August 12

You don’t realize how easy it is to lose yourself: whether it is in another person or to an addiction. You wonder if it’s possible to do so with a country.

Later,

You look around at the other passengers in the terminal -- 95 percent are Japanese, or at least Asian. Sometimes, you can’t tell what someone is until they speak. Your mother prides herself on the fact that she can.

This is a hint of what is to come--you now look like the majority. You wonder how people will respond to you. People sometimes return to ancestral homelands thinking they’ll be accepted as one of the natives, but often you’re considered just as foreign as everyone else.

August 13

Your first glimpse of Japan disappoints. After the endless airport (trams, customs, hauling luggage, FOREIGN PASSPORTS, etc.), you are outside, reenergized by the fact that you are here, eyes prepped to take on everything. You glance around. It looks just like the US. The subsequent shuttle drive past dingy blocks doesn’t puncture your mind with any sense of wonder. Sometimes a patch of green interrupts the assemblage of squares, but that is an exception. Everything is road, lines, and those ninety-degree structures with a three-color variance. Where are the temples? The exquisite gardens full of delicate clipped bonsai, crayon-colored flowers, and the petite darling bridge over a clear calm brook? Where is any of it?

What is even more disappointing is that Masa is not here. You really should be over the guy, especially after what happened just a month before you left.

You, sitting cross-legged on the bench in Stuyvesant Square, all excited about your upcoming job teaching third grade in an international school. Moving to Japan means an end to your moody roommate, escape from PS 12 in Brooklyn where everyone criticizes your lack of classroom management, and reinvigorating your sagging relations with Masa.

“Just think, we won’t have to live in a cramped one-room place!” you say. “I know the experience won’t be as authentic, but I’ll take comfort over roughing it any day.”

“Just like your mother,” he says dryly.

“What’s wrong?”

Masa has a telltale habit of resorting to smart remarks whenever frustrated or in a bad mood over something. He is tall and thin to the point that his skin barely stretches enough to cover his frame. His black hair, once bleached a lighter brown, is now grown out so that it is unkempt and two-toned. You “nag” him to get it cut, but lately he seems to do the opposite of whatever you say. His tanned face, narrow, sunken to the point you can see his flat cheekbones, holds dark eyes that look out at the fall foliage and cracked lips that clasp a lighted cigarette. He inhales deeply and blows the smoke out into the slight breeze. It isn’t enough to extend beyond your face. You cough and pull away from him on the bench. Your body tenses as if awaiting attack.

Masa sighs and takes another hit from his cigarette. He’s now up to two packs a day. Masa has never been the most cheerful person in the year-and-a-half you’ve known him. You met just as you were finishing your undergrad teaching degree at NYU, and he was just finishing. He’s more than a couple of years older than you, but has no ambition or direction. You think it was the accident.

Shortly after you met him, Masa tells you the story that he thinks defines it all. You sometimes wonder if it’s so simple, but you tuck away those doubts since it’s more comforting to have one answer for everything.

Back in the mid-nineties, Masa put school on hold, more or less, to DJ. He traveled all over the country performing at different universities and participating in the harsh competitions of New York. He even went back to his hometown, Tokyo, a couple of times. Then came the soccer game two years ago this summer. Masa’s team had been “kicking ass,” and he had been feeling particularly confident having scored three goals. So, when he came charging down the field, the defense surrounded him. He passed the ball; it was passed back to him in the air. He remembered jumping up to claim it when he collided with another player.

“It was like jumping into a ton of fuckin’ bricks,” he said, “and then, I hit the ground.”

He put his arm out instinctively; his body landed atop of it, zeroing in on his right wrist. Masa knew instantaneously that the bone had shifted from normal. It was broken. Months later, it was “healed,” but Masa knew it was irrevocably altered like his confidence. He tried to DJ once or twice afterward, but the result was substandard and just wouldn’t do.

Now he sits before you: tense, arms curled inward like an infant (and as uncertain) -- much to his parents’ dismay and the alarm of your mother.

