What Japanese Men Are Like, Part 2: Come On, Toshi

Toshi had excellent netiquette. He was born in Tokyo but grew up in Europe, his father in the foreign service. In contrast to the rough style of speaking in Osaka, and in contrast to the funhouse variety of English I sometimes receive in messages like this one:

I regret that it does not attach to your hope. Thank you for having you associate, although it was short time.
I am wishing your happiness.

… Toshi’s rather formal and old-fashioned emails appealed to me:

Good evening to you, I am sorry that I am writing to you just before going to bed.

I was utterly surprised that you have to work the whole afternoon and into the evening on Saturday, it is as if Japan in the 60's. I remember my father staying home Saturdays in the mid 70's. Before that, Saturdays off twice a month.

Anyway, I can patiently wait for your schedule to be finalized. Please write me when the decision is definitive.

Wishing you fine Wednesday and good night.

I thought perhaps Toshi'd be more adept at negotiating the cultural chasm that separates American women and Japanese men. And because of his time in Europe, he might even have less traditional ideas about gender roles than the average Japanese guy in his 40s. On our first date we spent a pleasant five hours over dinner and drinks. He seemed nervous in the beginning but that was endearing in its own way.

On our second date I asked him to make a reservation at this izakaya because I’m trying to expand the boundaries of my known universe in Osaka. So much of the start-up of a new life overseas, or anywhere, is building out your web street by street and strand by strand. Also, even after five years here I'm still crazy about Asian décor.

We arrived and were led up stairs, through a section of charming, private spaces into a cramped, shabby tatami room at the back with its own shoji door. Each time a waiter brought food they would knock and wait for us to call “Hai!” before sliding it open. Izakaya are eating and drinking establishments, and can range from tiny bars with three seats to chain shops with giant picture menus. To the best of my knowledge, they are also one iteration of the tea houses that were once the reservoirs of Japan's "water trade," a poetic euphemism for the sex industry. So as the door slid closed the first time, I wondered how long this place had been an izakaya, and how many women had sat with how many men in that little room.

If you spend any time in Japanese cities, it's impossible to ignore the all the ways the male sex drive is serviced. I pass dozens of hostess bars, maid cafes that cater to the endemic "lolikon," or Lolita complexes, and massage shops just walking from the train station to my Japanese class in central Osaka. Then there are the cheerful girls who stand on the sidewalk handing out pocket tissue with advertisements for phone sex or my new favorite, "delivery health," call girls you can order up like a pizza. All of this was simmering in the back of my mind as we sipped our drinks and waited for the various dishes to arrive.

But back to Toshi. Dinner was unremarkable for either food or conversation. The only thing I remember of it was that, over homemade rice balls at the end of the meal, Toshi made a point of saying, “Japanese rice is the best in the world because it’s the only rice that tastes good cold,” which he’d said verbatim on our previous date. But don’t get me started on rice.

As we were having our second drink, I felt tired so I uncurled my legs from under the low table and leaned back against the wall (we were sitting on the floor). I asked Toshi if he’d like to move to the side so he could lean against a wall, too, and he agreed. But instead he came and sat down next to me. He took my hand, kissed it, and said I was beautiful. I thought, "Oh, dear."

He asked if he could kiss me on the cheek, and I said OK, because any other answer would have essentially ended things right there. I had been emailing with him for a month and I wasn’t ready to write him off. Besides, we were on a date and he was a reasonably attractive man.

He leaned in for what I thought would be one little peck and suddenly I was being pressed against the wall by a middle-aged octopus. His stiff, robotically swirling tongue and two twitching index fingers comprised a triple-pronged obliteration of any hopes I'd had of dating the guy. At this point, the little person in my head decided that since this date was officially over, it would be a good cultural observation opportunity. I tried to stop the ridiculous flicking attack on my nipples. I even attempted to do every woman who might ever meet Toshi a favor by teaching him how to kiss, but soon he fell back into the stiff robot kisses, and all the while treating my breasts like lightswitches. I gave up.

I thought I'd try one more tack. I explained that I'd recently had my heart broken and wasn't interested in being with anyone casually. He said, "You're so lovely," and leaned over again for more ineffective swirling and flicking. I stopped him again and said, "You know that for women sex happens in the brain, right?"

"Yes, well, to be honest, I don't think I ever satisfied my wife" [of 15 years]. On the way home it occurred to me that he may not have even been divorced.

"Did you ever talk to her about it?"

"Oh, no. It would be too embarrassing for a Showa [post World War II] man. Or for a Showa woman."

