One thing I think I will miss is seeing a manly Japanese man pull his cell phone out of his inner suit pocket, only for there to be a big fuzzy pink pom pom charm dangling from it.
Last weekend I was surrounded by a lot of these Japanese men. It all began one typically random day when my co-teacher asked me if I would attend the PTA party. “Of course,” said I. Instead of the usual response of “Ok thank you,” I got, “WHAT?!? Really? Wow, good. for. you!” The teacher proceeded to announce to anyone who walked in the room that I would, in fact, be going. Mostly there was laughter, but one person told me that I rock.
Naturally I was suspicious. Over the next few hours I went on intelligence recon missions, like looking at the invite paper only to see there was a different price for women. With my ample free time, these facts weaved an intriguing situation with my imagination, and before the day ended I assumed I was going to a strip club on a fishing boat.
Japan is a great nurturer of the imagination. It takes you into completely new situations that don’t make sense, and you have to fill the gaps, but my mind doesn’t like to stop there. Take yesterday, instead of being in a sauna with 3 Japanese grandmothers, or more likely great-grandmothers, listening to enka, we were in my mind, having a full blown sing along.
The downside to this is sometimes Japan just doesn’t go far enough. It gets your hopes up, and then stops short at 15 PTA dads smoking around a table, eating canned fish and mayo, and ignoring you until they get drunk enough to ask why are you only staying here one year?
I am glad I went. It is at those very moments you appreciate everything that brought you to that exact place and time in the universe. But then the man to my left started to snore loudly as he dosed into his food, and I couldn’t help but think I wanted to be outside playing with kids in the street instead. And then I had a tragic thought. What if everyone else at this table felt that way too?
No comments:
Post a Comment