“Nina, how can you date someone like that?” she had demanded. “He’s going nowhere in life. You’re barely getting by yourself, and he’ll only drag you down! You need a man you can look up to.”

You didn’t mention these cruel words to Masa, but he sensed her disdain and recoiled. He feels no one has the right to judge him unless they know what it’s like to lose everything. And you? You want to be the one to “save” him, to make him feel better about himself so you will about you. So you try and breathe life into him with endless words of encouragement, activities, sex. It keeps degenerating. You think of Japan as a last resort.

Staring at your sushi one day in a restaurant on Avenue A, you glance up at the performance of the chef, and the idea springs up so suddenly it excites. Japan. Japan, that strange land of cuteness and conformity would take you away from your crappy life and improve things for Masa because he’d finally have to do something. It would be the impetus to change everything, the blast of oxygen for a wilting life.

Masa doesn’t say much in the months following your proposal. He left Tokyo at age three but has enough friends from frequent visits that he would have no trouble readapting. The only concern he raises with you is what to do once there. You suggest some things that he shrugs at, but you figure everything will work itself out until that moment on the bench. You’ve been a bit nervous in the weeks leading up to this moment, much like someone is before a doctor’s appointment. You keep seeing signs but aren’t sure if they’re legitimate, or symptoms of silly anxiety.

“I’ve been thinking about Japan,” he says as he blows more smoke out.

“Me too,” I tell him.

“Yeah, well, I’ve been thinking I’m not going to go.” He’s never been one to mince words. He’s as direct as most Japanese are not.

You don’t respond right away. You feel as if he has reached into your lungs and pulled out all the air and words.

“Look, I’m sorry,” he says too casually. “I know you’re all excited about this big change and what it could mean for our relationship. But let’s be honest -- this hasn’t been going anywhere for a long time.”

Masa pauses and stamps out his cigarette. “And what the hell would I do there? Yeah I can speak the language, but do you expect me to teach fuckin’ English like everyone else? Screw that.”

You don’t say anything, feeling he has pulled everything out like blood from an embalmed body. You know you will start sobbing any moment, but you don’t want to indicate anything in front of him. You won’t lose face, so you turn it away and begin to walk.

August 14

You are now at the hotel. Once all checked in, you open the door to your, of course, tiny room complete with full laundry and kitchen. Every inch of the bathroom gleams, and to your relief, the toilet is Western, not squat. You’ve never used one before but have heard about your mother’s experience the one time she used one on a trip to Japan. She was wearing one of her fitted, rigid skirts, and in the process of hiking it up and balancing on her tottering heels, she fell over into the filth.

Later,

You go outside to walk around. It is August and so humid all the fresh air has been sucked away. All you feel is hot. You glance up at the five-story hotel and try to memorize something unique, but everything looks the same. The buildings are all either brown, gray, or neutral, and you cannot as yet distinguish between the three writing alphabets: kanji, hiragana, and katakana. Every ounce of space is used, the buildings sometimes bursting onto the narrow streets. There is no open expanse or architectural novelty to remember, so you decide to stay near the hotel as though it’s a hand. You feel afraid to explore any more.

You look instead at the people, and you wonder if they can tell you’re foreign-born Japanese. Your jeans and sleeveless cotton shirt contrast with the A-line, pencil, or peasant skirts several of the women wear. Many are decked out in heels, immaculate makeup, and dyed hair (like mother). No one seems to go for the straight black look like you. (Everyone is brown, auburn, even blond -- and thin!)

Twenty minutes later you are back at the hotel in bed. Your two-block excursion exhausts you since the stress of trying to remember the exact spot of your hotel in relation to square building number 1000 depletes any energy you felt from the new.

August 15

Today you are off looking at apartments with Tanaka-san, a thin Japanese man from your international school employer. He is tan, compact, and contained, shooting out endless information. Only some of it hits you.