So he just spent 15 years flicking her poor nipples.

After about the third time I carefully explained how my delicate emotional state was affecting my libido, he said, "I know you'll probably say no but do you want to go to a hotel?"

For a brief nanosecond I considered how much I would be helping any woman who had the misfortune of being with him, but even my charity doesn't extend that far. And that was the end of Toshi.

What Japanese Men Are Like, Part 1

I know it’s reductionist to say “Japanese men are such and such” and I know there are as many kinds of Japanese men as there are American, British, or any other kind of man. That said, after almost five years here, there are some broad generalizations I feel just fine about making.

Men and Language

Men and women often use different verb conjugations and sometimes different words altogether. When I first heard Japanese guy-speak, in the mid ‘90s, I thought it had a charming swagger. I liked to copy it, much to my guy friends' horror. Now when I hear my female students using the male word for 'me' I find it mildly shocking (old age I suppose). Osakans, and Osakan men in particular, have a rough dialect that makes it sound like they're swearing when they speak casually. The endearment 'kimi,' which is something like a combination of 'little inferior person' and 'dear' can only be used by men, as far as I know.

TV Tropes

I watch a lot of Japanese TV: game shows, historical dramas, news, and if I'm really desperate, anime. One thing I've seen repeatedly is the clumsy come-on. I don't mean Hugh-Grant-stuttering clumsy, I mean a man grabbing his boss in an elevator and smashing his mouth against hers (where he holds it without moving for several seconds), or a man suddenly lunging at his old high school sweetheart, or a samurai putting a sort of choke hold on the neck of the woman he loves. It's so awkward and inappropriate and against basic human intuition that it seems almost robotic.

What I never see is the moment of chemistry between two people that would normally cause a kiss or embrace: the lingering eye contact, the lean-in, the faster breaths--normal human passion. I would like to think this chemistry isn't lacking in real Japanese relationships (though it would help explain the declining birthrate). This type of TV encounter is so common it must be coming from some part of the culture. I'm going to have to investigate this.

Until this, my third time living in Japan, I'd never considered Japanese men to be awkward with women. Shin, who I dated from 2000-20002, was the soul of ease and romantic to boot. I had such a good experience with him that during a bout of spring fever this year I decided to try the international site for Match.com.

Dating

Initially, things looked pretty encouraging. There was a guy who'd done aid work in Africa, one who taught English at a university in Nara, one who worked as a study-abroad coordinator and had lived in L.A. for seven years, and one who had spent 15 years in Europe.

My first date was with the study-abroad coordinator, Akira. It was in March, and I'd just gotten some costume items and make up for the Lady Gaga concert in April, so I thought I'd try the false eyelashes on my first date with Akira. Let me explain here that these were not your everyday lashes. They were more like black feathery awnings for my eyeballs. I think from 20 feet away they probably looked amazing, but up close I'm pretty sure I looked like a clown. The Starbucks where we met was mercifully dim and we got through a cup of coffee and decided to go for dinner. He was tall and very well dressed, attractive, and extremely at ease in English. I was underdressed in jeans, and every time I blinked my eyelid pulled where I'd glued it to itself, and the lashes flapped a little. He took me to a Balinese restaurant that started with an ornately carved teak door and opened up into room after room of romantic little nooks, with fountains and sheer gauze curtains between tables. I'd had very low expectations for the date, but I enjoyed talking to him in spite of my two giant handicaps and thought I'd like to see him again. A few days later he emailed saying we should get together for coffee sometime but it seemed like he was just being polite.

The former aid worker stopped emailing me shortly after he found out my research area was Women's Studies. I think it makes a lot of men defensive.

The university teacher was ok but he didn't seem culturally comfortable and I can't date someone who is as skittish about being with a foreigner as every other person I come into contact with. It's just too exhausting.

The guy I had the highest hopes for was Toshi, the one who'd lived in Europe for ages.

Rice Rant

Japanese people ask me about rice. A lot. Yes, I eat it. No, it doesn’t present any problems. To be honest, I’ve never considered whether rice is better than bread and I think it’s a stupid question. Japanese rice is definitely better suited to Japanese food than, say, basmati, but it’s not the only good rice in the world, mmmkay? Earlier this spring I went on a couple of dates with a Japanese man who had lived in Europe for 15 years. On BOTH evenings he felt the need to tell me that Japanese rice is the best rice in the world, apparently because it still tastes good cold. I can see it coming up once, maybe, when we’re discussing food in Europe, or expat habits, but both times? And what is the point of telling someone Japanese rice is the best? Hoping we foreigners will abandon our ignorant foreign-rice eating ways?

