Japan is the land of harmony, or “wa”. One of the most important traits for everyone to live peacefully in such a small country is to make sure that you don’t cause conflict or stand out too much. But I’m learning that it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t get your way, or you have to give in to people. It just means that you have to figure out way to get what you want without being confrontational. I learned about one useful technique to accomplish this at my kimono-wearing lesson this past weekend.

I had bought a beautiful antique obi (the thing that you tie around yourself at the waist) to go with my yellow kimono several months ago, but when I was finally ready to start practicing with it this weekend, my teacher discovered that it was a little too short. She suggested that I go to a kimono shop that she knows to get it lengthened, which you can do by adding other material to the parts that will be hidden when you tie it into an elaborate bow.

After she gave me all the information about what I should ask them to do, she had one last piece of advice for me. She said to me, “They are very fair at the shop, and they won’t try to cheat you, but they are running a business, so they’re going to try and sell you other stuff. Don’t buy anything else. Just tell them that you already have a lot of kimonos and accessories that were passed down from your mother.”

She then quoted a Japanese saying that essentially meant “sometimes it’s necessary to lie.” It gives white lies a whole new meaning.

I received an invitation for an exhibit from the Philadelphia Museum of Art today in the mail at work. The invitation was on thick paper and very attractively designed. But imagine my surprise, when I opened it up to see that the printed invitation was addressed “Dear Sir”. The Japanese side of it was just a normal invite.

It really never ceases to amaze me how Japanese people can get this sort of thing so wrong like this. There are so many people now who speak English especially in Tokyo. Couldn’t they have dug someone up and checked with them? Even if they didn’t, everyone has had at least 6 years of English, which is plenty of time to know that “Sir” is for men only.

My invite is going in the trash since the exhibit is obviously not meant for me.

I’ve been horrible about updating my blog. I think part of the reason is because I’ve gotten into updating my status on Facebook, and a lot of times, a line is all you need to share your thoughts with the rest of the world. But I finally found something that I need a little more space to write about.

Fourteen years ago, a good friend of mine — an American who was living in Japan for some time — got together with a bunch of his buddies to do a spoof of the Japan Times on April Fool’s Day. After going through a lot of trouble finding a printer, who was willing to print this, they ran several hundred copies and dropped them off at all of the government ministries in the early morning. The brouhaha, as a result, even made it on the ten o’clock news. My friend had given me a copy years ago, but I had all but forgotten about it until recently. The paper, however, is timeless in many respects, and definately priceless.

The paper has winners like the following:

Headline — Politicians Come Clean

In a bid to improve its flagging image, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party launched a policy of confessing to all prior crimes and infractions to demonstrate sincerity and deep regret. This follows last week’s announcement of a temporary amnesty program where all politicians confessing to sufficiently serious crimes will be eligible for discount fines, suspended sentences and frequent flyer miles.

The front page story about how the Kansai International Airport, which was being built at the time (on landfill) disappeared during unusually heavy rains while the construction crew was at lunch. The picture was of surfers riding past a floating control tower.

But the one that I couldn’t stop laughing about, even though it had nothing to do with Japan, was the tiny section at the back of the paper called “Today’s Chuckle”. It posed the question, “If a person, who eats vegetables is a vegetarian, does that make Jeffrey Dahmer a humanitarian?”

A few weeks ago, I decided to see what all the hubbub was about. You know, the hubbub surrounding that ever popular organization for retired drunks, condemned quitters and judgmental born-again Christians known as Alcoholics Anonymous.

For over a month now I’ve been drunk free. Notice how I didn’t say drink free. Drunk free means I allow myself a drink (as in one drink) at night, usually a scotch and usually around 9:00pm. I nurse the damn thing until the cows come home, shit all over the meadow, are butchered and appear in the meats section at your local grocers. Drunk free means I haven’t been buzzed or wasted. Drunk free means I’m craving sweets like crazy. Drunk free means I bought a pack of Marlboro Lights last week. And guess what!? It’s working.

At my first and only AA meeting here in Tokyo, I was confronted by the force of a collective raised eyebrow and an intense, accusatory gaze. It demanded to know, “What are you doing here?” To which I replied, “To learn more about the Church of Latter Day Saints.” Dead silence. I think I heard a cricket commit suicide.

I quickly learned that in order to attend the meetings regularly you had to stop drinking completely. If you didn’t, you weren’t welcome back. If you did, they had some cool-aid for you to drink.

