会いたかった—I wanted to meet you.

First off, I think I owe Larry Wayne "Chipper" Jones Jr. an apology. After arousing the sympathies of my ATL readership, I've come to realize my remarks were uncalled for. I think as usual, I just got emotional and Larry just got in the way. Todd's Right, What did Larry ever do to me? - -What has Larry ever done to anyone really? I was trying to remember why it was that I hated Chipper jones, and think it was a combination of too many names, that smarmy smile from his team team USA photo that I had to look at every at-bat when I went to the wbc back in March, the whole pretentious "Chipper Chardonnay" fiasco, and the fact that sonically, the words "chipper" and "douche" go well together. It didn't really fit either, he's a switch hitter...could've been made into much better "bi" joke or something. Now that I think about it, there's a lot of people I hate[ed] for almost no reason: Kevin Spacey, Melky Cabrera, Bobby Abreu, Payne Stuart, Davis Love III, Hideki Matsui, Shinosuke Abe, Michihiro Ogasawara, Tatsuya Utsumi, Seth Greisinger, Marc Kroon, Tatsunori Hara, Sadaharu Oh...I guess I'm just a hateful person.

You know who deseves it a lot more actually? Dustin Pedroia—what a sack of sh*t. I officially retract my remarks against the great slugging shortstop of the Braves and extend them to that bearded as*hole on the cover of MLB2K9 The Show. All the same though, this onion article is still really funny.

Shout out to Todd and Noel and the rest of the crew reppin' the Yakyu-Otaku in the fine state of Georgia. Maybe check y'all out this fall when I hit the third coast in my upcoming Dirty South Roadtrip™. Tour dates to be announced soon. If I ever get done with last summer that is...

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The cabby was startled for a moment by the outfit. He settled and asked where to and drove for a few blocks before asking「お客さん、、その格好で何をなさいますか。」
(Sir, might I ask what you would be doing in that apparel?)

I kept staring straight ahead, feigning dire purposiveness.
.
.
.

「俺の女を取り返しに行くぜ。」
('I'm going to get back my woman.')

The cabby nodding, gave a throaty growl and responded with fervor. 「いいなあ。その態度。男らしいぞ。尊敬するよ。」
('I like your attitude kid. Manly...I respect that.')

As all good cabbies will, he began after a moment to tell me his story. He was among that sad generation of old-machi Edoites that came up through the ashes of the war. He believed that all men in Tokyo (and quite possible in Japan at large) had lost all sense of masculinity after losing to the Americans. The inborn fire in my eyes, he said, reminded him of a era that was all but legend by the time he was a lad. I thought there was some seriously troubling remnant aspects of Imperialism in that speech, but I let it slide. Didn't wanna kill the mood. With a cabby that fired up, you can't lose.

He was grey on the head and looked to be in his late 50's. He spoke in the rare Edo-dialect and professed to have lived to seen Tokyo grow cancerously from a close-knit community built on love, fear and the will-to-survive, to the swollen, cold concrete mess of high-rise offices and apartment complexes that it is today. 'Progress...' he scoffed. 'People,' he said, 'Used to treat each other with respect. - -Say "Howdy do mister Takano? How's business lately? How are the wife and chillun?" Nowadays people don't even know the people they live next door to. 650 families smooshed into one city block and the only thing they know about their neighbors is they have a noisy dog. Boy I tell yous... when I was a lad we took care o' each other. Didn't have much, but if there was orphans about—lots of orphans back in those days—my parent's give them some bread and a shirt if we had one extra and send them on their way and if we needed some rice or a cigarette or some sen we'd ask a neighbor- -'
'- -What's a "sen"?'
'Oh, that was back before flagstation.'
'Inflation?'
'Yeas...and there used to be things called "sen", you see, and you get a hundred of them and you had a yen- -and in my grandpappy's time, there were things called "rin" which was a thousandth of one yen.'

