Man and Ultraman

“It is a common practice over there to offer each other a cigarette as daily greetings.”
“So I heard. Cigarettes are offered to the other to express friendliness and affection.”

I stood in front of the machine and read the sign again, just to be sure. Outside the dimly lit lobby, another cold, gray morning in Fukui, Japan was underway. The sky coughed with thunder, sending sleet and rain skittering down upon the pavement in freezing waves. Was I even in the right place? I wasn’t sure. It seemed like it could be the right place, if maybe a little grimier than I’d expected. And there was also the issue of the vending machine.

“It is a common practice over there to offer each other a cigarette as daily greetings.”

Packs of cigarettes receded in orderly rows behind the plexiglass facade. The words were in English. But the cigarettes, the vending machine, and the building we all occupied were unarguably Japanese. The existence of a vending machine that sold cigarettes was not surprising by itself; if anything, it was a visible reminder that I was still in Japan, where anything and everything from cellphone cases to contact lenses to lightly worn women’s underwear is sold in a vending machine somewhere. Of cigarette vending machines I’d already seen thousands in this country, so I was unimpressed by the one in front of me. It was the sign on it that had captured my attention.

Over there where?

Maybe this was some Japanese vending machine marketing guy’s idea of a clever way to sell cigarettes to Americans. If so, I thought, it wasn’t really very clever, was it? Americans by and large being from America, we’d know it if a part of our daily greeting involved being affectionately offered a cigarette by everyone we ran into. Conversely, maybe it was an American marketing guy’s idea of a clever way to sell cigarettes to Japanese people. If so, I thought, not only was it not clever, it was positively pathetic. The number of Japanese people who could read this exchange in English was microscopic to begin with. Subtract from those the number dim-witted enough to believe it, to the point where they’d actually be motivated to buy a pack of cigarettes and offer one to someone in a gesture of goodwill, and you probably couldn’t fill a small elevator.

I read the sign once again. The English wasn’t bad. Actually, it was not bad enough, I began to think, to have been written by a Japanese marketing guy, whose command of written English, in my experience, is rarely above disastrous. Though, to make up for it, the result is almost always entertaining. This was neither disastrous nor particularly entertaining, though I was willing to give marks for audacious and bewildering.

Standing there, scratching my head over an imagined conversation between two fictional foreign smokers of cigarettes living in an anonymous marketing salaryman’s head, I realized I was letting myself be distracted from the more germane point at hand, which was that no person should have to grapple with the near-term prospects of his own mortality in a hospital which has a cigarette vending machine in its lobby.

This would seem obvious. Yet on the other hand, here I was, standing in a hospital lobby, or what I thought to be a hospital lobby, about to walk upstairs to see a Japanese physician and in all likelihood learn that I had a life-threatening illness, while one floor below me there stood a cigarette vending machine with a sign on it encouraging people to inhale carcinogens together in the name of fellowship.

Obviously, I was stalling. Not even in the subconscious sense but in the full awareness that I was doing so, I lingered in the moldy lobby while a mixture of ice and rain spattered down outside. Fukui has been described to me on several occasions as “the Kansas of Japan.” I’ve also heard it likened to certain unflattering regions of human anatomy. Whenever I mention to someone in another part of the country that it’s where I’m living while I’m in Japan, I always seem to get a subtly cocked eyebrow in response, as if I’d told a Canadian I’m using Iqualuit as a home base while visiting his homeland. I was beginning to realize, however, that what Fukui lacks in metropolitan flair it more than makes up for in rain. It had rained virtually every day for the past three weeks. When I ask locals if it always rains this much in Fukui during winter, I’m usually told, “Yes, but in January it turns to snow,” which I think is meant to be comforting.

*

Please let it not be too deadly an affliction, I thought as I worked up the courage to go upstairs and begin waiting. I’d spent some time preparing myself for a variety of outcomes to my visit, and I thought I might be capable of receiving with a measure of dignity and grace all but a few of the worst possible diagnoses that could be handed down that morning. On the other hand, who knew? I might collapse into a wailing fit of hysterics and soil myself when the verdict was read, there’s no way to tell until the moment’s upon you.

A week previously, I’d begun to experience a slight soreness in the muscles around my left shoulder blade and within my armpit, and the skin of my shoulder and upper arm had become sensitive and painful, as if suffering from razor burn. At the same time I’d begun to notice when I was very still a regular pattern of short, sharp, small bursts of pain inside my chest, high and slightly to the left, roughly in a region that I imagined to be filled with critically important blood-delivery systems like aortas and ventricles and arteries. In fact, it had occurred to me that there are almost no unuseful organs located in the upper left chest region, as opposed to an area like the lower intestines, which seems to be a bit of a junkyard for old and antiquated bits of biology, a region in which short bursts of discomfort are a regular occurrence, hardly cause for alarm or any action more decisive than reaching for a laxative.

Also, I’d always been healthy as a horse, preternaturally lucky when it came to my physical well-being. I’d never broken a bone in my life, not even as a death-courting, high-school-football-playing adolescent. I’d never been on any medication stronger than antibiotics, never even had my wisdom teeth out. Once, when I was in college, I was diagnosed with mononucleosis at the university health clinic. Yet afterward I showed no signs at all of fever, sore throat, muscle soreness or fatigue (though none of this worked to my benefit with my girlfriend at the time). I could count the number of days I’d lost to flu in my life on two hands, with fingers to spare. All my grandparents had lived at least into their eighties, two of them into their nineties. I’d waltzed through my entire medical history with the carelessness and confidence of someone who knows he’s charmed.

