The product is manufactured from the modern technology chain; assuring the foods hygiene safety and obtaining high crispness and sponginess but always maintaining natural colour and flavour of fresh ripen fruits and especially the chemical substance is not used in the process of production. The ingredients of the product have many nutritive facts, Vitamin which are to necessary for human body and are also a delicious meal for tourists and travel days.”

What’s not to like?

Does this place sound like it was made for me or what?

Across the street from where I live, there’s a picturesque little house with a clay tile roof, dark wooden-framed facade, and gracefully arching eaves in the Japanese style. This is the home of the man I’ve come to call the Screamer.

When I imagine what he looks like, I picture a sinewy older gentleman in his underwear, his hair an unkempt spray of dirty white. In my imagination, the TV’s set to the History Channel, and he ashes into a plastic TV dinner tray that’s piled high with the crooked butts of dead cigarettes.

This is all just conjecture, of course. If it’s as cold in the Screamer’s house as it is in mine, he’s probably wearing something other than just his underwear or he’d be unconscious within minutes. Venturing into the unheated hinterlands of a typical Japanese home without the proper gear in winter is like jumping into the North Atlantic in swim trucks. You’d have to be very brave or very foolish.

And maybe he’s a beer drinker, I don’t know. Judging by the hours the Screamer keeps, he’s either retired or living on the generosity of the Japanese government. He has a cigarette voice, though. That much I’m sure of.

Once he’s begun, he usually holds forth for 15 or 20 minutes, though he’s flirted with the upper thirties. This happens I guess three or four times a day on average, sometimes more. The Screamer is not on a schedule. Occasionally he starts in at midday, other times he cranks it up at midafternoon or dinnertime. Often he’s punching in at two or three in the morning, then again literally at the crack of dawn, baying to bring the roof down. I keep earplugs beside my bed for just this reason. Whatever it’s about, there’s no point in both of us losing sleep over it.

This has been going on for five months.

When the Screamer is operating on all cylinders, I’m pretty sure everyone on my block can hear him. The difference between them and me is that they can presumably understand him. They don’t have to wonder. Me, I have no idea what he’s yelling about. It sounds important. Though almost anything sounds important when it’s delivered at the top of an invisible person’s lungs in a foreign language. For all I know he’s raving about the weather. But I don’t think so.

In between sessions, I sit in my one warm room and wonder about the Screamer. What could a person find so irritating that he’s got to yell about it at top volume for 15 minutes roughly every six hours? If the street construction crew from last fall were still out there, I could maybe understand. I’d probably be doing the same thing, having by now been driven completely insane by the machine that cuts through concrete and its evil operator. But those sadists moved on months ago to another unlucky neighborhood several blocks away.

I’ve considered that maybe it’s the talking trucks. These are a small fleet of vehicles outfitted with loudspeakers on their roofs that pack the wallop of air-raid sirens. The trucks are driven at a crawl through the neighborhood while blasting impossibly loud recordings of somebody speaking Japanese in the kind of monotone usually reserved for professors of statistics and automated messaging services. The movement of the vehicles creates a Doppler effect that gives the speeches, whatever they’re about, the eerie quality of messages from Satan, if Satan were a statistics professor.

The talking trucks come through several times a week. Each time I hear one coming, I’m tempted to splash ketchup on my ears and run out into the street, frantically waving the truck away, ketchup leaking from my ears down my neck. When the truck doesn’t turn around, I’d fall to the ground in front of it, writhing in agony. I figure it’s worth a shot.

Maybe, I’ve thought, he’s a dog person who’s been forced to care for a relation’s cat for an extended period. Cats will sometimes have that effect on people. Deliberately.

I’ve eliminated the possibility that he’s a rabid sports fan whose favorite team is having the worst season in its, or any other team’s, entire history. Likewise, I’ve dismissed theories involving repeatedly stubbed toes and misplaced keys. I’m at a loss to explain it. Is it a single thing that constantly pricks at him? Or is he set off by a whole catalogue of events that happen throughout the course of each day?

