The Kaisha Boys, Or, What About Ben?

On Friday, Ben spends part of his lunch at the table in the prep room highlighting the television listings in Metropolis, the English language weekly that lists various forms of entertainment in and around Tokyo.

“Well, that’s Bimbo Ben sorted out,” Ben says, closing up the magazine. Bimbo is the slang for broke in Japanese, and the students love learning that it means something else in English. Ben is bimbo near the end of the pay period. So am I.

Jun, who is sitting at the computer, snickers.

I say to Jun, “You’re laughing at Ben, Mr. I Went To Karaoke By Myself?” (This is not strictly true--he actually went to karaoke--this is Japanified English, by the way, “went to karaoke” as is the common “went to shopping”--with his girlfriend.)

Ben laughs and Jun mouths the words, “Fuck you,” at me.

I think, with some glee: I’m starting to break in with The Boys.

By The Boys, I mean Jun and Ben. These two are boy’s boys--the way some men (think Hemingway) are men’s men. The other boys are Masashi and Seth, who are both part-time teachers. Masashi is very self-contained and Seth and I hit it off immediately. But as they are part-time, I see them rarely. Most days around The Kaisha, it’s me, Jun, Ben, and Yuko, who is not only the head teacher and therefore our immediate supervisor, but a girlish girly-girl in her late 20’s.

I usually fall in with the boys anyway, wherever I’ve worked. (I’ve never done girly-girl. I didn’t do girly when I was a girl--and I’m not about to start now.) That leaves The Boys. The Boys are slowly learning that I’m not interested in dating them. Both have girlfriends---but this is Japan, so that doesn’t matter. They’re learning that I don’t care if they run out to pull girls in the lobby. I’ve even helped out from time to time by pointing out a cute girl that they’ve somehow missed, or by handing Jun one of the many boxes of mints that sits on the break room table. So frequently does Jun hit up the mints that the rattle of him shaking them from the box has become, to me, his mating call.

Jun is the first to start breaking down the walls. I think he was confused at first that I wasn’t impressed with his model’s looks and charming Brit manner. (My first week at The Kaisha, another female teacher asked what I thought of him, and I replied, “He’s a beautiful boy. He’s a charming, good looking boy. I am not interested in boys. I’m interested in men.”) Jun learned his English at the hands of British schoolboys, in a private (read: public--if you’re British) boys boarding school in London. This method of secondary language acquisition sounds to me like the linguistic equivalent of learning to swim by being unceremoniously tossed in the nearest river. Along with the most attractively Brit-accented English, Jun picked up in London the belief that, when compared to Western men, Japanese men are far, far inferior. He can’t shake this belief of his and spends a lot of time testing the reassurance that he gets that he is not inferior. I’ve probably said to him half a dozen times that he’s honestly one of the best-looking men I’ve ever seen in my life. At first, I think he thought I was trying to hit on him, but I didn’t follow this up with anything but a comment that he should be out doing something other than teaching English. (And, honto, this man is probably in the top 2% of men on the planet when it comes to looks. He stops traffic, he’s so good looking.) Anyway, I get the feeling--and I don’t want to psych 101 diagnose Jun, but--that he doesn’t quite believe in himself, so he tests these qualities, his best, constantly. He’s unable to move forward--in part--because he can’t shake the belief in his own inferiority as a Japanese male.

But what about Ben?

A few hours after Ben had sorted out the bimbo weekend television schedule, he and I were sitting in the breakroom alone. I was quietly working, prepping lessons. Ben commented that without Yuko and Jun around to tease, that it was awfully quiet. I hadn’t noticed, but I think my silence was making him uncomfortable, like, maybe I didn’t like him because I wasn’t keeping up the constant chatter that I engage in around other people. I laughed and said, “If Seth were here, what would I say?”

Because Seth? Seth is the man you’d want to--if you were being entirely practical about such things--marry. Seth loves to bicker. He loves to go around and around and around and bicker bicker bicker. You could fight with Seth all day long and no fight would ever be the same. Honestly, to me, this is the hallmark of the partner of a lifetime. Raised a Jewish-ish hippie, Seth is well-educated, funny, cynical, thoughtful, sarcastic, and waaaay too smart for his own good.

I love Seth because I can banter with him all day long. Not that we work together all day long, but he’s easy to talk to and I love to talk to him. We often exchange barbs with our banter, and I hadn’t realized how unusual this was until someone--an outsider--commented on it, and Ben explained, “Oh, that’s just Brenda and Seth.”

Seth, incidentally, is a difficult name for Japanese people to pronounce. The Japanese students I have don’t quite seem to believe that your tongue has to actually stick out of your mouth to make the “th” sound. I mean, try it. It’s funny if you’ve spent a lifetime not making this sound. It feels funny and strange, and the Japanese students don’t believe that “th” really exists in the outside world, I think. It certainly doesn’t exist in Japanese. So Seth has become Sesu. (Say “say-sue.”) Almost everyone calls him Sesu, though it only irks him when Westerners do it. I like to call him Sesu on purpose just to laugh when Seth says, “You’re not Japanese. You can say ‘Seth.’” Of course, now that I know it bothers him, I call him Sesu whenever I want to shorthand getting under his skin.

But what about Ben?

Ben is an Aussie, of course,who has been here three years. The three-year guys are usually the guys who’ve found Japanese girlfriends to handle the details, and who are considered by the Japanese to be more Japanese than the Japanese. Honto. Ben, however, is made a bit uncomfortable by this, something that I, for one, appreciate. Let me break that down a bit for you:

Ben introduced me to former Kaisha teacher named Jeremy. Jeremy used to occupy my apartment when he worked for The Kaisha. I’ll explain that apartments are difficult for foreigners to find in Japan, so The Kaisha rents several in many different parts of Tokyo---and other parts of Japan--and Kaisha teachers serially occupy the same apartment as their contracts run out. Jeremy quit The Kaisha and, I’m guessing, moved in with his Japanese girlfriend, so I met the guy whose hair I cleaned out of my bathtub drain. Jeremy is one of those “More Japanese than the Japanese” guys. He speaks Japanese relatively fluently and has these mannerisms and habits that every book about the Japanese will tell you that the Japanese have, even when they don’t have them. For example, in restaurants, every book will tell you that Japanese diners use the opposite ends of their chopsticks to serve themselves from communal dishes. The Japanese, however, don’t do this. Jeremy does. He is, incidentally, the man who was laughed at by a group of Japanese because when he was asked by one of them where he was from, he answered with the part of Tokyo that he lives in. The Japanese woman to whom he was speaking said, in English, “That’s in Japan. I asked you where you were from. You’re not from Japan.” And Jeremy only just resisted hanging his head when he had to admit to being from Canada.

Anyway, so Ben has resisted, for the most part, becoming more Japanese than the Japanese. But that leaves him in an uncomfortable spot I think.

What about Ben?

This requires more thought, ne?