But the mind of a man who has recently rounded 40 is different from the mind of a man in his 20s or 30s. And the mind of an uninsured man who is past 40, one who hasn’t had a regular physical exam probably since a Democrat was in the White House, is infinitely more different still. So it was understandable that a pattern of even small short pains in my upper left chest region would command my full and undivided attention.

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Okay, it’s Christmas Day over there in the states. You really ought to have caught the fever by now, but if by some chance it’s still eluding you, if you still feel like you’re on the outside of Christmas looking in, struggling to recapture an inkling of the way you felt about the day when you were still a kid, here ya go. Dip in any ol’ where and start reading. It’s always worked for me. Happy Christmas.

Japan seems to be big on everything about Christmas but the day itself. Trees and decorations have been up all over the country since October, Santa Claus is a regular fixture in storefronts, and holiday music has been playing non-stop. But December 25 is just another workday here. Businessmen will trudge to the office, stores will open as usual, teachers will teach, schoolkids will doze, trash will be picked up, and lunches will be eaten. Gifts, when they’re exchanged, will be limited to small tokens between lovers, as on Valentines Day. It’s a surreal experience.

I’m heading to Osaka and Kyoto for the next few days, where I’ll visit friends and hopefully catch a little holiday spirit. In the meantime, have yourself a holly, jolly Christmas.

Since I arrived in Japan, I’ve been asked repeatedly by friends and family if I’ve had a Lost in Translation moment yet. Given the marked absence in my life here of Scarlett Johansen or a similarly proportioned facsimile, I’m afraid the answer is no (unless you count my surreal karaoke encounters). But that doesn’t mean I’m not vigilant. One of the many things about Japan that that excellent film nailed was the way American film stars will happily mortgage their celebrity to Japanese product endorsements in a way they’d never stoop to doing in the West, for fear of looking like crass money-grubbing sell-outs (but who’s passing judgement?). Savvy the most prominent offenders below. See anyone who looks familiar?

I’m dating myself here, but I remember the very first episode of The Muppet Show.

Clarification: I don’t really remember sitting in the living room of the house in Charleston, S.C., where I grew up, watching the debut of The Muppet Show itself (not the way I recall watching Ultraman as a kid, anyway), but I do remember the very first sketch of the show’s premiere, which was in 1976. Is it possible my memory of the sketch was from a later rebroadcast? Yes, but I’m not interested in quibbling over such details right now, and anyway I’m talking about the sketch, not the date, so relax about the whens and the wherefores already, okay? Thank you.

My point is that I’ve been recently reminded that I remember the Muppet’s first sketch because I can’t get the song that accompanied it out of my head. For two weeks now, I’ve been humming it virtually non-stop – or at least in the rare moments when my brain hasn’t been occupied with endless repeats of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which I’ve been singing with my students at the American Club a half-dozen times each weekday since the middle of November, and which now occupies a neighborhood of my brain’s dimly lit limbic region formerly reserved for “Happy Birthday” and the theme song to One Day at a Time.

While I’m on the subject, let me state for the record that “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” is a really shitty Christmas song. This is a point that’s doubtless been made countless times before me, but having sung it approximately one hundred and twenty times in the last month, I feel I’m in a position to comment critically on this work with some authority. I’m not talking about the melody here; I’ll let others sharpen their knives on that aspect of its many shortcomings. I’m talking about the message it sends. And you know perfectly well what I mean.

Rudolph is despised, ridiculed, and ostracized because he looks different. This condition prevails until a popular authority figure legitimizes him with attention. After which all the other reindeer, who formerly couldn’t stand the sight of him, suddenly “love” him and everything is understood to be just peachy. Does this strike anyone else as a pitch-perfect description of junior high school? There’s no way this is an exemplary life lesson for children we don’t wish to grow up to be complete social pariahs. But you ask people to name their favorite Christmas carols (never mind that this is about as far from a real carol as Christmas music gets), and “Rudolph” almost always lands at or near the top. Christmas spirit? Please. Between messages like this and the standard holiday season sanctimony, I’ll take a good old-fashioned pagan celebration of the winter solstice any year, thanks very much.

Back to the Muppets. The reason I’ve been thinking about that first episode, as I said, was because of the song featured in the first sketch, which, unlike “Rudolph” and the theme song from One Day at a Time, I’ve recently realized is trapped inside my head because it’s one of my favorite songs of all time. And also because it appears on the new Cake CD B-Sides and Rarities, where it receives a splendid update. If you don’t know the song I’m talking about yet (or the sketch), here are a couple of clues: it was originally written by Piero Umiliani, but made immortal by Jim Henson and, now, a droller-than-thou indie rock band from Sacramento.

That’s right, I’m talking about “Mahna Mahna.” No fat elves, no flying deer, no miracle babies, no wise men or merry gentlemen, no figgy pudding or wassail, no supernatural astronomical events, no jingling bells or Christmas trees, absolutely no virgins, seraphim or otherworldly agents of any kind. In other words, my kind of Christmas carol.

[audio http://www.manandultraman.com/audio/mahnamahna.mp3]

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.