Funny Stories on Being a FOB in Japan 
What Do Japanese Girls Got that I Don’t Got? Part 2 
Tokyo Where to Go: Spa LaQua 
As the weather gets cooler and I see more and more people outside in long sleeves and jackets I can no longer live in denial: summer is on it’s way out.
Lately the weather had been perfect. Not too hot with cloudless blue skies, and the kind of quality fresh air that’s like a fillet mignon for your lungs. I decided to visit the small but charming Mejiro Garden. Here are some pictures.
True story: I was out and about with a friend in Shinjuku, and we were starving and looking for a place to eat. Well, Murphy’s law must have a sick sense of humour, because just as we’re contemplating giving in and eating at KFC, a random salary man comes marching through the sea of people on the sidewalk towards us, and as he’s barreling by he leans in and yells:
“NIIIGAAAAA!”
“..Oh my God,” said my friend. “Did he just…”
I kept walking, in shock.
Did that really just happen? Maybe he was speaking Japanese and I didn’t understand.
But as the seconds passed and I kept replaying it in my head, I had to accept the tragic truth: I was a victim of a drive-by (well in this case speed-walk by) hate crime.
In hindsight I think my reaction, or lack thereof, was the best thing I could have done, because to be honest that guy seemed…crazy. Even if I had been able to catch up with him as he whizzed by, he picked me because I was an easy target — I’m smaller than him and running my mouth would have probably gotten me a nice pop in the teeth. I’m sure he would have had no qualms with hitting me. He seemed like a man who’s got nothing left to lose. For all I know this was the last line on his suicidal bucket list and he was headed for an appointment with the next speeding train. And it’s not as if he sees me as a human being, much less a woman. He made it pretty clear that all I am to him is a nigger.
But still, there’s a part of me that wishes I had done something, anything more than well, nothing.
It’s something else how I’m learning that some of the positive stereotypes about Japan aren’t all that true.
“Japan is such a safe country; you don’t have to worry about anything being stolen.”
Uh, no, two friends on three separate occasions have had money stolen from their wallets since I’ve been here, and NOT in Roppongi in case you’re wondering.
“The Japanese aren’t overtly racist, just lacking in PC skills.”
Uh, go back and read the first paragraph of this post.
But, you know, despite that, I still want to live here, because thankfully I’ve met enough pleasant and kind Japanese people to easily cancel out that asshole. And there’s still so much I want to learn and accomplish here. So sorry racist salary man, but you haven’t gotten rid of me. Sure it was a disturbing experience, but sadly it’s not the first time someone’s said that to me, so you lose points for lack of originality.
I’ve got too much to do and see to let him get under my skin. And you know what, honestly, he’s not the real problem. At least there’s no mistaking what’s on his mind. It’s the ones in power, the ones who keep their racism under wraps to avoid a bad public image I worry about.
I guess I’ll take some extra time with the kids in my classes now, to try to keep them from turning into him.
If you’re a woman of Afric
an descent like me, and thinking about moving to Japan, I suspect there’s a certain concern on your mind: what the hell am I gonna do with my hair?
Just how do we black women living in Japan keep our beautiful, curly and unique hair looking supa dupa fly in a country where everyone else has not only different hair, but hair that is the exact opposite to ours?
Well, I wrote all about my own hair care experiences over at Surviving in Japan — a really useful blog with tips for everyday life in Japan for foreigners. I’ve benefited from many of the posts over there, like how to do a money transfer when the ATM will only allow you to do it entirely in Japanese, and where to find Tylenol and Aspirin. So when Ashley asked me if I wanted to do a guest post I knew it was time to pay it forward.
Here are my 4 Tips to Maintain Black Hair While Living in Japan. I wrote this post primarily for women because men tend to just chop it all off, especially if working in the conservative Japanese corporate structure, but there’s no reason why men couldn’t follow these tips as well. Head over to Surviving in Japan to check it out!
Now that I’m completely, independently living on my own, rather than in a guest house where four of my roommates were Japanese, I’ve accidentally turned up the heat on this whole living in a foreign country experiment, and the chemicals in the beaker are starting to bubble. I have to do a lot more things in Japanese, and although my Japanese has improved in the last eight months, it’s nowhere near sufficient to make any of this easy.
