From the window of the Shinkansen, George saw the summit of Mt. Fuji covered in snow and its ebony slopes attacked in slow motion by fleecy sheep clouds. "I hope I can remember this moment fifty years from now," he thought as he fell back to sleep.
He was lucky that the businessman reading comics next to him had noticed George's Shinkansen ticket from Tokyo to Osaka and courageously tapped George on the shoulder when they stopped at Shin-Osaka station or else George would have slept until they reached the terminus in Hakata. He grabbed his overnight bag and dashed out of the train as the doors were closing. It was too early in the morning. Not even 10 AM yet.
George looked about on the platform and soon noticed a short, skeletal, Japanese man somewhere between twenty and forty years old rushing towards him. "You Mr. Jooji?" George shook his hand. "My name Taka, but every call me Jim." He pronounced Jim as "Geem."
"Why do they call you 'Jim'?"
"My name Jim. Call me Jim. Nice meeting you today."
"But why do they call you Jim if your name is Taka?"
"Call me Jim. Nice meeting you today. This way please come."
They were headed to Osaka Castle where George was to be a model. George had no clue as to why a hospital in Hokkaido, in the far north of Japan, wanted a picture of a foreigner standing in front of Osaka Castle, certainly not one of the most beautiful or oldest castles in Japan, having been built out of steel and concrete, nor could he understand why they didn't hire a foreigner living in Osaka as the model instead of dragging him all the way from Tokyo, nor why they had chosen him, since he had no modeling experience nor even thought he possessed the looks typical of a model. Nevertheless, they had offered the job to him, and paid enough to make it more than worthwhile to take a vacation day from his teaching job at the English conversation school.
When they arrived, the crew looked bored. One camera was arranged on a not especially sturdy looking tripod. A middle aged Japanese man wearing glasses and a black jacket with the words, "American Yankee/ Best Show/ Won't you eat cow dinner yesterday!" written on the back above an American flag with what appeared to be at least two hundred stars was proselytizing to a group of at least ten teenagers wearing identical jackets.
Jim led George over to the group. The teenagers parted to let George through, though with the excessively wide berth they gave him, George wondered if they were afraid of catching AIDS from him.
The leader bowed and said, "Konnichi wa."
Jim translated, "He said, 'Konnichi wa.'"
George bowed, then said, "Hello."
The teenagers giggled, then in unison, yelled, "Aroo!"
The leader said something in Japanese. Jim translated: "He say name is Taka Nakamura dakedo pleased to be call him 'Jim.' He can speech English not. Very sorry. I translate you. Ima very isogashii, so now must start."
They motioned for George to replace his own red, Canadian flag jacket with the black jacket that they handed to him. The jacket fit like a robe - a robe cut for a fattened grizzly bear. Both Jims frowned.
"We make special for you. Big size. Gaijin size. Maybe too much big." They ripped the jacket off him. The leader shouted something at one of the teens who took off his jacket and handed it to George.
George tried to put on the jacket, but it was too small to even get his hands through the armholes.
"Yappari, na," the leader muttered. He shouted some more orders and another teenager ran off.
George returned the jacket to its owner, who accepted it but wouldn't put it back on despite the cold breeze.
"Get new jacket," Jim explained. "Now kyuukei." The leader began proselytizing again. George sat down on the stone wall. The crew's gear was scattered around him. On top of one bag was the NHK-TV English conversation magazine. George picked up the magazine and rifled through it. On page 5 was the conversation for the week: "Hello. My name's James Madison but everyone calls me Jim." George returned the magazine to the top of the bag.
While they were waiting for the jacket, lunch was served. A plastic box was handed to each person. "Obento," Jim explained. "Are you okay?"
George considered mentioning that he would prefer a thick clubhouse sandwich with extra turkey and crisp lettuce to a box of cold rice with a piece of salty fish and a pickled plum on top, but knew they wouldn't understand, or worse, might rush about trying to find such a sandwich, and instead, nodded his head, removed the disposable, wooden chopsticks from the paper wrapping, plucked the pickled plum from the top of the rice and popped it into his mouth, pretending to enjoy the sour flavor. "You ohashi use very good," Jim complemented him.
