Nineteen Fifty-Two

Sumo Is Pronounced “su-MO” Not “SU-mo”

Ben tells us that on the train ride from Higashi-Mukojima, he sat next to a couple of sumo wrestlers. There is a big sumo tournament in Tokyo this month, in Ryuguku (I think), which is Sumida-ku (my neck of the woods.) Ben leaves the room to go and hang up his coat, and while he is gone I tell Jun that I think sumo wrestlers are hot. He asks what that means, “hot.” I explain the concept of hot as it relates to sexual attraction, and he comments that it seems to him that every person has their own taste in such matters. Ben comes back in the room and I say something like, “Don’t you think sumo wrestlers are hot?” He says, “Not really,” then adds, somewhat unexpectedly, “but they do smell good.”

Nani? What?

The Brain suggests that the good smelling sumo wrestler may perhaps be because there is some special perfume or cologne for sumo wrestlers only. This is Japan after all, home of exclusivity. (Whatever that means.) But, no, The Brain is wrong. Akiko, Ben and Jun assure me that there is not some special sumo perfumer who cranks out special perfume for sumo only. It turns out that there is this beautiful and common belief in Japan that sumo wrestlers smell wonderful because men’s sweat is believed to be reassuring.

Some days, I love this place.

Smells Like Team Spirit

And speaking of perfumers, I did incidentally interview a perfumer the other night at the Kaisha. I happened to walk past the interview room and, peeking inside, saw a prospective student. (They actually call them “prospective students” and subject them to a two hour interview process even though they’re paying us tens or hundreds of thousands of yen to come to pet the foreigners and incrementally improve their English.) Anyway, I walked into the room, introduced myself, and asked the man what he did. “I’m a perfumer,” he said. “No kidding!” I exclaimed. (No kidding, by the way, is idiomatic English and many of the highest-level English speakers at the school have no idea that you’re not calling them liars when you say this.) He asked, “You know what that is?”

“Yes, of course,” I said. He told me that he was used to people asking, “What is that?” whenever he told them that he was a perfumer. I think he was glad to tell me instead that he worked in Meguro and had studied in Belgium (I think it was). He was interested in improving his English to take his work to the next (international) level.

I assured him that, for perfume omiyage, I’d be glad to help.

(Okay, I made that last part up. I’m actually not allowed to tell students such things--not just to avoid begging for gifts, but that I’m going to be their teacher.)

Anyway, just then Ben came in with Akiko to do the interview (yes, we actually subject them to an interview with a foreign teacher, even when they speak the barest bit of English, which can lead to some very stilted conversation), and I had to run off.

That’s this town for you, perfumers in the interview rooms at our little Kaisha branch.

When Did You Stop Beating Your Wife?

Here’s another slice of Tokyo life for you:

One of the male teachers commented that he wanted to have children. I said, “That’s a bit strange, I think, when men express the desire to have children.” He was, like, um, why? I explained that perhaps I was a bit wary of children-desiring men because in the US, we have so many men...who desire children. It’s a problem. Then I had to explain what I meant by that. I was assured by another one of the teachers, a woman, that men did molest children--but they would never molest their own children.

Welcome to 1952.

Okay, that’s not fair, certainly. There are still many Americans who believe the same thing, but there are probably fewer Americans who believe this.

Talking about this subject led to the subject of domestic violence or wife beating. I asked the same male teacher who had expressed a desire for children if his father had ever hit his mother. He replied, with absolutely no hesitation, “Of course.”

Asking if they had been hit as children brought up the calmest stories of being beaten that I have ever heard. i have my own stories, of course, but I tell them rarely, if at all. There is the veneer of shame in America regarding beating your children, wives, and loved ones. It happens, of course, but we don’t talk about it so openly. Here, beating your loved ones seems like it’s still a God-given right.

“I mean, he was drunk when he did it,” it was explained.

It occured to me on the way home from the gym that in Japan, you have to let go of your expectations--even those expectations that you have left when you think you have let go of all your expectations.