Mid-summer solstice means it's update time from yours truly here in Olde Nagoyaland. These dispatches have been fewer and further between of late, and admittedly harder to cobble together. Truth be told, I've been in a difficult headspace, and possibly still on the receding outer fringes of a particularly unpleasant bout of depression (chronicled more fully in my preceding 'cusp of spring equinox' entry). It's hard to tell. Could it be symptomatic of my age? Is there something missing? I have a lovely wife, and am fortunate to be enjoying a period of relatively good health (touch wood). So what's up?
I'm thinking that it may finally boil down to a kind of late mid-life 'identity' crisis. Not being 'young'...or particularly 'old' (though definitely heading in that direction)...not really identifying with anyone or anything in particular. Not old people. Not young people. Kind of like a second pubescence of sorts. That kind of being neither adult nor child thing. Of course, being a white man marooned out here in the smelly armpit of industrial Japan might also be playing into my sense of detachment, alienation and 'otherness'. Instead of going full 'weeaboo' (a newish term that I recently picked up in an online forum that denotes dorky white people who want to be Japanese) like some honkey geek Japanophile types that move out here, I seem to have gradually adopted a more stand-offish - even adversarial - attitude toward the whole 'gaijin immersed in the wonders of Japanese culture' thing. As time marches on, I want less and less to do with it. Hence, you're definitely not going to see me out at the local seasonal matsuri festival parading around in some ill-fitting summer kimono get-up, hob-nobbing with the natives, and show boating my stilted and broken Japanese. Being a big, dumb, awkward cartoonish figure, there to amuse the J-locals with quaint parlour tricks, just the way they like. The cute, token 'immersed' gaijin. Funny and manageable - in 'his' place. Nope. I'll be at home with curtains drawn, watching fucking Netflix, ignoring the whole noisy carbuncle. Lord knows there are enough f.o.b. Johnny (or Joanie) come lately dancing millennial gaijin monkeys to keep the J-folk amused until THE NEXT batch arrives.
Another thing. Looking around at a decidedly select sampling of my estranged 'peers' through the fish-eye lens of social media, I see kids front and centre. Kids becoming young adults. Kids graduating from school. Kids making their parents proud. The generational baton being passed on. Smiles, and pride. A focus. The family name and mantle being carried forward, into the future. Maybe that's what's missing? That great diversion from 'self'.
Offspring provide that tether...that crucial link between parents and 'the younger generations'. That insight and connection into the world of the newbies, and their aspirations, hopes and dreams. Their likes and dislikes. The things that matter to them. Facilitating a new way for their parents to define themselves as they get on in age. It makes sense. As for me...I look at the younger generation - the teens and twenty somethings, and I don't get it. I don't get 'them'. I'm obviously experiencing a classic case of generational schism. They have no taste. Their pop culture sucks. Their fashions suck. I hate their vernacular. Granted - they know how to use mobile phones like pros - but have zero common sense, and horrible social skills. They're whiney and entitled...I mean, I could go on and on. I'm not a fan. I guess that officially makes me a crotchety old man, hunched over on my stoop, perpetually yelling, "Get off my lawn, you little fuckers!". Except that I don't have a lawn..and they wouldn't understand me or give a shit, even if I did.
My wife tells me to be careful, though. "You don't know what they're capable of...." At worst, one of the little shits might harbour a grudge of some kind, boil over, pull a shank and stab me. No exaggeration. Summer in Japan is 'Stabbing Season'. As the mercury rises, the knives come out. No one is safe. A couple of weeks ago, a young guy ran amuck and knifed a bunch of toddlers. This, the day after a chick opened her boyfriend's gut as he slept, then went and sat in the lobby of their apartment building and waited for the cops... grinning and smoking a cigarette, as he lay bleeding out on the tiles, like a gutted fish. Last week, a guy walked into a police box in Osaka, stabbed a cop in the chest, and took off with his gun. Summer is just starting, too. Everyone is fair game.
I digress.
Kids weren't in the cards for us. Not that there weren't sincere 'late game' attempts made...but, alas...t'was not to be. By the time my life started to fall into something resembling 'order', and the idea of siring offspring seemed tenable, it became apparent that said ship had already sailed. I suppose I should be thankful that nothing slipped through the nets in my turbulent 20's or 30's. I can say with a fair degree of certainty that neither of my birth parents were particularly ready to take on the mantle of parenthood back in the mid sixties when I was grunted out...and the result was a bit of a short and rough ride for all concerned.
Still...here I am...and somehow (!) I made it this far. Whether or not I was much of a source of pride for anyone involved is another question; one which will forever remain a matter of doubtful speculation. Yet, I'm sure that I did provide that 'tether', or link to the bizarre sensibilities of my then younger generation to a Mum and Gramma that wouldn't have had that 'in', had I not been around to provide it - for better or worse. Not that it made them 'hip', or anything. Mum was always convinced she was cooler than we were, and Gramma was amused at best, but usually unimpressed. An unflappable lady. Still...here I am. Un-tethered, without any offspring to distract and/or help me define myself as I advance into my autumnal years.