Out here where I live, the dense sprawl of the city’s bland industrial center gives way to residential suburbs speckled with rice fields. The streets are narrow, without sidewalks, and the tiny houses are packed together like teeth. In front of every home, no matter how small, there’s a pocket-sized Japanese garden instead of a yard, separated from the street and the houses to either side by a low concrete wall.

Their owners obsess over these little patches of land. Were a typical American family to find itself with the same amount of yard space, they’d set about filling it with a barbecue grill, bird-shit covered plastic deck chairs, an inflatable wading pool, and a crumbling dead Christmas tree skeleton.

But the Japanese person’s relationship to this space is different. For my neighbors, a garden is an idealized representation of the living world, a microcosm of the relationship between people and nature. The result is a little like a work of art: sculpted trees and shrubs, stone lanterns, rocks and gravel, a clutch of bamboo, a little stream or waterfall with a few koi kissing the surface of a tiny pond. Each element, from the trees to the rocks and even the moss on them, has been carefully selected and arranged just so, like a painting. It’s supposed to be a place for stillness and contemplation, a little Zen zone where one can let go of worries and concerns for a little while and think about how big the universe is and how little we, and our problems, are.

In front of the Screamer’s house, the low little wall is there, but it’s empty inside, just bare dirt and dead grass. It’s like a garden waiting to happen. But it never does.

Usually the Screamer sounds angry. Sometimes I can hear him pounding on the walls. His voice jumps with rage, like bursts from a mortar. It has the tone of someone who is, say, moments away from plunging a sharp instrument repeatedly through the ribs, neck and eyeballs of another person, then dragging the bleeding carcass to a trapdoor in the living room, beneath which is a dirt pit whose depths are piled with lye-covered, rotting remains. He always seemed a little different, I’d say when they interviewed me about him. But I never thought I was living next door to a serial killer.

Other times, there’s a different quality to his tirades. The anger’s there, but it’s tinged with desperation. These are the times when I worry, despite myself. I’ve often thought about asking one of my Japanese-speaking friends to listen in on one of the extended rants and provide a translation. But a big part of me is afraid of what I’d learn. Do I, as a close neighbor, have any responsibility for the Screamer? I’ve never seen anyone enter or leave his house. I’ve never even seen him. What would I do if suddenly, one day, the shouting stopped?

*

When I was a kid in junior high school, I was deeply unpopular. This is not surprising. I probably would have disliked me, too, had I had several classes with me and had to share a table at lunchtime. In class pictures from elementary school, I’m easily identifiable as the shaggy-haired kid in too-small, brown plaid pants with buck teeth and an overbite so severe I could have eaten an ear of corn, as they say where I’m from, through a chain link fence. Usually my picture is slightly blurred, as if I’d been moving as the photo was snapped, which I probably was.

I was an energetic kid. Actually, I was way beyond energetic. I had a condition that in those days doctors used to call “hyperactivity” or, when they really wanted to fuck with your parents’ heads, “MBD,” which stood for “minimal brain dysfunction.” Today they’d say I suffered from an acronymic euphemism known as ADHD. Simply put, I was hyper. To the kids at Harbor View Middle School, though, I was a spaz.

(more…)

A person would be a fool to look for a single, simple window into the mystery of the Japanese character. But if a person were to insist, he could do worse than take as his window the riddle of karaoke.

Karaoke, you may already be aware, is like a national pastime in Japan. It holds the same kind of prominence in the Japanese social vernacular that happy hour does for Americans, or dinner parties or going to the movies. Karaoke clubs are at least as common as sports bars and cineplexes in the U.S., and they have roughly the same function: to get people out of the house and into places where they will spend lots of money on entertainment with little or no redeeming social value while using their cellphones. But in Japan, as with so many things here, they’ve turned this ritual into an art form, albeit one that seems on its face to be largely devoid of grace, beauty or history.

