you can't save me: epilogue

Thick, tightly neighboring eyebrows, dark blue pinstriped suit, weathered hands and sunken shoulders, salt and pepper hair. A little heavier on the salt.

Mr. Okamoto.

As I waited nervously outside his office for our counseling appointment, I was reassured that I was "in good hands," because the kanji for his first name meant "timely raper of beasts" or something to that extent. Roughly translated, I'm sure.

Apparently he headed up a special division in the Okayama police department back in his professional heyday. Their target? Yakuza crime. He now has the same quiet demeanor of every beleaguered Japanese man I've ever met, but with a little more spark. Pushing 70, while he's settled into the arguably less romantic position of "legal adviser" for our institution, he still packs the expected authoritative swagger from one with years of service busting j-train perps behind the badge. So when my phone recently started ringing with Kobashi san's impatient doctors and insurance agents on the line, his brilliant "legal advice" for all the hot water I ran my front tire into? He told me to Gaijin Smash.**

Gaijin smash the shit out of her.

Ignore the police follow-up, ignore her lawyers, ignore her insurance company, and ignore her busted hip. Pretend you don't understand Japanese, take extra long to call them back, and so on. In short, I was told to act the typical clueless, overbearing foreigner, and make it such a pain in the ass, that the case wouldn't be worth their collective time pursuing.

Well, I guess it's not a foul if you can't understand the ref, right?

In hindsight, I would have reached for the Smash in the first place had I known it was Kryptonite for more than just JR station staff, and the oft-smashed NHK man. But lawyers, insurance agents, and local law enforcement? Almost too powerful to be true. The theory is that me being a foreigner already breaks the clean-cut procedure by which the legal process is supposed to flow. Mr. Okamoto's theory is that me being a foreigner already breaks the clean-cut procedure by which the legal process is supposed to flow. The Japanese legal system (and much of society as a whole) would ultimately find the simple language complication more than enough trouble for them to handle, and they would back off. In my defense, they were making a mountain out of a mogura hill. Not like I completely broke her back or anything. Anyway, they all stopped calling, so I guess we'll never know.
Mr. Okamoto would be glad to hear it worked.
Ashamed to admit, but like a goddamn charm actually.

How could he have known that smashing was the best course of action in this situation? Must have known what it feels like to be on the receiving end. Not unlike getting kicked in the balls by a toddler, I'd imagine.





**A piece paying homage to the venerable "Gaijin Smash" would be replete
without paying proper respect to the original site, and the man that made
it a household name in the Japanenglish lexicon.

Old enough to party (at school)

Stumbled across a lone SD Mini card lying on the pavement outside of Tsutaya on my way home from renting Superbad the other night. While a painfully disappointing content scan of the photo data box failed to reveal anything terribly incriminating, I still figured I'd post a few of the lost photographs anyway:





Just seemed like the right thing to do.
You know, just in case the photos' despondent owner is scouring the internets as we speak, looking for 'em.

No-glove Wednesdays

At Ridaifu, we build character
Just in case you might have been wondering, I'm not terribly worried about all the snow in Okayama. I've got indentured servants freshmen to sweep it away for me. Brochure says they love doing it.

Hey kid, you missed a spot under the fence.

Putting the 'homo' in "homonynm"

...actually has nothing to do with the post.

Thought it sounded funny. Get bent.

A timeless dilemma. Guy loves girl. Girl does not love guy back, yet still leaves blinds open. Guy falls out of tree with pants at half mast.

Ok, so there isn't a tree (that I know of), but I know a dude--a kind of romantically clumsy and lovesick young chap who seems to be torn between powerlessly watching the girl of his dreams from afar as she ignores him, or using a high-powered lens to watch her from much closer through her window as she dresses.
Most hilarious, is how he brings these pent-up frustrations with him to the office. An anal-retentive stickler for grammar (as most skilled Asian ESL speakers can often be), when he's not asking me if I've seen her, what she's been up to lately, or for advice on how to approach her, he often finds the most maddening English questions to ask me during his spare time. Most of them are usually in preparation for gleefully handing his students their asses during a grammar quiz (or perhaps something less innocent), thus he wants to make sure every phrase is connected by the proper clauses, and in the most archaic and diabolical manner possible.

So, the DI's advice?:
Leave "Open the window, won't you?" and "Open the window, will you?" off the goddamn test. Nobody cares about your stupid windows, your epic failure with this chick, or whether or not these cumbersome and unusable sentences are correct. Ain't nobody ever use propah engrish ennyway. Shyaddup.