You sit beside him as he deftly navigates through the insanely small streets. He makes a mention of his past employment at a juku cram school, and that doesn’t surprise you. You can imagine him unloading all the information on anxious students who try and soak up as much of it as possible to then expel during exam hell-days -- days that dictate the course of a Japanese life more than a future spouse.

Tanaka-san parks the car and leads you up the stone steps to (what might be) your first apartment. You watch his small frame lightly move up the steps and wonder how he likes his new job servicing clueless gaijin (foreigners).

“This apartment very big for Japanese,” he says as he opens the door.

You step inside, remove your shoes, and stare around in wonderment. It is larger, more spacious than you had imagined. Visions of tubular bed hotels, with room enough for one turn only, constricted your mind with horror. This apartment consists of three rooms. The entrance one is perhaps 20 square feet, covered with an unappealing greenish hue circa 1970. The kitchenette at the opposite end has absurdly high beige cupboards, but the two-foot refrigerator and stove burner stand out like colossal Christmas presents among the miniature. You begin to feel excited. (Japanese apartments are notorious for having nothing but the toilet and the sink. Even more fabulous is what is in the next room -- a flowered, wicker couch!) Should this become your apartment, it is furnished! Separated by sliding cardboard, adorned with an abstract pattern of orange and blue, your happiness notches up a level as you step on light tatami mats, woven as finely as fabric and as smooth. Sunlight fills the room like air in the lungs, filtered through the shoji paper with precision. The shoji paper is white and pristine. You marvel at its fragile elegance but wonder if impatient fingers will cause innumerable tears.

Later,

After looking at various apartments, that first one stands out for you because the furniture and age make it seem the most comfortable and inviting. You will move in tomorrow!

August 16

Ito-san, your new landlord, waits for you downstairs in the hotel lobby as you lug your two ridiculously large suitcases behind you. He is smaller than Tanaka-san, but larger in personality. A huge grin appears on his surprisingly smooth face. His full gray hair, tinged with black, is slicked to the side, and large black frames cover his likewise large eyes. His whole face seems to stand out, projecting his friendly personality.

“Nakasone-san?” he asks.

You nod and he shakes your hand vigorously.

“You Japanese?” he inquires.

“Yes, but I was born in America,” I reply.

“American,” he tells me. “Nihongo wakari masu ka?” (Do you speak Japanese?)

You smile. “Sukoshi desu.” (A little.)

Ito-san laughs. “Nihongo ga muzukashi desu -- Very hard.”

You nod your head in agreement and wish one of your parents had spoken whatever bits they knew to you when a child. Neither is fluent -- or even proficient -- being Nisei. But still, at least your mother could have spoken something to you throughout the years to embed familiarity and confidence. It would be nice to think the language was held in some cell just waiting to be triggered, but alas, there is nothing.

Ito-san then unlocks his trunk and proceeds to pick up your suitcase, which you are certain weighs more than he does. You shake your head, smile, and attempt to take it away, explaining that you’ll lift it. You don’t want to crush your landlord before you even know him. Ito-san waves you away and shakily hauls the suitcase into the trunk. There is one second where it seems as if his bony arms will collapse, but he uses all excess reserves of strength to drop it in. He then repeats the whole performance. You stare in amazement, but really, it shouldn’t surprise you. You’ve seen your grandma accomplish similar feats with her 80-pound body, complete with the same smile and refusal of aid. You wonder if, like her, Ito-san really enjoys doing things for others, or if he does it out of cultural expectations.

“Grandma, please let me wash the dishes,” you say whenever you visit her in Hawaii.

“No, no, grandma do,” she insists.

“But you’ve done so much.” Your laundry, washed and ironed, your room made up each day as though this is a hotel, and all your meals prepared.

“Grandma happy you here.”

The banter continues on until you concede defeat or physically grab a dish from her hand. At that point, she finally relents and lets you wash. She complains afterwards you didn’t do it right.

