Always Eighteen

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Always Eighteen: Japan Edition

FIRST TIME IN KOBE

June 26th 2009 13:00

I could tell I was going to get into another fight when my host mother moved me from their large and spacious room to their spare guest room. Here is a picture of that room:

“This is stupid,” I told her. "I'd have to curl in four places to actually lie down."

She laughed. She said that it would only be for tonight, because her daughter was inviting friends over.

“Whatever,” I said. “Anyway I’m going.” My plan was to call a friend of a friend of my mother’s that night. He was apparently living in Japan, and my intention was to call him and ask if I could spend the remainder of my Japanese stay at his house instead of the hell I was in.

I caught a train and met Trevor at a McDonald’s in Kobe. It was great to see him again. It was always great to see my friends again.

It was the first time I’d been to Kobe, and I instantly liked it. It looked like a mix between Tokyo and Osaka: there were large buildings and imposing crowds, but there were also trees and parks and a certain peaceful calm that Tokyo could never hold still.

“Dean,” Trevor said, “check this out.”

He brought me to a Konami arcade game place and showed me the types of machines they had. One arcade machine was a giant robot you could actually ride in and virtually control. Another consisted of a giant screen displaying a soccer game, and the players, who were sitting in front of electronic desks, would place cards on these desks and then stare at the screen. I walked around and looked for free tokens.

We then met a girl who gave us a map and started looking for a giant Buddha statue from the map that looked interesting. We walked for some time and found a dockside area with a live band playing instead. There was a large structure of something undefinable in the distance, and for a while Trevor kept nudging me as I kept staring at the statue and thinking of nothing. There was a small market nearby that sold fake clothing and cheap bracelets. I bought a bracelet and walked up to a girl and asked her if she could put it on for me. My Japanese was improving, so I asked her what colour she liked more: red, or yellow? And she smiled and we hugged and Trevor asked for her email and we left. We found a giant dog and patted it and took a photo of it; its owner was a short woman with red hair. We found a shrine hidden behind some trees and walked around while a monk constantly watched us. We continued our trek to find the giant Buddha but found ourselves heading towards a temple instead

And as I walked up the quiet path and as the evening began to rise I rang a giant bell and watched a wedding take place. Trevor told me that there are certain things you should do when ringing a bell in a temple in Japan: donate money, pull a rope that rings the bell, bow, pray, clap twice. Trevor then said he might be wrong. I looked at the woman, at the priest, at the priests, at what they were wearing. We then left and spotted an adult DVD store. Trevor tried to get in but it didn’t open so we headed to the central city area, to a Seven Eleven and bought beer. We found someone singing and playing the guitar and selling his CDs and we drank and watched him. Trevor pointed to a hostess bar, I pointed at a hostess. Trevor told me about the first girl he ever loved, the one from high school. I told him about Eva, about how I was still in love with her even though I hadn’t seen her in probably two years. The imperfect sky above us and the endless stream of people reminded me that time was worthwhile. It was supposed to be cold but I was quite drunk by then so I didn’t feel it.

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SAKE PIKACHU

June 16th 2009 03:03

The week went by miserably. The longer I lived in the house, the messier I realised it was: underwear hung from everywhere, there were piles and piles of things occupying every free space besides the main entrance, they had no pantry – every bit of food and bottle of sauce and bit of leftover and piece of rubbish was left on the sink. My presents from Australia lay on the floor, unwrapped. I’d have fights with my host mother because I’d always come home late. I’d also have fights with her because neither of us could understand what we were saying. She took me to the groceries once and repeatedly asked me what the hell I wanted and I kept shrugging and saying,

“Nandemoii,” which I thought meant, “Just buy me whatever," and she’d look at me for a few painful minutes with an expression I couldn’t read.

Saturday came and I didn’t want to spend it with my host family, so I walked on over to Natalie’s house. She was eating katsudon with her host mother and another girl from our group, Celine.

“I’m spending the day with you guys!” I yelled at the lot of them, and to my surprise, they immediately agreed.

After taking us to a twelve storey, incredibly packed factory outlet in Osaka, Natalie’s host mother drove us to a sake souvenir factory that she loved to go to. She led us in and showed us all the bottles of sake. She went up to the girl behind the counter, and, after a few mumbles here and there she turned around and grinned at us. She pointed at the girl behind the counter, who was now pouring us unlimited shot glasses of sake to taste test. Ten minutes later we were all completely drunk.

“Party!” Natalie’s host mother yelled before kissing me quickly on the lips.

