I wore a suit to work that night, hoping to make a good impression on Mr. Sugiyama, the school’s director, and also to be told that a suit would not be necessary. But Mr. Sugiyama was delighted with my suit and used it to decry the attire of Bill and Melinda, the other two English teachers, both of whom were in the teachers’ room with their feet on their desks and wearing matching Hawaiian shirts.
“A very hearty welcome,” said Bill, while Melinda said,“Thanks a lot,” about the suit.
Melinda was from New Orleans, Bill from Vancouver, British Columbia. He had red hair that fell to his shoulders, while Melinda’s blonde curls went nearly to her waist. But they seemed to accept my short Marine haircut. They had bought their Hawaiian shirts that afternoon, Melinda said, to let their students know that they were now a couple. I got the feeling she was saying it so I wouldn’t think she was available, which I didn’t, of course, because of the shirts.
“Sugiyama’s okay,” said Bill, once Mr. Sugiyama left us, “but Mrs. Sugiyama. Oy vey!”
Melinda said that Mrs. Sugiyama was okay, too, but that one of her ideas for the school was that students and teachers should use first names and that, in order to set an example, we should call her “Etsuko,” while Mr. Sugiyama wanted to be called “Mr.” Sugiyama, and wanted us to use surnames. This name usage business was a current cause of strife between the Sugiyamas, though strife had been evident previously, Bill said, concerning whether or not we should have to buy our own teachers’ room coffee, or if the school should give tuition breaks to students who recruited their friends and work colleagues. I guessed that the first-name advocate, Etsuko Sugiyama, was in favor of both buying our coffee and giving the discounts, but soon discovered that she was casual yet frugal, while Mr. Sugiyama was generous to a fault.
I hadn’t understood before arriving at the school that Bill and Melinda lived in the same boarding house I did, owned by Etsuko Sugiyama’s father, also called Mr. Sugiyama. The building, Sunny Hive, was only a ten-minute walk from the school. I wanted to ask if they had a company store, too, but I’d arrived at 5:30, had an 80-minute class with Mitsubishi company employees at 6:00, a fifteen minute break, then another 80-minute class with some Takashimaya department store workers, the Kyoto branch of which I had shopped at that morning.
Melinda let me know that Bill had taught my classes previously, and that I was sure to find a steadfast gaggle of his admirers in them. She smiled a little ruefully at “gaggle,” while the smile I gave back to her was as absent of rue as I could make it. I didn’t want to start my new life as anyone’s confidant.
The textbook for my Mitsubishi class contained a series of drawings above conversations between a Japanese exchange student named Ken, and those he ran across on his first day at Mississippi State University. The section marked for that night included the following:
“Can you point me the way to George Washington Hall?” asked Ken, a map in his hand.
“I’d be happy to,” said an American girl. “Follow me. It’s right down there. I’ll show you.”
I asked various pairs of students to read the exchange, while others followed along in their books. I’d been forthright in my letter to Mr. Sugiyama, telling him I had never taught English nor anything else, but he wrote back saying what he needed was my native pronunciation, plus (forthright in turn) the ability to use the name of my famous college as a recruiting tool. Still, now that I was standing in front of a class, I couldn’t help wishing for a bit more direction.
“So what is Ken looking for?” I asked, after everyone had read the exchange.
When I got no response I asked again, more slowly and without that pesky “so” tacked onto the beginning. “What-is-Ken-looking-for?”
Most of my students were young women, but an older man in front said, “He is looking for George Washington, the father of America who could not tell a lie.”
His confidence led me to suspect that he had learned that from Bill. Also, I couldn’t quite believe that Mississippi State University would name a building after George Washington, with so many confederate generals waiting in the wings, so I looked for the author’s name and discovered it had been written by a certain “Mr. Sugiyama.” Our textbooks, too, then, were in-house products.
“Ken is looking for George Washington Hall,” said a woman next to the man.
“Right! And how did he say it? Tell me Ken’s exact words, then try saying it another way.”
“Please can you point me the way,” said a very pretty woman in the back.
Her hair was pulled into a bun and she was dressed in a demure kimono. She hadn’t said the line exactly as Ken had, she’d put “please” at the beginning, but I cut her some slack.
“How would you say it in other words?” I asked.
“Where is George Washington?” the first man said.
“Where is George Washington Hall?” said his neighbor, her face scrunched up.
“Why does Ken say ‘me,’” the pretty woman asked. “Why ‘point me the way,’ and not simply ‘point the way?’”
At “me,” she touched the tip of a delicate finger to the end of her nose.
“Because he doesn’t want the girl to think he is asking for someone else,” the first man said.
“Baka,” said his neighbor.
During my time in Tokyo I hadn’t learned much Japanese but everyone knew that baka meant “fool.” The man, however, seemed to take it well enough.
“Speak English,” said an older woman. “Remember Bill’s rule. Japanese is verboten.”
Bill had said “verboten” when setting an English only rule?
“I meant ‘foolish statement,’” said the woman who called the man baka. “It is obvious that Ken is asking for himself because Ken is alone.”
