Escape to Osaka

A big, international media studies conference was to take place in Tokyo this week. Several friends of mine were scheduled to attend and I figured it would be a triumphant highlight of my trip. But when the flu landed ashore here, the Japanese government imposed a battery of ill-conceived and futile restrictions on foreign travelers. Most of those from outside the country who were scheduled to attend the conference canceled, and then the conference itself was canceled outright. That night I had a dream that the little red ink pad within my signature seal case was running dry, and I was trying unsuccessfully to draw out enough ink to stamp my time card. I woke up and caught the first bus to Osaka. Ever since I arrived here people have been badgering me to visit Kyoto. They don’t know what a crass, know-nothing pleasure-seeker I am at heart. Osaka is the perfect city for me. There is very little sightseeing to be done there, only restaurants, bars, and shops winding through streets as circuitous as a yakuza’s tattoos.

The three staples of Osaka street cuisine are okonomiyaki (cabbage pancakes), takoyaki (balls of dough with bits of octopus), and gyoza (Chinese-style dumplings). There is plenty of okonomiyaki available in Tokushima and they are perfectly palatable, so I was under the mistaken impression that I had experienced this delicacy. Wandering the Shinsaibashi arcades Friday night I came upon a place that looked good: it was small and crowded and there was 60s-era free jazz playing, the latter a surprisingly reliable signpost of good food in Japan. I was ushered to the one empty seat at the counter and watched the chefs work their magic. Under paper-thin pancakes they pressed mounds of cabbage, eggs, kimchi, leeks, pickled ginger, powdered seaweed, even udon noodles, along with a variety of meats and fish, all topped with a sweet brown sauce and crisscrossing lines of mayonnaise. There were a dozen or so varieties of these things on the menu and the slender young gals next to me seemed determined to try every one, helplessly seduced by the chefs’ handiwork.

Later at the international bar Sam and Dave’s I drank cassis and soda (a break from umeshu) and talked to a 22-year-old Italian designer on his third trip to Osaka. Fashion here is defined by catch-all bricolage. The same kids wandering among the noisy boutiques of Amerikamura can be spied later in Shinsaibashi combing the racks of the Disney store for Mickey Mouse earphone winders and cell phone chargers. And for a tightwad like me the vintage clothing shops here measure up to those of any U.S. city. Wandering the Amerikura district I’m more convinced than ever that the medium is the message. Though the streets of Japanese cities have teemed with American popular culture for a century and a half, the frictionless flows of the Internet have allowed them to definitively triumph over us on any measure of hipness. Time Bomb Records has an exhaustive, pristine collection of girl groups, ska, bubblegum, psychobilly, and pretty much every other obscure and essential genre. Standard Books has a stunning array of works both authored and translated into Japanese: biographies of Eminem and Lee Scratch Perry, tomes on the movie Wild Style and the My Bloody Valentine record Loveless, the full runs of 212 Mag and Waxpoetics, whole shelves devoted to dog and cat photography and to album cover art, and pretty much every volume ever published by the mind-blowing German art-book house Taschen.

Osaka’s nightlife carries on without pause all weekend. Bars are open till 5 or 6 am and from there you can go to the after-hours places. You can still spy black-clad kids stumbling home in the late afternoon. I spent Friday night getting oriented at the Sam and Dave’s near my hotel in Nagahoribashi; somewhat like a Japanese Hard Rock, there are three outlets of the popular establishment in Osaka alone. Saturday I had a great burger at the ostentatiously American-themed Captain Kangaroo bar and several stouts at the Blarney Stone in Umeda. Sunday is a quiet night in Osaka; the bars are only open till 3 or 4. I finally made it to the intimate little karaoke bar Kama Sutra in Shinsaibashi (not much bigger than a karaoke room), downed four house beers and wailed through XTC’s “Mayor of Simpleton” and Olivia Newton-John’s “Have You Never Been Mellow.”