“That’s not right. That’s not right at all,” Celine slurred.

We then stumbled over to a nearby restaurant that had a largish statue of an ice cream cone in front of it. A lot of restaurants seemed to have a largish statue of an ice cream cone in front of it, and the ice cream would swirl upwards in the same way shit would swirl upwards. That particular restaurant sold everything made out of sake. They had biscuits made out of sake, cookies made out of sake, ice cream made out of sake. We ate the ice cream made out of sake.

“This is, this is the greatest night I’d had in a long time,” I said.

Natalie’s host mother pulled out these sunglasses from her purse. They were strange sunglasses: the white frames were covered with stickers of different coloured Pikachus. She told us to take turns putting the sunglasses on and looking through them, because apparently, when you look through them, you’d see Pikachus all over the place, jumping out of counters, looking through the pavement, attempting to hide behind your sake-laced food.
“It’s best to put them on when you’re driving,” she told us.

Everything slowed down when it came to my turn to try out the sunglasses. It was one of those moments when a noise in the background suddenly dies; a noise that you didn’t know existed until it actually stopped existing, like an air conditioner taking a break or a motor suddenly coming to a halt. My ears popped slightly and I suddenly had a feeling that there could be blood. I didn’t want to show them that things were trembling, something was forming. I looked at the sunglasses for a long while before finally putting them on.

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BLACK TISSUES AND THE BRIEF I'LL MISS YOU

June 3rd 2009 07:18

Our first class was called “Japanese Culture” and it was introducing ourselves and it was running around and it was playing games with girls who couldn’t understand me. There was one game where I shoved the teacher and screamed,

“You’re it! You’re fucking it!”

And then I realised the game wasn’t tiggy.

The six of us Australian students sat within our own little group in the cafeteria, commenting on how good and cheap the food was. Once in a while Trevor would wink at a girl and make her blush. I don’t know whether if it was from a few dirty jokes being passed around, or if it was from Natalie complaining about something, or if it was the fact that I was slowly starting to remember everyone’s names, but I was honestly enjoying their company. Maybe I just didn’t want to return to my host family.

It turned out that the red headed waddling girl is named Lauren. “Hey guys,” this Lauren said, handing us all some candies, “try these Japanese candies. They’re Calpis flavoured candies.”

No one wanted to hang out afterward our classes – they all wanted to return early to their host families.

I frowned. “I’m going to miss you all.”

When the short day was over I caught a bus home with Natalie, who showed me the train we had to catch afterwards. She then showed me her black gloves and asked me if I liked them. She told me that it was cold in this area, so tomorrow, she wanted me to come with her to buy some ear phone things or whatever to protect her ears. As we exited the train station we noticed someone handing out free packets of tissue paper.

“Check this out, Dean,” she said, pulling something from her purse. “Black tissue paper. They were giving out black tissue paper yesterday. Isn’t Japan amazing?”

I didn’t want the day to end, I didn’t want the sun to come down. But the day did end, the sun did come down.

“What a prick,” I sighed.

I walked Natalie home, waved her goodbye. I really didn’t want to head to my home, so I walked around the block; I found a bakery and looked at some of the bread and asked the girl behind the counter if I could just sit around there for a few hours longer, just looking at the bread. She laughed and said no, please leave. I left and explored the block. It was quiet and peaceful and there were a few people on bicycles. An old, hunchbacked woman looked at me and smiled.

Sakamoto Ryuichi - Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence

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ANGELS AND DOREMONS

May 21st 2009 13:51

I truly apologise for such a late entry. I’ve been investing too much of my time and attention on writing my second manuscript; I’ve now completed the first draft. Anyway I hope all is well with you all.

I woke up at about five in the morning because I couldn’t sleep. My host mother or “Mama” or whatever the hell she wanted me to call her gave me two pieces of toast and a glass of warm water for breakfast and asked me a number of questions I couldn’t understand. She then told me that I’ll be late, that I should run to the train station to meet Natalie. I said, Sure, but by the time I headed out Natalie was in front of my house. Apparently I was so late she decided to meet me there instead.

“Hi!” she beamed.

“Hi,” I said.

My host mother followed the both of us to the station, which was only a few minutes away. She then pressed a number of things on a computer and gave me a ticket and said something and smiled and waved the both of us goodbye.

“Okay,” Natalie said, taking off her gloves and then pulling out a map and timetable. “I’ve worked out the route for both of us to take in the mornings. We can catch a bus this morning just to see the path, and, if it’s not too long, we can walk or jog tomorrow morning to save money and work out.”