Ah yes, and you may kindly stop asking me for the grammatical difference between "as she is doing X" and "while she is doing X."
I know, what you're trying to ask, but I have no interest in assuming that you're touching yourself "as she is undressing from the third floor window."
Might want to lay off the unhealthy preoccupation--you're starting to come to work with dark circles around your eyes. Sleep much?
Binocular eyestrain?

Beastmaster hasn't been returning my calls

His massive, carefully timed yawns were oblivious and gaping--begging to be photographed. Jaws unhinged to reveal crooked rows of jagged, yellow teeth. Eerily human. Like a domesticated, bespectacled primate, dressed for success and casually riding the Sanyo Line to work on a summer's afternoon.




There's just too much funny here for just one caption, so swagger on into the comments and let's everybody have a jolly good swing.
I'll get the train rolling:



* If you've got the iron stomach, click to enlarge, and count all the pixels in each snaggletooth.

J-Train Repellent

* The following archived post was actually written on June 21st, and promptly buried in my blogspot 'drafts' pile. So shoot me.
Just be grateful I even let you read it.


I've finally been bested by the stupid NHK man.

Y1300. A small television usage fee, but in the grand scheme of things, one that I had flat-out refused to pay, for several reasons:

#1: I abhor Japanese television, and thus have not equipped my tv to view it.
#2: It is generally understood that only gullible suck-ups, and old people pay him.
#3: Actually, #1 is the only real reason, but apparently the principle of the matter wasn't good enough for him.

Little rat bastard finally got me on his third try.


The first time (three months ago), when he appeared at my doorway on a sunny Sunday afternoon, I knew exactly who he was, and what he wanted; NHK pin on his lapel, electronic clipboard in hand, he said that I owed an NHK usage fee, to the tune of Y1300, and to be paid immediately. I had not yet been in my new apartment for 24 hours, and still didn't have a bed, a desk, or coat hangers, much less a television. I was crabby from having spent consecutive nights on the floor, so I threw up the asshole gaijin hail mary, and pretended I couldn't speak Japanese. He totally fell for it.

Shortly thereafter, he returned to try again. Being a complete imbecile, I had totally forgotten my brilliant routine to guard against obnoxious salesmen. I greeted him in Japanese, after which he ran his collections speech, to which I courteously responded. In Japanese.

Shit.

I frantically backpedaled, as the little yen signs started spinning in his eyes. First telling him that the television I now owned was for gaming only, then proving it by showing him the coaxial cable that I wasn't using--come on, nobody could possibly be that stupid. I mean, bullet-proof logic, meet airtight proof--how the shit could they legally make me pay for something I clearly wasn't using? Well, apparently, I am totally missing something here, because they can. He politely pushed again for the Y1300. I sighed in resignation, and told him to wait. I took my wallet into the kitchen out of his line of sight, and quietly emptied it on the counter. Bringing it back, I showed him how payday was still a week away, and that I only had a "few coins" at the moment. He totally fell for it.

And then, just last week, he was back. Worse still, he caught me on my way out, wallet and keys in hand, which prevented me from identifying him through the peephole and deploying the boiling oil. He ran his polite little rubber-spined collections speech again, as I groaned and moaned and sighed all the while in utter displeasure, in hopes of expressing my burning desire to drop-kick his scrawny ass off the balcony. I threw another hail mary and told him I was an exchange student who would be returning to the states next month. He stopped for a moment, nervously cowering behind his printer clipboard as he decided my fate. This time, he would not totally fall for it.
I still had to pay.
I groaned and loudly let fly a disgusted "awwww maaaaan!!" Maturity, the likes of which can't recall employing since being sent to the principal's office for throwing snowballs in 4th grade. I gave him his damn money, and he printed me a damn receipt. And then, instead of handing it to me, the little rat bastard reached down and put the receipt in my mail slot--just inches away from my outstretched fist hand! As I stood there, seething in the doorway, my mind was rapidly calculating the levels of justification required for punching a vertically challenged human being, unprovoked, square in the face. Finally, with an apology and a bow, he stepped out of my tiny genkan--but not before smugly affixing his hard-fought gaijin victory to the corner of my door; a permanent daily reminder of my failure.

I honestly wish he had been more impolite--it would have made being a total douchebag about the whole thing, much easier for me. But all the bowing and apologizing--he was too nice. So now, not only am I out thirteen bucks, I'm also out a considerable amount of pride.


The truth may set you free, but not if you have to pay for it.

Sigh.