Jawaad Mahmood in Tokyo

Oh no, another one.

Don’t look, don’t look… he isn’t there. I’m still the only one. There’s no one here but me. I’m the ONLY…

Oh man, he’s now moving past the Old lady. I hope he doesn’t bump into her – idiot, he’s making me look bad. I didn’t spend all that time in the Anime club learning Japanese for nothing. This is a culture of RESPECT and UNDERSTANDING, he couldn’t understand.

Stupid monkey, doesn’t he know that the seat is for old people only? We are guests here!

Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster, an email from my girlfriend. Isn’t that cute, she’s sending me pink hearts. The bitches in Chicago didn’t send me pink hea…

Is he walking past me? Don’t look at me – don’t look at me! I’m not here. I’m not in front of you, you hairy ape. You, you gaijin, you clown. I’m with my nakamas and I’m going to write an email to my Tenshi right now!

“Dear Michiro, there is some Gaijin idiot who was standing in the train and sat in the se-ttei seki. I’m soooooo embarassed to be American! I hate America! Let’s go to Akihabara tomorrow after your work ends. I don’t mind if it is at 9. love love kiss kiss, your bestest boyfriend, Milton”

He’s off the train. FINALLY. Idiot.

I was always irritated when I saw this commercial. Not being able to read Japanese is actually a benefit, as its true insidious nature is more easily understood.

The basic idea is that a silly girl has borrowed 100,000 yen, and returns the money one month later – and only has to pay 1500 yen. At least that’s the mental picture you get if you are an exhausted salary man, forced to stare at these sorts of commercials in a packed train on the way home.

It isn’t misleading in the strictest sense, but it trivializes the difficulty of obtaining the 100,000 to pay back (not to mention the 1500 yen). There is small print that says “Please borrow money responsibly”; maybe responsible advertising would be a first step to that goal.

“The bastard cockblocked me!” exclaimed Josh, my ever-excitable American friend.

Thus I was introduced to the most dispicable character in the pick up game, the cockblock. Takayuki Fujiki, as we will call him for this entry, is a system engineer at a small Japanese company. He told me that his hobbies included learning the English language and getting drunk. I guess Takayuki didn’t realize that butting into Josh’s drunk conversations was not a good way to make friends.

Takayuki’s big problem was that didn’t know he was cockblocking Josh. He didn’t realize that jumping in the middle of two people and starting to talk in mangled English would be akin to a mental cold shower. Worse was how he wouldn’t leave regardless of the angry stares other guys gave him. It drove Josh nuts.

I’m not part of the game, and I don’t drink – but I do try to take care of my friends. Thus I was tasked with the unenviable duty of eliminating the cockblock. However, as I discovered, it was easy to get rid of him. I just bumped into him by accident, and when he spilled his drink, I walked him away (slowly) while letting Josh have his way with his woman. The second time I decided I didn’t want to have to talk to him, so I just started referring to him by Yakuza honorifics until he moved on.

I was snooping around after the party ended at 10 and caught an interesting scene. To frame it, you need to appreciate that the party was a total bomb, with quite a few unattractive women meeting foreigners looking to score. I think there was maybe two or three really attractive girls in the bunch. And yet, at the end of the party I could have sworn I saw one getting a payoff from the owner when they thought everyone had gone. Then it was down to the 3rd floor and into a Deai cafe where doubtless she fleeced a few J-Guys as well..

I don’t know the details, and maybe I misunderstood something. However, let me speculate by saying they pay attractive girls to tempt guys to come to these parties. (1 nice girl = 10 gaijin men = 40 gaijin lovers / English leeches). It’s a good economic system (since G-Men pay 20$ for the night, and non-comped foreign women pay $45), but it seems that this time there were more Gaijin guys than anything else. (I guess the girls stayed at home) A lot of the Gaijin guys got their money’s worth in beer (all you can drink). I, on the other hand, got my money’s worth watching some beta bois swarm around one woman and be slowly (but politely) rejected – all in a day’s work for her!

I have a question I always ask my friends in Japan – “Why do Japanese love Americans when it was Americans who dropped a nuke on Hiroshim and Nagasaki?”. It isn’t a question borne out of any dislike towards Americans on my part, but something I seriously never understood. (I personally couldn’t imagine ever forgiving someone who did something like that). Usually the answer is a vague “Uh, I dunno”. Today I finally got a real answer.

Toshiyuki, a guy I met at that Nanpa party a week ago stopped by for lunch. Like me he had no idea what that party was really for. We met up today and ate while talking about various things. The nuke subject came up, and he basically said something like this; Japan was a country that had lost the war for sure, but its leadership was waffling over the surrender requirements. Furthermore, it was war time and it is only appropriate that a nation use all its means to bring the war to an end in an efficient manner. On top of that, America had not annihilated the Japanese, and ended the war upon surrender, and Japan had been given the chance to be reborn economically afterwards. Any “righteous anger” would be double-talk in the face of the crimes that Japan had committed in World War 2. He ended by saying that most Japanese people weren’t patriotic in the strictest sense, and that most did not feel that they were on the right side in WW2.

Although I still think that the atom bomb was a nasty piece of work, I was impressed at the rationale laid out.