Japanese friends are hard to make.  Since coming to this transilient country I have befriended quite a few Americans and some British and Irish people. That’s mostly it.   In such a dense and developed nation, far fewer speak English than possibly anywhere I’ve ever been.

The culture is also hard to penetrate: most Japanese are shy, indirect, and not very socially brave. Americans are therefore seen as intimidatingly cool. Moreover, Japan suppresses individualism and glorifies conformity.  They even have a saying to this effect: The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

Then there are those great exceptions on which ride the waves of history.

His English is limited to some nouns, a handful of verbs (i.e. have, like, drinking, go), and every curse, slur, and derogatory word in the English language. He has actually taught me some English slang.

After he was fired from Pizza Hut for eating food he was supposed to be delivering, he found a job with a shipping company, usually sitting as passenger in a truck making deliveries. He is very blue collar, and, in a nation of deference and docile servitude to superiors, he even hates his boss.  And yet, he’s Japan’s greatest fan and patriot.

His name is Yuu Koyama.

I met Yuu at a bar on my fourth night in Kyoto.  He told me that he was Mongolian, simply because he felt like it.  He spoke, and still speaks, almost no English. And yet he is one of the greatest characters I have ever met.

Getting to know Yuu has given me insight into true cultural exchange. Because living here, oblivious to the Japanese language, makes me wonder about something ostensibly unrelated on the whole: how did European explorers communicate with Native Americans at First Encounter?

Stay with me here.  Columbus convinced the locals he was a god, but maybe that was no more than broad gestures and loud shouts at a lucky moment.  Then there was Cortez making alliances with local tribes against the Aztecs in just a few days. Up and down the continents, there had to be detailed discussions between leaders from European colonies and Native American tribes, over sales, joint decisions of the two societies, small disputes, trades, etc. School textbooks present the stories like the communication was natural. They had translators, Greg, the shortsighted and passionless observers will say.  Yeah how did the translators learn? What about the first arrivals?  How did they work without translators?

All those questions were answered this night in a long process.

Yuu invited me to an overnight bender in Osaka, Japan’s second largest city.  Thirty minutes from Kyoto by train, Yuu promised we could return at five the next morning.  He insisted on meeting at three in the afternoon, and was late as usual.  In a nation where ten minutes early is already five minutes late, this man is an anomaly indeed.

We met up with Yuu’s white collar friends in Osaka, and I naturally assumed they would speak more conversational English, bridging the great communications gap between us.  Their expensive suits gave off a promising vibe, but it was quite misleading.

They spoke nothing.

I mean this almost literally. Like all Japanese people, they understood “hello.” A few others understood random words like ‘name’ or ‘university.’ But these four Japanese 25-year-old businessmen understood about as much English as my Mom’s dogs. This is why I have a job.  From here on, I will call these people collectively “YuuCrew.”

We descended into an underground izakaya, which is a misspelling of a word for a traditional Japanese bar. The place was simultaneously serene and electrifying – every waitress was in a kimono, the construction was classic Japanese wood-without-nails, we had to take our shoes off and sit around the table in holes in the floor, and (some of) the food was cooked at the table.  If Taylor Swift wasn’t sharing her problems from the speakers, I might have thought I was in ancient Japan.

The waitresses spoke more English than any of the people I was with. One observed YuuCrew trying to explain to me what the pink food with white-to-black edges was.

“Raw chicken!” she finally said.  It was a good time for the “If it’s sold in a restaurant, it’s safe to eat” mentality.  I wasn’t too concerned – in fact I was stuffing my face. Then she described the drinks.

“The beer is no price.”

I choked. “What?”

“You have one hour purchase, food is you pay, beer is no price.”

I stared at her, unspeaking, as chaos swirled inside.  No price?

“Free?” she said, hoping that might register.

Evidently YuuCrew thought I didn’t understand.  They all launched into their own attempt in broken Engrish to explain the incredible system.  Through cascading echoes of “beer is no price,” “we not pay,” and other barely sensical words or statements, and faint visions of each of them in turn trying to point at the food and the beer with opposite gestures, nothing and yet everything was audible. A swirling storm of Japanese voices, bright colors, previously unimagined adventures and broken dreams of years past, and speculative thoughts on the eternal feelings of youth, all spun around my chaotic silence – the eye of the storm.

“Free,” I finally repeated quietly.

“YES!” screamed everybody, relieved that one of their 30 explanations had landed. I then uttered one of the ten phrases or so I knew in Japanese.

“BIRU JUKKO!” (“BEER FOR TEN!”)

We had one hour of free drinking to eat dinner, which, unless you’re from a coastal area of the Mediterranean, is plenty of time.

Several beers in YuuCrew began telling me about themselves, revealing a slightly increased level of – I want to say English?  All I know is, I understood them.  They shared ranging sexual escapades from having a girlfriend, to dependent upon prostitution, to a virgin.  In fact, they found it incredibly odd that I hadn’t indulged in Japanese prostitution. At this point, I had been in Japan for a month and a half.

Although tipping is flatly rejected in Japan, the waitresses were really nice to me. They took advantage of chances to practice English by explaining everything, and they beautifully decorated food and desert plates for me. One of them even gave me her phone number without my having asked for it.  Just for speaking English, I am instantly an attractive and hilarious novelty.  It’s pretty amazing, because the case is reversed in America, where speaking English is usually what ruins my chances with girls.

