A drink and a snack

Quite the weekend. Saturday began with a bit of shopping in Kumamoto's downtown walking mall. There are two main shopping streets, Shimotori and Kamitori, and from plastic food to fancy kimonos to discount Arita pottery to shops full of nothing but green tea, I never have much problem entertaining myself. Yesterday's shopping trip took me to Tsuruya, the two-building department store connected by a floating walkway. Tsuruya's famous around here; it's a really up-scale sort of store. There's Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and other such names I fill my closets with. Ha, ha, jk, I'm not turning Japanese that much!

Anyway, a highlight was a real live 'elevator girl'-- two -- actually. The elevator girls push the buttons for you and call out nice things, such as, 'Thank you for waiting. Third floor,' and, 'We're moving now, please hold on.' I was told by Hiro that they were very useful in the time when elevators were new in Japan, and few people actually knew how to use them. These particular elevator girls had fuchsia dresses, and dark purple hats with black bows on the front. They wore gloves. They were changing shifts when I got on, so when we got to the bottom floor, the one steps out, and like clockwork the other steps in, they both bow and apologize for the wait(of which there was none at all), and off we went. And a pleasant trip was had by all.

That was just the beginning of the weekend. Aikido was a smashing good time as usual, and practice was followed by the bonnenkai, or year-end drinking party. Last year, there were three or four other foreigners present, but this year I was the only one. Not that it mattered, really. With the aikido group, I rarely feel like an outsider.

Anyway, we had なべ, which says 'nabe,' or 'pot,' a kind of soup you make at the table yourself by adding ingredients to a large pot on a little burner. Most everyone drank beer, followed by shochu, the local firewater made from potatoes, mixed with hot water. Mostly men drink that drink here, and there were 14 men and two women(including me) at the party, an uncommon imbalance. Turned out this year our teacher, Honda Sensei, turned 70. So we celebrated the year end and his birthday.

After much drinking and festivities, half the group headed out, and the rest of us went out for a 'nijikai,' a second party. One of the older guys, who was the same age as my dad(you're still young, Dad!), chose a snack bar. I had heard a lot, I mean a whole lot about snack bars, but I had never been inside one. When I first came to Japan, I pictured a snack bar to be a place where I man could find a prostitute. But slowly, over time, my perspective has changed. I realized that the snack bar institution sort of took over for the geisha institutions when they dissappeared after the war. If a man wants to find a prostitute in Japan, I understand there are places where he can do that. But snacks, in general, I think are places men go to have conversations with women who will entertain them and flirt with them, and flatter them. Partly because I wanted to spend more time with the group, and partly because I was curious, I went along, and was welcomed.

When we went in, there was a couple at the bar on the right, the lady singing karaoke, and three snack girls at the counter. Right away, two of the girls sat us at the sofa which stretched around the left wall covered in dark red velvet and poured us drinks. There were 'snacks' on the table, fruit, cookies, candy, etc. I momentarily wondered if these were the snacks that the name 'snack' referred to. The girls served us whisky, then, they sat down next to us. It was very weird. The snack 'momma,' or owner, probably in her 60s, with her green hair tightly curled, also joined us, and danced around when we sang karaoke.

People here rarely sing karaoke in groups like we do in the US. They just aren't embarrased at all to belt out anything, no matter how skilled or unskilled they are, all by themselves. We each took turns. Hirata-san had a go at some song with the words 'Bounce with me' repeated over and over again Ochi-Sensei did a forced interpretation of Yesterday, and of course my heart nearly melted when Awesome Guy sang 'I Can't Help Falling in Love With You'(Elvis?) in deep bass tones. I sang 'Hello, Goodbye' by the Beatles and 'Sunday Morning' by Maroon 5, in English, and my favorite Japanese karaoke song, Jupiter, by someone someone in Japanese. My singing is not that of an angel, and yet, I got thunderous applause, thank you very much.

The girls(women, really, just normal-looking women in their 40s, maybe) made small talk, even with me. I looked around, and a girl had come out from the counter, sitting thigh to thigh with one of the guys, laughing. It all seemed very silly, but we were all having fun, and there didn't seem to be much sexual about the whole thing. Yet, I do think it gives me a deeper understanding into the Japanese, male, and human minds.

I have mixed feelings, but on the whole, I don't think there's much more to the snack bar thing than meets the eye. It headed towrds 3:00am, my friends waved the 3000yen(about $30) fee for me, but it wasn't over yet.

After the nijikai, Tanigawa-san and Awesome Guy and I went out for a sanjikai, a third party. They had yakitori, and I ate a tofu salad, and we talked about aikido, samurai, etiquette, O'Sensei, and the universe til about 5:00. I remember having the thought that there was nowhere in life I'd rather be then right there at that table.

Finally, I arrived in the hotel Hiro had booked(he had gone to a wedding ceremony that same night, so we got a hotel in the city so we both wouldn't have to worry about time), not even staggeringly drunk, and fell asleep dreaming of a white Christmas.

The real Sunday morning began, but I was somehow still dreaming...