Blogsizer The online journal and website of Tim Hulsizer

Japan part 1

Author’s Note

There are four types of travel books;

The first type is the Comic Road Trip, a joyous romp through a foreign country, ideally with an observant author who pokes fun at everything they see.  Bill Bryson is a great example of this;  He not only manages to paint you a portrait of the indigenous population, he somehow makes you laugh until tears stream down your face.

The second type is the Emotional Journey of Discovery.  This may be the tale of how an author’s life changed when she rode bareback on a Shetland pony through New Zealand, or it may be a book so culturally aware and so well-written it makes you periodically stop and say, “Oh, so that’s why the Inuit are so ebullient.”  This type of book generally involves the author: A) doing lots and lots of research (“From the north face of the Eiffel Tower to London Bridge it is approximately 391,000 footsteps, or the equivalent of 1,500 laps around a regulation Olympic track.”), or B) living in the foreign country for many, many years.  If you’re looking for a top flight example of this genre written about Japan, I strongly urge you to seek out Alan Booth’s masterful book “Roads To Sata.”  His passing was a great loss to travel writing enthusiasts and to literature itself.

The third type of travel book is the Anthropological/Wildlife Field Study.  Some of these are cleverly disguised as scientific books instead of travelogues, but the end result is more or less the same.  Look for passages like, “I approached the head of the village to procure passage to the lair of the albino sloth.  The chief had a large, broad forehead, making it quite clear at a glance that his lineage extended to the Yutuptup tribe 350 kilometers to the south.”

The fourth type is Other. Yes, I am lumping everything else here.  Meet me in the parking lot if you need to take issue with it.  These books can be anything from a recipe book masquerading as a travelogue about someone’s month in Naples, to a coffee table photo-essay on Beirut.  My book falls into this last category.  I may share a certain “breeziness” of attitude with the first group, but I didn’t really take one trip through Japan, I sort of blundered about here and there for awhile, somehow holding down a job at the same time.  I can’t lay claim to the second category either, because despite my intense interest in Japan, I’m no expert on the country and my language ability was at a pre-school level.  I can make all the pithy comments I want about Nobunaga’s ambition, but I’ve got precious little to back it up.

This book deals with things I did in Japan, places I saw, and people I met.  It’s messy, vulgar, obscure, and I’d call the whole thing fiction if I hadn’t actually lived it.  This won’t be the book that finally explains the Japanese mind to a Western audience, but then again, at least there aren’t any recipes.

Chapter One: The Setup

“The most recent in a long string of books by Westerners on ‘My Year in Japan’ or ‘My Trip Through Japan’ or ‘What I Have To Say About Japan That Is More Profound Than Anything Ever Said By Any Other JET Teacher’…”
- Carl Malmstrom, from a review of Will Ferguson’s entertaining ‘Hokkaido Highway Blues’

Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  My English professor in college told us that at least twice a class.  Well, no disrespect to the American education system, but that’s a load of simplistic horseshit.  It sounds awfully nice, and it’s downright profound when you’re dealing with a room full of horny 20-somethings writing short stories with titles like ‘Chris Baddas and the Awesome Snowboard Trip.” However, when you sit down and actually try to write anything of length or (dare I say it) substance, you find that every beginning has its own beginning, middle, and end.  So you go back and look for that miscellany, only to discover that you’re missing a beginning to this new beginning; a back-story, if you will.

Perhaps the reason my professor never bothered to mention any of these complications is because you’re better off just writing and not thinking about things too much.  Unfortunately, I’m much too analytical for my own good, and this is non-fiction to boot.  Therefore, I can’t simply leap to Kansai Airport in Osaka as my plane smacked the tarmac for the first time.  I have to take you by the reins, gentle reader, as a cowpoke leads the rangy palomino to yon stream to quench its mighty thirst.  I must lead you back, into the mists of time, to explain how I ended up going there in the first place.

I’ve been interested in foreign places ever since I was a kid.  We didn’t get out of New Jersey much, but for some reason I recall having a travel agency catalog of package tours on my bookshelf alongside Dr. Seuss.  How it got there I have no idea, but the seeds of wanderlust were sown all the same.  I devoured books about people escaping the confines of their life, and I eagerly awaited each trip to the library.  Excursions to other continents, voyages into outer space, or even Daniel Pinkwater’s classic ‘The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death’, it didn’t matter to me.  Sure that last one was about a couple kids escaping their beds at night to watch midnight movies downtown, but wasn’t that better than sleeping?

I’m not quite sure how the interest in Japan developed, but I think it had something to do with seeing anime for the first time.  For those of you who actually have lives, “anime” is basically the Japanese equivalent of the word “cartoon”.  A dedicated TV addict from infancy, I was fascinated when I chanced upon “Star Blazers” (AKA Space Battleship Yamato) or “Battle Of the Planets” (AKA  Gatchaman) while flipping about the dial.  It was unlike the simplistic American pap I was used to watching after school.  A few years later, still in grade school, a prescient fellow named Carl Macek correctly postulated that America didn’t have enough of this “anime” stuff.  He gave us the mighty “Robotech”.