“Baka does not mean ‘foolish statement,’” said the man she had said it to.
Everyone agreed that it did not.
“I still want to know why Ken says ‘me,’” the pretty woman said. “Is the book mistaken?”
She looked for the name of the author, too, perhaps because she’d seen me do it.
“‘Point the way’ and ‘point me the way’ mean the same thing,” I said. “In this case ‘me’ is intended to soften the question, make it more friendly. You could call it a colloquialism.”
Everyone looked at a woman who hadn’t spoken yet for a “colloquialism” translation. She shrugged and said, “Hanashi kotoba ka na?”
“Hmm,” said some, while others said, “verboten.”
During the rest of the class we talked about how Ken must have felt on his first day as a student in a foreign country - bumbling around, unable to find his classroom - and its connection to how I might feel on my first night as a teacher in a country still foreign to me, never mind that I’d spent two years in Tokyo, had no trouble finding the school, nor - they were kind enough to say - was I bumbling around.
“I think it is equally difficult for you both, for neither of you are at home,” one student said, while the man with George Washington on his mind said it was obviously more difficult for Ken, since I had the advantage of speaking to them in my native tongue. When the pretty woman heard that she said it was obviously more difficult for me, because Ken had intellectual challenges ahead of him and I had to deal with their inadequacies in English. She said “inadequacies” in Japanese and asked the woman who’d known “colloquialism” to translate it for me, verboten or not.
The class was a delight, and for half of my break I stood at the doorway as they filed out, telling them how much I appreciated their empathy for Ken and me.
My second class was far less advanced and dealt exclusively with Takashimaya greetings - “Welcome to our store”, “Welcome to housewares” “Welcome to our restaurant,”… Its eighty minutes seemed like one hundred and eighty, while my first class had gone by like it was forty. At nine o’clock I accepted Bill’s invitation to stop for dinner with him and Melinda on our way home, I guess on the theory that if it got late enough I would lose the urge to go back to Pontocho and make a fool of myself.
“Your second class was murder, right?” Bill said when we got to the street. “My advice now, is never set foot in Takashimaya.”
Our school took up its building’s entire second floor. Melinda was still there, helping Mr. Sugiyama put things in order. I took off my tie and jacket when we got to the street. It was warm outside with people walking about, chatting and happy. Perhaps down on Pontocho they were singing the Mahler song, exorcising their European guest’s grief.
When I said, “Takashimaya’s verboten, eh?” Bill laughed and said, “I taught them ‘achtung!’ too. Not so much to fool them as to piss off this German guy who lives in our building. He taught here for a while but what was really verboten was his ability to relate to the students. These days he goose-steps around in front of our building like the ghost of Germany’s past.”
When Melinda joined us, irritated with Bill for leaving her to help Mr. Sugiyama by herself, we headed for a bar I’d noticed on my way to work. It had a neon magenta cocktail glass out front, a magenta woman floating in it and holding up a cocktail glass of her own. Inside, its half dozen tables were empty and only a man and a woman, plus another man and woman, sat at the bar. The first man and woman sat together, the other two apart.
“Irasshaimase!” called a man, whom I later discovered was the owner.
“We come here more often than we should,” said Melinda. “I guess its convenience outweighs the expense.”
“It’s not expensive,” Bill said. “She just means that we shouldn’t eat out so much.”
“No,” said Melinda. “I mean we come here more often than we should.”
The bar’s name, Yamagoya - “Mountain Cabin” in English - radically contradicted both its neon cocktail glass and its decor, which was pleasing in its simplicity, with comfortable chairs and freshly cut flowers on the tables. We sat down and looked at menus. Udon, sandwiches, curry rice, omurice, and a variety of pizzas, all with pepperoni and something else.
“We usually get a veggie pizza and tell him to hold the pepperoni,” Bill said, waving to the owner. “We’ve told him to take the senseless thing off the menu, but there it is, ‘Vegetarian pizza with pepperoni,’ plain as the nose on your face.”
“Tonight I’m having udon,” said Melinda.
“I’ll have udon, too,” I said. “It’s what I ate most often in Tokyo.”
“Right,” said Bill. “Sugiyama mentioned you were at the American Embassy. What possessed you to quit the diplomatic service in favor of his lousy school?”
Diplomatic service? Had Sugiyama padded my resume after I told him the unvarnished truth?
“Time for a change I guess,” I said.
The owner put a record on - Louis Armstrong singing “Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans” - before coming over to us.
“Every-single-time we walk in,” Bill said.
He pulled at the neck of his Hawaiian shirt until his own neck grew as red as his hair. But he introduced the owner without showing his irritation. Junichiro was a lean-faced man in his thirties who wore a black T-shirt over black jeans and had his hair pulled back into a ponytail. He also wore glasses, which he took off to wipe on his apron. He nodded in my direction but we didn’t shake hands.
Bill ordered the veggie pizza with pepperoni, and seemed angry when Melinda didn’t say she’d share it with him but asked for udon. Their matching shirts, by then, had begun to seem like a sartorial accident.
