Lost in Shinjuku

Yesterday I went on a hunt for an art supply store called Sekaido somewhere near the O I O I store in Shinjuku... [pronounced maru e, not oui oui or oy oy, although that doesn't stop me from calling it that. Asshole gainjin behavior continues!] My friend B. and her friend J. met me there. I had heard of this place from a student whose grip on the English language is loose at best. It turns out that this store is, in fact, only near O I O I because it happens to be on the same street, albeit about ten blocks away.

After walking about five blocks and still no Sekaido in sight, J. asked a woman on the street if she knew where it was. This woman started to give directions in English [!] and then thought better of it. She turned and started leading us to the store. She went at least four blocks out of her way--in the opposite direction!--and dropped us off in front of the store. I felt really bad that the only thing I had on me that I could've offered her in thanks was a package of Spider-Man fruit snacks and there was no way I was going to part with those!

I guess if I had actually put any thought into it I wouldn't have been surprised at the cost of the paints. Since I hadn't put any thought into it, I was shocked.

I happened to look down and noticed that I had some kind of food or coffee or something on the front of my yellow shirt, as well as what looked like big drops of mud. [Can't take me anywhere!] I decided to part company and head home. I didn't want to zigzag back to the station the way we had come and so I started walking in the direction of the station from where we were. I found the trains, but couldn't find the entrance to the station anywhere. I wasn't lost, per se, because I knew where I was. I was in Shinjuku by the Tokyu Hands! I just didn't exactly know how to get where I wanted to be. I had been jaywalking in front of people that looked like they had an official-type job, it was raining, I was hot, and I had made a horrible mess on my shirt... In other words, I was in a foul mood and I just wanted to get home.

In order to spare myself the frustration of walking around in circles, I decided it was time to put those 20 words of Japanese I know to use. I gathered up my courage and went up to one of the official-type guys and said, "Odakyu wa doco desu ka?" It was really easy! He understood what I said! He knew what I wanted! He pointed me in the right direction. Within five minutes I knew exactly where I was. Within 15 minutes I was in the station. I should start asking directions more often!

Then the feeling of accomplishment came crashing down when an asshole businessman pushed me out of the way to grab a seat that I was about to sit in on the train... It's a wonder I didn't fall face first onto the floor. Thankfully I have perfected the art of giving mean looks and I believe that they're universal. It's just too bad that the damn businessman didn't even look my way...

Another example of me making an ass of myself...

I went to the video store, grabbed the video I wanted and went up to the counter. At what I thought was the appropriate time, I told the man that I wanted it for two days and three nights. [Which, in my extremely limited Japanese means I said, "Two, three," while holding up my fingers in case there was any confusion.] The video clerk started going into a very long tirade about something. As he was talking, I just kept saying, very quietly, "I don't understand what you're saying. I'm sorry. I don't understand," in English. When he had finished, he went through it again, only this time louder. I had the feeling that everyone in the store was looking at me and the fact that the damn clerk was now almost yelling wasn't helping... In the same quiet voice I just said, "Hi," and paid the money, took my video and slinked out of there...

While I was walking home I took the video out of the bag and looked at the receipt taped to it. The video was due back in a week. The man had been telling me that it was a week-long rental...

J-Pop? God help me...

It has been said that the reason Japan is [stereotypically] a racist country is that it's so closed off from the rest of the world geographically. Before the conveniences of modern travel--if you can call running through an airport like a maniac trying to find the damn gate and being given the fifth degree by people with no senses of humor "convenient"--pretty much the only people in Japan were Japanese and life was happy and nice. Then the gaijins came with their greasy food and strange languages and large bodies.

In speaking with my students I've found that a lot of the Japanese people are still very closed off... When asking what kind of food they like, most of them say, "Japanese." When asking whether they think Mexicans work harder than Japanese, they say, "Japanese work harder." [Incidentally, their argument there was that the cost of living is higher in Japan therefore they've got to work harder, which means they work a lot of overtime... In Mexico everything is cheap, therefore they don't have to work hard and it's easy. I think I was successful in keeping my shock and utter disbelief that I was actually hearing this bullshit hidden from the students...] When asking what kind of music they like, most of them say, "Japanese pop."

I had successfully avoided J-Pop, dodging offers from students to let me borrow their CDs & tuning it out when it's playing in commercials, TV shows and shops. However, one morning, when I was least suspecting it, the horror that is J-Pop found its way into my own home. My neighbor was blaring something that was so awful, so painful, so truly traumatizing that I couldn't help but listen as if in some bizarre trance. The more I listened, the more I thought about Ricky Martin. Is it a coincidence that J-Pop sounds exactly like Ricky Martin music? Could it be true that bad music around the world sounds exactly the same?

If only they would hire me..

On the first floor of the building where my school is, there's a store called Muji. Outside this store, on the street, there are store clerks that put together bicycles all day. They just sit out there on the street and build bikes. That's their job. That's what they do. No one bothers them. No one talks to them. No one asks them to explain the difference between, "Would you like me to..." and "Can I..." and "Let me..." It's just them, the bikes and their tools. I want this job. I want to build bikes.

Not sure whether you like a country? Go buy underwear!

I have chosen to find it amusing that about half of my bras have decided now is as good a time as any to die on me. Some of the bras didn't quite make it through the ordeal of the trip here. I think that maybe the airport workers who came in contact with my luggage were rather unhappy with the sheer size and weight of one of my suitcases and manhandled it just enough to crush the clasps and/or bend the underwires of too many of my bras... Really, I can't blame them. I was quite unhappy about the damn thing myself when trying to get through the airport when I arrived.

Across the street from my school there's a lingerie shop called Secret Room Tu Tu. I think that's a euphemism, much in the same way that a woman's nether region is called her, "delicate place." Of course, it's still very hard getting a straight answer out of anyone so I have yet to have that hypothesis confirmed.

Japan, like the rest of the world, operates on the metric system. I had no idea what size bra I would wear when measuring in centimeters. The kind ladies at my school wrote down phonetically how to say, "Can you measure me, please." [Saizu O Hakkate Kudasai] When they started telling me stories about their measurement experiences I asked them to tell me how to say, "Don't touch me please." [Sawara Naide Kudasai] Granted, I was told that this was rude and I shouldn't say it. They offered instead "Fuku O Kitamama De Onegaishimasu," [With clothes on, please]. As a last resort, they wrote out in Japanese something along the lines of, "I'm an American and therefore illiterate, deaf and dumb. Please help me get some bras. Please measure me, but try not to get too close. Space is very important to me. Thank you."

So I go into Secret Room Tu Tu and try to look busy while waiting on the people that were in there to leave. If I'm going to look like an asshole, which I most certainly was, I like there to be as few people in the room as possible. Once the other customers had left, I used one of the few Japanese words I think I might have mastered, that is, "Excuse me." The clerk walked towards me, although it was obvious that she didn't want to. Of course, I screwed up when asking her to measure me because I said, "O," twice. She got the gist. When she told me my size, I mimed writing it down, which she did, although she didn't want to write it on the pieces of paper I had brought with me. [In her defense, they were folded and for all she knew I had pulled them out of my underwear...]

I picked a couple bras that were in my price range [which, strangely enough, were the ones that I would've thought would be really expensive... It seems that the plain bras are more expensive than the embroidered kind.]. Thankfully, the padding--of which there was a lot--was removable and one of the bras fit. Because the shopping gods were smiling on me, it happened to be the cheapest [$19!] and came with a pair of underwear.

I'm beginning to really like this country.