MIKAGE
January heralded the beginning of a new semester teaching at this Osaka based company multinational, where the first thing I did upon entering each of my four classes, was to survey the terrain for prey. All male classes were always an inexplicable disappointment, especially when they wanted to bond over alcohol or other typical male activities. On the first day of one of my classes in Kyobashi, one student caught my interest in electro-magnetic style. There was radiance and spunk about her. Atypically Japanese, her brown slacks were like Saran Wrap around her thick athletic legs and bulbous posterior. Unlike other Japanese women, she was vocal and expressive, never covering her mouth during her hearty laughter. Even her face was different. She shared the same pearl white complexion as many other Japanese, but her other features were not archetypically Japanese. Though not as beautiful as many others, she was well above average and the S curves on her body, her moxie and her outstanding intelligence, surely compensated for the minor shortfall in her facial beauty.
“Yeh,” I thought, “I could definitely live with that.”
It’s impossible to have it all; super-fine, super-intelligent with a super-sexy physique, something’s gotta give. Super-fine women aren’t usually socialized to exert their intelligence, but instead to rely on their beauty, which works quite well for them. Highly academic and scientific women aren’t usually drop-dead gorgeous, as they don’t generally have the beauty to rely on. Fu was a 27-year-old scientist at this company and her position there made me even more attracted to her, as I have always found brainy women and women in power suits – Kamala Harris types - extremely arousing. Like her peers, Fu slaved diligently for the good of the company, working long 14-hour days five or six days a week, with large tote bags beneath her eyes as proof.
Since shortly after the beginning of the semester, she had been rejecting my advances and innuendos to play tennis or to be shown around her hometown Kyoto, which at least in the US could have been interpreted as sexual harassment.
“C’mon, you can show your teacher around Kyoto. I want to see the temples,” my eyes watering from staring at her onion and knowing full well that I had not even a gram of interest in temples.
“I don’t have time. I’m very very busy on weekends.”
Fortunately, at this corporation, one class within the first month was held outside as an icebreaker, with the location and activity democratically decided. Annoyingly, most times the students elected to patronize drinking establishments and even though I am not an imbiber, always I was obligated to share the cost. This time I deprived them of their democratic process and informed them of plans to go dancing. Most of these economic animals had never even heard the word dancing, let alone venture to a nightclub. However, Fu on the other hand, a sax player and lover of jazz, frequented nightclubs during her university years. So, I wanted to assess her behaviour in a social environment and get the digits discreetly.
Secondarily and of less urgency, I also wanted to break the others out of their rigid existences, have them feel the pounding and thumping of deep driving house music in their veins, as they had never had such experiences. At the Underlounge in Shinsaibashi I gyrated and pranced erotically with my students, taking care not to give any special attention to Fu, who was limber and flexible like a human rubber band on the dance floor. While the other students, men and women moved awkwardly, some under the influence, her movements were fluid, like that of an Alvin Haley dancer. It was as though I had provided an environment for which she had been yearning, an environment where she could be free to express herself outside the confines of her cubicle or lab, and at the end of the night we exchanged email addresses and telephone numbers. Mission accomplished.
Though I detest nightclubs in Japan, given my strong allergies to smoke, I survived by spending most of the time outside the club and upon my returns inside, I had to constantly remind myself of the objective: her telephone number. Fu, short for tofu - a name I gave her after we became intimate. She in turn called me Choco, short for chocolate – told me of her boyfriend with whom she had been for the past two years. Upon hearing this expected news, my heart sank to my toes in disappointment, but when she revealed that he lived in Tokyo and worse, that their visits were limited to only once a month, my heart returned to its proper place of joy.
Like so many women in Japan, Fu was involved in one of those senseless, unfulfilling long-distance relationships, getting only a minute fraction of her needs met. So many women here appear to choose to be in these vacuous, long distance relationships, over being single. This is perhaps attributable to the rigidity derived from the Confucian influenced interaction between the sexes. In the West, we are fully aware that humans are social animals, who can meet each other anywhere and develop Intimate relations. Not so in Japan.
While living in the States, it was not unusual to meet women while we both waited in our cars for the signal to change. Usually by the third or fourth signal we were exchanging numbers, which sometimes led to intimacy and or friendship. It is true that in the US, especially California and especially Los Angeles, the car is an integral part of one’s identity and people are usually judged by the kinds of cars they drive. Therefore, the nicer your car, the higher the probability for success at say, meeting women at traffic signals. But in my social experiments, I’ve even rolled up on beautiful women, while on my Honda 150 scooter, which resulted in a fair success rate of intimacy and or friendship and besides, my cars were normal nondescript cars; Golf, Audi 100, Peugeot 405mi16, to name a few.
