The bed was shakin'
15 December 2001, 20:57
Monday morning I was in a deep sleep and at 5.26 am, was shaken out of my dream. I kinda came to and thought I was having an Exorcist-like bed shaking experience. Until I realized I was sleeping on a futon. I jerked awake and three separate tremors, about three seconds each, snapped me out of my sleep and I lay there realizing I was experiencing my first earthquake.
Jeremy’s Legacy
Jeremy flew into Tokyo last weekend. His main legacy was a demonstration on the perfect way to deal with Japanese starers. It had always perplexed me that Japanese people, who are otherwise a fairly shy race, have absolutely no shame when they stare at you. It mostly happens on trains where commuters are bored and have nothing better to do than check out the foreigner. Some will even go out of their way to move so they can see you.
My defense is to ignore them, Matt’s defense is to stare back, some people pull funny faces, but these tactics rarely work.
Jeremy, on being confronted by a curious young man on the subway, blurts out a hearty “Konnichi-wa!” to him, loud enough for the rest of the train to hear, and kind enough for the young man to be shamed into blushing and looking down at his feet…
Permanent Link | The Salary Man Dilemma
6 December 2001, 20:53
Middle aged business men piss me off, man. If they’re not snorting and sneezing and coughing without covering their mouths, they’re pushing little old ladies out of the way to get the seats on the train. I feel a lot of them staring at me in expectation if I’m sitting on the train and they’re standing.
Its like they expect me to offer them my seat (that I won after winning a sign language barter with a fellow female, ‘you take it’, ‘no, you take it’, ‘no…”) simply because they are male and older. I know that, culturally, Japanese tend to unconditionally respect their elders but there also seems to be the misogynistic undertones of respecting middle-aged men over little ladies.
Forget that. No way. I wasn’t brought up in a household that respected men and women equally to throw it away for a germy, inconsiderate suit who refuses to give up his seat for a pregnant woman, for gods sake. I don’t care that it’s a cultural bias. They can have it and call me a culturally retarded gaijin. I’m glad to be just that!
One of my jobs as an Instructor is to teach Cabin Attendants to give good service in English (serving drinks and food, that is). In the line of duty, I’ve heard horror stories about the way some men treat them, such as the Cabin Attendants refusing to sell liquor to drunk men during flight and then being made to get down on their knees and apologise in front of other passengers. This f@#$ked up little tradition is supposed to redeem the male passenger’s “face” and the girls are too polite and weighed down in their own cultural obligation to refuse.
ANA’s policy is still that the passenger is always right. Even if the passenger is heavily tanked and being obnoxious, they are still supposed to serve him or her drinks, although in reality they simply water them down.
Only if the passenger physically endangers other passengers or the airplane, will the co-pilot (a man, of course) be called in to strap him or her down. The Cabin Attendants are not supposed to say, “No” at any time….
Nick and Coco
1 December 2001, 21:44
Nick and Coco did a fly by into Tokyo on their way to Qindao… poor Coco was more than bemused with the prevalence of Chinese kanji characters everywhere. She could understand what each character meant but couldn’t read them in the sentence. I guess its a bit like the differences between English and German. They both use the same alphabet, but the actual words are entirely different.