At the moment I can only pick out the small amount of vocabulary I know when someone is speaking, and only if they’re not speaking super-fast. The place I hate to go the most is the post office because for some reason, even in the heart of Tokyo, no one there ever speaks a lick of English. So I have to do my best to fumble through with one word answers, grunts and body language. Every time I leave I go home and furiously study from my textbooks.
Another thing I hate to do is reschedule a delivery if I miss it. I’ve been ordering things online for my apartment, and I pray every time that the delivery guy will come when I’m at home. But alas, he comes when I’m at work, and when I come home I see the dreaded missed delivery slip sticking out of my mailbox. So then I have to go to the convenience store and buy some light booze, drink it, and then make the phone call to a guy who speaks only enough English to say “sorry, I can’t speak English”. For every short sentence I make, for example asking if he can come back today or tomorrow, I get like four or five long fast ones in Japanese back from him, and I never understand any of it, and I can’t smile and nod because it’s over the phone. Usually the both of us just give up and he ends up coming back the next day and hopefully I’m home.
There’s some stuff I want to buy like a full length mirror and a chest of drawers. My clothes have been piled up on the floor gathering dust, and I’m in constant danger of leaving the house with my shirt on backwards all because I’m dreading trying to set up the delivery in Japanese.
Then lately, maybe because of the crappy typhoon weather, I’ve been feeling somewhat isolated. This was not helped by the guy who recently moved my bed for me. He’s been living in Japan for three-and-a-half years, and gave me a lovely monologue about how the Japanese don’t want us here. “They are so racist, I’ve worked with them and I’ve seen it. They always ask ‘when are you going back?”
Perhaps I’ve just been lucky so far in that the Japanese staff I work with have been amazing, and many of my students too. I hate thinking, “the racism is just around the corner, if I stay here long enough it’ll get me too.” I just want to enjoy my time here, especially while everything is still fun and new, but sometimes I meet people who have been here a long time, maybe five years or more, and they seem…downtrodden, or bitter and I can’t help but think, “damn, that’s what’s in store for me?”
I don’t want to leave, and there is an ambitious/sick part of me that even enjoys facing these new challenges, but I do hope that as my Japanese improves and I “get the hang” of how this mundane, everyday stuff works in Tokyo, I’ll feel a lot more comfortable.
So back when I was in Thailand last month, some fish ate my feet.
It happened when my room mate, her good friend and me went to one of the famous “fish spas”, where a bunch of little fish with an inexplicable jonesing for dead human flesh will eat it all off of your feet if you give them a chance…which I did.
Dinner Time
First you have to wash your feet, and then you dunk them into a tub where hundreds of fish are swimming around. At the place I went to, there was a tub with small fish, and then you could work your way up to the tub with the bigger fish — although even the “bigger” fish weren’t that big. We’re not talking catch of the day or anything… that would be terrifying.
No, these are tiny little fish with tiny little sucker mouths, and the second I put my feet in the tub they were all over me like my feet were a cheesecake on the set of “The View”. Have you ever had your feet tickled? Oh my Lord I thought I would go mad from the sensation. I wanted to pull my feet out, but then they wouldn’t be baby soft, and my room mate said I would get used to it.
Sure enough, after a few minutes I was able to relax and enjoy being slowly but surely devoured. Until another customer showed up. The man walked in, said a few words to the dude at the door, then took off his shoes and socks. The three of us stared at his feet, then stared at each other in horror. He was going to put these discoloured, diseased-looking things into the tub with us. Oh no, Oh no no no….
The guy running the place must have seen the panic on our faces because he basically told the guy to get lost. I felt bad for old fungus-foot, but I also really did not want to catch whatever it was he had going on there. This story has a happy ending because I walked away on baby-soft feet sans horrible foot disease.
I’m all moved in to my own apartment here in Tokyo and I’m pretty pleased with myself, I have to say.