I refer to these experiences not to brag about my prowess, but to illustrate the fluidity with which humans can initiate relationships wherever we are, the ease with which boy meets girl. Even under high-pressure circumstances such as at a traffic signal, where a man has only seconds to make a good first impression to cause a woman to lower her window, engage in conversation, anticipate meeting at the next signal and eventually giving him a means to contact her. In one vivid case during my university days, a woman and I flirted on the interstate 5 for about fifteen miles before I signaled for her to pull over. Lisa and I remained friends until we lost contact after I moved to Japan.
Laden with Confucian rigidities, the human as social animal is an alien concept to the Japanese, hence it’s better to trudge through a grossly unsatisfying relationship, as in their perception it is infinitely more difficult to initiate a new one. Of course, working 14 hours a day, sometimes six days a week, ensured diminished possibilities of her finding a new boyfriend. In fact, most of my students at this titanic corporation were in their twenties, prime age for reproduction. However, they complained incessantly about not having any leisure time to socialize and having to work up to 100 hours or more in unpaid overtime. As I have previously mentioned, it was at this mammoth company that one of my students died after working 16hrs a day 6-7 days a week, from age 22 until his expiration at 27.
Exacerbating Fu’s dilemma and making her even more of an untouchable, was the fact that she was a career woman. On occasions she attended kompas, sometimes arranged by her company, where all the men presumed she was simply an Office Lady at this renowned company. Fu told me that when she revealed her position and gave them examples of products in the marketplace she had either invented or designed, in their gross intimidation, they would have no further conversations with her. As a result, she began to conceal her duties from men at future kompas, leading them to believe that yes, like most women in the Japanese workforce, she too was a lowly Office Lady. And as if matters weren’t bad enough for her, Fu revealed she was third generation Korean-Japanese, which explained her enigmatic personality among Japanese women, a feature which was a liability for Japanese men, who think that Korean women are atsusugiru (too heated and passionate), but in fact, it’s the Japanese men who are just too lily-livered and caitiff for Korean women. Like me, though she and her grandparents were born in Japan, she held a resident alien card, which meant she was ineligible for a Japanese passport.
Among other things, Fu’s long-distance relationship illuminated clearly the crumbs that Japanese women are socialized to expect and accept from Japanese men. Recently I initiated an infrequent encounter with a chocolate eyed Japanese woman, whom I had met a week earlier, who found it exciting that I had taken her to the supermarket with me on the way to my apartment. The reality was that I had needed some soymilk for breakfast the next morning.
“Let’s run to the supermarket real quick,” I suggested.
The following week during a conversation on the phone, she told me how delighted she was that we went to the supermarket together before heading for my apartment, as it convinced her that I wasn’t just after sex.
Having a firm understanding of Fu’s situation and of the social dynamics affecting her, I presaged that soon I, her English teacher will be fulfilling her intimate needs, showing her what she was missing, which would result in her putting an end to her fruitless long-distance relationship. A woman as advanced, artistic and passionate as her surely could not have been satisfied with a sorry excuse for a boyfriend, whom she met once a month. In the ensuing weeks we spent every Thursday after class in stimulating conversation over dinner, getting to know each other and it so happened that one of her sisters resided one stop away from me on the JR line.
“The next time I visit my sister and her family, do you wanna go?”
At her sister’s house I was an instant hit especially with her 4-year-old nephew and 2-year-old niece and as the day progressed, her sister and brother-in-law encouraged us to go to the movies, forcing the bird into the lion’s mouth. As the evening was still early, I convinced her to accompany me to my apartment.
“I live very close to here. Let me show you where I live before we go to the cinema.” And after a few more hours at her sister’s, we set out to my apartment. The moment I had been anticipating for some five months had finally arrived. After countless dinners after class, our lips had finally met during a trip to Nagoya and since then my fantasy of inviting her for dinner had heightened.
