The Blond Gaijin

Copyright by Jennifer Bradley (Weir), September 1991

Sushi is the embodiment of all things Japanese: alien, exciting, frightening...raw. Viewed with a mixture of dread and curiosity by all those not Japanese, it is the one thing that all visitors to Japan are obligated to try. Inevitably, the first question asked of one returning home is "Did you eat sushi?"

My introduction to sushi began on my first night in Japan. The Hara's, my new family for the next full year, picked me up at the airport and took me immediately to a sushi bar on the way home. There was no better way to introduce me to the culture than by casting me into it stomach-first.

Sitting on a stool at the counter, I perused the selection of sea atrocities under glass: iridescent chunks of fish flesh, speckled pink salmon ovaries, gleaming whole baby squids. I felt confident that in Japan I would be able to take off those ten pounds I'd been meaning to lose.

I asked Akiko, my new host sister and the only one who spoke English, to order for me. She pointed to some innocent boiled shrimp that I hadn't noticed previously. The chef plucked one from the ice, quickly mounded it to a clump of sticky white rice, and deposited it in front of me. All of the customers in the small restaurant stopped eating and turned to watch me. Self-consciously and clumsily, I picked it up with my chopsticks. The wooden sticks plunged through the rice, crumbling it, and I was left holding only the bit of shrimp. Everyone laughed and clapped their hands, so I graced them with a short bow.

I tried the next one with my fingers, gingerly taking a bite out of one end. Again, the rice crumbled and fell all over the counter. I looked to Oba-chan, my host grandmother, to see how she was managing. She picked up a monstrous piece of eel sushi, tilted her head back, and shoved the entire thing into her mouth. She chewed once or twice as her cheeks puffed out with the extra food, then swallowed. Picking out a toothpick from a container on the counter, she proceeded to flick the bits of rice out of her teeth before beginning again.

After I choked and sputtered on a few large pieces of `safe' sushi, I had the knack. I was ready to try some more exotic types; raw tuna bellies, rubbery octopus, and glistening orange bubbles of salmon roe.

Then they offered me the snails. "Sure, escargot," I thought, "I can handle this." I was handed a plate with two crusty spiraling shells. Once again, the bar was silent as people stopped to observe me. Feeling confident from a few flasks of sake, I inserted my chopsticks into one of the shells and yanked until I felt something spring loose. Slowly bringing the sticks up to my mouth, I suddenly sensed something not quite right. I glanced down. Was the food higher on my chopstick? Taking a closer look, I saw the tiny tentacles twitch as the snail inched up a bit farther. I felt all the horrible things I had just eaten rise to the top of my throat as I realized the snail was alive! Repulsed, I dropped my chopsticks as laughter exploded around me. Oba-chan wrenched the snail loose from the chopstick with her stubby fingers and popped it into her mouth, crunching ferociously. Then, still crunching, she opened her mouth to cackle at me,

Such was my initiation to sushi...and Japan.

Sooner or later I wouldn't be able to hold it any longer. Eventually I would have to go to the bathroom. This terrified me as much perhaps as the snail incident had. Not, however, at the Hara's. Using the toilet there was like a religious experience. They had the newest model in Western toilet extravagance; streamlined attractive shape, heated cushiony seat. There was a control panel which regulated the position, force, and temperature of a jet stream of water. After a thorough cleansing of your appropriate areas, pushing another button produced a current of warm air to dry yourself. At the Hara household, toilet paper had become obsolete! After an initial misunderstanding of the contraption (I left the bidet on and flooded the room) I began to spend hours in there, my safe retreat from the hardships of the Eastern world.

Regretfully, these luxuries were limited to wealthy Japanese homes. In public places, toilets were much simpler. I caught my first glance of one of these barbaric devices one day while out with my host sister Akiko . Soon, nature called upon me and I stopped to use the restroom. I opened the stall, stepped in, and stumbled over something. Had I walked into a closet? Where was the toilet? Looking down, I discovered I was standing in a porcelain pit. The stains around the rim left no doubt as to what its use was. Disconcerted, I walked back out and told Akiko I didn't have to go after all. She gave me a bemused smile and we continued shopping. About an hour later, nature was screaming. I confessed to Akiko my confusion and revulsion about using such a primitive toilet.

