Beebs
05-01-2009, 09:00 PM
Forgive me for my following speal, but I needed an outlet for this since it's been bugging me for a few weeks. I've talked to my wife and a former English teacher with whom I hung out with while we were living in Japan, but it's still been on my mind.
So I figured I'd come here, share my little story and see if anyone else has had any similar experiences, Japan-based or not.
On with it:
I received an e-mail from an old roommate the other day. He told me that our two most famous hangouts near our old apartment were shutting down at around the same time:
"The Juke Joint", a small bar that played blues and jazz music.
"Amiyakitei", a small & cozy yakiniku restaurant.
Both located within a 5 minute walk of each other outside the west exit of the Higashimurayama train station in my old Japanese hometown of Higashimurayama (東村山) in the outskirts of Tokyo-to (spitting distance from Saitama prefecture).
Just a short background: I was extremely, extremely sheltered before I decided to live in Japan and Higashimurayama didn't make it any easier. It's a small tight-nit town, not necessarily in the boonies mind you, but besides the other foreign teachers that lived in my apartment building, I was the only non-Asian face that was ever seen walking around town. Sure they had plenty of fast food places where English was plentiful (relatively-speaking of course), but any non-chain restaurant me or my roommates walked into was never very welcoming, to say the least.
I had zero Japanese language ability, basically zero knowledge of the culture and felt like an absolute outcast the second I stepped out of my front door.
...until The Juke Joint and Amiyakitei.
The Juke Joint (or "JJs"):
One of my roommates, a skinny, straight-Russian-vodka drinking booze hound had found JJs before and invited me out one night. I soon discovered it was primarily a blue-collar bar with a lot of labourers and city workers. The guys were anything but scrawny and it would become one of the few places I actually felt small in Japan.
The bar was primarily owned by Hiro, full-time heavy truck driver who ran the bar after hours when he wasn't surfing at any stretch of water that would have him. Chest the width of Drago from Rocky IV and arms more solid than a slab of Jurassic granite. His co-worker was a non-filtered Winston-smoking guitar & bass player called Kono. Both gave me the once over and went back to laughing with the regulars and rummaging through the two meter-high stacks of blues/jazz CDs they had behind the bar.
My roommate, being his normal social self, sat us down at the bar and started talking to the guys beside us. His entire two-year stint in Japan he never learned more than a few words of Japanese, and the bar patrons knew even less English, but he was always, ALWAYS having a conversation with them whenever he was there. The subject was always cigarettes, booze, woman and music so I guess sometimes you don't need much vocab to get your point across.
One of the things I immediately noticed was that Hiro gave my roommate a glass of vodka and a lighter for his Lucky's as soon as his ass hit leather. He'd give Hiro a nod and he's stop whatever CD he was playing and threw in Bobby Bland.
It seems kind of trivial now, but I remember being in awe of someone who had only been in Japan for about 4 months with little or no language skills being able to be treated like that. We never felt like novelties or were singled out. No one was coming up to us and asking stupid English-student questions like: "Do you have four seasons in Canada?", "Is it cold?", "How often do you ski to work?", "Do you live near Niagara Falls?" or "Can you see Aurora from your house?".
Small aside: I now hate Aurora (The Northern Lights) because of that question. Every time I see it on TV (No, I can't see it from my house) I get a headache from the painful memories of being asked that question over and over and over and over again. If Aurora were a person, I'd train a crazed yak to take a steaming moist dookie in a non-biodegradable bag and rig it up so it hit him in the mouth when he opened his front door.
*Ahem*
I started going more regularly to JJs and it soon became my regular hang out after long brain-draining days of teaching English to bored businessmen and lonely, bitter housewives. It didn't take too long for me get access to the perks of being a regular. I'd sit down, they'd pour me a glass of Meyer's dark Jamaican rum, hand me a lighter and a 500 yen coin as change for the 1000 yen bill I always gave them for payment. I had fallen in love with Bobby Bland's music so after the current track had finished, Kono would look at me and point at the stacks of blues CDs. I'd hold up four fingers and he'd play my favourite track from the CD.