"My grandpappy's time"?
1904. Russo-Japanese War. Fall. My great-great grandfather is gets onto a boat in a small port city on the western edge of what was then Russian Empire and what is now modern day Lithuania. Russia is unsafe. Strikes are being planned. Revolution is foretold. America will be better. There's opportunity there. Neighbors are glad to see his family go. Damn Jews. He is 10 years old. Ellis island. Name change. Parents die of something nasty. New York is very lonely place. He moves several times, takes a wife, she was from Ireland. Redhead- -kosher though. Left Dublin for a lot of the same reasons. Too many Citizens about with their Garry-Owen's yappin' at your carriage. They had progeny. My grandfather among them. 1941. My Grandpappy is 17. Signs his father's name at the naval office so he could serve. Ship surgeon. Drove an Ambulance in Kyūshū. I wonder if he saw the cloud over Nagasaki. 195? This guy is born. 1957. My Dad is born.

Mass scale wars. Marks of progress. Industrialized weaponry. Pulls human bodies apart. Also brought human beings together in a strange way. I'm only here because of a certain capital and technology tie-up that started as a co-op between big players in Nazi-Germany and Imperial Japan switched from weapons production to factory automation after the war and expanded to the global market in the 60's. The aeroplane that brought me here, the schoolbook that taught me Japanese, and the laptop that I use to record my adventures are all resultant of efforts to win the global conflict that absorbed the generations before him. All my modern happiness rests easily on the wreckage of earlier half of the last century.

Pause to think. Hypothetical: If the war never happens the reproductive conditions of 1950's America are dramatically different. I likely would have never have come into existence. Maybe. Maybe not. Peacetime history is a lot more variegated than conflict. War draws straighter lines in history. Hypothetical: If Soon-Mi's maternal grandparents aren't uprooted and moved to Osaka to work in a bomb factory, they never meet, get married and raise their family in Japan. If the Korean war (aggregate of the loose ends of the Pacific War) never happens, then Soon-Mi's other set of grandparents never end up in Japan as refugees. Her existence is directly contingent to the two biggest and bloodiest watershed events in East Asian history. This goes on forever: We'd've never met if we'd not grown up in globalized world, how could I have ever fallen for Japan if I'd never started consuming it's media? Shogun, Perry, Emperor, War, MacArthur, Korea, GDP, Export, Bubble, Collapse, Existentialism, Studio Gainax, Collge, Ted in Japan. It's so obvious! You should know better than that. History isn't so simple. The human universe is not as linear as we're lead to believe. Thinking like that got you where you were this time last year:



It's 8:03 on Thursday [July 18th, 2007]. I’m slightly drunk. My laundry is done. My room’s clean. I’ve even done some extra-curricular video work. I’m too angry to read. I have staved off feeling sorry for myself long enough by keeping busy and waiting for the bathwater to cool. It’s raining. Again. I sided with frugality for once and risked wasting a summer night in Japan watching anime and lamented that morning wouldn’t come sooner over some Hennessey in a plastic cup.



Alone. Plotting my revenge under false pretenses against the only woman who ever loved me the way I wanted. - -Or maybe that was just another part of the puzzle from There to Now. Whereto?

Parallax, Parallax, Parallax...

'Whereto?' The cabbie interjected.
'It's just up here around the corner.' I said.
'Wife?' he continued. 'She's dead. She got the cancer. That was years ago though. After that, I quit me job as clerk in a shipping office and started driving a cab. Meet more people this way. More interesting one leastways. I like talking you know.'
'I gathered.'
'So you have children?'
'Two. Boy and a girl. Both married. I'm hoping for grandchildren soon.'
'That's nice.'
.
.
.
'So that, uh, girl you were talking about earlier? What's her name?'

I didn't wanna tell him her name for fear of the face he might make. "Yuki." I said.
'She sounds wonderful. I hope you win her back.'
'Me too.' I said, equivocally.