Most Americans have some familiarity with the phenomenon, whose name they render as “kary-okie” but which is properly pronounced “kara-okeh,” from the Japanese words kara and ōkesutora, meaning something along the lines of “empty orchestra.” Karaoke is widely understood to date back to the mid-‘80s – a decade that gave us many, many things for which we’re thankful only that they’re not around any more – when a Japanese percussionist began creating devices that allowed friends to play recordings of his music sans lyrics at parties so they could sing along. It took a decade or so for the fad to spread west, but once it did, as with most of the things Americans borrow from the Japanese (I defy you to find a “California roll” at a sushi restaurant in Fukui), the original artifact has been Westernized almost beyond recognition.

The differences between the two brands span both the superficial and the fundamental. Nearly all American karaoke takes place in bars, after the clientèle has been hitting the sauce for a while, enabled by a “KJ” or host who plugs in the music choices and provides witty (in the best of circumstances) commentary and encouragement. He’s usually paid to be there by the bar owner, who understands that the money he pulls in on beer from the singing crowd more than makes up for what he spends on the karaoke guy.

In Japan, some amount of karaoke is perpetrated in bars and clubs, but rarely is there a stage involved, or even the attention of the room at large. Instead, patrons use a hi-tech, head-sized remote control to choose which of the umptillions of de-lyrified songs they wish to play on one of the club’s corner televisions, always accompanied by a scrolling display of the lyrics and one of a few dozen breathtakingly banal, generic “music videos,” which feature young, beautiful, fashionably dressed Japanese men and women running through beaches and office parks, looking forlorn, angry, horny, flirty, pensive, rebellious or listlessly constipated, often all at once. In bars, participants sing from their seats or where they stand, passing around the microphone from singer to singer like parents at a PTA meeting. Nor is it free. Japanese people fork over anywhere from ¥100-¥500 (one yen is roughly a penny) to sing each song, in addition to plunking down for their drinks.

But most karaoke goes down in specialized facilities, all seemingly designed to look like Liberace’s bathroom. These buildings rent scores of small rooms or “boxes” by the hour, which often includes all-you-can-drink booze service and a food menu. In these sound-proofed, closet-sized cubicles, each sporting a couch, a table, a TV, a jukebox’s worth of music and personalized pitch control, you and your closest friends can enjoy all the karaoke you want, any way you want.

Here is where the paths of Japanese and American karaoke really diverge. The biggest difference between the two – and this is where I believe an important peeky-hole to these people’s brains lies – is that when you perform karaoke in Japan, you check your irony at the door, assuming you had any to begin with, which if you’re Japanese is unlikely, but more on this in a moment.

This is a distinction that can’t be overstated. In America, for all but the tiniest fraction of participants, karaoke is all about the irony. When we chug a beer, jump onto the stage, and grab the mic, we’re not serious. We don’t honestly intend to try to outperform the artist whose voice has been snipped out of the song. And we’re certainly not there to unbreak our hearts with Toni Braxton. On the other side of the Pacific we use karaoke to engage in a different sort of catharsis: self-mockery, that distinctly, reflexively American form of social inoculation in which we deflect the potential for public embarrassment by smashing the pie into our own faces. It’s a sociological judo of sorts. We want to make fools of ourselves, without which the entire notion of American karaoke – to say nothing of a decades’s worth of network reality television programming – is without purpose. Who wants to stand in a bar and watch talented people sing excellent renditions of Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On a Prayer” or Def Leppard’s “Photograph”? These songs sucked to begin with. They are not going to get appreciably better with a different vocalist and some vibrato. Even if you can sing well, in American karaoke it’s a bad idea to take your moment at the mic too seriously. Send an audition tape to American Idol, if you think you warble like a pro. But get off the karaoke stage, please, and take your Van Morrison, your Mariah, and your John Mayer with you.

