Sayonara Japan

By Max Value

Few people can truly understand another country and write about it with insight, aplomb and humour. Clearly, Max Value is not one of them. But fewer still can live in a foreign country for 25 years and still not have a clue. This takes unparalleled ineptitude and naivety, and it’s here the author really shines. ‘Dazed and confused in Japan’, ‘Lost and incontinent in the Orient’, ‘How to mangle a foreign language’, ‘101 Ways to Infuriate Locals’ would all be good subtitles for this look back on an expatriate’s life in Japan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9780359864744

Book preview

Sayonara Japan

Sayonara Japan

I swear I’m not making this up

Max Value

Cover artwork by Lachlan Miller.

Thanks to Bev Peters for her generous support and expert guidance.

© Max Value, 2019. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from the author is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Max Value with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Max can be reached at [e-mail]

ISBN #: 978-0-359-86474-4

For my students

who have not only been my students, 

but also my friends,

and my teachers of all things Japan.

An English teacher never had it better.

1. Pre-hysteric Period

How it all began

i. Catching a bus

My first foray into Japan was a few days after my eighteenth birthday. Travelling as an exchange student on a one-year program, I was sent to one of the most remote cities in one of the most remote prefectures in all of Honshu. Shinminato, located on the west coast of Japan, was one of those lovely little towns where you couldn’t walk down the street without bumping into a number of people you know well. Shinminato was one of those quaint little boroughs where the line between personal property and communal property was delightfully blurred. And Shinminato was one of those charming little towns that soon ceased to exist. In the year 2000, possibly as a millennium gift from Toyama prefecture, the government merged Shinminato with a neighbouring town and gave it a completely different name which I cannot for the life of me recall. And so an era came to an end.

But I loved Shinminato. I loved its folksiness. I loved its easy-going country pace. I loved the way that everyone knew everyone, and everyone knew everywhere and how to best get there. Except for one person: me. In a town of 50,000 people, there were 49,999 Japanese and one foreigner. There were 49,999 people under six feet tall and one foreigner. There were 49,999 people who could communicate with each other. And then there was that one lumbering foreigner.

This lack of ability to communicate was disarming. You went from literate to illiterate overnight and from abled to disabled in the same amount of time. It was like being an adult trapped in a child’s world. It was frustrating. It was humiliating. And it was hilarious.

Take my first night. I was staying in the home of a doctor and his wife, and the home was attached to their 20-bed hospital. Their children had grown up and the old couple were now on their own, except for all the nurses and admin staff and patients, and one foreigner who hadn’t had the foresight or diligence to learn even a speck of the language before arriving. I was sitting in the living room watching TV. (I must emphasise that I was watching TV - there was no point listening to it.) My host mother suddenly burst into the room and announced in a fluster that I had to take a bus.

A bus?

A bus, she insisted.

Why? I asked.

She didn’t have the language skills to answer, nor I to understand. Had I said or done something wrong? Why was I being turfed out after a few short hours?

Take a bus, she said again sternly.

Where are we going? I asked. I was quite shocked by this sudden rejection.

Take a bus, she repeated. Now.

Do I need to pack a bag?

No.

Grab my passport?

No. Just get the bus. She was flapping her hand at me in a rather aggressive manner which seemed to suggest that I needed to hurry. Perhaps there was a fire in the building? The death of a patient? Realising that questioning her was getting nowhere, I obediently rose and followed her. She led me down a hallway, opened a door, pointed and said, Take a bus!

Oh, take a baaththth?!

Yes. Take a bus.

Dutifully, after listening to her instructions, I took a bus.

Taking a ‘bus’ for the first time in Japan led to a whole other area of misunderstanding. No, I’m not talking about getting in without first washing, or pulling the plug when you’re done. Any half-wit foreigner can do that. I’m talking about serious issues of personal space. Having undressed in the outer bathroom area, I then entered the bathroom proper and obediently sat on the little plastic stool next to the bathtub and began to wash myself. I hadn’t been long into this procedure when the door suddenly swung open and my host mother waltzed in. Instinctively, I covered up. Is everything all right? she wondered.

Yes.

Goodo then. And back out she went.

Was she bursting in for a quick perv? Was she genuinely concerned that I might have soiled the bathwater by not first washing? Was she worried I might have drowned in the bath? To this day, I do not know the answer, but that was the first of many disturbing breaches of personal space that I would encounter or cause to be encountered.