The best moment was when I came back from a 3-week trip back home after spending about a year over there. JJs had a space above the back wall above the bar for pictures of famous blues musicians and bands that had come by for a gig or whatever. My roommate had a picture up there since he was an amateur guitar player and he'd fill in for the Juke Joint Band from time to time. Besides that, all the pictures were of celebrities and regular patrons.
I had done some salmon and halibut fishing with my dad and brothers while I was on vacation, and the very first fish I caught was a 35lbs spring salmon. Took me 20+ minutes to reel it in so one of my brothers had to help me hold it up for the picture since my shoulder was pretty much shot. Anyways, I brought a copy of the photo to show off at JJs soon after I returned. By this time I could explain the experience in Japanese to the people sitting around me. As I went to put it back in my pocket, Hiro asked if he could see it again. I handed it over, he stood on a nearby stool and promptly tacked it to the picture wall.
I profusely thanked him in Japanese and of course he didn't make a big deal out of it. He grabbed his beer and said, "Tsu sa-mon!" (To salmon!). I think he was hammered out of his tree, but I gladly raised my rum glass and joined him in his enthusiastic toast. I can't recall ever toasting to a fish, but that was best glass of rum I ever drank.
As more time passed, my roommate and I became fixtures at JJs. We were invited for their New Year's and Obon week parties, private after-hours drinking/jamming sessions and even during their annual Golden Week beach bbq/surfing/dance party at the Nalu Beach Bar in Ibaraki prefecture. It became a great place to go when we wanted to feel like we belonged, even if it was for a few hours.
Amiyakitei:
On the way home one night, I bumped into Takao (aka Tony), another JJs customer. After finding out I hadn't eaten yet, he invited me out to a small mom & pop yakiniku restaurant called, "Amiyakitei". I had walked by it for nearly a year and a half without ever noticing it. It had a small yellow sign with black writing above a narrow entrance way, squished between two larger stores. Inside, there was a counter that could hold about 6-7 people with a couple benches for small groups behind it. There also was a small back room with seating for four groups, but I never sat there since I prefer sitting as close to food as possible.
It was run by an elderly couple, Masta-san and Yoko-san (His name wasn't actually "Master", but everyone called him that so I followed suit - I don't think I ever learned his real name. Besides, how cool is it to be called "Master" all the time!).
Neither Masta nor Yoko-san could speak/write English so naturally all the menu items were in Japanese. I could read Japanese well enough, but I didn't know what a lot of it was. Luckily, Tony's job takes him to the U.S. a lot so his English is near fluent. He helped me with the difficult kanji and showed me some of the finer things in a yakiniku restaurant besides just beef and pork. I got to love duck, ram, and some seafood dishes. One of my favourite "desserts" was a kind of fish bread. It feels and looks like a firm rectangular marshmallow, but ironically enough tastes nothing like fish. You simply lightly grill it until it's browned then eat it with a slight dab of soy sauce.
Over a few months, I started to routinely order three skewers each of chicken, pork and duck (tsukune, butabara and kamotsukune). I did it so often that one night Masta-san joked that we should make it a new set. I laughed and suggested "Braddo-setto" (Brad's Set/Combo). He got a good chuckle out of it and left it at that. A couple hours later as I was about to leave, I saw Masta-san talking with his wife and daughter in the back of the kitchen holding three fingers up. As he took my money for the bill, he told me that he taught "Braddo-setto" to them and that I could use it anytime I wanted. Even Tony, a regular at Amiyakitei for years, was impressed that I managed to get my name on the menu.
