Chapter Two

Tokyo House


Acting on the recommendation from Jenny, a former resident and a buxom young woman with curls of light brown hair that flew in waves down her back, who also studied at Jaffera, I reserved a room for a month. Besides helping others and myself with her polished knowledge of the Japanese language, Jenny, an outspoken American lesbian, relished discussing the joys of sexual freedom found overseas. Whereas I can only say nice things about Jaffera’s top student, I will say for someone having such a grand time, she came across as being unhappy and whatever was bothering her, the answers weren’t going to be found in the half-pint of gin kept hidden in her handbag.

I arrived at Tokyo House late in the evening on the date my reservation at the ryokan ended, and was shown to an empty six-by-eight-foot straw mat or tatami room on the second floor, by the building owner, Mr. Takagi. A devout Buddhist and widower in his seventies, who always wore a loosened tie over a wrinkled white shirt, Mr. Takagi returned the day before I arrived from his hometown near Kyoto, where he’d spent a week mending an ulcer. In many respects, he might have felt as isolated in Tokyo as did his foreign boarders, and this made him well liked among the house residents.

Without the necessary curtains needed to block out the break of day, I awoke around seven a.m. and entered the living room where I sat watching television on one of the two living room sofas. The other residents didn’t start trickling in until nine a.m. when they began making breakfast in the kitchen or nursing a hangover in the living room. No one said much, least of all to me, but when a New Zealander with short, spiky red hair, and unblemished, smooth, almost translucent skin, howled in her best Kiwi English, “Which Yank bloody ‘ell took this message?” The place woke up and the residents began to look my way in suspicion.

Someone had written the name Cathy instead of Katy on the message board above the living room pay phone and the slighted New Zealander assumed one of my compatriots was responsible for the dirty deed. At the same instance, her reaction illustrated an attitude that became my introduction to the anti-American sentiment held by plenty in both Tokyo House and Japan's gaijin community at large.

On the one hand, the attitude is understandable. United States citizens are perceived by many foreigners as receiving preferential treatment as well as an acceptance from the Japanese, which those of other cultural and ethnic backgrounds view as unfair. The prejudices scores of foreigners face, particularly from neighboring Asian countries, are, in fact, pervasive. On the other hand, I had just arrived and found the anti-American mind set a drag.

In spite of any adverse cultural conditioning it was entertaining living among the fascinating, eccentric, and fucked-up residents of Tokyo House. Yet, it was my first hike into the dank haunts of Roppongi, a major entertainment district, which I considered the pinnacle of my earliest weeks in Japan.

Five weeks after arriving, I visited the area on a Saturday night where cheap thrills and pricey drinks are the starting point. The time was ten-thirty p.m. when I began the evening in a pub called Motown House, one of the district’s overwrought watering holes favoring foreign clientele. The brick stairs leading from the street level to the second floor brought me to the entrance where I pulled open a thick wooden door and slid inside. The joint was packed to the gills and leaning up against an overrun bar rail to order, I listened as one foreign business-type, fitted in a dark suit, white shirt, and striped regimental tie, took a wad of yen notes from his billfold, slapped them on the bar and make a quip about juggling his company expense account to cover it.

A stool beside the entrance was vacated and parking myself with a beer I sat monitoring the professionally attired Japanese ladies bullshit with the gaijin suitors who outnumbered them a good three to one. The hour of twelve midnight was soon at hand, and anyone with thoughts of splitting should do so because the last trains out from Roppongi stop shortly, and a taxi home can run up the cost of an already expensive evening. All the same, I didn't mind missing the trains, and exiting Motown House I strayed around the block and into another dive suitably called Gas Panic.

Inside I found Keiko, a graceful woman with eyes so warmly receptive they were erotic, who worked as a computer engineer with a software company. She spoke plausible English and had visited San Francisco State University (my alma mater, thank you) the prior year during the summer. It was all terribly romantic and I was flattered she paid attention to me, especially since she had gone through a difficult divorce with a fellow alumnus. We passed the evening cuddled at a table in the rear of the club, before returning to her apartment on the morning train with her head rested on my shoulder and the dawn breaking. Still, the Gas Panic is hardly the place to meet people in Tokyo, and as a rule I ended up drinking alone, with several notable exceptions:

A Winter's bliss: Spent a January weekend in the apartment of a married woman I met on a Friday evening, listening to stories of a dispassionate husband who, like her, cheated on the side.

Ladies in waiting: Got righteously hammered before ending the night at Tokyo House with a young lady visiting from Osaka. Talk about the classic one-night stand. I woke alone and found a sanitary napkin under my pillow. The unpretentious truth is the Roppongi nightlife is a bummer and, like my hangovers, got worse. My advice: Have a good time, but catch the last train out.

Now the sweltering summer heat and soiled haze of a polluted sky make the month of August the most unpleasant season of the year in Tokyo. There's not much relief unless swimming is your bag and you have an opportunity to visit one of the half dozen large outdoor pools in the area. I had plenty of free afternoons, but my spending habits (read: Roppongi) caused me to restrict my budget to the essentials. The four grand left in my Citibank account needed to last, so I sweated out that first summer biding the time.