The cab pulled up to same concrete gate as before. I got out, and paid the fare. Christ what a sad guy. Slowly, I made my way across the plaza, my geta clattering and pulling stares from all over campus. When I got to the makeshift concert hall, I found "Casper" the drummer from "Skank Laboratory" smoking a cigarette out in the entranceway. He dropped his smoking hand to his side and stared wide-eyed at my ensemble. It took all my effort not to smile and blow the persona.
'Where's Soon-Mi?' I said, with incredible forced seriousness.
He lifted his other hand and pointed to the room behind him.

The instant I walked in, the b*tch on stage about to begin her set stopped in the middle of a sentence and let the mic drop from her mouth to her mid-riff, which relayed audience attention to the Gaijin-in-costume walking down the aisle. I was two paces away from the table, when she finally turned to see me. I hit the brakes, my geta sliding gracefully over the tile floors to a stop at the empty chair next to hers, threw the flowers down on the table in front of her and delivered the line:

「会いたかったぜ。」

The whole area exploded into fits of brash laughter. I had successfully stolen the show (much to the chagrin of the current performers). Soon-Mi laughed shallowly three or four times, and then sat, mouth open as I took my seat, taking me and all my spectacle in. For once in her life she apparently had nothing to say about my outfit. I liked the change.

Soon-Mi picked up the flowers and examined them. I caught her smiling before she leaned over and whispered: 'What are you doing in that stupid-ass getup?'
'It's hot out, and I'm on vacation as of today. I should say the same thing to you, anyways, did you two plan that?'
Soon-Mi and the girl across the table from me both had on navy-blue dresses with white polka-dots. She guffawed. 'I phoned her earlier, we thought it would be funny.'
I looked at the girl. It was that same girl with the short hair whose name I can never remember. She was at the birthday party two months ago, and the Ska concert, and the shit festival last weekend. She looked insecure and confused.
'Good thing I came dressed like this on costume night.'
"Omae, baka na- -"
'Ssh! The show is starting.'

＊　　＊　　＊

She liked the flowers. Everyone did. After the show I heard girls talking about how nice it'd be if their boyfriends did things like that and how forthright foreigners are with their feelings. The buzz around the room was generally good. Almost everyone was curious as to the inspiration for my choice of clothing. I figured it was my ticket to an invitation to the after party. Once I was there, it would be a simple matter to entertain, to laud the girl publicly, to wine her, to dine her, and then take her back to the diamond.

The only one who stood silent throughout the whole ordeal was Soon-Mi. We had sat together and enjoyed the music, hardly talking- -but I didn't take that as a bad sign. She's in to it, you know? She enjoys sound on an intellectual level beyond my poorer understanding. She observed my schmoozing with an amused smile and an occasional sigh. When it was time to go, she stood up and walked with me towards the gate, apart from the pack. She was happy. I was able to make her laugh again. God's in his heaven, all's right with the world.

She lost her smile quickly when I asked her where she was off to after this.
'Look,' she said, anticipating my further questions. 'The first party at the restaurant is for club members only, I think. There's another party after, you might be able to come to that.'
'When will that be?'
'I don't know.'
'Best guess?'
'Maybe late...'
Liar.
'I'll call you when we get out of the first place.'
'Okay, but, I haven't eaten so...'
'You should go eat then.'
'Okay...do you know a good place around here.'
'...'
'Right, I'll find one...then...'
'Teddo...maybe you should go home tonight. I'm still going to the fireworks in Yokohama with my friends tomorrow. You can come to that if you'd like.'
'...Yeah. I'd like to...'
'Really, I'm sorry. It's just- -it's a club event, and...no one brought any boyfriends or anything tonight, so...'
'It might be weird?'
'Yes...'
She looked nervous. I didn't want to push. I knew that trying to invite myself to a club party here was "KY" but...was I really that embarrassing for her? All her friends seem to like me. They talked to me and asked me all sorts of questions, they said we should drink sometime. Were they all pretending? Does everyone in this country hate me and pretend not to just because they're polite?

Or does everyone love me except for her?

She bowed in apology and left me standing in the street to go catch up with her friends. Stranded, game over. I started off the way I came, and, on a whim, got on the first bus I saw to nowhere.

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Part of trip: The Summer of Lame

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