Just last week in the elevator I bumped into a Japanese German teacher who for some reason teaches in the English Department. She eyed the bento in my hand curiously so I showed it to her. It was standard cafeteria fare: a breaded, fried croquette, rice, some vegetables, a piece of chicken. She asked me whether I thought I’d enjoy it and I said I would be happier if there were more vegetables. But that wasn’t really what she wanted to know. “But at home you eat bread more than rice, don’t you?” I sighed inside. “No, I eat a lot of rice at home, too.” “Oh, really? Not potatoes?” (I have a German last name). Even though I’m four generations removed from the old country, it seems inconceivable that I might actually eat Asian food at home.

I feel so embarrassed for people when they ask me things like this. It's not like it's the Meiji Era and I'm the first foreigner to hit the ground. The country has been open since 1858. When I lived in Tokyo I was only asked once about the rice vs. bread debate (as if there is one), and that was by a man in his eighties whose tiny, adorable wife, named Plum, had invited me to their house for a lemonade after a neighborhood festival. In Kansai, however, it seems like it’s rice all the time (though I might be a little biased at this point). A couple of weeks ago the local news had a brief interview with a woman who had been “stranded” an extra week in Europe because of the Icelandic volcano. She said she was glad to be home because she missed eating rice. I understand that people love it, I do.

Once, ten years ago, my boyfriend and I went to a resort on the Sea of Japan for our one-year anniversary. They served a gorgeous meal in our tatami room with a view of the ocean. The inn was in Niigata, famous for the taste of its rice. My fellow had three or four helpings of rice -- whole bowls -- and proceeded to pass out at 8 pm in a rice bliss. Not the romantic evening I had imagined (shakes fist at rice).

Someday I will address the notion of the supremely healthy Japanese diet. But for now let me say the glutinous coating they put on rice is allegedly tied to the country’s high rate of stomach cancer. Speaking of rice, why is there brown rice tea everywhere, but almost no brown rice? You want healthy? There’s healthy: brown rice—even better, brown basmati. And I might eat more bread than I do here if it wasn’t all bleached sugary tasteless wonder-fluff. I’ve never seen people eat more bread than Japanese people in a buffet line (called Viking here, apparently because they ate so much). Just because the rolls are small doesn’t mean it’s reasonable to eat 10 of them. We actually had to put a two-roll limit on our students when they were in U.S. hotels.

Postscript: Tonight I went to an Indian restaurant. I ordered a Goan prawn curry and asked for basmati rice. But they didn’t have it because Japanese customers won’t eat it. I wiped my tears with garlic naan.

Gaijin Etiquette

This was from November, 2009.
There is a website called Deep Kyoto that I check out occasionally. I like it and I want it to be for me. On the surface it gives tips for bars and restaurants, or local bath houses, which is accessible enough, but it seems to actually be for the sort of gaijin (foreigners) who have been here long enough to go native. I feel there is a subtle form of wheat-from-the-chaff sorting that is done by longtime Japan vets of us less literate types, or maybe I'm just paranoid and insecure because it seems like I should be better at living here than I am so far. I've lived in Japan for almost five years, but the last time was seven years ago. This time I'm ten weeks in to a two-year contract and I'm still pretty rusty.



I wonder how many years the average Deep Kyotoite has been in Japan. How do you know when you've gotten to the Deep part of being here? Is it when you only date Japanese? Is it when you stop complaining about or even noticing unheated bathrooms and squat toilets? Is it when you can read everything? And in the meantime is there a semi-deep site I can go to instead?

One of the things I find most difficult about being here is the very hard-and-fast rule about how gaijin are supposed to interact with each other. Whether we're on the street, in a train, walking through Costco, or gazing at the same temple garden, we are absolutely not supposed to acknowledge that we see each other. It would be the height of uncouth behavior to actually smile or say hello. And what is so weird is that this is not something that comes from Japanese society but rather something that sprang up as more of us started arriving in this 99% homogeneous country. Just in case you think I'm making this up, I was recently crammed in a line, shuffling through the garden at the Temple of the Silver Pavilion in Kyoto. The leaves were at the peak of fall colors. It was gorgeous and I wanted to share it with someone--not like over coffee or at at a poetry reading, but just by making eye contact or smiling. As the line of people snaked around I noticed a foreign man perhaps a few years older than me (40-ish?) inching in my direction. I took a deep breath. I got ready. I went for the eye contact. And he lowered his eyes, turned his head a little, and sniffed. You know that little sniff of disapproval? That sniff.