August 17

You step out of your apartment tentatively to go to the hundred-yen store located only ten minutes away. You need some new items for your apartment. You try and take in as much of your environment as possible as you start toward the store on your own. You take a right and go in a straight line. At the end is a busy street. You see the huge yellow sign and turn to go to the crosswalk. Inside the discount store, you go a bit crazy buying dishes and other household items. After all, this is your first apartment alone. No more psycho roommate. Gina was okay on first impression: thin, tinted red hair, dark-rimmed glasses, trendy clothes, all smiles and easy laughter. You have a tendency to go with the first thing that seems right. In this case, you soon regretted it. Gina was sloppy, moody, and tardy with bills, throwing out food, and even the garbage. Yet the worst were the annoying passive-aggressive notes: incessant, nitpicking comments if anything you said so much as veered toward criticism. Everything was your fault, your issue -- when really it was she. Instead of confronting this fact, you avoided it all year by spending most of your time with Masa. He became everything; and when that started to slide, you panicked and thought of a one-step solution that would solve all the problems.

Now you seem to be lost in that “solution.” After loading up on twenty items, you are ready for the trek back. You cross the street confidently, trying to remember the road you came out of earlier. You pass several streets, but everything has that damn similarity! You may as well have come out of a cave. Finally, you turn right and head straight. It should at least bring you back to the vicinity of your apartment.

The trouble is that only the major Japanese streets have names, everything else is numbered in order of the building date. This makes giving directions near impossible, and you wonder if that’s why few Japanese invite guests over to their homes. Then again, having guests involves numerous preparations and time. Everything is a production in Japan.

Fifteen minutes later you are utterly lost. You strain your mind trying to extract anything: a number, a building, a sign, a tree. You wander around some more going in circles, squares, even triangles. You know you can’t ask anyone for help since you don’t speak the language well enough. And you look as though you should know what you are doing, but here you are going nowhere. You make it home just over an hour later.

August 20

That weekend, you have your first glimpse of the new Tokyo. You are going to Omotesando, dubbed the “Champs Elysee of Tokyo” because of the wider streets and multitudes of boutiques. The subway stop is exactly seven stops past the one you know, Yoga. Unfortunately, it becomes super crowded as you near Shibuya. The whole experience is quite astonishing as sweet, small-boned women morph into aggressive dogs protecting their personal turf, and your body is pushed into a contorted position you didn’t think possible. Once the train arrives at Omotesando, you see the infamous men in fine white gloves.

Omotesando is lined with trees and the usual four-sided structures one after another. They vary in composition and size, but nearly all have colossal advertisements tacked on them like magnets on a refrigerator: Love Psychedelico’s new album, Starbucks, Hello Kitty. At night, all the signs light the whole city in a blaze of neon that overwhelms the eyes.

You walk down one of the main streets and step into one of the boutiques. The clerks greet you as you enter with the phony falsettos common to women in the service industry. They smile impersonally, and you stare in amazement at the made-up mannequins and perfection. No shirt sleeves or pant legs of the miniature sizes have slipped out of order, nor are any of the hangers unaligned. No matter how much you try, you can never fold with the edges in line. Something always sticks out. The same is true for your hair.

Such shoddiness embarrasses your mother. She is always turned out for her job selling cosmetics at Bloomingdale’s. She doesn’t know where she went wrong with you and Rurika. It doesn’t help that your grandma is always making comments.

“Your mother not raise you right,” grandma says nearly every time you visit. She’s never gotten over your mother taking you and Rurika to New York after the divorce but, of course, only talks about how neither of you make the bed “right.” Neither of you cook either.

“Grandma know man who divorced woman. She never cook! They go out to eat all the time, so expensive! So they divorce. You need to learn to cook!”

You smile politely as you always do. At first, you think she may be talking about your mother since she doesn’t cook, but it’s more likely your uncle. At least you try to cook. Rurika just bites her nails and rolls her eyes.

Your grandma is forever chasing perfection. Even though she lives alone, she doesn’t relax. Every day, she sweeps the leaves and twigs out of her driveway and squats down to pick up each and every leaf out of her Japanese garden. While Rurika watches TV, you try and help in the garden. You can’t squat for long, so you have to sit cross-legged picking up the leaves as the little stones burrow into your butt. How does your grandma do this?

