The Tokyo-South Dakota Express

A First Supper

    I had just started to adjust to the rhythm of Musashi-koganei, and we gaijin ryuugakusei were pounding pitchers of Asahi Super Dry at an Izakaya down the street from the dormitory.
    “You study much Japanese before you got here?” Tom asked me. He was a grad student in history, the oldest of the foreigners in our dorm—he knew the ropes, and I was on them.
    “Yeah, about a year and a half’s worth.”
    “Test time. How do ya say condom?”
    “Gomu,” I told him.
    “Good, good. How about…  pussy? That’s the really bad one.”
    I looked over my shoulders before daring to reply: manko. The gaijin laughed around the table and gulped their beer down.
    “All right, you know the basics—you’re set.”
    “That’s all I’ve gotta know, huh?”
    
    Ally, a Japanese-American sat across from me. Tan and effortlessly adapted Tokyo, she reminded me of Hawaiian Japanese I knew from Creighton.
    “You guys like weed?” she asked. “I’ve got a box of brownies coming in from my cousin.”
    Yeah, definitely Hawaiian influence, I thought—but didn’t respond. Not that I didn’t want any, but the one thing we had been absolutely forbidden to mess with was illegal drugs. Even less progressive than the US on drug policy, Japan regards illegal substances—both legally and culturally—as equally threatening as cocaine or heroin.
    On the other hand, we were actively encouraged to indulge in legal recreation: that meant booze and women—sake to onna.
    “It’s going to get steamy in the summer,” our dorm manager had said, “and I know you’re going to want to get steamy with the Japanese girls, too. Go get them! But don’t bring them to the dorm to play.”
    Women were absolutely forbidden in the dormitories much like even relatively safe drugs—if illegal—were forbidden in our bodies. But every accommodation was made: in early dorm parties, our manager awarded prizes such as bottles of whiskey and a deluxe onani set, including a porno magazine and a box of tissues for those lonely, sticky summer nights in the dorm rooms.
    The forbiddance of women in the dorm was no idle threat, either. Later a guy down the hall from me was caught with a girl in his room late at night, and he was spared eviction only because he prostrated himself in his underwear in front of the dorm manager, crying and pleading for forgiveness.

    A bartender called for our attention, holding up a surfing magazine and pointing to the face of the man riding a wave on the cover. Bringing it over to our table, he held the magazine cover up next to Alex, a guy who had arrived at the same time as I had and ridden into Tokyo with me and a couple Japanese girls. An average white guy in a college football t-shirt, he flashed a smile pink with booze and embarrassment.
    “It’s you!” the bartender said. And we all agreed, it really was him.

                                                  In My Blood
    I navigate the labyrinthine concrete corridors of Meidaemae’s residential zone, making my way down to a vending machine that’s at the edge of my knowledge of the territory. Beyond there, what exists is a looming unknown to me, a frontier stretching far beyond where I’ve dared to explore.
    I slide change into the machine for a Mitsuya Cider, and the can clunks out into the silence that hangs over the streets. Nothing else moves, and no one else is there. Are they all indoors, glued to updates on the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe like I had been only minutes earlier? What was the Japanese media saying about the situation? I wondered. I had been following a live news ticker on the BBC’s website as it fed me nuclear nuggets of despair:
    Another nation instructs its citizens in Japan to return home.
    A Tokyo scientist already reports highly-elevated radioactivity in the city.  
    South of Tokyo on a US military base, soldiers receive iodine tablets to protect against radiation (just in case, of course).
Mukai Shutoku’s words ring in my mind: 「こんがらがってる in my brain. Frustration in my blood」
    Fellow gaijin residents in the the guest house where I’m staying have slowly begun to disappear. They evacuate on orders of their home countries or temporarily flee to western cities as the situation looks more and more ominous. My Japanese ex-girlfriend Kaori says she is afraid, too, but she and her family have nowhere else to go.
    I walk with my can of soda, cold and heavy in hand as the glow of day fades in Meidaemae. I breathe, imagining radioactivity as tiny particles already burrowing into me. In the sci-fi movies I love, radiation makes you glow or turn into the Incredible Hulk or Godzilla. But in reality, at just the right doses, radiation becomes an evil that moves undetected and hijacks your body at its most basic levels, destroying you slowly from the inside.
    I stare intently into the cool air, holding my breath and watching for a flicker—of some thing.
    こんがらがってる in my brain. 何が in my blood?

