Walking through the department store, newly decorated with “Happy Christmas” signs everywhere, I was stopped in my tracks by the sight of a guilty pleasure I have always wanted… It’s a blanket, but so much more than a blanket. Simply by adding sleeves, it becomes a world of cozy that makes everything better. For only 2000 yen (about 20$) this plethora of comfort could be mine. Can you guess what I did? I smuggled my Snuggy home and didn’t leave the house all day. Now I am ready for winter!
I like Japan, but WHAT THE F***?
I am shopping in the 100 yen store… let’s see, makeup brushes, lotion, nail file, and… what?
I just… I just… have SO many questions! How do they get it in such a little bottle? Why a squeeze bottle? Why is it next to the baby chapstick?? Whose womb did it come from? Is there a placenta donor bank specifically for cosmetic products? And how are they able to sell such a premium product for 100 yen!!??
In all seriousness, I am pretty sure there is no ACTUAL afterbirth for sale in the 100 yen. But one can never be completely sure.
I had my first experience with the Japanese police tonight. Thankfully it was instigated by me, a simple matter of a stolen bike. There is little chance I will get it back, but since it’s a foreign country, I thought it best to go through the official channels of reporting it, in hopes it will be worked out.
When I walked in to the KOBAN office and presented myself, I was met with baffled looks and and slow attempts to figure out what had happened. I was luckily equipped with the following handwritten note explaining my situation in Japanese, otherwise I would have been helpless.
I was then ushered into a room with two policemen who looked very nervous about conducting an interview with an American woman. Their helplessness was slightly off-putting, and I hoped I never needed them for something more urgent. We sat down and they began filling out forms, conversing in Japanese, and now and then attempting to ask me a question.
As my nerves over speaking to the police settled, I began to see the sitcom setup I had entered, sitting in this interrogation room with far more than a table between myself and the KOBAN. In fact, I was being questioned by what looked like, as far as I could tell, a schoolboy and a ventriloquist. The younger man wore his blue uniform like a costume, all covered in important-looking pockets and badges, which only made his quivering lip and look of pure befuddlement all the worse. I wondered how recently he had become a policeman, and what indeed he would do faced with a real criminal. The other man, similarly dressed, wore it better. He looked as if he knew how to use a gun, and seemed to feel that filing a missing bicycle was below his station. When he spoke, his mouth remained in its firm position, without so much as a twitch. How the sound escaped, I still have no idea. I had to smother my laugh as I imagined him with a chatty puppet on his lap; he may have missed his calling.
We somehow managed our way through most of the form with our limited Japanese and English, and I was beginning to feel like maybe I shouldn’t be there. The discomfort in the room was only growing, as if I was the first person to have EVER reported a missing bicycle. The schoolboy asked me my birthday and I realized I wasn’t sure what year to tell them. Japan uses a year system based on the eras of the emperors, and so my birth year in Japan is Showa 59, but this I couldn’t remember. “Um… 1984?” I offered, hoping they would understand. “Showa wakarania,” meaning, Why the heck do you have a different system anyway! They paused, as if they may have reached an unbeatable stumbling block, and the schoolboy policeman wrote it down with a painstakingly slow hand.
In the following fumbling silence, the ventriloquist blurted out, “Jo-ji Oweiru.”
“Umm, sumimasen? (excuse me?)” I stammered.
“Jo-jii Oweeeruus,” he said again as he pointed to my birth year on the form. Ah! 1984, yes!! George Orwell! This middle-aged Japanese policeman, who seemed to discarded facial movement as unecessary, was trying to make a connection. Yes, George Orwell wrote 1984, which is also the year I was born. It was related to nothing, and yet it connected us. He knew one thing about my generation and this was it.
But what he said next really took the cake. He thought for a second and then said with unfailing austerity, “And eurythmikusu.”
At that moment I knew this experience was not about finding my bike, but the perfect reminder that the universe is a stand-up comic with no end of great one-liners. Yes, as defined by a 60-year-old Japanese policeman in a Tokyo suburb, the year of my birth can be summed up in two equally important and monumental happenings: George Orwell’s famous novel and the Eurythmics. And the funny thing is, he is probably right! If you are going to remember two things from that year, you might as well choose those as any other! A prediction of a dire science fiction future and a British lady with a man’s voice and bright orange hair ushered me into the world, hallelujah!
The ventriloquist smiled at his brilliance and then returned to facial immobility. Our moment of connection was over. But for a brief moment, in the 45 minutes I spent there trying to accomplish a simple task, he had tried to offer all he knew of my world and my era.
They probably will not find my bike. But for what I was given in return for my visit, I could pretty much care less.
Though this has become a regular sight for those of us living in Japan, I still get a kick every time I see a sea of bright-colored hats at waist level running across the sidewalk like a caffeinated flock of head gear. In other words, the Japanese use a brilliant little system I call the matching hat system. If you are going to take the kids out of the classroom and walk them down the street, the only way to make sure you dont lose one is to stick a rainbow color on each child’s head, and if you see a little spot of yellow bouncing away you know you have some herding to do.
SHASHIN PER DAY: Living Japan 