“She does too much,” you complain to Rurika.

She shrugs. “She wants to.” Rurika has come to expect such catering so she does nothing (like always!) during the visits.

You leave the perfection of the store for the outside fashion at the edge of Harajuko Station. You stare in shock at the Japanese youth decked out in punk, Goth, hippie, Indian, and nineteenth century American attire. You had heard of this phenomenon: how the young, stripped of their cultural and economic security, turn to fashion to define who they are. A kaleidoscope of color, material, and style surrounds you as the tourists snap away. It is art. The girl standing before you had to wake up hours before you to put together her look: “vampyric nurse.” She’s dressed in a long-sleeved rayon blouse with ruffles on the front, complete with a straight skirt to the knee, and a blue ribbon tied around her neck. Her black hair is pulled back with only bangs and wisps left to frame her painted white face. Her eyes are encircled with thick black liner, and the outline of her brows indicate their location beneath the paint. Crimson lipstick covers her pouty mouth, and pink circles decorate her pasty cheeks like bruises. She wears a lacy white headband to indicate her look.

You have to take a picture to show Rurika. What a contrast to her sloppy Goth phase, motivated by laziness and personal aggravation rather than image. She and your mother carried on passive-aggressive battles for years. In high school, instead of confronting Rurika on her Goth look, your mother would hide the worst items like the black lipstick and the Doc Martens. Rurika responded by piercing her tongue. She never spent half the day applying Kabuki-like makeup. The Japanese are meticulous even in rebellion.

August 25

Today, someone approached you to ask for directions because she thought you were Japanese. It’s ironic to see people approaching you with a presumed identity you’ve always tried to slide away from most of your life. It’s not that you felt ashamed, you think, it’s just that you felt to define yourself as one thing excluded you from something else.

You’ve always had this tendency to avoid groups. In high school, you quit the band because being labeled a “bander” translated into geek. Even more, you witnessed how this group isolated itself from the majority. You never thought to question why; you only felt disturbed by its silent demands that you only associate with those in it. It was about restrictions, like a corset pulled to modify the body. If worn long enough, the new shape remains after removal.

August 27

You can’t believe that you never thought about the whole identity question before moving here to any great degree. You’ve spent most of your life not thinking about who you are because you’ve always felt apart somehow. In a strange sort of way, you now find yourself identifying more with who people think you are all of the time -- the Nihonjin (Japanese).

Here, the issue keeps popping up because of all the expectations and assumptions people have. Today, you sat near some of the Japanese teachers at lunch, and they asked you all sorts of questions in the language until you said you didn’t really understand and they switched to English. People assume you have a certain level of fluency because of how you look. They also assume you know things about the food because your mother “must have” cooked it at home. You explain you grew up eating Spam, Stove Top, and (this is the real abomination) Uncle Ben’s Rice. Your mother, ever the perfectionist, can’t cook to her standards. You think it also has to do with her not wanting to “ruin” the pristine kitchen, so dish use is minimal and takeout common. Your house is one where things are to be seen and not touched. Your mother is also that way about herself. Your father couldn’t stand such perfectionism and formality; the casualness of Hawaii was in him from birth.

Your mother grew up hating the Aloha State: the laid-back nature of the people and their dress, the lack of what she deems “high culture.” She loves it in New York where manicure parlors are as common as plate lunch. She is all poise, polish, and elegance. Your father is Hawaiian shirts and shorts, surfing, and stains. You don’t know what possessed the two of them to ever marry. Maybe your mother liked your father’s looks, his older age and career stability, her ticket away from grandma. Maybe your father liked your mother’s looks. It didn’t last long. He left when you were two, before she even knew she was pregnant with Rurika. Your mother moved in with a cousin in New York, gave birth, got a job, and then set about finding a man who would provide. She found her income with a stuck-up German expat who became your stepfather. Your father remarried a chubby Japanese woman with a hearty laugh and a penchant for gossip. He ended up with three more children and more or less forgot about you and Rurika -- except monetarily. Your mother had no more children, but she also seemed to forget about the two of you. Rurika ended up rebelling with crazy getups, the occasional drug, and laziness. You are the dutiful one: passive, quiet, doing what is expected without complaint. This is your first time to really be away from it all.