I met a lot of the city’s famously friendly natives at these places, practically all of whom had either visited the U.S. or were planning to do so (mainly Las Vegas and NYC), as well as quite a few ex-pats, mostly Australians, Brits, Irish and Yanks. Cool, young Japanese girls flock to the international bars; they can dress sexily without having anyone assume they’re hostesses or, better still, they can wear jeans. Learning that I was based in Tokushima, the natives offered patronizing quips about the Awa Odori dance (pretty much the only thing Tokushima’s known for), just as people in Detroit or Chicago start in about Bronner’s Christmas Wonderland when I tell them I’m from Saginaw. I returned to Tokushima on Monday with a sudden, stupid feeling of insecurity: do I live in a Japanese hick town? Shikoku has only been linked to Honshu by bridges for about twenty years; some Osakans were still unaware they could get here by car. After 15 years in New York and Philadelphia earlier in my life, I seem destined to spend the rest of it on the margins, even here. Having put a few days between myself and Osaka, though, Tokushima is again offering up the small pleasures I discovered when I arrived a month and a half ago, and starting to feel a little more like home.

conversation and food, mostly food

I have a pretty jaded sense of humor but Nagao never fails to crack me up. He giggles his way through the story of his Japanese student who, with typical difficulty teasing out the phonemes /r/ and /l/, recited the first line of Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” thus: “I wandered lonely as a crowd.” In his own days as a student Nagao benefited from an English instructor who drilled him with tape recordings of the phonemes: “rice, lice, rice, lice …” Nagao’s mnemonic for the distinction: “We live on rice; we are lived on by lice.”

My pleasure in Nagao’s company seems mutual, as I too manage to put him in stitches at least once every conversation, but this is easy when you’re an American in Japan. He was especially taken with a story from my first visit to the sento. I was about to enter one of the baths when an older gentleman called out to me, “Ereki, ereki!” while pinching his lower arm demonstratively. “What?” I asked. He repeated, “Ereki!” This charade went on for awhile until I finally pointed at the bath and said, “I’m going in there,” and he gave me a kind of “it’s your funeral” wave-off. I dipped a foot in and was shocked, literally, as the bath was equipped with steel plates that emitted a mild electric charge. (I’ve since ventured further into the “denkiburo,” literally “electric bath,” and found it quite relaxing.)

What amused Nagao was the man’s exhortation of “ereki,” a coinage that combines “electricity” and “denki,” the Japanese word for electricity. The term is more commonly used to describe a musical instrument (electric guitar) and genre (post-60s electric rock), but by using it to describe the bath the guy actually thought he was speaking English. Japanese borrowings from English are always a bit tortured, mostly because of the phonetic rule that every syllable consist of one consonant and one vowel. Sometimes the result is a lengthening of the original term: the three syllable “credit card” is doubled in length to “kurejito kado.” Other times, apparently when people couldn’t be bothered to work out all the consonants and vowels, the result is a shortening: “electricity” becomes “ereki,” “family computer” becomes “famicom,” and “orchestra” becomes “oke” (as in “karaoke,” or “empty orchestra”). Still other times, the neologisms are wonderfully creative hybrids, as when young people here describe their culture’s relatively rare moments of physical intimacy as “skinship.”

To the degree that I’m learning anything about the language here, it’s mostly from fellow foreigners. Ironically, given how much is done for my benefit, among natives I’m almost always a non-person in conversation. My companion Hideki, though a stellar Man Friday, is a less effective translator: he talks to others present in Japanese and to me in English, and gets so engrossed in conversation at both ends that he neglects to play go-between. This works surprisingly well for me, as I’ve always been a daydreamer and never very good at following conversations even in English; here, I have an excuse to zone out.