Once lunch was disposed of and a reasonably well fitting jacket arrived, they set about working. An X had been painted on the concrete. George was instructed to stand there. One of the teens grabbed a megaphone and shouted at the onlookers, which consisted mostly of pigeons, with a few sparrows in the back, to clear away. The leader clicked the shutter three times.
"Owari ya," he yelled.
"We owari," Jim explained. "Don't you know?" George didn't know. "Finish."
George handed the jacket to Jim. "What should I do with this?"
"Present for you," he said
George stuffed the jacket into his bag. He would be kicked out of the language school if anyone saw him wearing a jacket with such bad English. "Now what?"
"We go to hotel."
While they were stuck in traffic in a taxi, Jim asked, "Do you have a plan tonight?"
George certainly wasn't going to waste an evening in Osaka sitting in the hotel room. Jim was dweeby, but might make a reasonable guide. "No plans. What did you have in mind?"
"Namba. You know? Nampa in Namba. Are you all right?"
George had never heard of Namba before, but expected that it wasn't much different from the other entertainment districts scattered across Japanese cities. He arranged to meet Jim in the lobby of the hotel at seven o'clock.
By six o'clock, George was exhausted from walking all around Osaka but it took another hour to find his way back to the hotel. He collapsed on a chair in the lobby.
At eleven seconds before seven according to the clock behind the reception desk, Jim walked through the revolving doors into the lobby. He was wearing a maroon suit, white shirt, lavander, flower print tie and wing tip shoes. His hair resembled the feathers of waterfowl plucked out of the Persian Gulf. "Sorry I'm so early. You not ready?"
George realized that Jim had been expecting him to be wearing a suit too, maybe a maroon one. George was dressed in the same jeans and shirt he had been wearing all day and had brought only one change of clothes for the next day. Besides, he was too hungry to spend the time to go back up to the room to change.
"Let's get some food."
"Do you want Macudonarudo?"
"Real food!" George growled from the stomach.
Jim wasn't sure what to do. What was real food for a gaijin? He took George to a steak house just off the shopping arcade in Shinsaibashi. The restaurant was quiet, filled mostly with middle-aged couples in formal attire. When they finished eating and were ready to leave, George pulled out his wallet. Jim said, "No, no, I chiso." George shrugged and put the wallet back in his pocket while Jim turned the check over and turned pale. He paid the $400 tab while George waited outside on the street. When Jim rejoined him, he said, "Very delicious you think?"
George rubbed his hands together. "Great snack! Now let's go get some dinner! Cute little fillets, weren't they? Where can we get a pizza around here?"
George, with his long strides, marched down the narrow street, effortlessly parting the crowds of people and weaving between the creeping taxis, horns honking, leaving Jim struggling to keep up with him. When George turned around, Jim was no where to be seen, but fortunately, George's bearded face stood out in the crowd, allowing Jim to catch up with him while George stood on the street corner, smoking a cigarette.
"In here," George said, beckoning him into Shakey's. When they were seated at a booth, surrounded on both sides by gaggles of uniformed high school girls, George asked Jim to order a large pizza. "Any toppings are okay as long as there's no tuna fish or seaweed." Jim couldn't eat anymore, but ordered a beer for himself.
While waiting for the pizza, Jim peeked at the gregarious girls on both sides, unabashedly staring at George and talking about him, secure in the knowledge that he could not understand their conversation. If George only knew what they were saying and how to talk to them, he could easily score, Jim thought. He was envious of George, but at the same time, realized how little he could know of what was happening around him and pitied him.
Half of the girls were fat or pimpled from eating too much junk food, but there were a few cute ones in the bunch. "Which is your favorite type?" he asked George.