By this time, I had my both my roommates going full time as well as several teachers I knew/worked with. Every so often Masta-san would tell me about a frightened-looking foreigner that would walk in and order my set then sigh relief that he'd found the right place when Masta-san said, "Ok-desu" with a thumbs up. Another teacher had apparently ordered 10 Braddo-settos in one night. Coupled with the beer he had spent nearly 20,000 yen. The next time I came in, Masta-san could barely wait for me to sit to tell me about the big spender as he gave me a free beer. I like to think that whatever kind of debt I may have owed for getting a combo meal named after me, I sure as dog shit and titties on the Showcase channel on Friday nights more than made up for it in sheer profit for the owners.
Masta-san, his wife and I would always chat whenever I came in. We would talk about our days, the weather (of course), difficult customers, etc. They were extremely important in helping me handle my then-girlfriend's parents regarding our move from Japan to Canada. It had been a point of extreme stress for about a year, but Masta & Yoko-san were always there to lend me a sympathetic ear and some great advice. They'd had gone through hardships with their ultra-conservative future in-laws when they were dating so they felt for my plight and helped me anyway they could. They became instrumental in the entire process and had it not been for them, I surely would have cracked under the strain of it all.
Masta-san even "saved" me from another Japanese customer once. I was at the counter with one my roommates on a slow night. This drunken salary man walked in a few seats down from us and ordered some food. He tried to do the customary, "Hey you! Engrish! You rike sushi, yes? My name is *belch* Takeshi. Whatto izu your namu?" kind of gibberish we get from drunk salary men after they've had too much liquid courage.
Unfortunately, this had become more and more of a problem as I became a well-known face around Amiyakitei. Any newcomer would ignore me until Masta-san would walk over with his glass, I'd pour him some of my beer, and we start chatting. It took them a few seconds to process what the fook was going down, but they figured it out pretty quick. Despite my level of conversational Japanese, they'd still lean over after 4 or 5 beers and try their hand at drunken Engrish. I was polite enough as to not offend, but it was clear I had no desire to converse with them. Masta-san even asked one night why it bugged me so, and I explained that if they were sober I'd make every effort to talk with them. Given the natural fear of English most Japanese have, I give anyone lots of credit for making the attempt, however, if they're drunk and I'm trying to wind down after a long day, they can piss right the fuck off since a. They're not going to actually remember anything useful from the conversation since they're not doing it out of a desire to better their skills and b. It's the same fucking questions/topic over and over. He understood and would smile at me whenever it happened during a crowded night.
This night, though, the drunken fool was the only other customer there. As he leaned over with that tell-tale grin, Masta-san actually physically put one hand between and me and grabbed the guy's shoulder with the other to lightly push him back. He offered him free beer after free beer and kept on inane chatter to keep the attention on him and not us. Anytime the dink tried to motion towards us, Masta-san would say, "How about another drink?" and he'd back away as he downed his brew. He finally got so pissed out of his tree that he fell asleep on the counter. Masta-san called a cab, got the dude up and helped him out. When he returned, my roommate and I couldn't stop telling him how much that meant to us. We paid our bill, but then I took out another 1000 yen note and knowingly broke the no-tipping rule. I knew full well it was very rude (no, I wasn't drunk), but as I put it on the counter I explained to Masta-san that I aware that it was impolite, but what he did was just too considerate to ignore. He sheepishly took the tip and thanked us. Tony and I later explained to Masta-san the importance of what he did and why it would have been insulting had I not tipped him. He understood, thanked me again, and cracked out some high end sake from Okinawa to celebrate his new knowledge of Western culture.
I, of course, ordered a Braddo-setto.
I think one of the central themes to Az's editorials is that foreigners get treated differently than the average Japanese citizen. Generally, we're bigger, louder and more independant. We usually scare the shit out of small children, mothers and train ticket booth staff. We're starred at, pointed out and avoided. It's something that makes some foreigners very uncomfortable at first, but most of us reach some kind of acceptance and do our best to go on with our day.
Despite the impossibility of foreigners ever being able to be wholly accepted in Japanese society, in that small hole-in-the-wall bar and mom & pop yakiniku restaurant we were more than just customers. We weren't a novelty, we weren't used for free English lessons, we were never excluded from anything any regular customer could attend or participate in, and we were never denied service for being non-Japanese.