September 5

Today was your second session with Saburo-san, your Japanese teacher. Since you already know a little bit, having taken one semester of the language at NYU, you can start at the end of Book I.

“You are making good progress,” she says evenly, “since you study. The most important thing is to take advantage of every opportunity to speak Japanese.”

You smile. “I get asked for directions a lot.”

“Everyone probably thinks you are Japanese until you speak,” she says.

You nod. It should seem strange to speak of “looking Japanese,” as though you’re an impersonator, but there is a clear distinction between being raised in Japan and elsewhere. You wonder if Saburo-san ever feels apart, since she has spent much of her adult life overseas and is fluent in several languages. She certainly surrounds herself with “foreignness”: teaching English to gaijin, enrolling her kids in English-speaking schools, and constant traveling. At the same time, she is also very exact in time and appearance. Black hair cut in a simple bob, skin untouched by sun. Her pale face has few lines for forty-nine (she admitted her age once to your surprise); eyes light brown and double-lidded, lips painted the same shade of pink every week. Saburo-san is fitted in sleek sweaters and skirts, the requisite jewelry in place. She also possesses that relentless Japanese curiosity about how others perceive them and their country.

“Nanio benli desu ka?” (What is inconvenient?), she asks as I study adjectives.

“Tokyo ga benli desu.”

“Hontoni?” she asks. “Why do you say that? I think Tokyo is very convenient. There are all kinds of restaurants, stores, and museums. The underground is very efficient so it is easy to get to places.”

You realize too late she is offended. You had forgotten what Masa told you, “After the Japanese ask you about their country, always respond with a compliment.”

“I just meant that some things about Tokyo are inconvenient like the ATMs closing at five on weekends so you can’t get money out,” I tell her. “But in general, it’s convenient, though I miss debit cards and the like.”

“Japan is still a cash society,” Saburo-san admits, “but do you know why? You can walk around with lots of cash and not worry about it being stolen. At this moment, there is not a huge reason to change to credit cards and such, but I’m certain it will in the future.”

You smile and say nothing. You love how she remarks on this minor inconvenience but still manages to transform it into praise.

September 8

Last night, you got the lowdown on the dating scene here, albeit from a rather sleazy perspective.

You enter What the Dickens, this bar where a lot of gaijin hangout, with some acquaintances from work. You’re standing near the bar when this white guy comes up to order. He’s medium-height, dressed in an expensive, pressed gray suit with a decent tie. His hair is blondish-brown in a sort of “bedhead” style, eyes blue, nose straight, face square. He asks you if you speak English, and you explain you’re American.

“Really?” he says lighting a cigarette. “Cool. I’m Roger.”

“Nina.”

“How long you been here?”

“Bout a month.”

“A newbie. I started here on a six- month contract, but kept on staying. Been here three years.”

“Here for life?”

Roger laughs. “Nah, I don’t love it that much. I’m going back at the end of the year to San Fran with my girlfriend.”

“Japanese?”

“Of course,” Roger tells you. “I wouldn’t want an American after this, cept maybe you.”

You smile wryly. “So, the dating scene’s been good for you?”

“Yeah, it is for most foreign men. I went crazy at the beginning. In Ropongi, it’s so easy to pick them up. Most of them are really naïve. You know, some guy will say he’s goin to Hong Kong for the weekend, and they fall for it. Meanwhile he’s dating one or two other girls at the same time. In America, you couldn’t get away as easily with that shit.”

You nod about to excuse yourself for the restroom when he continues, “One of my girlfriends dated an English guy before me. She was really young when she met him, like twenty-two or twenty-three, and the whole time he was with her, he was dating a couple of other girls! She eventually found out cause the idiot invites her over, and she goes to the elevator in his place. Well, there he was getting it on with someone else. Musta gotten the times screwed up.”

