Saturday, January 27th, 2001
I wake up about 3:00 or 4:00 to six inches of very wet snow. Echo wants to take me to a bar. Jesus! Doesn't this woman ever stop? Well, it is probably good...she will keep Lester so busy and or drunk he won't be able to get into trouble. We go back to the local surf/rasta bar, Westwood, and I get to meet Andy and Arnie. Whew! These are my kind of guys; mature and smart enough that we can sit around discussing cultural relativism and international relations, and the next minute they are having a snowball fight. Andy is a Scot...Lester says that Andy is the man when it comes to Japan. I guess he has been living here for about five years. He is fluent. MI-6 wants to hire him as a British "cultural consultant" on the Far East. Gulp! Arnie is....a man with a slight accent that could be British English, but I gather he is Icelandic (either that, or he is just really interested in and proud of Iceland for some reason) yet he lived in Flagstaff, Arizona for a while too. He says learning American English is easy...just watch about two hundred American movies! Sakamoto-san, a Japanese student who studied with all of these foreign whackos eventually shows up with his girlfriend and one of her friends. No suprise, but the women hardly say boo except to compliment my hairstyle in Japanese. Echo is strangely quiet, but I have a ball talking with Andy and Arnie.

The bar is on the second floor with an narrow exterior spiral staircase. Andy lead us out, and I hear him say,"Hmmm...look at this..." He is playing with the melting rained-on slushy snow on the railing at the top of the stairs, and after picking up each succesive handful he rather disdainfully drops the slush over the edge. After about the fourth time of repeating this, he looks down, and says with very-knowing mock surprise, "Oh! Is that Arnie's bike seat?...I think it is." Arnie immediately goes into a fake rage, putting on a great show, while Andy bounds away down the stairs with joy at what he has accomplished. Not much beyond pretend heroics happens in the ensuing slush fight until Andy pops up from behind his cover and turns to get more slush. At this instant Arnie somehow lands a double-handful right above the back of Andy's collar, but below the back of his hat. The nanosecond he sees the mostly-liquid projectile connect with Andy's neck, Arnie spins around, jumping for joy, yelling and punching the air....and missing the best part of it all; the shock of the ice combines with the force of the blow and causes Andy's feet to shoot out forward from underneath him. He sort of catches himself behind his back with his hands, but he also sort of falls ass-first in a deep, slushy, muddy, 32 degree puddle. To top it all off, Andy's errant feet hit his own bicycle, knocking it off it's kickstand, and causing it to fall on top of him in the six-inch deep puddle! Hehehe! We are all hysterical.

The slush is the very reason Echo and I left the bikes at home, so we end up running through the four-to-six-inch deep slush lake that is the sidewalk, trying to keep up with the bikes without getting our feet wet. We don't accomplish either goal, but catch up to the guys at Saitama University International House. It is Kate from Australia's going away party. I meet Kate from Australia and she is very nice. The official funny thing of the day: After chatting for a while, she lights up and starts smoking. She pauses, offers me a cigarette, and I turn her down. Kate refuses to believe that I am not a dark horse as a young American non-smoker. I tell her about the illegality of smoking in public in Corvallis, and about how tobacco is not cool among my peers. "Yeah, but that's bulls**t _everyone_ young everywhere still smokes!" She says that it is illegal in Australia also, but all of her friends still smoke. I reply that it must be challenging when your choice is in your own house or outside, and she says, "Yeah, or a bar, or a restaurant..." Exactly, Kate from Australia, not in a Corvallis bar. She stops, looks at the cigarette in her hand, and then apologizes and runs into the kitchen, holding the lit cigarette up to the exhaust fan when she is not dragging on it, and seems to want to continue our conversation by shouting between rooms. I tell her she is being silly, but she doesn't believe me. I think she had been drinking as she seems to feel that coming back into the other room would entail being rude around a non-smoker (and in this she is miles ahead of most Japanese.) Hehehe! I find the whole incident more amusing than anything, and our arguing is very good-natured and fun. She gives me her e-mail address, telling me that she can get me a job in Japan! She says, "Do you know those people who, for whatever reason, just love you? There are some people here who just love me, and if I recommended you, they would hire you to teach English in Tokyo." Cool! She also says that if I am not interested in a job, at least we can get together next time we are in the same country.

At this party at the international school I meet Camillo, an outspoken, naturally-friendly, dark-haired, brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking, sort of foreigner...I didn't catch his nationality. I also meet Byron from Venezuala, a girl named Kascha from Michigan, and a long-haired, somewhat shy and geeky, but ultimately friendly Pole who has a strong interest in both Japanese culture and supercomputers. He is working on a joint Japanese/Polish supercomputer project where Japan is supplying the all the money and equipment, and Poland is supplying all of the people and the brains! I find it all a little hard to believe, because it sounds almost like the start of some stereotyping American joke, but you learn something new everyday, and the Japanese mode of doing "projects" is still a long way from comprehension by Americans.

One of the Japanese students there is interested to talk to me in English as he is moving to Los Angeles. He is very scared because everyone has been telling him about how dangerous it is. He asks me if he would get mugged and killed. I tell him not necessarily, but that he would have to think about it all the time. This didn't help him to understand, so I told him that he would be operating in a different mode. I told him to throw every assumption that life in Tokyo had given him out the window...and shift to a state of constantly weighing the risks.

"You can't assume it is safe to walk around with a thousand bucks cash in your back pocket in L.A."

"Really? Why not?"

"You can't walk alone in all neighborhoods of L.A. at all hours."

"What? What does that mean?"

"After a late night, it is probably better to take a taxi rather than walk or take a train, and never leave anything in a parked car."

"Wow...I never realized. That sounds terrible."

At this point I started to realize how much urban Americans learn to live with it without ever thinking twice. There is another way, folks. It really is amazing how safe Tokyo is.

As we had to quiet down in the dorm, but we wanted to keep partying, we all head down the street to the local Karaoke bar. What a kick in the pants! This is the most fun I have had so far! I don't know why, but it is so much better than karaoke in the U.S. With the crowd we have, we don't do too many Japanese songs, just a few of the more popular ones. We skip the Korean and Chinese altogether. We hear La Bamba and some Ricky Martin song about fifty times each as these were the only Spanish choices. Arnie has all of us who can understand in stitches with his Spanish alternate lyrics...then for the benefit of the others he translates the rudest parts into Japanese and gets everyone laughing. For some reason, I keep having to sing all of these impossible "American" songs. Now, I recognize that the average popular male vocalist had a tenor or possibly baritone voice, and not a bass voice, but that is not the only issue with the requests I was getting from everyone. It starts with Mr. Big "I'm the one who wants to be with you, deep inside I hope you feel it too...waiting on a line of greens and blues, just to be the next to be with you..." A nice high first tenor solo that modulates up by a half step what....either three or four times! My first encore also bows to popular request and is "Sweet Child of Mine" by Guns N Roses, and it goes downhill (or maybe up) from there. It is still so much fun I never want to leave. Keep the beer and music flowing! Echo seems ancy, so we eventually take a cab home to avoid the snow...and we have a heck of a time catching a cab! After being passed by several times, I keep my face turned away and try to look short until the cab has pulled up and can't pass us by just because I am a foreigner.

Today's observations: Japan must be hell for people in wheelchairs. Japan must also be hell for foreign fire marshalls; stuff on the sidewalks, stuff in exit doors, two-foot-wide staircases with promotional displays on them...and hundreds of people in some rooms, especially bars and clubs. I bet a visiting U.S. fire safety inspector would die of a coronary before even getting out of the train station. Hehehe!

January 28th, 2001

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