Spring Fever

The student is new and I don’t quite like him. Aki tells me later that he’s cheap, and it’s clear that he has a cheap soul. One night after class, he invites another student drinking. He does it in front of me, but he does it in Japanese. The other student, the woman he invites, knows me fairly well, so she knows I understand some Japanese. As soon as he invites her, she turns to me and says, “You can go too, right?” I say, “Sure. Thanks for inviting me.” He says nothing.

The next week, I’ve forgotten all about it, but after class the woman reminds me by saying, “It looks like it’s just the three of us.”

Uh.

I get the feeling that he had wanted it to be a date--but that she is clearly not interested in this being the case. They wait for me in the lobby and I tell them to go on up to the bar and when they have gone, I ask the other teachers for advice. If it’s a date, I don’t want to fifth-wheel myself into the situation. The decision comes down to the fact that I’ve already promised to go. So I go.

Up in the bar, the two of them are drinking. They’ve already ordered food. I order a gin-tonic, and we talk about many things. The man is relatively fluent in English, and the woman is the best speaker the school has, so the conversation is fairly easy. When there is miscommunication, it comes down to cultural difference. But in this case, it comes down to a cultural similarity.

“Be careful in spring,” the man warns me. I ask him what he means. He explains that in spring, people become crazy. That’s how he puts it: “People become crazy.”
“Do women and men become crazy?”

No, it’s mostly men. “Ah,” I say. Spring fever.

I ask for some examples of how spring fever manifests itself in Tokyo.

He says, “For example, there are more chikan on the train.”

Oh, Really?

Chikan is the Japanese name for the molesters who take advantage of crowded trains to grope women.

I already know this, because the word appears in one of The Kaisha’s textbooks. When I learned this word, I used it as an excuse to teach the word “pervert,” and I asked the students if they had encountered perverts on the trains. Every man, of course, said no. Almost every woman said yes. The woman who was the single exception has a third-degree blackbelt in Shaolin-ji and carries herself like a woman who is not to be trifled with.

“I’d like to meet a chikan on the train,” she said to me.

I too had never been the target of chikan. Until recently, that is.

About a week ago, I was on my way to work and I took a seat on the subway. There were other empty seats in the car, but a man in his thirties immediately sat down next to me. This is unusual for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that most Japanese won’t sit next to foreigners on the trains unless they absolutely have to. But here was this young man, apparently eager to sit next to a foreigner.

I put on my headphones and he pulled out a manga, one of the thick comic books printed on cheap paper, and he began to read. After a few stops, he put the manga back in his backpack and pulled out his cellphone. When he did that, I couldn’t say exactly how, but the vibe changed, became charged with some energy that I haven’t felt before in Japan.

Let me explain:

The Japanese are very conservative with the expressions of their emotions. Their faces don’t often or easily betray their feelings, and when they happen to, it seems to be either entirely accidental or entirely on purpose. Too, their expressions are not the big expressions of Americans but are often so subtle as to (in public anyway) merely hint at expressions. So, no, they don’t show emotions so much.

But.

But when the feeling changes, you can, if you are careful, certainly feel it.

For example, when David came to visit, he came to the school on the night when The Handsome Businessman had my class. The jealousy that emanated from The Handsome Businessman was palpable. He said nothing, but I could feel it. Of course things between us were sticky, but with David in the picture, that stickiness was catapulted to a different level. It was suddenly much like the very sticky floor of a cheap movie theater. I couldn’t say what had changed, but I could feel that it had changed, and that the change wasn’t good.

Another time, The Ex-Student and I had a relatively minor tiff over something and he got angry.

I’ll explain that it was late and I wanted to leave his apartment after last train. It wasn’t that we had fought. On the contrary, it had been a pleasant evening, but we had been spending a lot of time together and I just wanted to sleep in my own bed that night. I told him I’d take a taxi home and he didn’t want me to do that because it was expensive. It was a few hours until first train and he thought I should just wait it out. I listened and then said again that I was going and I got ready to leave and I left. He followed me down to the street and, as I hailed a taxi, he got angry. When he got angry absolutely nothing about his expression or voice changed, but I was almost knocked over by the anger that suddenly materialized. It had a strange stillness to it...and trying to think of what to compare it to, I am reminded of accounts I’ve read which tell of what happens to the sea before a tsunami. It must be strange to watch the sea pull into itself, away from the shore with a momentarily inexplicable suddeness. That was how it felt when the Ex-Student got angry.

So, anyway, yes, I have felt emotion--sadness, happiness, anger, desire--even when there is no external manifestation--no change of facial expression or voice--of it.