Where Osaka Castle Casts no Shadow

(a section of my current nonfiction project, Flyjin)

    Every once in a while I feel compelled to take a picture of a stranger in a public place. A favorite among these photos is one I shot near Osaka Castle of a young girl walking her dog. I try to recall this photograph from memory: I can picture the girl, wearing a white track jacket and green pants, her dog nearby on its leash. I know she had ponytails, short ones, and I think they’re tied up with pink bands. For some reason I can remember the sun being bright that day, and it must have been chilly. I remember a small white shack that sold takoyaki and yakisoba and various other Japanese carnival foods. Behind the shack and the girl, I can recall a business district, buildings towering up around the park.

    Looking at the photo now, I realize my memory has misfired. The green of the pants was actually the green of the bench behind the girl and the green of the trees and bushes I had entirely forgotten. In my memory, the girl stood alone with her dog before a backdrop of human-made structures, but the photo reveals that she is not alone: a man in a puffy coat and a surgical mask reads a book on a bench, and a foot and grocery bag swing into the left side of the picture, soon to be followed by their owner. In sum, the scene has much life I had forgotten, but what was important to me at the time stayed in my impression.

    The shack I had remembered is not in the picture at all, but the garbage cans in which patrons would dispose of their plates and chopsticks are present. Perhaps the shack found its way into my memory of the picture because I remember I had ordered food there just before taking the picture. I had asked for yakisoba (noodles) but had been served takoyaki (chunks of octopus inside a breading and topped with sauce and fish flakes). I actually really like takoyaki, and it’s an Osaka specialty, but I had eaten some just the night before on Dotonbori, a street known for its many restaurants, shops, and gaudy signs. That accounts for my memory of the brightness, too—I must have stopped for a few too many drinks that night before, as now I recall having a dull headache that day.

    Why had I felt compelled to take this particular photo? It occurs to me now that I must have been thinking of the woman I was dating back in the US—she loves shiba inu, the type of dog the girl was walking. Up until the time of the earthquake, she and I had been planning for her to come stay with me in Tokyo during her break from school. I had hoped that, having not been to Japan for so long, she might have forgotten how much she likes it and would decide to stay longer. If she did, I imagined we’d end up with a dog just like the one the girl was walking.

    If one were to view the scene from the girl’s perspective, Osaka Castle would loom gigantic behind me, past the park and winding trails leading up to its stone gates. I’d be there, sitting on the edge of a fountain beside a half-eaten order of takoyaki, a white-skinned foreigner snapping a picture of a native stranger. Before that I had watched some of a high school baseball game, and afterward I’d finish my food and head onward to the castle and to the gift shop where I’d buy a souvenir hand towel sporting a picture of the castle for 500 yen or so, and two years later, that towel would hang in an office in South Dakota.

    The more I think of it, the more I remember how much that headache had bothered me. It was steaming hot inside Osaka Castle, aggravating my symptoms as I climbed floor after floor to look at the museum inside. But I was determined to get out and see the major attractions in the city. I hadn’t planned to visit Osaka in this way, just getting out of Tokyo to avoid potential mayhem, but I was going to make the most of it. I knew I might not be in Japan much longer, after all. This scene I photographed, it seems to me now, contained feelings of longing both for home and for staying in Japan. No matter how hard I tried to stay focused on enjoying my accidental vacation, it seems my subconscious wandered to the dilemma without my noticing.

    Taking one last look at the photo, I notice a huge, dark shadow seemingly cast by the person not yet wholly in the picture. The shadow looks to be sneaking up behind the girl and contrasts completely with the luminous white of her jacket.