"Pepperoni and mushroom, with extra cheese," George replied as he lunged for the pizza that was being placed on their table. "Have some," he said through a mouthful of food.
Jim picked up a piece and put it on his plate to be polite, but did not eat any of it.
"You have special Japanese girl friend?"
George laughed and throwing his hands out, answered, "I don't have any girlfriend."
"You don't like Japanese girls?"
"It's not that I dislike Japanese girls. It's just that we have nothing in common. We don't speak the same language, we don't think alike. Most of the girls I've met here want someone to take care of them, marry them. I want a friend, a partner, someone to travel with, someone to share my thoughts, and stay by my side, not just be a mother to my children. It's difficult to find that kind of person even in Canada, raised the same way as me, speaking the same language. It's impossible here. Can you understand?"
"Maybe, I think so," Jim replied. "But for just sex. You should have Japanese girlfriend."
George recalled some of his experiences, including the last girl he had gone to bed with, a former student who had invited him to a love hotel after they both had drunk too many whiskeys and were high from singing too much karaoke. A normal, sweet, quiet girl who always wore pink lipstick that somehow always got smeared on her front teeth, she had burst into his class a week later waving a knife and threatening to kill him and then commit suicide if he wouldn't see her again. "Sex is great if that's all I want and that's all she wants, but it never works out that way. She wants more and I end up feeling like shit. I've realized that no relationship is better than a bad relationship."
George stared at the empty pizza tray. He wiped up the blobs of cheese remaining on the tray and plate with his finger and downed the last of his beer. "If I did have a Japanese girlfriend, she'd be thirty years old and married."
"Married?"
"No expectations. No commitments. Just sex. I don't work until 3 o'clock, so she could come over in the morning, we could have a few hours of sex, a nap, and she would still have time to cook me breakfast before going home. Best of all, she could use her husband's money to buy me presents. I need a new television." George laughed. Jim didn't know if he had heard correctly, so he laughed, too.
Jim didn't object to George paying the tab this time, though George didn't refuse his offer to pay for the beer that he didn't drink.
"Okay, where to?" George asked.
"This way come, please," Jim said, leading George towards his favorite disco. Though he had been there many times before without getting lucky with any of the beautiful girls that inhabited the place, this time was different - he was with a gaijin.
They walked for a few minutes, over the old British style Namba Bridge, past entwined couples, gaggles of women in miniskirts and spike heels, groups of men in maroon, purple, burnt orange, and even bright green suits sporting well sculpted and oiled hair, drunk businessmen in uniform grey-blue suits, arms around each other's shoulders; past the punks with orange hair in studded biker's leathers and boots, handing out bags of tissues containing advertisements for phone sex clubs and loan sharks; past the bums and the ramen and yakitori food carts; past the monstrous crab, it's claws flailing; past hundreds of giant, flashing neon signs and into the long line formed outside the Maharaja. The groups in front of them consisted entirely of mixed groups of four to ten people, all in formal wear.
Jim frowned. "Maybe problem. One hour half wait. Sign says no men only. No tennis shoes. No jeans." Jim started to walk away, but George walked up to the maitre d'.
"Can I go in like this?" he asked, pointing at his jeans and shoes.
The maitre d' said something to one of the waiters, who brought back two more uniformed people. They huddled for a minute, then the maitre d' opened the door for George, who motioned for Jim to follow him. It was good to be with a gaijin.
Jim flashed his membership card and was told it had expired. George paid $30 to enter. Jim paid $30 plus an extra $50 for a new membership card. They were each handed ten tickets of Maharaja money to buy drinks. George headed for the bar. Beers were five tickets each. Cocktails were eight. George bought two beers and handed one to Jim when he finally found him seated at a table.
"Kampai," Jim said.
"Rock n' Roll!" George said.
"Rock n' Roll," Jim repeated. "You like to dance?"
George looked at the dance floor. Only about a third of the couples dancing were couples. The rest were girls dancing with girls and guys dancing with guys. "Let's find some girls to dance with, eh?"
