Adventures in Japan

Merry Christmas All

Thursday night I went to a Christmas party at work. It wasn't like Tyler's "Christmas party" where he had to sing songs and dance around for the entertainment of children and their parents. Mine was a grown-up party. All I had to do was hang around and eat and drink. My kind of shindig. But because it was a party and not, strictly speaking, an English lesson, much of the conversation was in Japanese. I understood some of it, but I discovered that Japanese people not only have the capacity to speak incomprehensibly fast, they can also converse at volumes well below my range of hearing. It was like talking through a glass wall (or maybe a window, if the window was closed). People would look right at me and ask what seemed to be simple questions, but I'll be damned if I could make out more than a few words of anything they said. Everyone was really nice about it, but they probably all think I'm stupid.

There was lots to eat and LOTS to drink. In Japan it seems there's always someone waiting for an opportunity to top up your glass. They won't offer to fill it, they'll just go right ahead and do it. Sometimes the only way to keep people from pouring more liquor into your cup is to leave it full and not drink what you've been given. Now me not being one to let anything go to waste, I ended up drinking a lot.

Once the party started to wind down, I caught one of the last trains of the night and met up with Tyler and David at the Green Leaf where I drank some more. Then we went to The Brittania and continued to drink. Then we bought some liquor in a convenience store and drank it while watching Super Size Me in the lounge upstairs. I think Tyler and I finally got to bed sometime around 8:00 Friday morning.

Friday afternoon I got a call from a Russian lady in need of a warm body for some event work starting at 3:00. Because it was extremely short notice, she offered to pay me ¥10,000 for just over two hours of work. How could I say no? Well, having had a long night of drinking not too many hours previous, I was extremely dehydrated, short on sleep, and I hadn't had anything to eat since some chocolatey snacks in the wee hours of the morning. I went anyway.

Partly due to my depreciated physical and mental state, the whole experience was surreal. But a lot of it had to do with the pachinko. Pachinko is kind of like a cross between pinball and a slot machine. In a pachinko parlour (Japan has thousands upon thousands of them) players sit in front of their chosen machines and watch hundreds of little steel balls fall through the machine and bounce off pegs and into holes (kind of like Plinko on The Price is Right). When a ball falls through the right hole, the machine will spit out more balls, or trigger some crazy slot machine action, and then maybe spit out more balls. Now that may not sound like too much fun, but the machines all have themes, you see. Anything from comedians to cartoons to masked hero shows from the '70s. Underwater themes seem to be especially popular.

So anyway, the job consisted of wandering around a loud, smoky, pachinko parlour in a Santa dress, giving away prizes that consisted almost entirely of seafood (why not?). My companions in this endeavour were two Russian girls that spoke very, very little English. Now I myself don't understand more than two words of Russian, so I had to communicate with the other girls in Japanese. Somehow that seemed really weird, but then again, I was really, really tired.

I worked again on Christmas Day, but this time at a pachinko place all the way out in Kobe. I was a little more hydrated, slightly better fed, but somehow a little less rested. And I worked five hours this time instead of two. We handed out hot towels for the first little while, but after that we just walked around. Around and around and around. Making our Christmasy selves seen and tyring not to get in the way. One of the other girls seemed to have worked at that particular pachinko parlour fairly often. She was always waving at players and chatting with them like they were old friends. That must have made the time go by quicker. But I'm not complaining. There are a lot of worse jobs out there that pay a lot less money. Hooray for being an exotic foreigner!

So after all of that, what did Tyler and I do for our special Japan Christmas together? Laundry. Surprisingly enough, hanging wet clothes outside, on a windy late December night is not exactly pleasant. More like digit-numbing. So after that we turned on the heat for the first time since we've been here. I feel like such a sissy.

We also ate some really disappointing supermarket chicken.

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And now Tyler says I should write some more interesting things about pachinko. Like how some players put little steel balls or coins in their ears. I'm not sure if it's for luck or to block some of the noise, or both, but I've definitely seen people do it. And aside from betting on certain types of racing, gambling in illegal in Japan. Yet some people manage to make a living playing pachinko. How do they do it? They exchange their buckets of balls for prizes at the pachinko parlour, then go around the corner and exchange their prizes for cash through a little hole in a wall. Then the mystery people on the other side of the hole sell the prizes back to the pachinko guys for a bit of a profit, and the cycle continues. Now, I'd heard about these prize-exchange shenanigans beforehand, but I expected the little windows to be hidden away down back alleys or something. Nope. They're right out front for all the world to see. The police don't hassle them at all. I guess they have better things to do. Or maybe it has something to do with shady underworld dealings. I dunno, but it's an interesting system.