Japanese karaoke clubs, however, are filled with the earnest faces of people in thrall to their own tortured vocal chords, their eyes aglow with sincerity, their hearts breaking visibly as they sing – badly, terribly, execrably, more often than not – to a mixture of saccharine-slathered Japanese and American pop, classic rock, and movie musical tunes (“Summer Nights,” anyone?). Watching a middle aged man in a business suit relaxing with his buddies after a hard day at the office by butchering “Born To Make You Happy” from his seat at a bar table while the rest of the room ignores him is an extraordinary experience, like nothing you’ll see in America, unless maybe you’re in a Sacha Baron Cohen movie.

It’s a picture, though, that’s emblematic of the Japanese people, as best I can tell. As I mentioned before, the Japanese capacity for irony is practically nonexistent. Comedy in Japan skews to the slapstick and Vaudevillian variety, rather than toward the Americans’ droll, arched eyebrow or the U.K’s deadpan ridiculous. Reality TV shows here, of which there are an infinity, traffic not in the savage mockery of the West – itself a product of our disdain for the unironic quest for celebrity – but in gentle lampooning and self-parody, heavily weighted toward laugh-filled contests of intelligence and mental skill, calling to mind American game shows of the ‘70s like To Tell the Truth and The Gong Show.

The first few times I experienced Japanese karaoke, it was not as a participant but as an audience member – which felt, at the time, more like voyeurism than anything else. Invariably, my American-built earnestness-radar was activated, displaying a target-rich environment. The automated irony defense powered up in response and prepared to deliver a debilitating spray of snark, which is its default setting. Is this something these people really want to be doing in public, I kept thinking, finger poised over the trigger. Shall I just put them out of their misery?

But in the four months I’ve been here, I’ve noticed a marked decrease in my instinct for derision and ridicule. I’ve even spent a few evenings slugging back beers on a couch with friends in a karaoke box, and a few times I’ve caught myself singing Simon and Garfunkle without a hint of irony. It’s a little scary, yeah. I’m out of my element. But I didn’t come to Japan to be the same person I was in South Carolina. Pass the big-ass remote control, punch in Britney, and – God help me – gimme more.

Returning to Fukui last weekend, I had 90 minutes to consider this sticker on the seatback in front of me. Looking for an exit? See bottom left.

There’s a metaphor for my life in Japan somewhere in here, I just know it.

As best as I can tell, there are no turkeys in Japan. It seems to be a species of fowl entirely foreign to this part of the world. Everyone I ask looks at me as if I were talking about a Wattled Curassow or an Abyssinian Ground-Hornbill when I say the word turkey. When I try to describe what a turkey looks like, which inevitably involves some amount of pantomime, everyone says, “Ahhh,” and directs me to the local KFC (“Kentucky Fly Chicken.”)

It’s tough on a guy whose favorite holiday is Thanksgiving, let me tell you. Here, it’s just another day. Tomorrow, of course, is another story. November 23 is another one of those traditional Japanese holidays whose very name can put people to sleep: Industry Day. Doesn’t that sound exciting? “Hey everybody, are you getting hyped for Industry Day?!” Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz… It’s actually a national holiday, copped originally from a harvest celebration, now dedicated to workers everywhere and low federal taxes (I do not kid). It’s occasionally known by the ever so slightly sexier appellation “Labour Thanksgiving Day.” The law establishing the holiday cites it as “an occasion for commemorating labor and production.” (You think I kid? I do not.)

It’s the first time since I’ve been here that I’ve really missed America. And I realize it’s not actually America that I miss, or even the food or football or the Blue Nun. It’s not just the wailing children or the drunken political arguments or being assigned turkey-carving duty and botching it spectacularly and trying not to bleed onto the serving platter, at least not obviously. It’s not having to pretend to like Ambrosia salad, even though it’s the most unnatural and disagreeable holiday foodstuff since the invention of fruitcake. It’s all of that wonderful crap. Because it’s all inseparable from the people with whom we’ve experienced it all our lives. As much as we talk about dreading the holidays – and we do, rightfully so – we dread not being able to spend them the way we always have even more.

Send turkey sandwiches and Blue Nun.