Tim Anderson - Tune in Tokio

“Yes,” I reply, clasping my hands together in a bid for symmetry. “Big enough.”

# of times since arrival I’ve said

“thank you”: 5,423

“I’m so sorry”: 5,424

“It’s a shame about that baby”: 2

In which our hero’s new roommate becomes an international metaphor for something god-awful.

People have all sorts of reasons for leaving their home country to live in a completely foreign land where they stick out like sore thumbs. Some are good reasons (personal fulfillment, sobering up, wanderlust, cultural curiosity), and some are questionable (avoiding the law, drug smuggling, sex tourism). MOBA, one of the most popular language schools in Japan, doesn’t care what the reason is, as long as you can pretend to know how to speak English.

I’ve had my doubts about MOBA’s hiring practices from the very beginning, and not just due to the fact that my roommate Sean only has a high school education, has never met a double negative he didn’t like, and had no problem getting a job as an instructor. I’ve also noticed a tenuous command of the English language on the part of a few of my coworkers who can barely string a sentence together correctly without breaking into a cold sweat. Like Stanley from New Zealand, who brings a briefcase the size of a tuba case to work and says things like, “Yeah, but he didn’t play like do that right down the middle without your mum crickety bum licker.” Or Pete from Pennsylvania, whom I recently overheard in a class explaining what the word broke means like this:

“You know if you have something, like a dish or a glass, and you drop it on the floor? Broke is what it becomes. For example, ‘My watch is not working. I think it is broke.’”

As an English teacher, and a kind of anal retentive one, when overhearing such egregious misteachings of the language in an adjacent classroom (we can hear everything through the thin walls), I often wish I could leave my class, jump into a phone booth on the street below, squeeze into my spandex, grab my magic Declension Dildo, and quickly emerge as some sort of costumed English language superhero (Conan the Grammarian?) whose mission it is to save people across Japan from the dangerous consequences (i.e., sounding stupid) that can result from mixing up the past and the present perfect forms of verbs.

“Here I come to save the day!” I would sing as I flew into master villain Pete from Pennsylvania’s room, slapped the hapless teacher silly with the Declension Dildo, and corrected the students before the mistake could be permanently etched into their brains. “Brok en ! His watch is brok en !”

“How can we ever thank you very much?” the grateful students would say.

“Just use ‘broken’ in a sentence correctly,” I’d reply with a wink before sheathing my weapon, flying out of the room, and quickly returning to my class in normal clothes. My own students, having taken the opportunity of my being out of the room to have a quick conversation in Japanese, would be none the wiser.

But my doubts about MOBA’s commitment to excellence in English instruction have been confirmed beyond repair ever since the arrival of my new roommate, who took Sean’s place when his MOBA contract had ended. Sean is on his way back to Melbourne and his job as a customs agent at the airport.

“I’ve done what I set out to do,” he told me with a wink and a nudge over a farewell drink at our local bar.

Even without the wink and the nudge, I’d pretty much known he wasn’t talking about fulfilling his lifetime goal of scaling Mount Fuji or learning the traditional Japanese process of making washi paper. He was talking about making it with Japanese girls.

Sean is one of those guys who come to Japan for no other reason than the possibility of having sex with Asian hotties. It’s common knowledge around these parts that Western guys, especially those with limited sex appeal in their own countries, can experience the ultimate image makeover by just stepping off a plane at Narita Airport. All of a sudden, they’re exotic and hot. They’re like that tuneless, unwashed, and insufferable local band in your town that nobody goes to see but somehow develop a huge following in Japan thanks to some obscure seven-inch they managed to get released there because of their cute mugs and the voracious appetite of young Japanese girls for white boys playing guitars. In Australia, Sean was a pale, stocky, simian type, perpetually squinting like he is always staring directly into the sun. In Japan, he’s a sexual dynamo, in spite of the fact that, when he speaks Japanese to his lady friends, he sounds like Crocodile Dundee ordering a kangaroo burger at a sushi bar.

But what had Sean’s plan been in specific terms, I wanted to know.

“Six in six,” he says proudly, taking a swig of Asahi Super Dry beer.

I’ve never been too good with numbers. Was I meant to divide, multiply, add? Surely not subtract. I’m confused by it.

“Six ladies in six months,” he clarifies, looking at me.

Oh, I see. A girl a month. A cross-cultural experience of a lifetime easily reduced down to simple mathematics and sex. Cheap and calculating, yes, but I must say it’s always encouraging to hear about someone reaching his goals with little to no effort. But such little ambition! Surely he could have shot for nine or ten.

A few weeks after Sean’s departure, Ewan and I both receive faxes at work informing us that we’re getting a new roommate on Friday. His name is Ron Faust and he’s from the U.S., and that’s all the information they give us. Though we are both a little nervous at the idea of our home life being altered, it’s in the back of our minds that this Ron Faust could be a really cool guy who might breathe new life into the AF Building.

“Maybe he’ll be a good cook,” Ewan says.

“Maybe he’ll be a flutist,” I offer.

“Maybe he’ll be a necromancer!” says Ruth.

“Maybe he’ll be a fugitive,” says our neighbor Julia, who used to work at a prison in England. We all giggle in blithe amusement for the last time that week.

By the time Friday rolls around, we’ve prepared ourselves as much as we can. Ewan cleaned up the kitchen and common area and even bought some wine and crackers that he arranged on the kitchen table as a welcoming gesture. I put new batteries in the TV remote.

I wait around with Ewan for a while watching the Discovery Channel, but I eventually get sick of waiting for Ron to show up and leave to visit Julia two doors down. We get drunk and continue the “maybe he’ll be a…” game until things get really stupid.

“Maybe he’ll be,” Julia stammers, her head bobbing on her hand, “Madonna!!”

“Yes!! Or,” I begin, holding my index finger in the air to emphasize the seriousness of my point, “it’s also possible that he’s Cher.”

When I come back at midnight, the mythical Ron Faust still hasn’t arrived, and I see that Ewan has opened the wine, downed a few glasses, and even started in on the cheese and crackers.

Ron, it turns out, doesn’t arrive on Friday. Nor does he arrive the next day. After a few more days, Ewan calls the Tokyo head office of MOBA to find out what’s happened to him. All they know is that, apparently, he hadn’t shown up at the airport for his flight.

Three days later he still hasn’t arrived, and Ewan and I are happily getting used to the idea of not having a new roommate and maybe turning the unused bedroom into a fitness/meditation room. Then, two weeks after the day that he was meant to arrive, who should ring our bell at ten p.m. on a Friday but Mr. Faust himself. He is drunk and from Philadelphia. And he looks like a pirate. He has a scraggly, unkempt beard, glassy eyes, and when he says, “Hello, I’m Ron,” it sounds as if he’s just released a small collection of rocks from his lungs.