Midaregami

Following my long-established tradition, I have things to say here about video games and music, but before those august and revered subjects can receive their due in discourse, I have a certain amount of spleen-venting to do.

Not but a few days ago, I was taking a sushi dinner with my fearless comrades-in-sushery Maeva and Jake. Perhaps halfway through our meal, a crotchety old man approached us and asked if we were ALTs, then made as if to sit at our table. Jake and Maeva were visibly pained.

“No,” I said in Japanese. “I’m a ninja.”

The old man looked at me blankly.

“You know, those guys that kill people. Ninjas. I’m a ninja.”

The old man’s eye twitched alarmingly. He wasn’t getting the joke, nor was he taking the hint.

I should’ve pressed the advantage, perhaps suggesting that my lack of ninja garb was due to the fact that I was just on vacation, but I quailed and reverted to English, allowing him to sit at the empty spot in the booth. More fool me.

After a few minutes of awkward conversation (during which his doubtless long-suffering wife tried fruitlessly to get him to leave the poor foreigners alone) he finally left, leaving us marginally infuriated. Before turning his jaundiced, twitchy eye on us, he’d similarly assaulted Auggie and Alex (serendipitously also at the sushi joint, in the booth next to us) and in that case, within two minutes of conversation, he inquired Auggie’s marital status by asking “Do you have someone you love?”

I swear, I have not fabricated a single detail here.

I acknowlege that a big part of the JET program is to “internationalize” rural parts of Japan by giving them a contact with the outside world, and I think that most JETs perform this task admirably well. But I do not think that means that we are somehow exceptions to the rules of good comport. This man sat down at two separate tables, uninvited, and began asking highly personal questions. In his mind, this was just fine—apparently he thought the rules of not-being-a-dick only applied to Japanese people.

Next time, I told Maeva, you just speak French at ‘em, and they’ll wish they hadn’t messed with us. But no, not even that would’ve saved us. Later, in relating this story to a teacher at Yoka, she smiled in recognition. “Oh yeah, old’ Y-san!” she said. “You know, he taught himself French, too.”

I should’ve stuck with the ninja story.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 21st, 2004 at 10:38 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.