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Blowfish and Mickey Mouse“Sure, I’ve had blowfish,” Kaori tells me. She, Masayo and I are having lunch at my place. Kaori is one of my interpreters while Masayo is my immediate boss at VOICE, the company that has brought me to Tokyo to give workshops. Together, we’re celebrating a rare afternoon off with cuisine à la Rose at my tiny condo.Both these women are young enough to be my daughters -- I should only be so lucky as to have daughters like these. Brainy Kaori reminds me of a princess, with elegant hands that she moves as gracefully as cherry blossoms in the wind. Masayo is gorgeous, too, with eyelashes so exceptionally long, I often remind her that if she ever tires of her job as an executive, she could easily find employment as a mascara model. I’ve put together a minor feast from the staples in my pantry: Shrimp salad, a sea vegetable salad, and adzuki beans that I’ve seasoned with butter and the strange, stale herb left by one of my predecessors at VOICE’s guest speaker condo. Now that we’re comfortably chatting over lunch, I’m ready to dish the dirt, or at least ask the most intimate questions I can about this strange country where I’ve been living for nearly three weeks. So, of course, I’ve asked about blowfish, the delicacy that allegedly can be poisonous if not prepared just right. “I’ve had it too, many times,” Masayo says. She is not bragging. She never brags. “But aren’t you scared?” Kaori explains that blowfish isn‘t dangerous because it’s always prepared by certified blowfish preparers. With proper training, they can easily remove the poisonous part of a blowfish. Another Japanese myth exploded! My first trip here, I’d looked for vending machines at street corners that wash money (for sanitary reasons, not money laundering). That wasn’t true. And now, I’m learning, ordering blowfish isn’t like asking for Russian Roulette on a plate. It’s more like eating mushrooms. “You can even buy blowfish in a supermarket,” Kaori tells me. “It’s very expensive, so they sell it in thin slices. Masayo adds, “It is always arranged in the form of a chrysanthemum.” It’s nice to have a clue, since whenever shopping at any normal Japanese supermarket, I’m illiterate. Fish arranged like a tulip? Now I know, that would be fine. Just avoid buying seafood shaped like chrysanthemum. But I still don’t get why anyone would want to eat it. “How does blowfish taste?” “Oh, it’s very good,” my friends agree. “Although it doesn’t have much taste, really. You eat it for the texture. Ever have sashimi made of octopus? It’s like that, only softer.” On a daily basis, teaching in Japan educates me in how tricky it is to live in a country that is truly foreign. Sometimes I feel completely at home. At random intervals, however, I morph into a helpless gawker. That’s how I react to the pigs. My first official lecture this trip to Tokyo is a “Guest Event” for some 70 people. I describe what I’ll do in my workshop on aura reading. A man from the audience asks a question. After answering it, I invite him to the front of the room for an aura reading. Then, he’s handed the microphone to give feedback. Everything I’ve said has been accurate, he tells the group. Smiling, he confides that he knew he’d feel comfortable with whatever I said because my name is the same as his pet’s. “And what kind of pet do you have?” Beaming, he says, “A pig.” Probably, Rose, his pig, is adorable. I really don’t know from pigs. In Japan, I don’t even know much about autographing books, as I soon discover. One of my books has just been translated into Japanese. Folks here line up halfway around the room for me to sign their copies, and I keep opening each book upside down and backwards. Eventually I’ve broken a personal record for upside-down autographs, cranked out like fast food sushi. Then the man with the pig brings over his cell phone so I can admire Rosie’s picture. She’s sweet. She’s pink and, apparently, quite adorable. Days later, I’m out taking a stroll in the beautiful Tokyo twilight. Passing an apartment building, I see one of those adorable Japanese men who remind me of my (non-Japanese) husband. This fellow is visibly super-smart and sensitive. He leans against the wall, smoking a cigarette. Nearby, his apartment door opens. Out strolls a pig. This must be his pet. He’s a raffish-looking specimen, large, with mottled skin. If he didn’t move so purposefully, I’d accuse him of waddling, and I’d definitely refer to him as “swine,” rather than some sweet pet pig. His teeth, I suspect, are large. And as he moves toward me, I figure that this particular swine must weigh at least 50 pounds. It takes every ounce of civility I possess to not scream. In my workshops, the audience gives me further lessons in civility. There are 82 students, each having paid $500 to take my weekend workshop. If they were rowdy Americans, I might have problems with crowd control, but their Japanese counterparts are enormously respectful. They pay close attention, take detailed notes, and are altogether a pleasure to teach.
Unfortunately, most of them still bear psychological scars from “Cram School.” It’s like teaching survivors of Catholic school who had particularly strict nuns. Multiply the effect about 20 times over, per person. It has taken me years to figure out ways to coax Japanese students into speaking during a group discussion. And I’m still struggling to get them to laugh at my jokes. American humor is different. Since I work with a translator, she can’t duplicate the parade of regional American accents that usually vary the pace of my workshops. It’s enough of a job translating the meaning of my words into Japanese. I may never know the percentage of my translated sentences that make no sense whatsoever. I do know how it feels being ignorant of the audience’s language. For someone who’s almost compulsively verbal, it’s incredibly humbling to have the language skills of a baby. As I lecture, a kind of torpor comes over me, having to stop every phrase or two while the interpreter solemnly conveys every one of my words, however mundane. Waiting for her Japanese phrases feels like slogging up a hill covered in thick snow. Every idiotic word I say translated so ponderously -- will I ever wake up from this slow-motion dream? At least, one moment of clarity comes after a student worries that he has done one of my techniques incorrectly. I offer him three different ways to handle this problem. Which will he choose?