On the stroboscopic dance floor, Jim began dancing immediately. George looked for a partner. Two girls were dancing next to him. It was too dark to see their faces, but he tapped the closest one on the shoulder, pointed his finger at her and himself and wriggled his arms to indicate they should dance together. She put her hands to her mouth to cover her giggle, then grabbed her friends' arms and stepped back. George shrugged his shoulders and motioned that the three of them should dance together. The two girls grabbed each other's forearms, stamped the floor a few times, then hands over their mouths to cover their giggling, they retreated into the thick of the crowd.
George went back to his beer. Jim waved to him from the dance floor. George waved back and finished off the beer. The group of five girls at the next table were all smoking, though it was obvious that none of them ever smoked. He took out a cigarette but couldn't find his lighter.
"Do any of you speak English?" he yelled over the music.
"No English," one responded.
"Can I borrow your lighter?" No response. He pointed to the disposible lighter brought back from Hawaii lying on the table, but none of the girls moved to hand it to him. He bent over and grabbed it, lit his cigarette, put the lighter back on the table and went back to the bar for another beer and a pack of matches. He had used all his phony money and it took the broken English of all three bartenders and a handful of patrons before he understood that he had to pay another $30 for a new packet of money. He bought two more beers and sat back down at the table. He wasn't really looking to pick up anyone that night. He just wanted to dance, and Jim wasn't a suitable partner.
Jim soon rejoined him, dragging two girls along. They refused to sit down at the table, and instead stood in front of it, presumably in case they needed to retreat quickly.
"Where from?" one asked. They both giggled.
"Canada." He knew this conversation by heart.
"How long in Japan?" the other asked.
"Six months. Do you like dancing? Let's Rock 'n' Roll." It took a considerable amount of hand waving and arm pulling before the girls were persuaded to join them on the dance floor. When the song ended they bowed and dashed off in the opposite direction.
Jim and George sat back down. When the beers were finished, Jim went for two more. "Here's no good. All ojoosama."
"What's that? Is it the same as okamasama?"
Jim spit out his beer laughing. "Maybe same."
"What's ojoosama?"
"Rich girl."
"That's a bit different from 'transvestite.'"
"Transvestite much easier to nampa."
The effect of the alcohol had already turned Jim's face bright red. George was just getting warmed up, but they were both out of tickets and bored with the disco.
"You like karaoke?" Jim asked.
"I love karaoke."
"I know good place. Are you okay?"
The bar wasn't the usual karaoke pub. Instead of five or six middle aged businessmen, this place held fifty high school and college students in a giant circle surrounding the stage. Instead of the usual sad, slow enka songs, they were singing rock 'n' roll. Not good rock n' roll, nor were they singing it well, but it was still better than enka, George thought.
The waiter took Jim's card and returned with a half empty - half full bottle of Four Roses whiskey and a fifty page song list. While Jim mixed the mizu-wari drinks, George thumbed through the song list. Despite the promise of the place, there were only the four standard English songs - My Way, Yesterday, Happy Birthday to You, and Jingle Bells. He had sung each a hundred times before.
"Which one you sing?" Jim asked. "I ask."
"Don't they have anything else?"
"Big choice. Many, many songs."
"Only four English songs and I'm sick of all of them."
"Huh?"
"Don't they have any more English songs."
Jim grabbed the book and found the page listing the four English songs. "Here. English. Are you okay? Which one you sing?"
George took the list from Jim's hands and put it on the table. Then he took the pen and request form from the tray and wrote on the back of the slip: "Are there any other English songs?" George had taught English long enough to realize that even the worst English speakers in Japan could read English.
"Aah - wakatta! Okay. Wait one minutes please. I ask." He returned with another book of songs, all in English.
A miracle! George had never seen such a plethora of English songs including some less that than ten years old. There were even a few he liked and wanted to sing, finally settling on "Hotel California." Jim filled out request slips for each of them.