Natalie told me about her host family during the bus trip. After the awkward lunch with them the other day I expected her to say something awful about her first night there. But she didn’t. She had the time of her life. They were funny and inquisitive and loved her presents and kept giving her food. She said that for breakfast, her host mother gave her a Japanese pizza, a bowl of salad, an egg, some tea, some milk, some yoghurt and some toast. She asked me what I had.

“Yeah, pretty much the same.”

We hopped off the bus and Natalie instantly spotted a 99 yen store. We rushed inside and fair enough, everything was 99 yen. I quickly found a few cans of beer and bought them. We headed out, slightly happier, and headed for the university which was apparently nearby. I pulled out a can of beer to have a much needed drink but Natalie wouldn’t let me; she didn’t understand that it’d been more than a whole day since I’d had alcohol.

As soon as we walked into the university, girls started taking photos of Natalie. They screamed,

KAWASUGIRU!

Which means extremely cute. She blushed and hid behind me and my bag of beers.

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OUT OF THE FRYING PAN AND INTO THE SUSHI

May 1st 2009 01:17

On the drive to my host mother’s house she told me a bunch of things I couldn’t understand, and I responded with things that she couldn’t understand. I’d always say, “What?” and she’d always ask, “Hm?”

We parked at some store where she went to pick up a dress. A number of her friends were there, and they looked at me up and down and said something, so I asked them, “What?” and they laughed. They gave me an incredibly hard piece of candy and made me eat it right in front of them. For no good reason there was a tiny dog there, just running around, and they made me pat it and stroke its ears.

My mother picked out her dress from a rack and told them a number of things before leading me to her car and heading to her home. After another ten minutes of “What?” we finally arrived.

Her home, which would be my home for a month, looked like this:

My host mother said something and opened the front door and let me in. When I looked inside I was surprised: the house looked worse than my room. All this time I’d assumed that every Japanese home was clean, but this home reminded me of one of the New York subway tunnels you’d see in the movies. There was litter everywhere, there were strange smells coming from every direction, it was dark. She brought me into the kitchen: there was no pantry – everything was scattered messily on the sink. My host mother pointed to a corner and I suddenly flinched. I didn’t know that somebody was actually sitting there. I guessed that she was the daughter, the one described in the document about my host family. She’s two years older than I am and is incredibly pretty. I sat down opposite to her. From her broken English I gathered she actually stayed in Sydney for two months. From my broken Japanese she gathered nothing.

Eventually my host brother and father walked inside the crowded room. I said hi to them but they said nothing back. My host mother, who’d been talking on the phone then, quickly handed it to me. She said,

“Um, nephew. Only speak in English.”

“Are you sure?”

My host mother nodded. The problem was the person on the other end of the line could only say “hello” and that was it. So we were there, on the phone, completely silent, my host family just staring at me, for five minutes. We then had dinner, which consisted of me not understanding anything my host mother was asking me and the rest of the family not saying anything to me at all and ignoring my questions. I was advised by the scholarship people to bring them a souvenir from Australia so, grinning, I handed them a stuffed toy koala and some chocolates. They glanced at it, told me to put it on the ground, and said nothing.

I went to bed that night missing my friends.

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HOW I MET MY MOTHER

April 24th 2009 03:40

Natalie and I felt like little orphans sitting on the other side of a display window, waiting for our host parents to come and choose us.

“Seriously, Dean,” she kept going, “if my host family is shit, I’m walking to your house no matter what. You know I can’t speak Japanese that well. ” She looked at our documents. “And this says my host family can’t speak any English whatsoever. I mean, what if I like, get raped?”

I ignored her. Eventually a short, worried looking woman came and stopped herself in front of us. She was wearing a green jacket with prints of gigantic Chinese-style flames on each of her arms. Arms akimbo and still looking worried, she started this five minute monologue that neither Natalie nor I could understand; we just nodded. Eventually this woman’s worried exterior receded and let out a relaxed, friendly smile. We followed her to her car. She kept trying to talk to us during the drive to wherever the hell we were going; all Natalie and I could do was look at each other in confusion, then look back at the mother and nod. I pulled out my Japanese-English dictionary; the crazy woman tapped it and laughed like a maniac. We arrived at her home. She pointed to a room that had an altar and a photo of an elderly man on top of it, muttered something and then told Natalie to place her luggage in it. My luggage was still in the car, and from the few words I could understand from this woman, my real host mother was late and that she’d be picking me up from there.

