Hiromi and Me

Hiromi and Me
Originally uploaded by Tokyorosa

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned this woman, Hiromi-san. In addition to being a student at The Kaisha, Hiromi was very, very rich and very, very bored. She married into the family who owns one of the biggest seaweed producing companies in Japan. She married the oldest son, the guy who, by tradition, inherits everything. (He picked her out of the secretarial pool, is what she told me.) Though she still held a kind of figurehead position within the company, her days were mostly spent shopping, drinking, and taking English lessons.

Hiromi used to do things like show up to her lessons with hundreds of dollars of cookies or chocolates, boxes and boxes worth, for the staff. She also used to take us out for dinner or karaoke or drinking in Ginza--the most expensive neighborhood in all of Japan, if not indeed all the world--and she always always always picked up the check for the entire party (an unusual practice in Japan, where the check is normally split evenly among all those in attendance).

I had a lesson scheduled with Hiromi on my last day at The Kaisha. (She actually took two lessons in a row at our school--one with me, one with a young man named Masashi--and on other days, she had other lessons with other teachers at other Kaishas. Lessons cost between 2000 and 10,000 yen per hour--about $20-$100--and she wasn't taking the cheap lessons, believe me.) On my last day, Hiromi decided that we had to celebrate, so she walked up to the manager and told me that she was taking me to lunch. He agreed. (Hiromi spent a lot of dough in the school, so he really had no choice.) We walked out into Ginza and into an Italian restaurant where I had a pasta dish (she had already eaten lunch) and we split a bottle of wine. She called the waiter over and asked if she could order food to take back to The Kaisha. He said they didn't do carry out (most nice restaurants don't, of course), but they did have a selection of sweets that could be boxed up. She asked him to bring over a selection and he did and she asked my opinion. There were two boxes, a large for about 8000 yen (about $80) and a smaller box for about 6000 yen ($60). Trying to be polite, I suggested the smaller box and Hiromi agreed and promptly asked for four of them.

We finished our lunch and I reminded her that she had to return to The Kaisha for her next lesson with Masashi. She paid the bill and I thanked her and we walked back to the school and she met Masashi and the manager in the lobby and said she wanted to continue drinking with us, so she was taking us all out to the restaurant downstairs. The manager agreed, of course, and so we all promptly went downstairs in the middle of our workday and started drinking.

Now, let me just say that Japan is not--and never has been--a three-martini lunch kind of place. Hiromi was definitely playing the humor-the-rich-patron card when she asked the manager to let us go out drinking.

About three beers into our party, I realized that I was more than a bit tipsy, so I went into the bathroom and took one of my mirrored self-portraits. And then we all had to go back to work, so we thanked Hiromi and I went back to school and taught the night's round of English lessons.

When I grow up, I want to be Hiromi: A rich, bored Japanese housewife.