While waiting, they finished most of the half bottle of whiskey. George was beginning to feel a little drunk. Jim was wobbling about the room trying to pick up girls with the opening line, "Come see my gaijin friend," which he was sure was certain to succeed if the girls would only stop spinning around. George sat at the table and continued to drink.
"Your friend's really drunk."
George turned around to find a Japanese girl wearing jeans and a Bart Simpson, "Don't have a cow, man," t-shirt.
"How come you can speak English?"
"I went to high school in Indiana last year."
"Sounds tough."
"It was. I couldn't say more than 'hello' for the first three months. But now I'm forgetting everything I've learned. My name's Kiki."
George offered her Jim's vacant seat. Jim didn't need it anymore. He had sunk into oblivion in a corner of the room. As she sat down, a voice called George's name over the speaker. The whole crowd clapped.
George stepped up onto the stage and grabbed the microphone. "Hi. I'm George Cambell from Canada. I'm going to sing Hotel California by the Eagles." The crowd clapped again. Someone yelled, "USA number 1!"
George waited for the music to begin. And waited. A man rushed on stage and pushed a few more buttons on the machine, but still nothing happened. Two more men came on stage and pushed more buttons. Finally, one said, "No have." Another handed him the English play list. George picked out one of the other songs he liked. They pushed more buttons, but still no music.
"Only here," one said, pointing at the standard four English songs.
It was still too early in the year for Jingle Bells, wasn't the birthday of anyone he knew, hated "My Way," which left only "Yesterday." He pointed at the song. They pushed the buttons and soon the tune of "My Way" began while the words flashed on the screen over pictures of naked women. The crowd cheered him on.
When he finished singing, they gave him a big ovation and chanted "USA! USA!" until the next singer began.
"You have a beautiful voice," Kiki said when he sat back down.
"Thank you."
"I'm sorry I have to go now. My parents are very strict, especially since I came back. They are afraid I'm out picking up foreign guys." She laughed. "See you next time."
George poured the last of the whiskey in his glass but before he could get the glass to his mouth, one of the button pushers had started tugging on his arm. Jim was sick in the corner.
The button pushers descended on the scene with a pile of rags while George dragged Jim towards the bathroom. Someone handed Jim a big plastic bag just in time to prevent him soiling the two girls exiting the bathroom.
George paid the bill while Jim finished emptying his stomach. The bill came to only $25.
While Jim finally staggered from the bathroom, George helped him up the stairs.
"I'm okay," Jim said. "Just Bush-kaze. No problem." He leaned against the wall while George tried to hail a cab. None would stop - a foreigner and a Japanese in a stained maroon suit could only mean trouble, but finally one pulled over and George pushed Jim into the cab before the driver had time to reconsider. George waved good-bye but Jim was already passed out.
He stood on the corner, lit a cigarette and considered what to do. The narrow street was still filled with people. It was too early to go back to the hotel. He wanted another beer. Maybe some yakitori.
He was looking down the street for a suitable bar when someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around.
A woman in a full length, black mink coat overtop a sequined dress and black and silver high heels stood facing him. She had short hair with brown highlights, stylish glasses, and a humongous ring. She looked about thirty-five years old, which meant she was probably about forty-five.
"Hello," she said.
"Hello," he responded. She said nothing more, so he asked, "Do I know you?"
"You have very nice voice." Though he couldn't remember seeing her face, she must have been in the karaoke club.
"I have present for you," she said.
"A television!"
"Very nice present. Come with me." She put her hand on his sleeve and tugged gently.
"Where?"
"With me," she said pulling a bit harder. She certainly wasn't bad looking, and no matter what happened, he knew he could escape to Tokyo the next morning. But she was too pushy, and would probably be the same in bed, if that was actually what she had in mind.
George pulled the pack of cigarettes out of his packet, lit a cigarette, and leaning against the railing, smoked it while staring at the woman waiting impatiently in front of him while he considered what to do.
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