Sure, Robotech is essentially an awkwardly dubbed space opera.  Sure, it’s edited together from no less than three separate Japanese cartoon series.  Nothing on American TV was telling a story like that, with characters that acted in a manner approaching realistic, with giant robots and epic space battles.  Although it’s not without its flaws, I loved it like a parent loves their slightly awkward child.  My life and fifth grade conversation revolved around it.  My interest in Japanese (pop) culture had begun.  Sadly, my school status as a “geek” was sealed as well, but who needs a girlfriend when you have 200 episodes of melodrama, right?

As I grew to manhood, I took even more interest in other cultures.  I envied my grandmother’s trips to Europe, and dreamed of someday going there myself.  I read more books about travel, watched more TV documentaries about steamy locales, and played a lot of video games.  Once we moved to New Hampshire, I even went to Canada with my parents, where we basically went to the zoo and played mini golf.  At least the guys on the next tee were yelling “Birdiiiieeee!” in French.  Don’t get me wrong, it was an exciting trip, but I hadn’t even begun to sate my appetite for foreign travel.  I swore to myself that college would be different.

And so it was.  For one thing, I finally figured out what the big deal about girls was.  For another, I got to meet some more people of other nationalities and I interrogated them at length about life in their countries.  It was hard to imagine a city with buildings older than 1800, but I did my best, and I even tried applying to Temple University in Tokyo to study abroad for a semester.  As it turns out, this would have required auctioning off both of my kidneys to pay the tuition, so I nixed the idea.  My feverish brain labored over the issue, tormenting me with its cries.  “Help me!” it shrieked.  “Show me a menu that doesn’t have French fries on it!  Show me new and different hand gestures to offend people!  Show me cars that fit fewer than 8 people and a government even more corrupt than our own!”  Still, my best efforts went for naught.  It was at this crossroads that I sat down in Sociology class and met J.

J stuck out like a sore thumb, and it was great.  If somebody had a stupid opinion, he’d gladly giftwrap it, stamp it, address it, and cram it right back in their ugly craw.  If our bland, tenured professor got lazy and left an opening for an argument, J was there to waste ten minutes of class time on the semantics of a statement.  He was the first to say we should leave when the prof was 3 minutes late, and his shock of reddish hair stuck up like an angry Irish beacon, calling the rest of the students to rally around his indignation.  I would never share a class with him again during my time at Keene Sate College, but our paths would cross in other ways.

J was a black belt in his form of martial arts, a style he learned from a Japanese gentleman in New York.  J suffered from severe respiratory ills, alleviated only by keeping in shape.  He had tattoos of Japanese kanji on his palm, chest and arm , denoting the times he flew to Japan to participate in his clan’s competitions, full contact events that most Westerners never see.  At Keene State, he started a martial arts club on campus and since I was a film major I had the opportunity to work with him on the distinguished classic, “James Blond: For Your Thighs Only.”  His group came in to do some stunt work, and I believe it was at this point that I met his friend N.

N was Korean by birth, raised by a small-town, New Hampshire family to be a football fanatic, and she was about as sarcastic as it’s possible to be without actually dripping venom.  Add to that her ludicrously long black hair and passion for ceramics, and you have one unusual young person.

As it turned out, I wasn’t the only card-carrying member of the Nerd Brigade.  Both J and N were (like myself) avid role-playing gamers.  The upshot of this is that pretty soon I was in a room with them every week, rolling twenty-sided dice and saying things like “I seduce the barmaid wench using my +3 cloak of inebriation.”  We gamed often and long, occasionally partying in someone’s room instead with a bottle of some awful Cinnamon schnapps and a smoking bong.  You know, the standard definition of “higher learning.”

J graduated a year before me in 1997 and, not surprisingly, went to Japan to teach English.  He extended a very generous open invitation to stay with him free of charge, and who was I to say no to that kind of deal?  First, however, fate would smear me with a generous coating of humiliation.

It started in the fall semester after J’s departure.  I was single, N was single, and we were both stoner gaming geeks.  Why not see if the friendship could make a little transition into something more?  Long story short, after a brief and embarrassing couple of months of “kind of, sort of romance” (drinking and talking awkwardly) she decided to let me in on a little secret.  You guessed it, she and J were a couple.  How could I not see it and why didn’t they tell me, you ask?  Well, as it turns out, J had broken up with his old girlfriend the semester before and she was what they call “the jealous type.”  Once he and N fanned the flames of ardor that summer, they decided to keep their tryst a secret so that the old girlfriend wouldn’t make their lives hell.

Now I hear you bellowing, what in the name of Odin’s beard does all this have to do with me going to goddamn Japan?  Patience, young one.  I was a music director at the college radio station for four years, and I had accrued a vast store of free CD’s and rare promotional items from major record companies.  In late 1997, I managed to get a tidy sum of money from selling some of those items on the internet.  I knew I wanted to spend no less than a month in Japan, and the only time that fit into my school schedule was winter break, from late December to mid-January.  I booked the flight and told J.  “Great!” he said.  “You’ll be here the same time N’s coming to visit me.  We’ll all be in the same apartment for a month!”  I pretended to think for a second.  “Yeah, sounds great!” I replied.