other, we would get together and talk over a bottle of saké about all the things that had gob-smacked us during the day.
“You know all those little mom-and-pop shops are up the hill?” Blad said one evening.
“I do.”
“Well, I found what looked like a little garden shop. There was a woman watering the plants, so I picked one of the pots up and asked, ‘Kore-wa ikura desuka?’”
We had recently learned how to say, “How much is this?” in Japanese.
“The woman babbled something to me that I couldn’t understand, so I went to another plant, picked it up and asked, ‘Kore-wa ikura desuka?’ She said something to me again, but as I was picking up a third plant, she bolted into the shop. I could hear her screaming to someone inside.”
“And?”
“Well, a few seconds later a man ran out—may have been her husband—and he gestured wildly at the plants and shouted, ‘No!’ He turned to some flowers, shouted ‘No!’ again. Then he turned to me and shouted, ‘No! No! NO! This . . . is . . . our . . . HOME!’”
I laughed so hard I cried. When I finally regained my composure, I asked what Blad did next.
“I put the plant down and continued on up the road.”
The first six months were often like that: Blad and I getting drunk on whatever we managed to score from a student; and then howling with laughter at the day’s boner mistakes and misunderstandings. On the weekends, I would travel by train down to Fukuoka City and make love to a woman I thought for certain I would eventually marry. I still missed home and my friends in Portland, but not as much as when I was fresh off the boat.
There is a version of my life wafts across the ether of my imagination in which I continued on that happy trajectory, getting married to the girl in Fukuoka, and taking her back to the U.S. where I enrolled in graduate school and we lived happily ever after. The version of my life that I actually lived turned out to be vastly different.
By October, the girl was out of the picture, having returned to the boyfriend she had originally left for a prenuptial fling with me. Equally demoralizing, my employment situation was dire as my boss did not want to renew my contract.
I suppose that if I’d had more savings I might have left “Never-Never Land” and returned to Portland where the job market still stank and unemployment was over seven percent. Around that time, a friend back home wrote to me, saying that he was so desperate for work that he was thinking of taking a job as a manager at a new coffee shop in town called Starbucks. At least, he reasoned, the position offered a decent health insurance package.