So I’m going it alone. I honestly thought it would be harder than it has been. Will I get drunk in the future? Certainly. Will that future be anytime soon? Probably not. Why the fuck not? Because I like knowing that I have control over me and it’s become a bit of a game. And God knows, I like me a good game and will not give up so easily…give up drinking that is.

Japanese cabs used to not only be clean, but the drivers were some of the best there is. They knew every road, every shortcut, every trick for getting around traffic. Not anymore. Yes, the cabs are still clean. But the drivers are clueless. In this spirit, here is my list of cabs that I hate.

- Cab drivers, who deliberately take congested roads, thereby driving up the fare. Everyone knows that Roppongi Dori is busy especially in the evening. Don’t take it.
- Cab drivers, who don’t know where they’re going. If you’re going to be a cab driver, at least know where the major intersections are.
- Cab drivers, who only know the major roads, or at least pretend to. This adds on a few hundred yen sometimes.
- Cab drivers, who don’t know where they’re going but won’t admit it.
- Cab drivers, who drive slow on purpose.
- Lazy cab drivers, who drive by and pretend not to see you because they don’t want to pick up the fare.

I’m getting worked up just thinking about this.

Patrick and I went to the new Midtown buildling to dine with some friends at the Union Square Tokyo last month.
That in itself is a whole ‘nother story that we will go into on Fugudiaries (hint: it was terrible), but afterwards, we both used the bathrooms as people are wont to do before they leave a place. Because the restaurant itself doesn’t have a bathroom, customers have to leave the place to use the common one on the floor. At Midtown, you walk down a hall. The first left is a larger private bathroom for the handicapped with automatic doors that you can open and close with a button. The second left is the mens’ room and the womens’ is at the far end.

Well, as we were coming out, the handicapped bathroom opened up, and we were surprised to see not one, but two people inside. A woman with a very short skirt and a skimpy top walked quickly out, while a man was still inside looking like he was throwing up in the sink or something. Patrick’s theory is that she was a prostitute since she walked out without saying a word to the guy.

Until that day, I actually liked the handicapped bathrooms because they were large, private and often available even when there was a line for the ladies’ room. I just hadn’t considered how else people might take advantage of its roomy interior. Now I know.

Two things you might not have known — Japanese LOVE kitsch and the prime minister’s wife has a blog. If you’re wondering what those two have to do with each other, check out the photo of the Barney cushion on it.

You may wonder what that thing is. Please, let me enlighten you.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is what Japan’s First Lady decided to give the wife of the leader of the free world, aka Mrs. Bush, on her first state visit to the White House. Barney is their dog’s name. If it looks hand-made, it’s because it is. She says in her blog that she asked a friend of hers to make it. She also says Mrs. Bush loved it.

I, for one, would love to know what she really thought. Okay, I admit that I give people hand-knit sweaters as baby gifts (fyi: I’m a good knitter so it’s none of that lopsided stuff). And, maybe, just maybe, I would consider giving one to a muckety muck, who has everything in the world that I could afford. But a cushion???
It’s not even big enough for the dog!

Please let me know if anyone has seen this dumped in the garbage somewhere. Or would they burn something like this to make sure no one will find out and it doesn’t turn into an international incident?

I don’t know why, but Japanese LOVE slogans and mottos. If you walk into a train station, a poster will say, “Children are watching. Mind your train manners” or simply, “Walk! Don’t run”. Elevators in traditional office buildings might say, “Quiet please in the elevator. You don’t know who is listening” (which is actually pretty smart advice) or, like I saw the other day, “Greet your colleagues with a smile.” If you look around, I can guarantee that you will see slogans everywhere. In fact, until recently, men would walk around neighborhoods, clapping two blocks in a steady rhythym shouting, “Take care with fire!” in a solemn monotone. It’s a holdover from when people had wood-burning ovens or gas stoves with valves that needed to be closed every night. The practice has all but disappeared, though I know it’s still around in some areas because I heard it recently.

Japanese are trained in slogan-writing as a child. When I was in fifth grade, I remember homework, where we had to create our own poster about staying healthy. In sixth grade, we had to create a poster, about an environmental issue — I vaguely remember doing something about smoking, but there were others on littering or pollution.

The best one that I saw recently was a bathroom in an office building. The toilets were Japanese style, where you have to squat. Right at eye level, there was a piece of paper that said, “How you use the toilet is a reflection of yourself.”