They made us feel like more than just customers. We felt like family.
To JJs and Amiyakitei. May I never forget how important they were.
So I figured I'd come here, share my little story and see if anyone else has had any similar experiences, Japan-based or not.
On with it:
I received an e-mail from an old roommate the other day. He told me that our two most famous hangouts near our old apartment were shutting down at around the same time:
"The Juke Joint", a small bar that played blues and jazz music.
"Amiyakitei", a small & cozy yakiniku restaurant.
Both located within a 5 minute walk of each other outside the west exit of the Higashimurayama train station in my old Japanese hometown of Higashimurayama (東村山) in the outskirts of Tokyo-to (spitting distance from Saitama prefecture).
Just a short background: I was extremely, extremely sheltered before I decided to live in Japan and Higashimurayama didn't make it any easier. It's a small tight-nit town, not necessarily in the boonies mind you, but besides the other foreign teachers that lived in my apartment building, I was the only non-Asian face that was ever seen walking around town. Sure they had plenty of fast food places where English was plentiful (relatively-speaking of course), but any non-chain restaurant me or my roommates walked into was never very welcoming, to say the least.
I had zero Japanese language ability, basically zero knowledge of the culture and felt like an absolute outcast the second I stepped out of my front door.
...until The Juke Joint and Amiyakitei.
The Juke Joint (or "JJs"):
One of my roommates, a skinny, straight-Russian-vodka drinking booze hound had found JJs before and invited me out one night. I soon discovered it was primarily a blue-collar bar with a lot of labourers and city workers. The guys were anything but scrawny and it would become one of the few places I actually felt small in Japan.
The bar was primarily owned by Hiro, full-time heavy truck driver who ran the bar after hours when he wasn't surfing at any stretch of water that would have him. Chest the width of Drago from Rocky IV and arms more solid than a slab of Jurassic granite. His co-worker was a non-filtered Winston-smoking guitar & bass player called Kono. Both gave me the once over and went back to laughing with the regulars and rummaging through the two meter-high stacks of blues/jazz CDs they had behind the bar.
My roommate, being his normal social self, sat us down at the bar and started talking to the guys beside us. His entire two-year stint in Japan he never learned more than a few words of Japanese, and the bar patrons knew even less English, but he was always, ALWAYS having a conversation with them whenever he was there. The subject was always cigarettes, booze, woman and music so I guess sometimes you don't need much vocab to get your point across.
One of the things I immediately noticed was that Hiro gave my roommate a glass of vodka and a lighter for his Lucky's as soon as his ass hit leather. He'd give Hiro a nod and he's stop whatever CD he was playing and threw in Bobby Bland.
It seems kind of trivial now, but I remember being in awe of someone who had only been in Japan for about 4 months with little or no language skills being able to be treated like that. We never felt like novelties or were singled out. No one was coming up to us and asking stupid English-student questions like: "Do you have four seasons in Canada?", "Is it cold?", "How often do you ski to work?", "Do you live near Niagara Falls?" or "Can you see Aurora from your house?".
Small aside: I now hate Aurora (The Northern Lights) because of that question. Every time I see it on TV (No, I can't see it from my house) I get a headache from the painful memories of being asked that question over and over and over and over again. If Aurora were a person, I'd train a crazed yak to take a steaming moist dookie in a non-biodegradable bag and rig it up so it hit him in the mouth when he opened his front door.
*Ahem*
I started going more regularly to JJs and it soon became my regular hang out after long brain-draining days of teaching English to bored businessmen and lonely, bitter housewives. It didn't take too long for me get access to the perks of being a regular. I'd sit down, they'd pour me a glass of Meyer's dark Jamaican rum, hand me a lighter and a 500 yen coin as change for the 1000 yen bill I always gave them for payment. I had fallen in love with Bobby Bland's music so after the current track had finished, Kono would look at me and point at the stacks of blues CDs. I'd hold up four fingers and he'd play my favourite track from the CD.