"Get off my lawn, you little fuckers!"
Which brings us around to Ye Olde Nagoyaland. Two weeks into rainy season 2019. Yesterday was up to 32C. The heat coming off the pavement was pretty extreme on my late morning run. Recently, my daily routine keeps me in a pretty limited area of Losersville, so on the rare occasion that I do get out to one of the city's more bustling commercial zones, like Osu, Sakae or Nagoya Station, I find I barely recognize them. Out with the old, in with the new, I suppose.
Back in early March, my wife and I made a day trip out to Osaka to take care of some business at the U.S. Consulate, and going through Umeda Station, I barely recognized where I was, things had changed so dramatically. Winding the clock back to 1990, that was my 'home turf'. My Tsukamoto, 'Moriyama Biru' gaijin ghetto days. It was like the Wild West back then. Ah...to be young again. Osaka is a great town when you're 23 years old, wide-eyed and f.o.b. Thirty years later, the pace is a bit dizzying. Love the energy, though.
With that horseshit 2020 Tokyo Olympics debacle coming down next year, deadbeat Olde Nagoyaland seems to be trying to up its game. A cynical attempt to catch some of those tertiary tourist dollars, I'm sure. We were out at the Nagoya Castle grounds a few weeks ago, and they're in the midst of trying to give that whole area a facelift - including the castle, itself. They seem to be set on rebuilding the thing from scratch, in wood, to its original specifications. What they've had there since the late 50's is an elaborate concrete facsimile, which has failed recent earthquake safety tests, due to structural deterioration. Concrete doesn't last forever. The old wooden 17th century structure was, of course, bombed out and burned to the ground by American B-29's in 1945...like much of the rest of Nagoya.
Anyways, as a preamble, they've put a bunch of overpriced restaurants in the Meijo Koen park area, to cater to the lunchtime and weekend tour bus crowds. You can get a soft ice cream draped in a paper thin sheet of gold leaf for ¥1000. No, thanks. We were there on a Sunday, and the area was congested. Lots of Chinese tourists these days, pushing and shoving...eating and waving smartphones around, chucking garbage everywhere and buying everything in sight. We went through Osu about a week ago. Sunday afternoon, and it was a zoo.
This is Loserville's traditional covered shopping street (shotengai) area. Old stores gone, new ones open. Lots of gaijin. Hard to say if they are of the Japanese government's unfortunate new 'untermensch' under class of temporary blue collar workers, tourists, or students...? Predominantly young...much like I was when I first arrived on these shores. Speaking a smattering of languages. Lots appear to be from greater Asia...some from Brazil, with the occasional Euro-whitey mixed in.
Apparently, the hipsters have arrived. Beardos with man-buns, neck and arm tattoos, ironic t-shirts, dorky glasses and skinny jeans. Oh...and big goofy back packs. Vaping. The girls look almost the same...minus the beards (mostly, anyways), with pallid corpsey looking skin, almost invariably tiny feet and massive giant arses squeezed into jeans that appear two sizes too small. My wife even remarked in passing that the white folk these days weren't looking very 'cool'. She used the term "ダサい!" (dasai!), which directly translates as 'useless', but in a more colloquial sense, means 'lame/unfashionable/worked out'. She's not wrong. I'd go even further to say that they gross me out. I'm a man out of time. I fit nowhere. Especially not with these bellends. "Dasai!" is right. A good reason to stay home and draw the fucking curtains. Maybe if I'd produced one of these little fuckers 25 years ago, I'd feel differently. I'd see their world more sympathetically, through warped hipster lenses. We could be safe space seeking Social Justice Warriors together. Arm in arm. Combing the nits out of each other's beards. God.
A couple of weeks until we split the deadbeat Nagoyaland scene for our big annual four day summer escape. Four whole days. It's over before it's even started. In the beginning of March I told the guy who runs the kindergarten I've been teaching part-time at for 23 years to please NOT schedule me on July 12th, as we were going to book our annual 4 day thing, and I wouldn't be here. That's four months notice. He nodded a 'no problem', took note, leaned in and made a check on the calendar. I watched him. "No problem". Last year I told his wife, who co-runs the school, and she promised to pass on the scheduling note. It was April...three months prior. Plenty of notice. As tends to happen, someone's wires had got crossed, and when I got my July schedule at the end of June, they had booked me through the specific day that I had requested 'off'. We went through a big blame game hassle of who said what and when to whom, and amid scowls and grumbling, the schedule was altered to accommodate my initial request...though their first reaction was to blame me and attempt to cancel the class, outright. Henceforth, I started asking for my class schedules two months in advance - and three, if possible. So, the second week of May I asked for the July schedule. It shouldn't have come as a big surprise that I was booked for July 12th...but it kind of did. Un-fucking believable. So, I call the 'boss man' on it. He starts dithering and making excuses. "I told you at the beginning of March, before my wife booked, and you made a note, and said NO PROBLEM". "Yeah,but...yeah,but...you see...July is a busy month...", etc.