"Don't be intimidated. They're really much more sanitary," she assured me.

"Sure they are, just like camping, right? As long as you don't pee down your leg." I eyed my blue jeans, comparing them to her more practical skirt and knee socks.

Akiko led me back to the bathroom where I examined the toilet further. It was basically a hole in the ground surrounded by a shallow porcelain dish, about two feet in length, with one end tilted upward.

"Which way do you face?" I asked her.

She laughed at me and pointed out two dirty foot prints painted in the tile on either side. She began to demonstrate how you spread your legs and squatted over the top of it, but embarrassed, I stepped out and closed the door.

"Akiko, how do the handicapped manage one of these?"

"They use the western style toilet. It's the next stall over."

I almost hit her.

Akiko left two weeks after I arrived to go to college in Tokyo. Consequently, I was faced with a problem. English speakers were rare in Kanazawa, the city that was now my home, and the only person I understood and who understood me was hundreds of miles away. My only option was to buckle down and learn Japanese as quickly as possible.

The first Japanese word I learned was dame. Oka-san (my host mother, Mrs. Hara) and I were walking through the market one day. We noticed a decrepit, toothless old man following us and muttering to himself. Ignoring him for the moment, I stopped to watch a man filleting fish while Oka-san fingered some cantaloupes at the next stand over. I felt something brush my hair and absentmindedly reached a hand back to push whatever it was aside. Suddenly my hand was grabbed and I wheeled around to an overpowering stench of fetid breath in my face. The old man had hold of me, and was stroking my blond hair with his other hand.

"Pretty,pretty..." he cooed at me in English.

Oka-san looked up and was over to him in an instant, wielding her umbrella. She hit him repeatedly on the head with it, yelling out "Dame! Dame!" until he let out a high-pitched giggle and hobbled away. Dame is a useful word, meaning anything from "don't you dare" to "get the hell away from me!"

The Haras were very patient with me in my attempts to learn Japanese. In the beginning I was a poor student. I tried hard to learn, but the foreign sounds were difficult to pronounce. At first they taught me simple phrases.

"Do itashimashite". You're welcome.

To me it sounded like "Don't touch my moustache."

"Gochiso sama deshita." Thank you for the meal.

"Goat cheese on the desktop."

"Bikkuri shita." What a surprise.

"Big Hare Krishna."

By the time school started, I had all of my stock phrases down pat. My fellow students did their best to speak slowly and clearly for me, but they were obviously disappointed when they couldn't express something to me. If I didn't comprehend them, I learned to pretend that I did by grunting and nodding affirmatively, using the all-purpose phrase, "Ah, so !" Later, I would find my dictionary and look up all the words I hadn't understood.

The Rotary club that sponsored my trip over had advised me to make friends with my Japanese classmates and not to spend much time with the other exchange students in the city. The first part was easy. Kanazawa was a city of about 400,000, but because of its location, it attracted few foreign tourists. Thus, to the Japanese, I was new and exciting, "The Blond Gaijin." (Gaijin is a word that every visitor to Japan learns immediately. It means `outside person' and is applied to everyone that is not Oriental.) Everyone at school wanted to get to know me. Girls would approach me in the hall and ask,"Can I be your friend?"

I would say "of course," and then never see them again. Acquaintances were easy to find, but true friends were rare.

I wanted to find people like me, who were lonely and frustrated by all the language and cultural differences, who simultaneously loved and hated Japan as much as I did. They weren't hard to find since perhaps they were looking for me as well.

There was Bill, the other American, who was resentful of Japan. He had wanted to go to Denmark, but hadn't scored high enough in his preliminary Rotary interviews to warrant his first choice. The only thing he liked about Japan were the girls, and he was angered by their distrust of him.

Sophie was a vivacious, athletic Australian who had the misfortune of being over six feet tall. Japanese girls were intimidated by her, and the boys thought her gawky, but accepted her for her outgoingness and ability in sports. Because she had no girlfriends, she had learned to speak in the harsh guttural slang of Japanese schoolboys. Her host family deemed this unbecoming and had threatened to send her home.

Mandy was closest to me in age and personality. She was a Canadian with freckles and auburn hair. All of the boys at her school were infatuated with her, but were too shy to approach her. They sent her little gifts and love-notes instead. The schoolgirls were annoyed by her effect on them and thus ostracized her.