He laughs. “You know English guys are the worst though. Most of them are traders so they’re making the big cash. Girls are attracted to their meishi (business cards). You know if they’re working at Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs, they’ve got it made. So, they meet the girl, tell her after a week they love her, and then she’s easy to get into bed. After that, they just ditch her and move on, or go home back to their wives. Some of those girls in Ropongi have been lied to so many times, there’s got to be something wrong. And those are mostly the types who stay later.”

“Stay later?”

“The nice girls leave on the last train home. The ones left have slept with five hundred guys or they’re really trannies.”

“Quite the scene here.”

“After awhile you get tired of it.” He takes a sip of his beer and stares at some Japanese men over in the corner. “They’re probably here to get a drink before going to a hostess bar later.”

“Have you been to one?”

“Once or twice, most of them are for Japanese men only. In Shinjuku, most of the hostess bars won’t allow foreigners.”

“And Japanese women work there?”

“Yeah. The men pay five-to-seven-thousand yen an hour just to sit and ‘talk.’ If the price is right, the women will sleep with them, but they try and draw it out to make more money.”

“And most of the strippers and such are foreigners?”

“From Eastern Europe or Russia. Most of them have fake breasts, and the Japanese men just drool over them. The smallest bill is the thousand yen, and you see them putting three to four into the girls’ g-strings.”

The two older Japanese men were not sitting down and were watching the band.

“I bet they’ll stay out all night,” he comments. “There’s one guy at work who never calls his wife to tell her if he’s coming home or not or where he is. But she’ll faithfully make supper for him every night.”

He sighs. “You know that 90 percent of Japanese women won’t date foreign men,” he said somewhat in disgust. “You’ll always see the most beautiful girl with a Japanese guy, and if I approach one in places like Shinjuku, they’ll put their hand in my face and say no. Maybe I’m bitter, but I would think that most of these women would want to date foreign men. I would think they would want to have the chance to go to a culture where they’re not a shufu housewife, cleaning the men’s shoes and walking three paces behind. I would think they would want to go somewhere that the men help out with the housework.”

Somehow, you can’t imagine him with a mop.

September 15

It’s easy to become charmed by this country. The cuteness of the kids in their matching coats and umbrellas, the fact that businessmen will hang Hello Kitty charms from their cells, the noise machines in women’s bathrooms that you press so others don’t hear un-dainty sounds emitting from the body, and on and on.

The money is good from your job, your apartment peaceful, the food unbelievable. You haven’t met many people, but in some ways you’d rather not deal with their relationship with Japan because everyone here has one.

September 20

Supposedly, people go through stages in their adjustment to another country and culture, similar in some ways to a romantic relationship. You are in your honeymoon phase right now and would rather not think about anything negative. You’ve been too aware of the disappointment of things from a young age. Sure you hear about the cracks in the system, ones that threaten to expand along the fault line, but you observe nothing. Not the English girl who was raped and murdered; the boy who stabbed his mother for “nagging” him; the student who brought a bat on a bus and started swinging; the salarymen who wander listlessly in the parks since they cannot face the shame of unemployment; the more desperate ones who take a plunge in front of trains; the women who are blatantly groped on subways; the highest rate of unemployment ever since the end of the war; the rising bullying against the less popular or “others” at public schools; exam hell; corruption scandals; silly fashion trends like wearing ten-inch platforms resulting in death from one woman losing her balance and slamming her head on the pavement to another getting her shoe caught between the brake and the gas so she could not stop.

No, you don’t see any of that. On the surface, everything floats with the current; there is no sign of trouble. You try and avoid all of this outside news and separate yourself from what you witness -- like those passersby who pretended they did not see the sick littered on the sidewalks like fishflies, vomiting and writhing from the sarin gas. No, you want to stare straight ahead and ignore all the negative and complex. You want to be one with the crowd. It’s a nice feeling to fall into the anonymity of homogeny.