We walked upstairs to what was probably the family room. The strange lady’s son was there, just sitting there. He was this big, fifteen year old kid, probably the biggest fifteen year old I’ve ever seen in my entire life. He was nearly twice my height. He didn’t say anything so I went and asked him,

“Hey, listen, do you like anime?”

He looked at me for a second before turning back around to face nothing. I glanced at Natalie, who shrugged. The woman stepped out of the kitchen and, smiling, gave us tea as well as mochi. Natalie nudged me. She didn’t like food like mochi so I had to eat her portion, too. But I didn’t mind. After some time of just nodding to the woman and eating the damn mochi and having an urge to find alcohol and cigarettes and drink and smoke and drink and smoke, another woman came upstairs to join us. She was a largish woman with long curly hair and glasses and big lips. She spoke to the crazy woman and they joked around. The crazy woman pointed at me and the bigger woman’s eyes followed. She looked at me, and, smile fading, nodded for a second, then continued her conversation. The bigger woman then indicated for me to follow her. The crazy woman smiled at me and said, “Goodbye.”

“What? Why? Why goodbye?”

But no one understood, so they made me take my luggage from the crazy woman’s car and then transfer it to the bigger woman’s car. The bigger woman, unsmiling and slightly irritated, muttered that for the next month, she’ll be my mother and that I should call her mama. I sighed.

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FEAR AND LOATHING IN SMALL OSAKA

April 8th 2009 03:59

What I first noticed about our host university were the girls. There were girls everywhere, and even if it was winter they loved to wear short skirts and carry designer handbags. They glanced at us and giggled. Some even pulled out their mobiles and began taking photos.

“What if they’re just looking at us because we’re sweating and it looks like we haven’t slept in days?”

Trevor ignored me and marched on to the head office with everyone else. Before finally finding the university, the seven of us had been travelling, lost, for over three hours. One of the girls even cried. Natalie said she missed Brisbane already and hated how short everyone was. We reached the office and were introduced to the woman who’d be running our program, Yumiko. She wore short shorts with black stockings and had a sleepy look on her face. She never smiled. Reading a piece of paper, she told us a number of things in Japanese that I couldn’t understand whatsoever. I glanced at Trevor. He was asleep.

Yumiko ushered us into a small room where we were supposed to wait for our host parents. We sat there, tired, bewildered, and one by one, as two hours passed by, each of us were taken away by our host parents until it was only Natalie and I remaining. She looked at me.

“If I have shit parents I’m going to your house right away.”

I rolled my eyes and said nothing. I’d been living independently and psychedelically and drunkenly in Japan for the past week; I enjoyed my jazz discussions with Trevor and the way we’d both survive passed midnight and find ourselves flying through flashing lights and music and Hiromi Uehara and actions of no regret. But now he was gone, taken to the home of some strange couple.

“I’m scared, Dean,” Natalie eventually admitted.

The room felt smaller, the world told us that it was a quiet place to live in. We waited.

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THE FAR FAR AWAY OSAKA UNIVERSITY

April 5th 2009 10:47

Around this time I was excited by my new group but also irritated by them. In particular I was irritated by Natalie, who always found something wrong. She didn’t like cheap food or running underneath the rain and screaming. I like cheap food and running underneath the rain and screaming. She found out from our itineraries that my host family lived right next to hers, so she kept telling me,

“We’re going to live near each other and be best buddies, Dean.”

This worried me.

After buying a few souvenirs we packed our bags and checked out and caught a train to the small town where our University was supposed to be. It was a long walk; the last time I sweated that much was when Trevor and Takkun and I sprinted from the guy who pushed his cigarette into my face. I was hung over and ready to fall asleep and vomit in my sleep; the only thing that kept me going was everything around me: the winter, the people, the stores, the sounds, the plants - everything in the country was beautiful. One girl in our group, Lauren, decided to lead the way, apparently because she’d been in Japan before and was more fluent in Japanese than all of us. After about an hour she stopped. Tired, we all stopped behind her.

“Guess what? I’m lost.”

We sighed.

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NATALIE

March 13th 2009 03:02

It was night time and it was humid when we met the rest of the group. We introduced each other but I quickly forgot everyone’s names, so I remembered them by their appearances: the fatty with glasses, the high maintenance brunette, the tall pretty faced but slightly overweight girl, the red haired waddling girl from class, the one with the bad weight and height problem, the body odour guy. We all met at the entrance to Shinimamiya station in Osaka – they’d been waiting for Trevor and I for a few hours – and in the background from a tinny radio somewhere Bob Dylan sang his own version of The House of the Rising Sun. This guy in a business suit looked at us foreigners up and down and muttered something to his companion. They both laughed.

