Takoyaki sounds like Mexican food on a stick, and I was
surprised to find the little donut-holes sized ball of dough to be full of
octopus tentacles and even more surprised to be enthralled with the hot grassy
flavor and chewy shellfish except that tentacles have a bad connotation and it
makes me nervous standing so close to the pink district, where posters of
faceless naked women advertise pleasure for a different kind of tentacle whom I
try to avoid but I there wasn't much choice since I didn't have any friends and
the ones who were my friends only knew five words in English: shit, damn, fuck,
hell, and bitch, which made for interesting conversations especially when the
only Japanese I knew was Emperor-Speak which is only used for the most
important people in the world which my friends definitely weren't.
Tokidoki sounds like wishy-washy and I always used it as a
response when someone asked me if I liked something even if it didn't make any
sense because it was fun to say and they probably didn't understand me because
of my accent and my Emperor-Speak anyway and most of the time it fit to say
that sometimes I liked to go to the onsen and that sometimes I understood the
dials on the washing machine and sometimes I liked to eat Ramen but it didn't
make sense to say that I was from sometimes and that my name was sometimes but
eventually I learned to say “I don't understand” and I looked less like an
idiot than usual with my frizzy hair and tomboy clothes but people still
stopped and stared particularly when I was naked.
Onsen
means bath house and at first I as afraid to go in because of the staring but
eventually I got over it except for the mud bath which was for both genders and
really didn't look like mud at all because the top half of the bath was water
and all the mud was settled at the bottom so I wore my towel into the water but
it got soaked and when I stood up to hang it on a ledge everyone could see my C
cups which are much bigger than any Japanese woman's breasts but only average
by American standards and I felt so awkward that thought I would never go to
another onsen again because of the sulfur smell and the burning on the soles of
my feet from the hot paved bottom and the embarrassment but my friends
convinced me that it wasn't a big deal and that they understood I was a gaijin
which even though it's a derogatory term made me feel much better about all of
the social barriers I was busting through with my Americanness.
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Angela R. Lindfors is a stay-at-home writer and mother. In 2007 she studied abroad in Japan and in 2008 she graduated from St. Edward's University. She currently lives in San Antonio, Texas.
Bay Laurel / Volume 1, Issue 1 / Autumn 2012