I got a whole bunch of appliances for a fraction of their price at sayonara sales. For those who don’t know, a sayonara sale is the frantic garage sale expats in Japan put on before they leave in an attempt to unload all the stuff they’ve accumulated. See there’s a fee to dispose of big stuff like beds and shelves and appliances. A lot of the time people even give away appliances for free!
I still have a lot of work to do, but I’ve been skipping merrily through housewares stores in Japan picking out my perfect decor. It’s kind of a pain to get the stuff home on the train, (I almost dislocated my shoulders lugging home a microwave in a suitcase) but that is the level of my dedication to home decor.
My new neighborhood is quiet, and residential, but near some major shopping and entertainment meccas in Tokyo, so I feel like I’ve got the best of both worlds.
Here it is, my urban castle.
Here's my ginormous kitchen. "Where's the stove?" You may be wondering. See that square thing holding up the frying pan? Yeah, that's it. I could buy a two burner plus grill range, but I don't really need it. I'd rather have precious counter top space.
And here's my cheerful orange bathroom. I made it orange because I hate getting up early, so I'm hoping the orange will be like a proverbial wake up slap.
I’ve been living in Japan for eight months now, and though I had always feared it might happen, not once has a child run screaming or starting crying at the sight of my blackness.
Not until yesterday that is.
I was shopping at Don Quixote. For those not living in Japan Don Quixote is a department store similar to Wal-Mart. I was shopping for stuff to pimp my crib, when I spotted a black man with an adorable half-black, half-Japanese two year old daughter. As I try to do when I see another person who looks like me in Japan I gave “the nod” of acknowledgment, which opened the doors for conversation.
“Where are you from?” he asked, with an African accent. I told him I was from Canada.
“Are you a student?”
“No I’m a teacher”
“Oh, I’m looking for someone to teach my daughter English, and I want her to have more interaction with the black community.”
It was at this point that the little cutie started crying.
“She must be tired,” I commented naively.
“No, whenever she sees a black face, or anyone not Japanese, she gets scared. She’s only used to me.”
Whaaaat? She’s afraid of…me? Little old me?
The irony, that the first child who cried at the sight of me was half black. Don’t that beat all huh? Well I think I’ll take the teaching job, so she’ll be seeing a lot more of me. But we’ll be best friends in no time 
I sometimes think about how difficult it would be to raise a visibly foreign child in Japan. I don’t think I would do it. This little darling believes in her childlike way that she’s Japanese, and technically she is. She was born and raised here. Yet sometime soon, maybe when she starts school, she will encounter people who are only too quick to show her that no, she is not “real” Japanese. And it won’t just be Japanese people either. It will be the foreigners who expect her to speak perfect English.
I don’t envy her (even though I can tell she will be a complete knockout when she grows up). She has some tough life lessons ahead of her, and I think in order to have the necessary tools to face the upcoming challenges she needs to have an understanding and healthy self-love for both sides of her heritage, so I’ll do my best to get her to stop crying.
On my second night in Bangkok I went to get one of the Thai massages my room mate kept raving about.
“They’re only like, 200 baht ($6 dollars or 600 yen),” she’d say, “and it’s an hour long and they do such a good job.”
You’d think she worked for the Thai Tourism commission with all that endorsement, but I was curious, and the price was right. So that night we walked the strip of massage parlours, nail salons and Indian restaurants that led up to our hotel. We stopped at one where a delightfully friendly and obviously gay man waved us in.
“Come massage, it’s good! What kind massage you want?”
There was a good selection: Head and shoulder massage, foot massage, leg massage, aromatherapy…all for under 10 dollars – both Canadian and U.S. We both went with the full body “Thai” massage. We were led inside, told to take off our shoes and given questionable plastic flip flops. It took us like five minutes to climb the stairs to the massage room because my room mate was trying to make as little contact with the flip flops as possible, walking like a cat whose claws had grown too long or something.
When we did finally get upstairs we were taken to the massage beds, separated by curtains. We had to undress and put on some flowy pajamas, which were comfortable. Then I lied down to wait for the masseuse. By this time I was really getting into it. The atmosphere was relaxing: the lights were low, and there was some soothing Dido playing in the background. My masseuse came and told me to relax, and began expertly massaging my calves, really working out all the kinks with just the right amount of pressure. When she worked her way up to my back I started to drift off. How could I not? The massage was soothing, the music soft and calm…I was experiencing extreme chill factor. So my eyes drifted closed, and then I heard it.
