This is not About the Kids

I just found a card from my 21st birthday. It's a homemade card with cartoon bunnies on it and it says, in English, "You are sexy girl. Let's play tennis." Then a bunch of stuff in Japanese which I can no longer read because pretty much the only kanji I remember at this point are the characters for "Japan" and the characters for 1-4. Which is pretty bad considering how many I used to know, once upon a time. But then I recall that once upon a time was, like, 18 years ago.

Anyway, this card reminded me of my 21st birthday, which I celebrated in Japan. I totally remember who gave it to me, too, it was one of the friends of one of my host sisters. This host sister was named Tomoko and for some crazy reason I kept thinking she was the older of the two sisters who I stayed with, even though she was the younger one. They were 19 and 21 and so sweet. They took me along with them on all sorts of adventures, we talked about as many things as we could considering my limited Japanese, and they taught me how to cook. And I taught them how to cook American food, which at the time was basically restricted to spaghetti with meat sauce.

On my 21st birthday they threw a big party for me and another exchange student, Sigal, whose birthday was the day before mine. This party had pink champagne, I mean, it was literally pink, which is something I've never seen before or since. There were also dainty miniature finger sandwiches with things like cucumbers in them, like what you might expect at an English tea, as well as Japanese foods and those desserts that look delicious but then actually taste like bean curd when you bite into them. The wild crazy drinking-legally-for-the-first-time aspect of 21 wasn't present because in Japan the drinking age is earlier than 21, and plus there are vending machines all over the place that sell beer.

It was hot and humid and as dusk turned to darkness I heard the clang of the guy walking around the neighborhood banging on the wood block. (I just googled this phrase: "Japan guy who bangs the wood block to remind you not to leave the stove on", and surprisingly did not receive a single relevant hit! I'm pretty sure that's why he went around banging that block every night, at least that's what I remember my host family telling me, something about preventing fires, but google has failed to provide a more satisfactory explanation). Anyway, it was a beautiful night, aesthetically, in the way that you can only have in Japan, in Kyoto, in the summer. Even the pile of little presents for me and Sigal was artfully arranged just so. (Of course there were presents. There are always presents for any event, big or small. I couldn't sneeze without getting a little present (omiyage, see, I remember something) from somebody).

Speaking of words I remember, here is another one: gokiburi. That is the Japanese word for cockroach. Not just any cockroach, though, these creatures were the size of mice (no, rats!) and they flew. Also, they were...meaty. Big and meaty and round. I seriously just gave myself a nasty shiver down my spine remembering these gokiburi. Whenever I saw one, I would just quickly walk the other way and pretend that our encounter hadn't occurred, as if I had just run into an ex-boyfriend and the breakup had not been amicable.

The summer I was in Japan, it was so humid that mold grew on my sandals during one rainy weekend. After that happened I set them out on my window ledge every day to bake in the sun. I studied hard (come to think of it, why?), I stayed up late, and occasionally I rode the Shinkansen to Yokohama to visit my old friend who would subsequently escort me to the beach at 2 a.m. so that we could sit on the dunes, look at the rolling waves, and talk about the future. Senior year. Graduation. Real life. Jobs. Careers. Stuff I didn't want to think about too much unless it was 2 in the morning and I could hear the waves crashing on the sand.

Living in Japan was exhausting to me, in the way it can be when you have to speak in a foreign language 24 hours a day. Or the way you have to concentrate really hard to make sure you're reading the signs correctly so that you get off at the right train stop. Most things generally flew over my head, and I never quite got the hang of the public toilets, and I grew tired of people in Kyoto getting up and moving whenever I sat down near them on the train. I couldn't understand why it was rude to blow your nose in public but acceptable to sit there and loudly hork up snot for half an hour straight. But then I would come home and watch my host sister take her cat by the head, pull his ears back so that he looked like he was traveling at great speeds, and say, "Do you want to ride the bullet train? Are you riding the bullet train?" Which was exactly what my dad used to do with our cat, substituting rocket for bullet train. That familiar action reminded me, we're all the same, everywhere.