What’s more, when I came out of the bathroom (fully dressed) she chastised me with a sombre voice, You are ashamed of your body. Because I covered up? What did she want, an exhibition? Some star jumps and a sultry dance? I let the comment go (what else could I do?) but it wasn’t till much later that I realised she was saying (and possibly apologising for the fact) that I had been embarrassed.

ii. Personal Space

This issue of personal pace was a curious and confusing one for me. I had been taught before coming to Japan that the Japanese were a very modest and shy people, acutely aware of the sensitivities of others, and who adhere to any number of subtleties and chaste behaviour that the culture might call for. Then they go strip off and get into a bath with complete and utter strangers. And this communal and completely nude bathing in public baths and hot springs is not something that is done with the reservation of the demure. It is planned well ahead, delighted in in the moment and celebrated, sometimes for weeks afterwards. I’ve spent half my life in Japan and I still don’t get it. I’m not a prude. I’d walk around my house naked all day if my wife wasn’t so disturbed by it. But when it comes to public bathing, the Japanese seem to have fewer inhibitions than they do being naked in their own home. Seems to me they might have got it round the wrong way. But when in Rome, let the Romans do what they want to do.

The problem is, sometimes the Romans want me to be a Roman too. Really Roman. I mean, getting into a bath stark naked with a bunch of strange men is agony enough, but in Japan they also have mixed bathing - as in men and women bathing stark naked together, in the same bath, naked, side by side, together, soaking naked together at the same time with members of the opposite sex naked - and for this then eighteen-year-old, it was a reason to seriously consider absconding. Which is what I very nearly did one day when a progressive couple from my sponsor club took me to a ‘special onsen’. When we arrived, there were animated pictures on the walls of men and women gaily chatting to one another in the bath and having a lovely and seemingly completely normal time as though playing cards or discussing paint samples.

I did not sleep that night. I lay in bed with my eyes wide open and spent every minute trying to psyche myself into a state of social awareness for the morning’s prime cultural event. ‘There is nothing wrong with the human body’ I told myself over and over. ‘There is nothing wrong with bathing alongside other men and women. It’s normal here. It’s what they do. There is nothing wrong with the human body. There is nothing wrong with the human body. There is nothing wrong with the human body…’ Then why after a night of talking to myself like this did I still feel in the morning that there was something terribly wrong with this arrangement? When the fateful hour arrived, the husband asked me if I was ready. Yes, I lied, and then followed him into the men’s change room like a dog being dragged into a clinic to be neutered. We then moved - stark naked - from the men’s change room into…the men’s onsen. We never even went near the mixed bath. That remains the happiest anticlimax of my life. There were apparently three separate baths - men’s, women’s and mixed. Mercifully, they chose to go conservative. I only wish they’d told me beforehand.

(Some mixed bathing is spontaneous and unexpected. One time I went to an onsen with a bunch of mischievous Europeans where the signs for ‘men’ and ‘women’ were not fixed to the wall. After a number of people had gone into the bath, they switched the signs around. But that’s another story…)

Many of my adventures and misadventures occurred in school. I loved school in Japan mainly because I didn’t have to do anything. It was basically a year of bludging disguised as ambassadorship. I think there’s nothing in life that gives a guy more pleasure than simply not having to do anything but being considered important for it. I was truly in my element.

My first day at school perpetuated the understanding that things - and personal spacey things - are just not the same in Japan. At one point in my first morning I asked my homeroom teacher where the toilet was. He appointed a boy in my class to show me. This boy then took my hand - held my hand - to lead me to the toilet. This seemed so gay to me - not in a derogatory sense but in a very gay sense - and in the moment I very nearly decked him. But when I saw that none of the other students reacted to it in any way as being strange, I realised that one boy leading another boy by the hand into the toilet just isn’t quite as unusual as it might be back home. (Now, if he had followed me into the cubicle, that would have been another matter…)

Yet things remained confusing as a few months later another boy in my class tried to hold my hand for no apparent reason. It wasn’t till he smiled, fluttered his eyelids several times and declared that he was gay, and that I was beautiful, that I realised a serious personal space had been violated.

It got even stranger when it came to personal space and interrelations with girls. For the whole year I was there, the only girl who would speak to me one-to-one was one of my host sisters. No other girl would approach me unless it was from within the safety of a herd of twelve. It was fabulous. They would gather two or three metres from me, spend fifteen minutes practicing questions in English clearly within earshot, then shuffle up to me like sheep roped together and ask me what my blood type was. (I had no idea what my blood type was. They may as well have asked me about my pH balance.) But it simply appeared too wanton, too brazen, for them to approach me on their own.

This perspective seemed to be one that was held across the community. One night I went to a dance club with another exchange student - a girl - in the next town. We only stayed a short while and I was back within my curfew. Yet I was reprimanded by my sponsor club, my school and the local supermarket checkout lady (remember, everyone knows everyone) for such unseemly behaviour. What would people think?

Not a month later however, my sponsor club decided I should see the sights of Kyoto. They arranged for me to do this over a three day period