It’s election season again. In Japan, this means that the city becomes infested all of a sudden with little trucks, vans and buses with candidates names on big boards on top, blaring a short speech asking everyone to vote for them. The right wingers I get — they post themselves at intersections or drive around major roads at any given time throughout the year, annoying people with “patriotic” right-wing music. Theirs is noise pollution. They live to disrupt. What I don’t get are these campaigners. Do people really reward them for driving around their neighborhood with microphones at 8:30 in the morning? Well, I don’t. They were there this morning, as I was coming out the door. I pointedly ignored them. And it was not without some satisfaction that I threw out my election ballot this evening when I got the mail (nevermind the fact that I wouldn’t have voted anyway).

The other night I rented Prom Night Two: Hello Mary Lou, a very silly 80’s slasher flick. Look, I enjoy scary movies, even when they are not at all scary but instead so stupid they are comedies. Besides, my partner is out of town on business so renting a real scary movie now would mean not sleeping at all.

The first and only time I saw this movie, until last night, was back in high school and given that I’m a gay man, I didn’t remember that the movie included a few vagina shots. Back then they were hairier than their present counterparts and so harder to miss but I wasn’t interested in that. Still, if those ‘gina shots were fuzzed-out when I first saw the movie, I’d be more likely to remember them. How can a pixeled vagina not cause more of a stir than a vagina al fresco?

Here in Japan they disagree, or at least the censors do. The offending vaginas were pixeled (pixelated?) out of view, fuzzed-out, and this offends me. Not only does it make me remember them more than I would if they were not censored, it makes me feel like a stupid child with an overprotective parent looking over my shoulder.

What will the censors do when Babel is released in Japan? When I saw that movie in The States and the Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi bared all, the first thing I thought was “How are the Japanese censors going to deal with this?” Incidentally, her performance was the best one in that movie, with or without a “money shot.”

As a “single” trailing partner in Japan, I’m not granted the rights afforded to married trailing partners. Japan, like the US, does not nationally recognize gay unions, so if you’re like me, you’re shit out of luck.

If you are a straight trailing partner and in a relationship but not married you find yourself in a similar situation. I’ve met a few women in this predicament here in the land of loveless marriages. It’s not the kind of information they share with their married lady friends over lunch at The American Club. But I’m not a married lady friend and I’m much younger than the married ladies these “single” ladies lunch with. So after ten or fifteen minutes with me over coffee or a cocktail, I become Oprah and they become my guests.

The other day, a “single” lady friend of mine told me that she and her partner were not married and that she had been doing the visa run thing every 90 days or so. I know this run well. It involves long, lonely plane rides back home and the ability to earn shitloads of American Airline miles. God love ‘em.

A couple of months ago she tried to extend her visa another six months. So she enlisted the help of a Japanese acquaintance, had her make some calls and then visited the dreaded immigration center in Shinagawa.

It turns out that in order to even be considered for an extension, she and her partner had to provide mortgage information, life insurance documents, joint bank account statements and a declaration of love to one another on paper. And, I shit you not, a letter from her partner’s parents declaring their support of this unmarried union.

My advice? If you can get married, do. Why put up with all this BS? And if he doesn’t want to marry you, I say go on a visa run and never come back.

I’ve said this before but I watch a lot of stupid Japanese TV. One of my favorites is a show that’s a little bit like Iron Chef, but the cooking is done by four members of a not-so-young-anymore boyband. They have a celebrity guest each week, who orders whatever he or she wants. At the end, the guest determines the winner — if she’s a woman, she awards the winners with a kiss on their cheek, and if he’s a man, he brings gifts for the winners.

The show occasionally invites American celebrity guests, and I’ve seen ones with Cameron Diaz and Madonna. These are enlightening because they provide you with a glimpse of what these people are really like since the point of the show is to interact with them. It was fun, for example, to watch Cameron Diaz eat. I’ve never seen anyone enjoy eating so much. She ate everything with such obvious pleasure (In her words: “I love anything fried. Cardboard – if it was fried, I’d eat it”). Madonna, on the other hand, wouldn’t touch the tempura that they served because it was fried. Typical.

