“Aruku? Aruku?” the elderly taxi driver kept repeating as we stood on a steep narrow street somewhere in Kamakura. He was making the ‘walking the Yellow Pages’ gesture with a white gloved hand.

“Hai…” I weakly replied, brow straining to squeeze every last drop of my Japanese vocabulary out of my already-agitated brain. I gesticulated wildly, hoping to make myself understood as if we were playing an impromptu game of charades. I was trying to communicate to him that we wanted him to wait for us while we walked up (Aruku? Aruku?) to the Zenaraibenten Shrine and that we would pay his waiting rate. I barely remembered my Japanese 10 and 11 lessons from college. The kindly old man spoke no English.

It had been building up over the past few days since we’d arrived in Japan, but it only dawned on me completely at that moment: No matter how hard I wanted desperately to be Japanese, I would always be an outsider looking in.

=====

Before we landed at Narita, I still held on to the idea that I was somehow an expert on Japanese culture. I’d watched, in rapid succession since passing the bar exams, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Death Note (the anime series and the live-action movies), Code Geass, and Honey & Clover. I listened to Mr. Children and Gackt and Ayumi Hamasaki on my iPod. I believed without a doubt that I would have no trouble adjusting, that there would be no culture shock.

I was very wrong.

=====

I realized this the next night. My fiancee and I spent twenty minutes outside the Takarazuka Theater, the all-female answer to Kabuki, watching a large but very well-behaved crowd of women sitting out in the cold of the night. They were quietly waiting for the stars of the show to come out. Every now and then, they would stand in unison without a word. Then, when it would turn out to be a false alarm (or a lesser actress), they would all sit back down, as silently as when they stood up.

I was certain they would all break out in squeals when the tall, slim star came out, but instead very subdued applause broke out when she did. One fan presented her with a bouquet of flowers, which she accepted graciously before entering a car that drove off. Then the crowd dispersed silently.

I didn’t understand anything, I realized. I was on an alien planet where high school girls wore worryingly short skirts as uniforms, where shoppers calmly browsed through a wide variety of sex toys at the discount store, where a princess and a goth could share a walk huddled together in the evening cold.

It was all real, just like in the stories and movies and anime and manga. And yet I still knew nothing.

=====

While I was waiting for my future mother-in-law to finish her shopping, I opened up my DS to play The World Ends With You.

I was seated next to the men’s wear section in the Tokyu department store, in Shibuya. And I was playing a game set in Shibuya, where my character was shopping in a store called ‘Shibukyu’, looking through men’s wear.

My brain broke.

=====

Close to midnight in Shinjuku. I stepped out onto the street from the train station along with a huge crowd of people. Across the street, a woman dressed in a fur-lined jacket, denim short shorts, and knee-high boots jumped up and down, waving wildly at no one in particular. Then she put a leg up on a concrete bollard and run her hands up from her ankles to her hips, still looking at our crowd.

I did not understand.

=====

Out for a midnight walk in Ginza, I decided to get completely lost, turning down streets I’d never been down before. I passed closed department stores and bars and konbini stores and yakitori stands. I watch a man with his necktie around his forehead puke into a gutter while his friends patted him on the back. I noticed a homeless man sleeping in a very clean cardboard box. Inside, there was a small color TV and an alarm clock. The man was sleeping in a neatly pressed gray suit.

=====

Walking down Akiba, reading the napkin advertisement for a maid cafe, I notice a a storefront with a smallish TV screen playing various movie trailers for newly released DVDs next to the TAITO Building. I enter to browse for videos. Pushing absently through a black curtain, I discover that the decidedly PG storefront was a ruse. Instead I found five entire floors devoted to pornography. The steps of the steep staircases showed different advertisements from different studios, each showcasing their own stars in various positions. I pass the foot fetish section, the plus sized section, the mature section. On the third floor I notice a shelf dedicated to pregnant women.

=====

After a long day of visiting Yamanaka Lake and Oshino Village at the foot of Mt. Fuji, the couple who was showing us around, Keiichi and Christine, were driving us back to Gotemba Station so we could catch the train back to Tokyo. Keiichi, a fund manager originally from Kobe and an avid fan of the Sengoku Jidai, the time of the samurai’s heyday, was telling us about ghosts and superstitions and all sorts of trivia.

My fiancee chimed in, saying “Mame chishiki!” (In case you didn’t watch that episode of Azumanga Daioh, mame chishiki, literally translated as ‘bean knowledge’, is an idiomatic expression referring to trivial knowledge, essentially, knowledge worth beans.)

Keiichi was impressed. “Wow, how can you know this much about Japan?”

“We’re Japanophiles,” my fiancee replied. She added, a little more hesitantly, “We’re otaku.”

Keiichi replied, “Nothing wrong with that. After all, this is Japan.” He laughed. “If you aren’t otaku, then what are you?”

(to be continued)

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