Red haired waddling girl from class: “Okay, I want to show you boys our hostel!”

We all hired a hostel the night before the actual scholarship started to get to know each other more. The girls wanted to go cheap, which I suppose was good for Trevor and I – after our intense first week in Japan we had a combined value of ten dollars.

We went and checked in: we all had individual one bedroom rooms, which were about three metres long and were just wide enough to squeeze through. My room made a constant creaking noise and smelt like freshly released semen. There was an old TV force fitted right in front of my bed, as well as a VHS player (I later found out that a lot of people in Japan still used VHS and hadn’t upgraded to using DVDs). In the VHS player was a tape. So I turned the TV on, put the AV on and pushed the video in and pressed play. The video was of this ghost woman just screaming and screaming at the screen. My heart jolted and I immediately pressed stop and thought about The Ring. I tried to eject the tape but it wouldn’t. I unplugged the TV and hurried out of my room.

“Why do you look so scared, Dean?” One of the girls giggled.

“It doesn’t matter.”

We spent the rest of the night getting to know one another by having beers in the first floor of the hostel. Some guy joined us, also Australian, who was in Japan to find a partner. He was a crazy guy who liked to swear and take his shirt off a lot. He was a racist, too, which didn’t make sense. After talking and drinking with everyone I soon came to conclude that I probably won’t get along with any of them. I suddenly realised that I was in Japan, that I was a stranger and that Brisbane was a dream that walked off and hadn’t come back. I looked up from my drink on the table towards the high maintenance brunette, who complained a lot and decided to use Facebook on the computers rather than talk to us. As if my eyes made a Hear Me Hear Me sort of noise she instantly turned around from her computer screen and spotted me, and we looked at each other, and she let out a small crease of a smile and so did I, and the next supposed brief instance became slow and pulled behind before the universe reverted back to normal.

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GOODBYE KYOTO MONKEY SIGN, GOOD EVENING OSAKA

March 1st 2009 10:39

I woke up with all my things still unpacked and sprawled all over the place. Trevor was still asleep. I turned the television on and flicked around until I saw CSI Miami dubbed in Japanese; I flicked the channel again to find CSI New York dubbed in Japanese. I pulled out a bottle of whiskey from Trevor’s bag and poured some in a glass and gulped a bit of it down to wake me up. There’s something about drinking whiskey that makes me feel like some sort of sophisticated wise man who wears a suit and hides his sadness and has a big leather chair. I looked around the place: our whole tiny hostel room smelt like cheese snacks and vomit. Trevor grunted, swore at me, fell back asleep. That was our seventh day – the day we were supposed to meet the rest of the group and actually start our study scholarship.

If you haven’t been up to date with everything, I’m in Japan because Vicki introduced me to someone who enjoyed a few of my short stories and decided to grant me a study scholarship to the country. To be joining me was Trevor, who travelled around all over Japan with me for a week prior to the scholarship, as well as one guy and five other girls from a University who I’d never really spoken to.

Trevor and I said our goodbyes to the guy in the hostel as well as some other residents (Germans and Koreans) we’d met, and we hopped over the pedestrian crossings one last time, waved passed our favourite restaurant one last time: we were glum – we thought it’d be the last time we’d see Kyoto. So we stayed a little bit longer; we wondered about the gigantic train station and the gigantic Christmas tree behind its rear, we explored the city behind it. We bumped into this girl I met in a party in Brisbane so we went with them to a karaoke bar and shared free drinks and cigarettes from smiling businessmen. After a few more drinks and awkward kisses and fooling around and wondering about it was nine in the evening and we were already two hours late for meeting the rest of the group. We sang our farewell and zoomed off to Osaka in a shinkansen.

Trevor sort of said something like: “We had our fare share – well I had my fare share – of beautiful women, we drank and met people and learnt things about ourselves and cruised the night towards morning… Dean, this is the life… we truly are spoilt.” Trevor smiled as the bullet train did not rattle. I wanted to thank him for telling me about Coltrane and all the wonders of jazz but I said nothing. Our bullet train stopped. We picked up our big bags and headed out sweating – it was a warmer than Kyoto. We weren’t tired. We checked our watches and asked for directions. We were in Osaka – the real story was just about to begin.