But the most interesting one yet was the one I just saw with Nicholas Cage. He covered his mouth with his hand while he ate, so no one could see him taking a bite. At first, I thought he was pretending to be like some Japanese women who do that. But then, he hid behind his jacket while he took a bite out of a pizza because it was too large and awkward to hide with his hand. After the Japanese production staff began laughing (you could hear them in the background), and the MC commented on it, he explained a little uncomfortably that he’s never eaten in public before. I presume he meant that he’s never eaten on television before, though that makes no sense because there must have been movie scenes in which he’s seen eating. Whatever he meant, one thing was clear. He looked incredibly ridiculous. Makes you wonder if he’s that self-conscious about everything.

When I first came to Japan three years ago, I made a huge effort to make sure that I fit into the Japanese culture and spoke Japanese properly, so I didn’t seem like one of those returnees with an accent and a complete disregard for Japanese manners. When I look back on it, I realize how exhausting those efforts were.

Now I’ve pretty much given up any pretense and effort to be more Japanese than I am. I’m in a new job, where the environment is 100% U.S.A., I hang out mostly with expat friends, and I include foreign words freely into my Japanese even when I’m not sure the word is understood. I even order my coffee in English in the coffee shop of my foreign-owned office building. In short, I live in an American bubble in Tokyo and much happier for it.

I teach elementary school children at an afterschool program. Half are full on Japanese and half are half and halfs–one parent local, one parent gaijin. But without any exceptions, they are all cuter than cute. We’re talking so cute you just want to rethink your whole attitude towards not having kids cute. But not really. Maybe. That’s why what I witnessed, yet again, this weekend really bothered me.

Cute gaijin kids traveling with their parents on the subway never get second looks from the locals. True, it’s rare that a cute local kid will raise an eyebrow. But there is one type of kid that I’ve noticed gets more looks and smiles than a shapely whore in pink heels. The French Kid.

Sure, the French Kid is a gaijin but remember that the Japanese worship all things French and that includes their fugly rodent spawn. I wasn’t surprised but I was angry when I saw no fewer than three Japanese adults smile and admire the ugliest little croissant I have ever seen. She had the forehead of that popular Mongolian sumo wrestler, the ears of a rat and the eyes of a nocturnal marsupial. But none of these horrible deformities stopped the offenders from smiling at her like demented clowns.

I want to see more locals smiling at their home-grown kiddies and even (am I asking too much?) at the half and halfs. Please?

Growing up in the U.S. and Japan, being a Japanese citizen with permanent residence, and being brought up by Japanese parents who wanted to see me integrated with the U.S. culture, I naturally had identity issues just like anyone else with a similar background. Even now, I often feel like I’m more Japanese than American in the U.S. and more American than Japanese in Japan. 

But there are certain times when I realize how American I really am, and the last couple of days is one of them. If you live in the U.S., you’ll know that I’m talking about the elections. The first thing I did when I got home from the show (see “Sesame Street for adults”), was flip on the television to see, who was winning. The first thing I did in the morning was flip on the television again to see who won. Then I sent my sister to go buy breakfast and the paper, so we could read more about it. I’ve never voted because I don’t have the right to vote, but even so, I was surprised by how excited I was to see the Democrats take back at least the House and possibly the Senate.  Then I compare it to my utter disinterest in Japanese politics.

Not really. I’ve been glued to those television travel programs they’ve been showing lately on Nat Geo or Discovery. I forget which. It’s always “Somewhere Revealed!” Last week, Isabella Rossalini was hamming it up for her native land in “Italy Revealed!” Don’t you wish you could talk like her on cue? Especially while ordering at an Italian restaurant. “Orzo, Daaling.”

So Friday was Culture Day, a national holiday here. We didn’t visit the controversial Yasukuni Museum on Friday because I’d rather share an elevator with Ann Coulter than go to a Japanese museum on Culture Day where you know it’s going to be wall to wall locals. You see, here in the Land of Order, one cannot simply wander thru an exhibit, focusing on this, skipping that, walking from here to there. That would be too easy.

Here there is an imaginary line that everyone follows. You baby step it past the entire exhibit, rarely stopping, never walking, shoulder to shoulder. Couple that with the Japanese version of air con and everyone in sweaters because it is the fall after all, and here you dress for the season, not the weather, and you have one sweaty, steamy, seething Mexican.