The best moment was when I came back from a 3-week trip back home after spending about a year over there. JJs had a space above the back wall above the bar for pictures of famous blues musicians and bands that had come by for a gig or whatever. My roommate had a picture up there since he was an amateur guitar player and he'd fill in for the Juke Joint Band from time to time. Besides that, all the pictures were of celebrities and regular patrons.
I had done some salmon and halibut fishing with my dad and brothers while I was on vacation, and the very first fish I caught was a 35lbs spring salmon. Took me 20+ minutes to reel it in so one of my brothers had to help me hold it up for the picture since my shoulder was pretty much shot. Anyways, I brought a copy of the photo to show off at JJs soon after I returned. By this time I could explain the experience in Japanese to the people sitting around me. As I went to put it back in my pocket, Hiro asked if he could see it again. I handed it over, he stood on a nearby stool and promptly tacked it to the picture wall.
I profusely thanked him in Japanese and of course he didn't make a big deal out of it. He grabbed his beer and said, "Tsu sa-mon!" (To salmon!). I think he was hammered out of his tree, but I gladly raised my rum glass and joined him in his enthusiastic toast. I can't recall ever toasting to a fish, but that was best glass of rum I ever drank.
As more time passed, my roommate and I became fixtures at JJs. We were invited for their New Year's and Obon week parties, private after-hours drinking/jamming sessions and even during their annual Golden Week beach bbq/surfing/dance party at the Nalu Beach Bar in Ibaraki prefecture. It became a great place to go when we wanted to feel like we belonged, even if it was for a few hours.
Amiyakitei:
On the way home one night, I bumped into Takao (aka Tony), another JJs customer. After finding out I hadn't eaten yet, he invited me out to a small mom & pop yakiniku restaurant called, "Amiyakitei". I had walked by it for nearly a year and a half without ever noticing it. It had a small yellow sign with black writing above a narrow entrance way, squished between two larger stores. Inside, there was a counter that could hold about 6-7 people with a couple benches for small groups behind it. There also was a small back room with seating for four groups, but I never sat there since I prefer sitting as close to food as possible.
It was run by an elderly couple, Masta-san and Yoko-san (His name wasn't actually "Master", but everyone called him that so I followed suit - I don't think I ever learned his real name. Besides, how cool is it to be called "Master" all the time!).
Neither Masta nor Yoko-san could speak/write English so naturally all the menu items were in Japanese. I could read Japanese well enough, but I didn't know what a lot of it was. Luckily, Tony's job takes him to the U.S. a lot so his English is near fluent. He helped me with the difficult kanji and showed me some of the finer things in a yakiniku restaurant besides just beef and pork. I got to love duck, ram, and some seafood dishes. One of my favourite "desserts" was a kind of fish bread. It feels and looks like a firm rectangular marshmallow, but ironically enough tastes nothing like fish. You simply lightly grill it until it's browned then eat it with a slight dab of soy sauce.
Over a few months, I started to routinely order three skewers each of chicken, pork and duck (tsukune, butabara and kamotsukune). I did it so often that one night Masta-san joked that we should make it a new set. I laughed and suggested "Braddo-setto" (Brad's Set/Combo). He got a good chuckle out of it and left it at that. A couple hours later as I was about to leave, I saw Masta-san talking with his wife and daughter in the back of the kitchen holding three fingers up. As he took my money for the bill, he told me that he taught "Braddo-setto" to them and that I could use it anytime I wanted. Even Tony, a regular at Amiyakitei for years, was impressed that I managed to get my name on the menu.
By this time, I had my both my roommates going full time as well as several teachers I knew/worked with. Every so often Masta-san would tell me about a frightened-looking foreigner that would walk in and order my set then sigh relief that he'd found the right place when Masta-san said, "Ok-desu" with a thumbs up. Another teacher had apparently ordered 10 Braddo-settos in one night. Coupled with the beer he had spent nearly 20,000 yen. The next time I came in, Masta-san could barely wait for me to sit to tell me about the big spender as he gave me a free beer. I like to think that whatever kind of debt I may have owed for getting a combo meal named after me, I sure as dog shit and titties on the Showcase channel on Friday nights more than made up for it in sheer profit for the owners.