“BRAAAAP!”
My eyes snapped open. Was that…was that a belch? Everyone stated giggling. Apparently the back massage helps relieve gas, as someone on the other side of the room was demonstrating. We all had a good laugh and I got back to relaxing, but not long after my eyes closed again,
“BRAAAAP!”
Um, OK, that’s kinda nasty and distracting. I’m trying to relax over here. But I guess it can’t be helped. I’ll try to ignore it.
“BRAAP! BRAAP! BRAAAAAAAAP!“
What is wrong with this person? Did they drink a whole two litre bottle of coke before coming here? Or maybe they have some kind of horrible gastrointestinal problem. Dammit!
Yeah. The loud belching ruined to mood to say the least. But it was OK, since I went back a few more times after that and thankfully Belchy MacBelcherson wasn’t there.
Bangkok and Tokyo are about as different as two cities can get, and yet when I arrived I felt a distinct sense of Deja Vu. It was culture shock again, it was the sense of embarking on a whole new adventure.
As soon as I exited the train station delicious smells drifted to my nose. There are so many food stalls and street restaurants lining the roads of Bangkok it’s like the whole city is one big wonderful buffet with an endless selection. I really love Thai food, so when I got a whiff of that sweet/sour/spicy aroma I had to smile, imaging the pigging-out that was to come. And pig out I did, but the funny thing is eating a concentrated amount of chilli peppers in a short amount of time has consequences, dire consequences…
But I’ll tell you more about that another time. First, gather ’round and I shall tell you a tale, of the worst toilet in the world (probably). I encountered this masterpiece of waste management engineering after a great meal at a street restaurant on what my room mate called “the food street”. I ordered beer with dinner and instead of the usual bottle they brought this huge bottle that I had to drink on my own, because my room mate doesn’t like beer. So I chugged it back and not long after I felt “the need”. When I asked for the bathroom the waitress led me to a dingy little alcove where a man was washing dishes — that was when my misgivings began.
The food that led to the beer that led to...the toilet...
“Sorry, sorry,” he said as he scurried out and I walked through the puddles of water on the floor to a door in the corner, opened it, and froze. In the middle of a soppy floor made of dingy blue tiles was a little hole. The room had that gas-station-piss scent and there was no flush in sight. God, this was going to be just horrible but I really, really had to go. So I prayed to the gods of sanitation, dropped my pants and got into squat formation. A little white lizard peeped at me from the wall while I went and I nervously eyed a big spider web. Finally, the longest pee in history was over and I got out of the as quick as possible, only stopping to furtively wash my hands. And toilet paper? What do you think this is? No, that was one luxury I had to do without. On the bright side, using the squat toilets in Tokyo is now a walk in the park.
Look out for more posts about my exciting and enlightening trip to Thailand.
It’s decided, I’m moving out. The guest house life has been far less traumatic than I expected, but I do have some gripes: mainly space. Maybe you already know this, but real estate in Tokyo is like a fraction of the size of it’s western big city counterparts. Exhibit A: my rabbit cage.
If I lie down and stretch out I can touch both ends of the room.
I’ve got a pile of clothes that’s falling over because I have no closet or dresser to put them in. And it’s not because I’m too cheap to buy one either. There’s just nowhere to put it! In fact it’s blatantly obvious that the room I live in used to be one room, but the company split it in two to get more rent.
That’s why I live right next to the front door, and I can hear when everyone comes and goes — whether that’s at midnight or six in the morning. There’s also this…scooter guy who comes to our neighbor’s house every morning at about four. Not only does his stupid noisy scooter wake me up, the security light above the door turns on, flooding my room with an abrasive orange glow. This light also turns on when a cat or a bird or roach or microscopic bacteria pass by it.
Yep, it’s definitely time to move on, and this time next week I should be in my very own apartment.
Recent Comments
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yeah it's yakisoba in there, but back in the day I just called them spaghetti sandwiches.Muse on Funny Stories on Being a FOB in Japan
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