The first time I thought maybe life in Japan was going to be something unusual, I was standing in a train station in Kanagawa trying to figure out what to do. I had lived in Japan less than a month, it was right before Christmas, I was broke, and I knew no one in the area except the guy who had just broken up with me.
Let me back up for a minute and tell you a little about him. Not much, because he wasn't all that interesting, but there he is, a symbol of everything that was about to go wrong--or right, depending on how you look at it--for me. He was a Japanese guy who lived in San Francisco, and I met him online. We didn't confess our love for each other online or anything like that, but as I was flying out to Japan, I got myself a layover in San Francisco so we could meet, and we enjoyed each other's company enough that when he came to Japan a couple of weeks later on business, we met again as boyfriend and girlfriend. He gave me some beautiful pearl earrings for a Christmas present. But he was a very serious man, and I, alas, take few things very seriously at all. When he told me that night in Kanagawa that he was breaking up with me because I just wasn't a serious enough person, my first thought was "WTF? That's the stupidest reason anyone has ever broken up with me. You cannot be serious about that." But he was. And so there I was, standing in a train station asking myself WTF.
I hadn't moved much beyond that train of thought when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I only had been in Japan a couple of weeks, but I already expected it to be an old lady nagging me about something I, in my hideous foreign-ness, was doing wrong. Instead, it was two salarymen, and they asked me as if it were the most normal thing in the world, "Nomi ni iku?" I did not know what that meant, but I immediately recognized the gesture of sake drinking, and I was in. There was nothing I needed more in my life right at that moment than a man making sake-drinking gestures at me.
I want to be very clear about this. I did not think about the decision at all. I did not consider that these two petite, middle-aged salarymen might be serial killers who preyed on lost blonde girls. I did not consider whether they were actually asking me for sex, which I might or might not want to give. I did briefly consider that I had no money to pay for drinks, really, but I had been in Japan just long enough to realize that a smiling blonde can get away with a lot, so I figured I could pretend to have lost my wallet if it turned into an issue. Or something. I didn't think much about any of this, didn't want to think about any of it, just wanted to say yes and see where that path went. So, that is what I did.
We went to a pub type of a place and drank. Mostly they talked and I smiled. I couldn't really understand enough Japanese to do more than that, and they spoke no English. It was enough that I sat there and smiled and poured their drinks for them. In that way, I earned a night of free drinking. When they were tired and wanted to catch the last train home, we parted. They didn't want my money or sex. They just wanted a reasonably pretty girl to pretend for a while to enjoy their company and keep their cups full. It was a pretty simple deal, and I was sold.
I had just enough money to get back to my house on the train that night, but I spent the whole ride plotting over how to spend my time in Japan never having to buy my own drinks. It didn't quite work out that way, but close enough.
With my next paycheck, I bought myself some tools to teach myself Japanese on the reckoning that a pretty girl who could speak Japanese would get more free drinks than one who could merely smile dumbly.
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