After the hour was finally up, YuuCrew refused to let me pay my share.  We stumbled back out of the rabbit hole, the best of friends, bellowing things in neither Japanese, English, nor even human. The Japanese crew kept suggesting places to consume various forms of alcohol.  I made the apparently revolutionary suggestion that we find a bar where we could meet Japanese girls.

Chaos reigned.

“GIRLS? GIRLS? YOU LIKE JAPANESE GIRLS?”
And two minutes later we were heading down another rabbit hole.

The bar was staffed by women in bikinis.  The setup was, beers for us were cheap, but beers for the waitresses were expensive. No one ever explained why we would buy the waitresses beer.  This, however, was YuuCrew’s concept of hanging out with girls in Japan.

The bar turned out to also be a Karaoke Bar.  Yuu, desperate to hear his favorite song sung by an English speaker, put on Lose Yourself.  After he and his friends had already paid my way out of the first restaurant it seemed wrong to refuse.  I felt awkward about it, until he outdid himself and next put on the US National Anthem.

What was I to do?  I sang it like Beyonce.  The rousing ovation I received from the entire bar contrasted heavily with when he next requested the Japanese National Anthem. Everyone’s smiles vanished as their eyes locked onto the floor.  Yuu was singing his heart out, screaming, breaking only to curse at America.  His friends were laughing.  But for the rest of the bar, it looked like the most awkward, shameful moment of their lives.

Once again my efforts to pay were fiercely, almost rudely, rebuffed.

On the way to the next bar, we stopped at the subway station for beers.  Yes, the actual subway station sold actually beers. There I attempted to enchant a young Japanese girl with the help of Google Translate.  I have no memory of what I wrote or what Google Translate said to her, but she seemed at first humored, next confused, and eventually mortified.

Next, spotting a gaggle of girls taking group photos, I could not resist photoblitzkrieging them. Being an American affords me this privilege.  I didn’t waste it:

We eventually settled at a sushi restaurant. If you haven’t seen one of these before, they are really incredible – the sushi revolves on one carousel and can be freely taken, or you can order sushi to be raced to you on the upper track, from a computer touchscreen. At the end you are charged for the number of plates you drop into the individual intakes at each seat. The experience is thrilling, and the sushi is at once better and cheaper than any sushi I ever had in America.

I first experienced this pescatarian paradise with Rob, my co-trainee, but now I was going with Japanese people who had grown up with this experience. Language was no longer a factor. They were teaching me with other senses. I learned the bizarre origins of so many fish, the precise combination of sauces and spices to apply to eat each kind of sushi, and the ideal order in which to eat ten straight plates of it. I was suddenly a sushimaster, and what a worthy experience it… should have been.

Alas, I remember none of it.

At this point I don’t clearly recall a single word that was spoken, but I remember vividly that somehow we were communicating quite flawlessly.  Perhaps it was all sight and sound, and only by finding the same seat in that same restaurant could I reproduce the experience and recall their teachings.  Maybe this is why the Spanish and Portuguese so swiftly resorted to violent conquest during their exploration of the Americas.  Maybe Cortez just really wanted to bring the entire Spanish Conquistador Army to a nice corn tortilla shop in Tenochtitlan.  “You GOTTA try it, esé! Hey, what are these… papayas? WHERE ARE THE TORTILLAS?” Bloodshed ensues.

I had visions of a militaristic mind when, after the dinner, YuuCrew insisted I take this picture below of their fearless leader, next to the mountain he had conquered.

Finally, I managed to pay for my share.  I even snuck in an extra 500 yen ($5). For the next thirty minutes of our walk across the city, YuuCrew argued over where the extra money came from. Finally, during a pitstop at 7/11, they realized there was no other possibility, found me and angrily forced the brass coin upon me.

At 7/11 I finally met a couple of English speakers – two young men from Australia on a business trip.  They hadn’t actually met any Japanese people yet.   I hadn’t been talking to them for three minutes when Yuu came over. Without introduction, he began a long diatribe about his love of doing vile sexual things, with excessive cursing, mingled with compliments.  He suggested that as Australian and American men, we probably had larger penises than him.

“Japanese penis, very small!” he declared.  As far as I know, Yuu has never seen an episode of South Park, nor has he heard of the episode sampled here:

During the conversation YuuCrew purchased and provided to us several alcoholic energy drinks – which were just like the infamous Four Loko, banned in the United States in 2010.  The energy burst from consuming two of them instantly masked my inebriation. For a time I thought it was the prelude to a prolonged night of fine toasts, internationalist conversations, adventures, and greatness. It was actually this:

I suppose, in the alcohol-induced primordial hunt for sex, food, and pride, differences will blend together in a brilliant cascade of flashing colors.

(Edit: I am still in contact with one of the Australians, who tells me he was fitted with a GoPro that night.  How I forgot that, I’ll never know.  When he produces a video, I will share it here.)

Reflecting on a night like this about cross-cultural communication, one realizes that crafty Cortez must have shared many drinks with local Mexican tribes, that Marco Polo was probably the first European ever to throw up from drinking too much sake, and the Russians probably conquered and subdued all of northern Asia by introducing vodka to the tribes in their way.

International pioneers never understand each other and we, their descendants, still don’t. We just stumble blindly forward together, waiting for the next mutual understanding, hoping it’s drink instead of cannon fire.

More pictures from that night:

Thanks for reading, and happy July 4th!

-Greg