Together, a strange assortment of homesick gaijins, we were the closest we could come to a family.

We were never alone. Walking down the street separately or together, people would wave, laugh, smile and point to us. Schoolboys would practice their English on us--"Haro-jees ees a pen--preeze teach me your phone number..." At any news event, fire, or car accident, we were always the ones to be interviewed by the television crew. Yet with all this attention directed at us, we screamed out for more. We pretended to scorn the publicity, but deep down we craved it, trying to outdo each other in the amount we received.

Good, clean-cut students at home in our respective countries, the instant fame transformed us into brats. We hung out with punk rockers, went to pool-halls and pachinko parlors. Oddities already by nature of our appearance, we sought to be even more outrageous, spiking our hair up at unbelievable angles with bar soap. We skipped school and spent afternoons at Mr. Donut (our Western retreat) drinking cheap coffee, smoking, and fabricating stories about our sexual encounters.

There was an unspoken competition as to who could befriend the most nontraditional Japanese. My contribution was Yoshi, who had bleached his ebony hair snow-white, claimed to have once lived with Bono from the rock band U2, and now lived with his gothic French girlfriend Babette.

And then there was Jiro. He was unnerving to look at. Taller and bulkier than most Japanese--about 6 feet five inches- his unwashed hair had been cut into a semi-mohawk, and his jet black eyes were slightly off-center. He always wore the same black jeans and black Sex Pistols tee-shirt, faded so the lettering was almost unreadable. Although ugly as sin, he exuded a dangerous, sexual aura that fascinated us. Jiro's sole existence was dedicated to denying his Japanese heritage. He had dropped out of high school to form a punk band, in which his lyrics usually went something like this. "Life sucks, oh yeah...life is really the pits,yeah,yeah,life sucks..." Supposedly he was trying to relate to the senselessness of existence in a country where conformity is the only acceptable behavior. He would scream his songs out at his tiny audiences, kicking and tossing his body about in impossible contortions. We loved it.

Nearing halfway through our year, Sophie, Bill, Mandy, and I realized that so far we had nothing to show for our six months in Japan. We had been trying so hard to emphasize our differences that we had forgotten why we had come in the first place. We resolved to buckle down and become as Japanese as a gaijin was permitted to become.

Sophie joined the kyudo (Japanese archery) club at her school and Bill joined kendo (martial arts using bamboo swords). I desperately wanted to take karate with Mandy, but my Rotary club and host family wouldn't allow it. They didn't want to be responsible if I got hurt, urging me instead to take the `finer arts'. I tried to learn them all at once: tea ceremony, flower arranging, Japanese calligraphy, haiku writing.

The Haras were close friends of the madame of a famous Kanazawa geisha house, and they were delighted when I took an interest in learning their traditional instrument, the koto. It is the Japanese 13 stringed harp. We went to the geisha house (a rarity for gaijins) about once every two weeks. The geishas would try to mold me into their little geiko san. (Contrary to popular belief, modern day geishas are not prostitutes, merely entertainers.) Each time I went, they put me on display, singing or dancing for them while they would talk about me in front of me in the third person. "Isn't she cute? Can the gaijin speak Japanese?" Although they would speak to me in Japanese, and I would answer them likewise, it didn't hit them at first that I understood most everything they were saying. Often after carrying out an extensive conversation with me in Japanese, suddenly they would hold their hand over their mouth and exclaim, "Oh-I'm sorry-but you don't speak Japanese, do you?"

I learned to answer sarcastically, "Iie, Nihongo ga sukoshi mo wakarimasen. " No, I don't speak a word of it.

Mandy, Bill, and I took the same plane back to the United States at the end of our year. Japan had seemed mysterious and exotic before we had arrived, but once we got there, it seemed to lose all its mystery. As we grew accustomed to life in the Far East, the United States seemed to be the exotic country. Yet as soon as the plane took off, and we looked down over the landscape, Japan once again was the strange exciting country it had been in the beginning.

We knew we were supposed to have learned something in Japan besides the things we had set out to learn (language, culture, etc.) but we weren't sure what it was. We felt different, but we weren't sure how.