Excuses.
He starts getting dodgy, hands trembling, eyes darting around like a cornered dog. He calls his 'Girl Friday' in to the office, and she brings the class calendars. I presume she makes up the schedules, too. She's all shrugs. It's not her fault he didn't pass on the information. Back to the previous year's scenario, trying to pin it on me, the 'unreasonable gaijin', making demands on the hapless kindergarten. "Well, we'll just have to cancel the class..."
"No. No way. No 'yeah,but,yeah,but's - I made a simple request, that you NOT schedule me on THIS PARTICULAR DAY four months ago. FOUR MONTHS AGO. You agreed. Is that not enough? No excuses. I've worked here for 23 years. What is this?!?"
His hands start shaking. This has become a bonafide 'scene'.
He dithers a little more, then comes back with, "Oh...so...just this time, we can switch the day from the 12th, to the first week in July, but next year no...it will be impossible..."
My jaw drops. I can't believe what I'm hearing.
"What?!? You've got to be kidding! This is ridiculous...", etc, etc.
I'm trying really hard not to swear or reach out and slap him in his stupid insectoid looking head. This back and forth went on for 10 minutes, getting more contentious. My voice was getting louder. He was wrong. He fucked up and he knew it, but he was desperately trying to save face in front of his Girl Friday, and not cave. Under pressure, he finally agreed to book an additional class in June to avoid the July scheduling squeeze, and to negate the possibility of this happening again, to do so next year as well. What the fuck?
Meanwhile, my wife, who had the day off, was waiting out front in the car, wondering what the hell was going on. I was in there battling with this wormy little fucker for almost half an hour. Did I get any apology?
Ha! Not on your life. The best he could come up with was a mumbled, half-hearted..."It was my mistake"
Say "Sorry", arsehole. Suck it up.
The whole situation could have been avoided if he'd just owned it from the start, and put it right. His stubborn arrogance and pride prevented that. He just had to go down that sorry fucking rabbit hole. After settling everything with a rigid shaking of his boney, clammy little hand, I grabbed my pay envelope and bag, and headed out past his wife and daughter, who were hunched outside the door listening in, pretending to be sorting through toys and flashcards. I could swear that I got two sympathetic nods along with the customary high pitched "bye-byes!"
First class back after a three week pause, and Girl Friday comes in to the office with a painfully fake smile, giving me some kind of weird, 'tentative' dark energy. Cunty body language, too. It was easy to pick up on. There had obviously been some big 'talk' in my absence.
Eww.
Maybe she's traumatized and thinks that I blamed her? Maybe that's what worm man told her? Meanwhile, wife and daughter seem just fine. Worm man is busy giving his sales pitch to a group of prospective mothers and toddlers in the next room, so I can slip out with my pay, and not have to navigate his off-putting bullshit. Cut to Tuesday. After I'm done, he comes out to pay me, and tries to act like nothing happened. Typical. He's rigid and nervous. It's palpable. I make some small talk about rainy season to break the tension, sign the receipt, take my money and leave. Situation diffused. For now. 23 years and this is what it is. What a fucking prick.
My wife chimed in and confirmed that in Japan - as opposed to other countries - the longer you work somewhere, the shittier you tend to get treated. Fact. It's a backwards, upside-down fucking place. The Japanese are also champion excuse makers, and not big fans of owning mistakes or apologizing. "Demo, demo..." (yeah,but,yeah,but)...."Dakara...dakara" (because...because....). And gaslighting. "It's your imagination!" It's their national modus operandi. Infuriating, but sadly, to be expected.
So...back in this morning, and again on Tuesday. The kids are (almost) always fine. As usual, it's the adults that are the problem. I hope worm-man has somewhere else to be. It's too bad that it has to go this way. I'm sure it will happen again.
We look forward to this little break in the action every July. We even spent a bit more to book it a week later this time - in hopes of avoiding the un-necessary mess I got into with them over the July schedule LAST year. To no avail. What a massive waste. People are so fucking disappointing. That friggin' plane can't leave soon enough for me. Hopefully it doesn't piss down torrents of rain for the whole four days we're gone, like it did last year. Fingers crossed.
That'll do it for now. Curtains down on this here summer solstice round up from crusty old yours truly here in losersville Olde Nagoyaland...the deadbeat, sweaty armpit of industrial central Japan... and it may do you well to remember that indeed - no matter where you go - - there you fucking are. Right. There. Nowhere else.