My expansion began the moment I set foot on the train, and upon our arrival at my place I was fully engorged. Fu’s exceptionally hard Alps were sturdy but delicate, requiring extraordinary gentleness, which I found frustrating. In my eagerness, I just wanted to swallow them whole as I ventured down south with my fingers. Grabbing her bikini trapped, athletic rump with one hand, I licked her from my fingers on the other. Voraciously ridding her of her last garment, my timber hardened to a level seen only by women of her china complexion. There is something infinitely erotic about my midnight hued negritude invading and enveloping their ivory. Fu’s southern hemisphere was the most ravishing of all I had seen. Lipless and smooth, it appeared to have been cast with great precision, and she became my diet for the ensuing thirty minutes. My tongue glided all over her glossy hairless dessert, causing her to rail in ecstasy and when I finally began the slow and gentle decent, main vein bursting, she gasped breathlessly, mouth agape, “it’s too big, stop.” Once again, a strong athletic woman the likes of Fu, received me with protest but slim, svelte women had no problems. Finally after gaining complete entry, she struggled to make guttural utterances,
“Itakimochii (“it hurts but it feels so good.”) “Iku.”
In the muggy Japanese summer’s night, Fu and I continued in a sweaty orgasmathon, futon drenched in mucilage, until well into the night. To my delight she had missed her last train, hence leaving us no choice but to continue the climaxathon on my soggy futon. The next morning, she could hardly walk and experienced some southern bleeding, as well as from her nipples.
“Segoii, I never knew sex could be like this,” I over-heard her telling her sister on the phone. Shortly after she began sojourning regularly at my apartment and mornings would see her setting off to work with the widest grin on her face.
Co-workers found her newfound morning chirpiness quite curious.
“Recently you’ve been in such a good mood in the mornings, what happened?” they inquired. And we joked about how lucky she was, as most Japanese women never experience the luxury of a few orgasms before work. In a cry for help, I told her of my demons, hoping she could have saved me from myself.
“But if you moved in with me, I’d be able to stop,” I reasoned, absolutely convinced, or at least trying to convince myself that I had wanted to stop my infinite philandering, which Japan made so effortless.
“I don’t know, I’d have to think about it, my parents wa dame kamo.” (I don’t think my parents would agree.) Disappointment and relief became one emotion. Disappointed that we couldn’t cohabitate and relieved that I could continue my whoring of which she was now fully aware, all a part of my buyer beware policy.
Fu and I made full use of Japan’s spacious toilettes for the handicapped. Frequently in Kyoto, when her athletic legs jettisoned and taunted me from her miniskirts, I’d pull her into the nearest ‘hotelette’ or ‘toihotel,’ remove her panties and curl her onto the warhead for a quickie.
That summer, while returning home from a trip to Shirahama with Anita, I received an email from Fu.
“Where are you?” It read. Our five o’clock plans to meet by the water fountain at JR Umeda had completely slipped my memory.
“I’ve been at the fountain now for an hour,” read her second email.
“Oh my God! I’m so sorry babe, I went to visit some friends in Fukushima,” I typed as Anita slept in my arms on the train.
“I can’t wait another hour, I have to go home. I really wanted to meet you today yo Chocotan. I went to the doctor today for my polyps and found out I’m pregnant.”
A sudden darkness engulfed me as I saw her tears in her words. I had failed her at the worst time.
“But how the hell could that be?” I pondered. I was always sure to withdraw the warhead before releasing the lifemakers, but the highly improbable had occurred. Anita awoke to find me in deep narcosis, as if I had just been hit by a train driven by a ghost.
“Dou shitan no? What’s wrong?”
“Just thinking about work stuff.”
Fu’s pregnancy was not my first, second, third or even fourth, but it would be the first ever pregnancy that I wanted to keep. It was the first time ever that I was fearless, or at least exerted some control over the fear, by focusing on acceptance of my new role of fatherhood. This would be fatherhood, as opposed to absentee fatherhood. We began talking about getting married and moving back to California where our wages, especially hers would be higher. Given the slavery in Japan, as an engineer at this large firm her monthly salary was significantly less than mine. And even with a biannual bonus of some 400,000 yen, my annual income was still greater than hers though I worked less than half the hours she did. Furthermore, I argued we could further our education in the States, where her patents would belong to her, as opposed to being owned by the company. Overall, at that time, the task of raising the child just seemed less daunting in the States, given easy access to childcare and the general openness of the society.
Our pregnancy was untimely for Fu, who had just received a promotion a month earlier, one that accompanied stellar recommendations from her superiors. Hence a pregnancy, especially one out of wedlock, would be a monumental embarrassment and after discussing the matter with her two sisters, the decision was to save face and terminate.