“So Mrs. Sugiyama’s father owns Sunny Hive,” I said. “Does that mean we pay our rent to him?”
I tried to put a curious lightness in my voice, something the evening hadn’t called for yet.
“The school pays our rent then takes it out of our salary,” said Melinda. “Etsuko comes by often, though, to ask if we need anything. Bill likes to say she is taking advantage of us, but I think she’s just a friendly woman who wants us to be comfortable in our surroundings.”
“Friendly woman, I’ll say!” Bill said.
He smirked like if I wanted to know more I’d have to pry it out of him, so I let my contrary nature come out a little by asking them about themselves. It turned out Bill had never been to the United States, but had come to Japan from Thailand. He made it clear that not having been to the States was a point of pride with him, his way of protesting the Vietnam War, which I would have had to fight in if I hadn’t gotten my embassy assignments. I’d liked Bill well enough at the school, but by then I wanted to say “verboten” to him.
Melinda said she’d gone to college at Emory, to graduate school in linguistics at the University of Michigan, then come to Kyoto to study Zen but discovered that she couldn’t keep her mind from wandering whenever she practiced its meditation.
“Zen is supposed to keep us in the ‘now.’ It’s supposed to set us free, but all it ever did for me was make me feel uptight or make me fall asleep,” she said.
When our udon came and Junichiro told Bill that his pizza would be another few minutes, Bill said we should start without him. He also said that zen was “no mind,” and the reason Melinda couldn’t get into it was that her mind keeps churning away.
She’d just made it clear she felt uptight or sleepy, and got mad at him again for not listening to her. It also made me take another stab at changing the subject.
“Have either of you been to Pontocho?” I asked. “I was there this morning and had a strange experience.”
“Did Melinda put you up to saying that?” asked Bill, his cheeks as red as stoplights.
“For Christ’s sake, Bill!” said Melinda.
I’d had my share of relationship troubles - terrific fights in England with the only woman I ever loved - but never while meeting a stranger or wearing the same shirt she was. The couple sitting at the bar got up and left, perhaps disturbed by the anger coming from our table, while the single man and woman let their fingers touch the glasses in front of them, as if they had once been a couple but drifted apart, with nothing left between them save four empty barstools.
When Bill’s pizza came he transferred his frustration to it by biting off the tip of every slice. He wiped his hands on his shirt and smacked his lips. “Okay then, what did you find at Pontocho?” he asked.
“Just the closed doors of restaurants and bars,” I said. “What’s the big deal about it?”
‘Ah!’ said his look, ‘a man who fights back,’ but he said only, “Why was it strange? You said something strange happened.”
“And you asked if Melinda put me up to saying it. Why did you ask that?”
If I was a man who fought back, there was no harm in doing it right.
Bill grinned at Melinda, demanding without saying so that she answer my question. But Melinda was bent over her udon, and didn’t look up again until Louis Armstrong started singing “La Vie en Rose.”
(Tune in again next week for Cornelius on love.)
Endnotes…
I modeled Mr. Sugiyama’s school on a Tokyo school I taught at in 1972. Mr. Sugiyama, however - as well as Bill and Melinda - was not modeled on anyone. In my work character development comes from speech, from what my characters say, not from how they look. I rarely give detailed physical descriptions, for I don’t see my characters in my mind’s eye nearly as much as I hear them in my mind’s ear. Thus, “the pretty woman” too, bares no physical description aside from her bun, her kimono, and a delicate finger touching the end of her nose.
“Sunny Hive” was the name of a building I lived in in Tokyo. Since I liked the name I decided that Cornelius and the others should benefit from the disposition it seems to embrace. If their building doesn’t turn out to have ‘sunny’ occupants, blame it on them, not me.
Cornelius’s line, “I wanted to ask if they had a company store, too” is a reference to the 1955 hit “Sixteen Tons,” sung by Tennessee Earnie Ford.
English language textbooks often dealt with some hapless exchange student trying to find his way in a foreign land, so I adopted that situation for Ken, at Mississippi State. My translation of colloquialism, “hanashi kotoba,” means “spoken words”… the“ka na?” something like, “isn’t it?” or “maybe?” I’m sure that there are better translations but it was the best that I, and the woman in the class, could come up with on such short notice.
I visited a bar called “Yamagoya” occasionally in Tokyo. Its roughhewn and winding interior really did seem mountainous. Giving Junichiro’s bar the same name when its interior bore a closer resemblance to the side room of a British men’s club, seemed a good example of the ubiquitous misnomers in Japan at the time. So did “Veggie pizza with pepperoni.”
There was a small coffee shop near my Tokyo home that played Louis Armstrong’s music incessantly, mostly his “Hot Five” band of 1928. I changed the tunes to ‘later Louie’ and took them to Kyoto. Many Japanese bars and coffee shops were (and maybe still are) known for particular musical specialties - almost always either classical or jazz, sometimes both.
As far as I know neither Bill nor Melinda bore the surname “Gates.”
What would Mississippi have against George Washington?
This was so enjoyable to begin a Sunday morning. You describe your characters so well, and I can easily imagine the scenes you create. Thank you!