Masta-san, his wife and I would always chat whenever I came in. We would talk about our days, the weather (of course), difficult customers, etc. They were extremely important in helping me handle my then-girlfriend's parents regarding our move from Japan to Canada. It had been a point of extreme stress for about a year, but Masta & Yoko-san were always there to lend me a sympathetic ear and some great advice. They'd had gone through hardships with their ultra-conservative future in-laws when they were dating so they felt for my plight and helped me anyway they could. They became instrumental in the entire process and had it not been for them, I surely would have cracked under the strain of it all.
Masta-san even "saved" me from another Japanese customer once. I was at the counter with one my roommates on a slow night. This drunken salary man walked in a few seats down from us and ordered some food. He tried to do the customary, "Hey you! Engrish! You rike sushi, yes? My name is *belch* Takeshi. Whatto izu your namu?" kind of gibberish we get from drunk salary men after they've had too much liquid courage.
Unfortunately, this had become more and more of a problem as I became a well-known face around Amiyakitei. Any newcomer would ignore me until Masta-san would walk over with his glass, I'd pour him some of my beer, and we start chatting. It took them a few seconds to process what the fook was going down, but they figured it out pretty quick. Despite my level of conversational Japanese, they'd still lean over after 4 or 5 beers and try their hand at drunken Engrish. I was polite enough as to not offend, but it was clear I had no desire to converse with them. Masta-san even asked one night why it bugged me so, and I explained that if they were sober I'd make every effort to talk with them. Given the natural fear of English most Japanese have, I give anyone lots of credit for making the attempt, however, if they're drunk and I'm trying to wind down after a long day, they can piss right the fuck off since a. They're not going to actually remember anything useful from the conversation since they're not doing it out of a desire to better their skills and b. It's the same fucking questions/topic over and over. He understood and would smile at me whenever it happened during a crowded night.
This night, though, the drunken fool was the only other customer there. As he leaned over with that tell-tale grin, Masta-san actually physically put one hand between and me and grabbed the guy's shoulder with the other to lightly push him back. He offered him free beer after free beer and kept on inane chatter to keep the attention on him and not us. Anytime the dink tried to motion towards us, Masta-san would say, "How about another drink?" and he'd back away as he downed his brew. He finally got so pissed out of his tree that he fell asleep on the counter. Masta-san called a cab, got the dude up and helped him out. When he returned, my roommate and I couldn't stop telling him how much that meant to us. We paid our bill, but then I took out another 1000 yen note and knowingly broke the no-tipping rule. I knew full well it was very rude (no, I wasn't drunk), but as I put it on the counter I explained to Masta-san that I aware that it was impolite, but what he did was just too considerate to ignore. He sheepishly took the tip and thanked us. Tony and I later explained to Masta-san the importance of what he did and why it would have been insulting had I not tipped him. He understood, thanked me again, and cracked out some high end sake from Okinawa to celebrate his new knowledge of Western culture.
I, of course, ordered a Braddo-setto.
I think one of the central themes to Az's editorials is that foreigners get treated differently than the average Japanese citizen. Generally, we're bigger, louder and more independant. We usually scare the shit out of small children, mothers and train ticket booth staff. We're starred at, pointed out and avoided. It's something that makes some foreigners very uncomfortable at first, but most of us reach some kind of acceptance and do our best to go on with our day.
Despite the impossibility of foreigners ever being able to be wholly accepted in Japanese society, in that small hole-in-the-wall bar and mom & pop yakiniku restaurant we were more than just customers. We weren't a novelty, we weren't used for free English lessons, we were never excluded from anything any regular customer could attend or participate in, and we were never denied service for being non-Japanese.
They made us feel like more than just customers. We felt like family.
To JJs and Amiyakitei. May I never forget how important they were.