But what I felt from the man on the train was different. It felt like some strange brand of eager excitement, charged with...something familiar. And it was fast.

The man was on my left. With his right hand, he pulled out his cell phone and he crossed his arms, quickly sliding his left hand beneath his right arm, toward me.

Try Harder

The lesson I’m teaching is about how one talks about advantages and disadvantages. One of the handsome businessmen (who takes my class on his lunch hour) is talking about his time abroad. The other student is the class is a recent university graduate who will soon move to Australia, to study English for ten months. Because the businessman lived in London for a year after he graduated from university, I ask him if he has any advice to offer the younger student. He does offer her some advice, mostly having to do with being careful about what one eats. (“Be careful of your stomach,” he suggests.) She says she is afraid of putting on weight, and I tell her that I have put on weight in Japan. We all laugh about this tendency to combat homesickness by eating.

Later, I ask them about the advantages and disadvantages of having a roommate. (The ghost of Ben appears in the room as I use his old prepped lesson which uses the Australia “flatmate” rather than the American “roommate.”) I ask them if they’ve ever had a roommate or flatmate. The businessman says that, yes, he had a roommate for one or two months. The university student says that she wants a roommate, but that her parents “think it’s dangerous.” Questioning her leads to the understanding that it is foreign roommates that her parents think are dangerous. They don’t want her to live with “foreigners” when she lives in Australia.

I laugh.

I ask the businessman if he had a foreign roommate when he lived in London. No, he says, but he wanted one. He tells us that he wanted to live with a foreign girlfriend. “I tried very hard,” is how he puts it.

I laugh. I do not ask what he thinks the advantages of living with your foreign girlfriend might have been. Instead I tell the young university student that she should find a foreign boyfriend and find them out for herself.

They ask if I have ever “had a foreign roommate.”

Uhhh. What do you mean by roommate?

I’ve had the feeling from the businessman that the reason he’s taken my class is because I remind him of the outgoing independent women he met when he was in his twenties and lived in London and traveled throughout Spain and Italy, the women he “tried very hard” to get. Coming back to Japan, he did the expected, married a Japanese woman and began a family. When he first began taking my lessons, I asked him if he needed English for work. (Many businessmen need certain scores on certain standardized tests in order to be promoted or to work abroad.) He said he did not use English at work. I asked him if he wanted to keep or build on the language skills he had learned in London. (Many high-level students come to English conversation schools for this reason.) He said he worked for a Japanese company in London and spoke mainly Japanese there, but that he wanted to improve his English now. Later, in the course of one of our conversations, he told me that he began taking my lessons when his wife was out of town, staying with her family in Nagoya. I asked why she had been with her family and he explained that she is now pregnant, the pregancy was “difficult” and she wanted to be near her family. Because many women travel to their hometowns to give birth, I assumed that she had done the same. No, turns out she is only three months pregnant.

Huh

Kaisha De

I am walking through Ginza station on my way to work and I hear someone say in Japanese: Her? She works at The Kaisha. I turn and see two men looking at me.

Early

It’s fairly early this morning--before eight a.m.--and I am up, having a few cups of coffee, doing some laundry, and watching a few episodes of Northern Exposure that Dave sent on DVD. (Thanks, babe!) It’s Saturday, so I don’t have to work today, and I plan to go out to Ueno to see the Prado exhibit today.

Yawn.

I’ve not been writing so much, either for Tokyorosa, or on the trains. One of the reasons is that things here have started to seem normal to me. For example, The Brain doesn’t boggle at things like women in kimono on the subway. I don’t think it unusual anymore to see squid and seaweed-based treats for children in the grocery store. So I don’t write them down in my train journals. I don’t note them in the online journal.

But it worries me that I haven’t been writing, so I’ve begun to send myself emails from my phone when I do notice things. They’re strange little emails, so of course I’m going to share them with you:

omiai
someone on the train smells like an unwashed dog. maybe its the woman
in kimono.

perfect body and hands that would be perfect if not for the bandages
that cover open wounds(from?)

attaining enlightenment on the train.
densha zazen

one of the benefits of travel w another is that u can piggyback on
their wonder when urs fails u.

ima meticulous creature, but not one of habit

cherry blossoms at asakusa bring me to tears. a.m. commute.
junko joke lesson

seeing same person leaving & ret'ing 2 HM.

the smell of cloves, four schoolchildren and a kind teacher, on the way
to??

they are like little monkeys, then they cover their faces and sleep
like little ghosts.

his grave, under a blue sky