We visited Yasukuni on Saturday to avoid all that. As a shrine, it’s nothing to write mom home about. But no one really goes to see the shrine, not the foreigners anyway. You go to see history rewritten inside the museum. The museum building itself is rather imposing for being squat. We entered, bought our tickets and headed up the escalator to the beginning of the exhibit. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting to see but I ended up with a history lesson that was both hilarious and sobering. If history is written by the winners, then you can’t fault the loosers for keeping a stiff upper lip under overwhelming humiliation.

It’s not the Rape of Nanking, it’s the Nanking Incident (just a little oopsie). It’s not colonialism, it’s liberating Asia from those European rat bastards (besides wouldn’t you rather have occupiers that look like you?). It’s not flying fighter planes into battleships, it’s…okay, it’s flying fighter planes into battleships. There are even paintings of fighter planes on fire diving into battleships. Just plain wrong. But is it art?

I left feeling slightly depressed and as always, in need of a drink. I also really wanted to play Battleship! B12. Miss. F2. Hit! You sunk my Battleship!

I haven’t been home around this time of the year for the past few years, but if my memory serves me right, many stores have already put up holiday decorations, encouraging you to start thinking about buying gifts and decorations. Well, Christmas is here in Japan as well — encroaching earlier and earlier every year. Tokyu Hands has a huge display of Christmas stuff as does Daiso, everybody’s favorite 100 yen shop, and convenience stores, which are starting to sell winter candy (white chocolate, tiramisu flavors…). It almost reminds me of home… except for the fact that Christmas is a commercial holiday here. Couples and children celebrate it, but I doubt many of them can tell you the meaning of Christmas.

I realize that most people would probably argue that Christmas is commercial in the U.S. as well, but as a Christmas-connoisseur, I have to say that it’s not the same.

Those who’ve been to Japan know about the Japanese love for packaging. Candies, chocolates and cookies are individually wrapped and sealed in a bigger bag at grocery stores. At department stores, you find individually wrapped snacks in bags in fancy tin boxes, wrapped in a beautiful paper and then placed in a bag before they hand it to you. It’s all quite ridiculous. I’ve yet to reconcile this behavior with the Japanese almost-obsession with envirnomental issues. But that’s another issue.

Given this propensity for packaging, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when my forwarded mail came packaged by the post office after I moved. Mail that was sent to my old address gets placed in a clear plastic envelope. A sticker with my new address is neatly placed in the center. It’s really amazing.

The past two nights, I`ve been woken up by a mistaken phone call from The Obituary Store of all places. I know this even though they just hung up without saying anything the first night because we have caller ID. While I’m sure they had no clue that they called up a Chicago VoIP line on the other side of the world, it was definately jarring to see “Obituary Store” on your phone at 3 a.m.. But as annoyed as I was, curiosity got to me. I’d never heard of an obituary store.

A quick search on Google pulled up the Web site. The store was apparently started by a former insurance agent, who discovered a talent for writing obituaries when he wrote one for his late uncle.
According to a National Examiner article on the Web site, the store sells obituaries from $95 to $800 for a laminated life story with photos. But wait! If you register today (you have to register even if it’s just to check out the online store), you can buy a memorial plaque for $29.95!

Who knew there was a business in this.

I’m watching a show right now called “Font of Trivia”. The show usually consists of introducing trivia that nobody knows, but part of it consists of finding the answer to questions that viewers submit, thereby creating new trivia.

The question of the day — Which profession can run across a 10 cm wide, 10 meter bridge that is 10 stories high the fastest. The candidates: a sprint athlete (Japanese college champion), a window cleaner, a construction worker (champion of construction worker competition), a mountain climber (foremost female mountain climber), a Buddhist monk (can walk across coal), a circus trapeze artist, or a rescue worker (won Japanese rescue worker competition 8 straight years) and a stunt man. Just for point of reference, on the ground, the sprint runner was the fastest, followed by the rescue worker and trapeze artist.

In order to do this experiment, they found the one 10 story building in the country that would allow them to film — the top of a city hall in the southern most island of Kyushu. It took them 10 nights to put up this bridge. The sprint runner went from 2 seconds and change on the ground to more than 5 seconds 10 stories high. The stunt man falls off (They wear a safety belt), but climbs back on and finished in 20 seconds. Third place was the construction worker, who is obviously used to heights. Second place was the trapeze artist who had brilliant balance going for him. And first place was the rescue worker, who made it in 3.2 seconds. Ta-da!

I used to watch this show all the time, but this was probably the best trivia that they’ve come up with out of all the shows I’ve seen. Words really can’t do it justice.