Dating Game
I attended a sort of dating game on Saturday night. It was my first time to do something like this, but apparently it’s real popular in Japan. It’s based off of a Japanese game show. There are a even number of men and women at the event. You sit at the table opposite someone of the opposite sex, and talk for ten minutes. After 10 minutes, the men all rotate to the next table, and so by the end of the rotation everyone has talked to everyone else. Then there’s 20 minutes of free talking time. And then the game starts.
All the guys come with one flower, and the girls come with a box of chocolates. The men all line up and come forward one at a time to present the flower to the girl he likes. But, if someone else likes the same girl, they can call out “Chotto Matta” (wait a minute) and also present their flowers to the girl. The girl at this point must choose who to give her chocolate to.
It's a bit of a rough game, because if the girl has to choose between two different guys, then someone ends up getting a pretty public rejection. Also, because some girls receive flowers from several guys, at the end there are girls left standing without any flowers.
I commented to my friend Chris at one point that you can’t have a fragile ego and play this game. Chris countered that you can’t have a fragile ego and be on the JET Program in general. He then talked about all the times he was meeting someone for the first time in Japan, and the first thing they would say to him would usually be something like, “fat, you fat.”
It's a bit of an oddity about Japan. For a culture that is usually so polite, there seems to be an exception when it comes to pointing out physical attributes. Chris isn't even that fat. Not by American standards anyway. My friend Ryan, now he was fat. Ryan, you'll recall, was the other English teacher in Ajimu for the first two years I was here. Nice guy, but quite over weight. And you would not believe the amount of flack he got because of that. Japanese people were not at all shy about pointing out that he was overweight. For my part, I endured several comments about my acne. This past summer my acne was worse than it had ever been in my entire life, caused by the hot and humid climate of Kyushu (well, my diet of chocolate and coffee probably didn't help). And at the time Japanese women did not hesitate to tell me how disgusting they thought my acne looked.
But I digress. I'm supposed to be talking about this dating game. It was 30 people in total (15 guys, 15 girls) mostly all Japanese. Of that number four of us were foreign men (me and 3 guys from Britain) and two foreign girls: an American and a Canadian. I felt like I was somewhat tricked into going to this thing. At the time I agreed to come to it, I was told only that it was a party. After I found out what kind of party it was, I protested, but I was told that it was only for play, and more of a friend meeting party.
Which wasn't completely true. There were some people there who were definitely looking for a potential mate. I wasn't really looking for a new girlfriend, so I was unsure of what to do. I found a pretty face and starting talking to her, but when I got the sense that she might like me back I started to get worried. Since I was one of the last guys to present my flower, it was already apparent at that time that some of the girls would be left standing without having received any flowers. I thought this particular girl might expect to get flowers from me, and I didn't want to leave her up there without getting flowers from anyone. On the other hand I didn't want her to think I was really interested. So I gave her my flowers, and then panicked and ignored her for the rest of the night. I suppose this gets filed under my long list of “situations I could have handled better.”