My ignorance of the language becomes especially propitious at meal time as it allows me to focus on my food while others yammer on. Staples here include sashimi, yakitori (little skewers of meat and vegetables), yakisoba (noodles and vegetables), and okonomiyaki (cabbage pancakes). Food is typically doled out in a cavalcade of small portions from a common platter or grill or Lazy Susan. This plays havoc with my eating habits since, like a dog, my stomach has always failed to send signals when I’m full and I therefore rely on my sense of sight to regulate my intake. At restaurants at home I’ll often mentally allocate a part of the oversized American serving to a doggy bag before I even start eating, yet here despite the dainty little plates I end up overeating. I’ve been especially profligate with the sushi and sashimi. Good fish is so taken for granted here that it’s common for a forlorn plate of kampachi and squid to sit unfinished or untouched while people gather around the grill slavering over skewers of the most routine wieners and chicken nuggets. The upshot is that I'm engorging myself on pretty much a nightly basis. I tell myself that I'm prepping for my role here like De Niro in Raging Bull and do my best to maintain my ignorance of metric weight conversion (I only weigh 86 kilos!). But in Japan one squats on a low stool to shower, and in front of the shower there is always a mirror, so I’ve had the privilege of watching my body grow in a very special way.

thoughts on teaching

The putative focus of my classes here is communication and culture, but my colleagues have made it clear that the most important thing is to interact with students in English. People here are always endearingly grateful whenever anything comes out of my mouth resembling their native language, even though the average snack bar hostess knows far more English than I know Japanese. Yet I’m almost discouraged from trying to meet the students halfway. There has been a stronger push than ever for English education here, with a prevailing sense that Japan will not take its rightful political and economic place in the world until its population becomes fluent in English, which is so radically different from Japanese in its vocabulary and grammar.

It’s a little too heavenly to be told you’re doing your job by speaking your own language. The intersection of language and power permeates my interactions in a way that’s hard to ignore. “You’re lucky,” says one colleague, “You can go anywhere in the world and people understand you.” The Japanese professors who visit SVSU are expected to speak English (or whatever it is we speak in Michigan), whereas I can go happily along in my own language and it’s the students’ job to adapt. For the majority of our time in the classroom to be spent vaguely understanding each other is expected here; at home, it’s a cause for complaint. Listening to the students here fumble along in broken English, I’m filled with admiration for their halting attempts to reconcile themselves to the closest thing to an international language – and embarrassment at some of my own students’ abuse of it as their first language.

I’m told that the students here find me gratifyingly easy to understand. My naturally slow speech, which tries my own students’ patience, works to my advantage here. The students are still pretty quiet but we’re starting to develop a rapport. I find their questions often focus less on particular words or verbal constructions than on everyday idioms, especially those conveying emotion or relation. Why would someone say “Don’t mention it” after being thanked? Why do Americans say “You shouldn’t have” after receiving gifts? (Do Americans not like gifts? Are they ungrateful?) People are especially preoccupied with the small pleasantries that grease the wheels of interaction. Japanese is full of these: not just the endlessly repeated “sumimasen,” “onegai shimasu,” “arigato,” etc., but the polite prefixes and suffixes so often used to dress up verbs and subjects. My favorite Japanese stock phrases: “gochiso sama” (“thanks for the wonderful meal”), “otsukare sama” (at the end of the workday, “thanks for your hard work”), and “yoroshiku onegai shimasu” (upon meeting someone, “please be kind to me”).

One of the DVDs I brought from home is Ozu’s late-1950s gem Ohayô (Good Morning), in which two young brothers stage a sort of civil action against their parents by refusing to talk for days on end. Their immediate gripe is the parents’ refusal to buy them a TV set, their larger gripe that so much of what passes for talk between adults seems pointless. Soon enough the children’s small gesture turns the social world of the neighborhood upside down: a woman down the street takes their silence personally, she strikes back with malicious gossip about the kids’ mother, and a neighborhood feud nearly ensues. The message is clear enough: even as we seek new information (via television, a new medium in a newly prosperous Japan at the time of Ozu’s film), we often neglect the functional importance of communication in just keeping the peace. In the end the kids call off their protest and get their TV, and mostly use it to partake in that most redundant and reassuring pastime, watching baseball.