Conversations at a BBQ

Now that summer has arrived and the weather has started to get nice around here, there have been a lot of BBQs recently. They are usually international events, where foreigners and Japanese people mingle.

I usually get into a lot of interesting conversations there, so I thought I’d jot a few of them down.

There is a group of what may be described as “Japanese hippies” there. Actually “hippy” might be the wrong word. These guys have nice clothes, good hygiene, and only slightly long hair. Maybe a better description might be what Phish called, “prep-school hippies”, although even that is slightly inadequate because they’re no longer in school, but about my age. They do remind me of some of the people I went to high school with though.

They are always listening to music or playing drums, and seem to have an aura of coolness around them that attracts a lot of girls. They are very friendly to me, but to be honest I am more interested in the girls hanging around them than I am in talking to them. I am friendly and talk to them only so that I can be around the girls. I engage them in conversation only to the bare minimum that I can still be on friendly terms with them, and then talk to the girls around them.

I feel slightly guilty about this, and it strikes me that these are the exactly the kind of guys I tried so hard to attach myself to in high School. I wonder why now I am only concerned about using them for their access to women. Perhaps since I have come to Japan I have become spoiled by attention. I have met countless Japanese people who have been looking to make foreign friends or practice their English. Perhaps I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve stopped appreciating gestures of friendliness, and now blow off people I would have jumped at the chance to hang out with ten years ago.

Or perhaps I’ve just changed since I was in high school. In high school I thought if I could just hang out with these people enough their coolness would rub off on me, but now I’ve more or less given up the pursuit of cool, and like to hang out with people whose conversation I genuinely enjoy, and who have similar interests to me. This tends to be largely other geeks like myself.
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I am introduced to another English teacher like myself. She has just been in Japan for 6 months. I mentioned I have been here for almost 4 years now, and she couldn't believe it.

At 4 years, I’m starting to become one of the old men here. Very few people stay that long, and if they do, they are usually the “lifers”. People employed in an English conversation school get burned out quick and seldom make it more than a year. Even JET has a 3-year cap. 4 years seems like an incredibly long amount of time to everyone else.

“Your Japanese must be perfect,” she exclaimed.

“You would think after 4 years it should be, wouldn’t you?” I said. It’s not as good as it should be, and sometimes people who have only been here for 2 years have better Japanese than me. It’s a depressing topic, and I don’t like to talk about how bad my Japanese is, so I left it at that.

“After 4 years, you must have had all sorts of great experiences,” she said. “What’s the most exciting thing you’ve ever done? The thing that you can go home and tell everyone about.”

When the question is put to me like that, it seems like I’ve done very little during my 4 years here, and I don’t have any interesting stories. I thought for a moment, then mentioned the across Japan hitchhiking trip Greg and I did a couple years ago, and that seems to impress her a bit.

Although to be honest even that sounds more impressive than it was. The trip went so smoothly, and the rides came so readily, that it can’t really be called much of an adventure. In fact in our journey across Japan we never even got off the highway until the very end. And besides which, I can’t really take credit for that trip because I would never have done that trip if Greg hadn’t pressured me into it.
***

I was near the grill and a Canadian friend of mine was entertaining several Japanese girls. He decided to direct some of the attention towards me by saying, “Joel actually is from Iran.”

There were coos of amazement, but I quickly denied this. My friend changed into English long enough to say, “Ah come on man, you’ve got to play with it a little.” I apologized for blowing the joke.

A Japanese girl with a big tattoo on her back came over. She was wearing a short top, so large parts of the dragon tattoo were visible.

Historically tattoos in Japan are usually only worn by the yakuza, or Japanese mafia. I think this is changing somewhat because the girl in question did not appear to be involved in organized crime, but her tattoo was an object of interest to everyone present.

My Canadian friend started to set me up again. “Actually Joel has a tattoo on his ass.”

I tried not to blow the joke. “It’s true,” I said.

“Let us see it,” someone said.

“No, you can’t see it,” I answered defensively. And then I tried to recover, “I mean, I would show it to you but…”

Someone else asked what the tattoo was. I tried to think of the most random thing I could think off, and thought of Mike Tyson’s tattoo of Chairman Mao on his bicep. “It’s Chairman Mao,” I said. Actually for people who know me, maybe that is a bit predictable, but these people didn’t know me so I thought it would still have a random funniness to it. No one laughed, and I thought that maybe because of the recent tension between Japan and China it was a bad joke.
***

I am introduced to another girl, this one Japanese. She wants to learn German, and asks me if I can teach her. “I don’t know German,” I said. “You would have to find a German person to teach you that. I only speak English.”

“But there are no German people in Gifu,” she complains.

“There’s at least one,” I said. “I’m sure of that.”

“Can you introduce me to him?”

“He’s not really a friend of mine,” I said. “Actually he’s more of an enemy.” I almost liked the way that sounded as it rolled off my tongue. I never really had an enemy before. The girl just nodded in a confused way, and changed the subject.