Heading Down the Hill

8/7/09

I’ve been spending the last couple of days doing house work – laundry, dishes, cleaning, moving things around, with occasional breaks to study a little Japanese or watch a movie, or to walk down to the ¥100 store (Seria) or the small supermarket (Minatoya). Today I managed to not leave the house all day….I’m not even sure what I did for over 6 hours. Andy had made one request for me to drop his laundry off at the dry cleaners, but I had managed to push that task off until it was almost time for him to get off work. So I decided I’d walk the 10 minutes down the hill to wait outside Hachinohe High School for him to come out. I grabbed the dry cleaning and started my trek down the hill. I’ve learned by now that there’s no point in taking a shower at the beginning of my day because, by the end of it I’m covered in a layer of sweat that sticks to me like a greasy film.

At about 3:45 I saw Andy emerge from the school gates. He was surprised to see me waiting for him. As he walked over I motioned to him that I had the dry cleaning. He crossed the street and we headed toward the cleaners. I knew deep down that I had put off going to the cleaners until now for a reason. It’s much easier to encounter unfamiliar situations here when you’re with someone else, and I was much more at ease tackling the Japanese dry cleaners with Andy by my side. It turned out to be one of my more successful ventures.

We had to hurry straight home after the cleaners because tonight was the night of Andy’s official Welcome Party thrown by the teachers at Hachinohe High. We were to meet Satchiko, Andy’s supervisor, at the school promptly at 5:20 – tardiness does not exist in Japan, and when a party starts at 6:00, that means the first toast is at 6:00 sharp. Satchiko was waiting in the parking lot when we arrived. She was fairly short, young-looking – maybe mid-30’s, with the standard Japanese bob.

There seem to be three official hairstyles here that all young people choose between. There’s the bob, usually a longer version than what you’d picture, and the length can either be consistent all the way around or tapered toward the bottom. Then there’s what Andy has dubbed the Japanese Brit mullet. It’s a shaggy cut, thickest on top and then thinning out in uneven layers as it contours down around the base of the head and neck to the shoulders. Third, there’s the long hair pulled up in two symmetrical pigtails and the thick bangs, curved around the temples to frame the face. This look exemplifies the image of the Japanese schoolgirl, with her neatly tucked pinafore frock, pleated skirt and knee socks. This image is what grown Japanese men fantasize about: and it’s hand fed to them in every form of media - Manga and Anime and countless other types of illustrated quasi-pornographic materials. There seems to be a bit of a cultural irony in the fact that Japanese society is so repressed in so many ways, yet it is completely acceptable for grown men to drool over images of prepubescent school girls in public.

Andy recently got an email from another JET, a girl named Karissa whom he befriended at their orientation, with a link to an article about Japanese men who engage in “2-D Love”. In other words, they become so obsessed with a particular Anime character that they then carry out a romantic relationship with that character by affixing the character’s 2-dimensional image to a body pillow. They wine and dine the body pillow, they take it on dates, and at the end of the night, they have sex with it. I guess this is a more portable version of the life-like sex dolls that originated in Japan and were made famous on the American silver screen in “Lars and the Real Girl”.