“I would be disappointing the people who recommended me for this promotion. We will always have another chance, the timing is bad Chocotan,” she assured me.
Though I disagreed with her decision, I supported her.
“But you’re gonna pay half,” I acquiesced.
“Why?! I’m going through it, so you should pay the whole thing.”
“But I don’t want you to do this. Why should I pay for something I don’t want?”
“Choco, I told you. It’s bad timing. We will have another chance.”
In an odd reversal, Fu had assumed the role which I had had with my over ten or so pregnancies prior to hers. She was more matter of fact about the process than I was. It was as though I had become the emotional female and she the rational male. Perhaps that’s why she was the scientist and I the adult ADHD wanderlust. But it was indeed a relief to learn of my newfound ability to become emotionally attached in such situations, a sign that my dissocial personality disorder was finally waning in midlife. I also took comfort in knowing that I was not firing blanks, still firing live rounds.
“Well, we should definitely move in together after the abortion and get married at the end of the year.” And to that she agreed.
On the morning of Friday July 25, 2003 I made the most painful withdrawal from my account, at an ATM near Hankyu Mikage station: One hundred thousand yen, the equivalent of a thousand dollars, after which we made our way by taxi to a clinic near Hanshin Mikage station, where I had signed consent to perform the operation. In Japan the husband’s signature is required if the woman is married, the partner’s signature is required if she is unmarried and the parent’s signature is required if she is under 20 years old. We spent two mostly silent hours in the morning, on the second floor of a dark nearby diner, where Fu grudgingly watched me eat breakfast while she starved, having eaten nothing for twelve hours. Soon the bell tolled the hour of reckoning and we set out on the long five-minute trek back to the clinic, where after twenty minutes’ wait, we were lead to the fourth floor, where she disappeared into the chamber.
As a testament to the grossly insensitive, callous and uncaring Japanese patriarchy, the layout of the clinic was of such that women must walk by a display of beautiful, smiling newborns, on their way to and from the abortion chamber. This arrangement epitomizes the cluelessness of the Japanese patriarchy and was also observed at a different clinic at my second termination in Japan.
During the three-hour wait, I passed the time reading in the waiting area and at times venturing outside where I found amusement in observing a Chihuahua left inside a Brabbus S600 Mercedes, with the engine running to keep the air conditioner operating, for some four hours. Though this was a common sight in Japan, I couldn’t help pondering, “which moron, would leave a car like this – or any car, for that matter - running for three hours for a dog, especially one which looks like a cross between a rat and a bat?”
“I’m sure he paid more attention to the ratbat than he did his wife or girlfriend.”
Upon re-entering the clinic, I was summoned by a doctor to the abortion chamber. “She wants to see you,” which started me ambulating toward the room, passing a group of newborns on my left. Fu’s legs were still suspended at her ankles, by stirrups pendent from the ceiling and the freshly used utensils were still in the aluminum tray above her right leg. As I have stated earlier, I was no rookie to abortions. Truth be told, from the age of 19 this was my fourteenth, but the first I truly felt, the first in which I was a participant. I felt like her legs in the stirrup were also mine. And for the first time, I could be empathetic about the agony of the process. Not that I have become sentimental about pregnancy terminations, for I haven’t. I still think the freedom of abortions in this country is one thing about which the Japanese are right. However, in this case, for the first time I became intimate with the process and tears flooded my face in that bleary room, as I stood next to her.
Fu, this strong, athletic, vibrant and spunky woman that I had met only six months prior, looked like she’d been hit by an airplane. She had been reduced to a listless, lethargic and barely coherent cadaver, lying with eyes shut as I caressed her haggard ashen face. Shortly after, the Doctor reappeared to instruct me to wait outside the room while she recuperated.
The ten-minute taxi ride to her sister’s home was eternally surreal, seeming as though that Friday was not a day of the week but some existence in a sphere never before experienced. Buildings, bridges and trees meandered by as the taxi traveled into outer space before arriving at her sister’s, where we slept spooning for some twelve hours.
In the succeeding days, we made extensive plans to move in together. It would have been easier to console each other under the same roof and we would marry in December of that year. There was no reason for me to believe that, given the fact that she was an adult of 27 years old and that we as two adults had just made one of the biggest decisions in our lives, that she would not be able to leave her family’s home for us to begin our lives together. In fact, she assured me that her family would be no problem. “I am an adult.”
Next: MEET THE PARENTS