He gives the correct answer. The crowd cheers wildly. Some Japanese interpreters get into a shtick with foreign teachers where the teacher and interpreter bicker in front of the group. Personally, I never bicker with anyone. Until now. In this classroom, I have no choice. Yumi, my workshop interpreter, can flat-out refuse to translate my jokes. And she does, announcing loudly, “That’s not funny to a Japanese person.” Or she’ll stop part-way through some discourse I’m particularly proud of, complaining, “What you’re saying here is not logical.” As if that ever stopped me when I speak English! Still, I know that Yumi-San means well, even when acting a bit crusty. And my students are very forgiving. Late one afternoon, she’s having trouble translating the phrase that Americans would use to tell someone “You’re too much.” Finally Yumi comes out with a short, rhyming phrase. Playfully, I repeat it. The audience freezes. Oops, I haven’t said “You’re too much” in Japanese. I have said “Tits.” Still, my students learn a lot, including whatever I mean to teach. By the end of my final workshop, it takes 45 minutes for me to pose, next to each student, for cell-phone photos. I also collect an enormous pile of gifts:
After the last workshop ends, I go out into the rain with Masayo. She hails a cab and we enter, exhausted. But “Look up,” she tells me, before the taxi pulls away. At the curb stand a dozen of my students, heedless of the drizzle, waving as I say goodbye. Never, and I mean never, in 37 years of my doing workshops, has anyone treated me this way. I feel like a rock star. Still, I will never become truly conceited, not so long as I’m teaching in a country as foreign as Japan. Look at what happens when I try to watch TV. This is always an ordeal because I combine my Washingtonian sophistication with the aforementioned infantile language skills. To complicate matters, as it says in one of my guidebooks, “If you’ve come to Japan to watch TV, you’ve come to the wrong country.” This year, Tokyo television includes a shopping channel, something I haven’t noticed during previous visits. Sales aren’t as high-pressure as in shows like this in America. Here, mostly clothes are sold. The clothing model moves in slo-mo with the deadpan sizzle of a latter-day geisha. My favorite aspect of Tokyo’s Shopping Channel is that, day or night, the station seems to have only two main sales people, a woman who must work about 20 hours a day and a man who fills in the rest of the time. These broadcasters may be the hardest working people in all of Japan, which is saying a lot. I’m especially captivated by the perky female announcer. She’s clearly been coached to keep the products in perpetual motion -- either that or she has a strange neurological disease -- so she’s always stretching the fabric on the jackets, or she’s making the shoes walk on their own, one centimeter at a time, by moving them back and forth, and she’s constantly caressing the olives. Think of Charlie Chaplin making the dinner rolls dance, only here it goes on for the entire show. One of my last nights on this trip, here’s what I catch on TV: It’s a game show. Five celebrities sit at a long table. Each celeb is dressed up in a different, colorful, national costume. In front of all these participants is a lavishly decorated dinner table… with a moving conveyor belt. Traveling along this miniature railroad come tiny serving dishes. Each one contains just one large blob of tofu. Perhaps the tofu is seasoned with international flavors to match the costumes? All I can tell, from the show’s rapid and excited voices, is that everyone here is tremendously excited about this tofu. One celebrity at a time attempts to catch the tofu, mid-journey along the conveyor belt. Now here’s the beauty part. Each celebrity, using only simple chopsticks, attempts to convey the precious morsel into his or her mouth. Nobody ever misses. Given my own precarious chopstick skills, I consider this part of the game truly remarkable. But something else about this contest seems to impress the crowd, and I never discover exactly what this something is. Every time a celebrity eats a blob of tofu, an expression of tremendous delight appears on every single person‘s face. Then, all celebrities cheer excitedly, as though witnessing a breakthrough Olympic event. Next, visuals jump across the screen, displaying a national flag. Special music follows. Corresponding to what? The tofu? The contestant’s costume? Only God knows… plus, perhaps, the millions of Japanese-speaking persons watching the show. After each musical interlude, the contestants repeat the show’s theme song. Ever more tofu moves around the conveyor belt. And what is everyone singing, again and again? It’s the Mickey Mouse song. “Hey there. Hi there. Ho there.” It’s my last night in Tokyo. VOICE is hosting a banquet at a traditional Japanese restaurant. We guests sit on cushions, lounging at two long tables. Our waitress brings us some 13 courses, each one in a distinctive ceramic dish whose elegance is nothing compared to the food itself: Miniature worlds of custard and garnishes and vegetables I’ve never tasted before, such as “mountain vegetable,” bring a transporting experience like eating the first asparagus of spring after you have been brought to a magical forest. I eat my first octopus, and it’s delicious. So is the squid, lightly dressed in a golden sauce of miso and vinegar. On the next platter, there’s sashimi. My friend Masayo points to a plum-red sliver of fish. With a twinkle in her eye, she says just one word: “Blowfish.” I lift it up with my chopsticks. Cool and soft, it moves through my mouth like a slow-motion “Wow.” Delicious! © Rose Rosetree, 2006 |