But the heat wasn't as irritating as the gaijins running the show at Interlink who siphoned off for themselves the teaching hours they promised to me. The wankers copped the work, and the missed income had me in the dumps; but trusting tomorrow would get better, I got out my cold bottle of sweet saké from the refrigerator and plopped down on the Tokyo House sofa. Try picturing two large couches with people buried in slouches, mixed in muddled discussions, empty beer cans lying about, a cluttered dining room table, a filthy kitchen, the flickering picture of a soundless television set against the wall, a haze of tobacco smoke and you have the Tokyo House scene.

That night a house party was in effect. One of the newer residents, Klauss, a fifty-something German scholar visiting from Bonn and doing research at the prestigious Keio University in Tokyo, was celebrating his triumphant visit to Seoul where he nabbed a six-month student stamp on his passport. (One must register with a Japanese Embassy outside the country to become eligible for a student visa whereas extensions can be filed within Japan.)

The Interlink school had me on the payroll illegally, but only for a short period longer. Jaffera's falsified paperwork was delayed, yet when it was ready I planned a two-day jaunt to Korea myself so I was concerned with what Klauss had to report, which wasn't much except that the paperwork would take a day to complete assuming the documents were in order.

Klauss, whose trimmed mustache and well-manicured appearance gave him a look of distinction, also spent a night in Seoul with an Amerasian hooker, which brought laughter from Aki, who was slumped in a chair watching the soundless television while drinking beer. Aki, a Japanese national and a curious man who often wore a tweed jacket regardless of the summer heat, doubled as caretaker in Mr. Takagi's absence. The previous year Aki had lived in the United States where, during a three-year stay, he managed to marry an American woman, pocket a green card, get divorced, and do a stretch in a New York county jail before being deported.

Tim, sprawled on the sofa opposite myself, said nothing, which was out of character for this Tom Cruise look-alike. An exchange student from Oregon State University, Tim fancied himself quite the cocksman and when he wasn’t upstairs in his room with the ladies, he could be found downstairs wearing a Mao cap and spewing propaganda regarding the ideological differences between Eastern and Western countries to anyone willing to listen.

Meanwhile, freckled-faced Becky, pressing her blouses on an ironing board next to the television while smoking a cigarette and sipping a glass of straight vodka, finished the first round of inquiry by insinuating in so many expletives that Klauss was an exploiter of womankind. Becky, an Australian whose insufferable disposition helped make everyone's life in Tokyo House that much more miserable, was critical of everything Japanese and could be on the rag for days on end. Becky the Bitch.

I'm sure it was the loss of teaching hours, but I felt too down to join the fun; instead, I opted to drink with Robert and Derrick, who had left earlier for a pub up the road. Robert, in his thirties, lanky and loose-limbed with bush-cut blond hair, was a former civil servant from Sydney, Australia, who, despite having been drunk most of his free time, was a man of soul who spoke at length about the pitfalls facing the working class.

Thin as a rail, yet handsome and a snappy dresser, Derrick was a Chinese-American from California, and in a deep funk. It seemed that four months prior he befriended a young lady age sixteen living not far from the Japanese language institute where he studied during the weekdays. The two met in a Mr. Donut coffee shop and over the course of time began spending Saturday mornings in a love hotel near the school for a romp on a waterbed. The party ended when the parents discovered about these illicit trysts and threatened potential legal action against both the language institute as well as Derrick.

More bizarre than the thirty-year-old Derrick's rationalizations (“I thought she wouldn't tell”) behind doing the deed with an experienced sixteen-year-old, was the young lady's participation in the selling of her underwear to a pornography agency. The agency in turn sold them and other parts of her clothing, e.g., her high school uniform, to those interested in such a fetish. Whereas Derrick claimed to know nothing of this, the parents of the young lady were plenty irate and spoke to Mr. Takagi, who made it clear he was to leave at the end of the month. With that, Derrick began to mark his evenings by matching Robert's pints of beer with his own rum and cokes.

Walking out the front door, I heard Lisa, who until now was studying kanji (Sino-Japanese written characters) at the kitchen table, start in on Tim about something and whatever pleasantries were in the air deteriorated. A pretty woman with light green eyes that were her best features, Lisa, like Tim, was an exchange student from Oregon State. Lisa was also a staunch feminist on the run to forget a Japanese ex-boyfriend, living in Portland, and since Tim carried on with the ladies in Tokyo like there was no tomorrow their disputes over what constituted a successful intercultural relationship often took on comical proportions.

However, a less argumentative outlook on personal relationships and the Japanese were the views expressed by an American sociology professor that visited Tokyo House on several occasions. This lady friend of Klauss, who was at the end of a year sabbatical from the University of Hawaii, had lectured at various Japanese women’s colleges attempting to instill in her students the importance of their changing role in modern Japan. These students were taught the “3 H's,” Height, High education and High income, so many fretted about finding in a prospective husband didn't need be mastered before the age of twenty-five and that individual employment goals were of equal importance. Yet the frustration the professor voiced with respect to a reluctance on the part of her students to revise their immediate goal in life wasn't atypical for Westerners who, after attempting to impose their own cultural values, end up bashing their head against a brick wall.

Please, if you plan on coming to come to Tokyo, and I hope you do, leave any ideas of rearranging society at Narita Airport, because I've seen more than one foreigner split in a furious huff when realizing the Japanese don't “get it.”

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