Tim Anderson - Tune in Tokio

“Um…,” I mumble, not sure how to answer, “I just read it; I don’t touch myself or anything.”

He doesn’t really appreciate the joke.

“Well, I always read the articles in Playboy . They’re really good. Course, I look at the pictures, too.”

Gross.

Then he starts talking about this woman who’d bought his car a few weeks before he’d made the big move to Japan.

“She had a great stack, though not much of a face, I’ll tell you. It wouldn’t stop a clock, let’s put it that way.”

It’s very interesting to hear a man who is about as sexually appealing as a toilet seat talk about someone else’s lack of physical attractiveness. Kind of like hearing Tony Danza say that he’d broken up with a girl because she sounds stupid.

Ron starts warming up to me once he gets his tenth or eleventh drink in him. He asks if I want to share a Valium with him. He says we’re kindred spirits. I beg to differ and decline the offer, though I am ve-heh-ry tempted. Instead, I say my good nights and go back to bed.

In bed I wonder what Ron’s mother looks like. I wonder if their relationship has ever crossed any moral boundaries, and as I’m drifting off to sleep with the word “Debbie” dancing in my head, I jump awake, having had an epiphany that won’t be silenced. His mother and Debbie are the same person! And the husband is his stepfather! And he’d left the country because something terrible had happened that he’d needed to escape from! He got his mom pregnant! I have it! It all makes sense now! Gross!

Having had such a monumental breakthrough, I have trouble falling back asleep. I toss and turn for several hours, listening to Ron curse and burp and piss and yell throughout the apartment. The sun rises and I hear him cursing to himself at the front door right outside my room. He opens the door, and I can hear him throwing things out and over the balcony into the garden below.

It is then that the screw turns, and, the sleep deprivation allowing my polite Southern façade to crack, I bolt out of bed, throw open the door, and shriek, “What the fuck are you doing?!!”

I look down at the area where our shoes had once lain just inside the door. They’re all gone, except for one of my sneakers that he still has in his hand, poised to toss. Taken off guard, he turns to me and starts fumbling for an explanation, but since in the past five hours he has ingested innumerable beers, a whole bottle of Jack Daniels, a Valium, and an ocean of vodka, an answer isn’t forthcoming.

I storm out the door onto the balcony and look over the railing. There, four stories down, is a wonderland of footwear tossed away like so much rubbish.

I turn back and look at Ron, my nostrils flaring, my eyes surely bulging. “Don’t you ever touch my fucking stuff, do you understand me? Don’t you fucking ever fucking touch my fucking stuff!”

I run down the stairs, stumble into the garden, and start picking up all the shoes and carrying them up to the apartment. It takes me two trips, which gives me a good chunk of time to get even angrier. When I’ve retrieved all the shoes and brought them back up, I stand at the threshold of the front door and glare at Ron, leaning against the wall in the hallway looking confused. I am ready to use the “F” word some more.

“You fucking drunk insane fucking idiot, what’s your fucking problem?!!”

Meanwhile, Ewan has finally come out of his room and started being my yes-man, punctuating my railings (“You need to fucking dry out! Fucking shit fuck!”) with the occasional sober “exactly” or “that’s absolutely right.”

It turns out that Ron, in his profound delirium, thought Ewan and I were playing a cruel joke on him. He couldn’t find his leg on the floor and naturally jumped to the conclusion that we’d thrown it over the balcony.

I ask him why the fuck he fucking thought that fucked-up shit, and he says, “Because of the argument.”

“What fucking argument?” I ask with petulant exasperation. “What are you fucking talking fucking about?!”

He must have interpreted our conversation in the kitchen earlier-the one in which he’d offered me a Valium and I’d politely declined-as an epic struggle between opposing forces that had ended in a vengeful prank. I should have just taken the damn pill. (It’s not like me to dismiss offers like that out of hand.)

I take advantage of the fact that he’s sorry and prostrate, and I send him to his room with no more vodka.

“Go to fucking bed!” I command him. Still confused and very, very drunk, he sheepishly obeys and limps to his room.

I’m awake for good now. Ewan and I have a cup of tea in the kitchen after cleaning up the remnants of the past eight or so hours and try to think of what to do. Meanwhile, Ron is in his room snoring like a hacksaw. Then, of course, he starts talking-screaming, really-in his sleep. At one point I hear him shout, “Hey, fatty!” but since neither Ewan nor I can generally be described as such, I figure he’s safely asleep and dreaming of Debbie/his mother.

Ewan and I can’t figure out how he had gotten hired by MOBA. Yes, they hire some idiots, but how had Ron stayed sober long enough to get through the interview? Had he not made a bad impression when he’d creamed his coffee with whiskey and then wet his pants?

I spend the whole day at work telling everyone about what happened and worrying about what I will find when I return home. Will he be selling all my CDs for a hundred yen by the side of the road? Will he have turned the refrigerator into a medicine cabinet for his many pharmaceuticals? (Actually, that might be nice.) Will he have killed, crushed into powder, and then snorted poor Ewan?

How could this have happened? Is MOBA so desperate for teachers that they’ve resorted to raiding American rehab clinics, luring the conscripts out with the promise of limitless Absolut and tonics? It’s true, the English conversation school industry in Japan is one of the most fiercely competitive in the country. On trains, magazines, television, newspapers, and billboards everywhere, advertisements for language schools abound. Even celebrities, always up for making a quick buck in the lucrative Japanese market, get in on the fun, allowing their images to be used to convince the Japanese public to say screw it, get a second mortgage, and sign up for some English lessons. Which means you have the baffling phenomenon of Celine Dion’s face on an Aeon English School poster beckoning people to come to Aeon and learn to speak English like an overwrought French Canadian.

I understand the need for teachers to meet the demand of an English-starved public. In Japanese grade schools, kids learn English reading and grammar starting in junior high. But since most English teachers don’t speak English, they are ill-equipped to prepare their students for any real-world English-speaking scenario. So a handsome student named Tatsuya can graduate from a Japanese high school, walk right up to a native English speaker named Cheryl in a dimly lit bar, say something as basic as “I can buy you any drink?” in order to woo her, and because Tatsuya’s pronunciation is so horrendous, Cheryl will promptly hold up her hand and say, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Japanese.” Their relationship will end at roughly the same time it started. Very sad.

The tragedy of Cheryl and Tatsuya is why native English speakers are a hot commodity here, and all of the competing language schools understandably need a constant influx of teachers from America, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in order to meet the demand. But I’m old-fashioned, I guess. I think prospective teachers should be able to do more than present a valid passport and pass the height requirement. They should at least have to pass a breathalyzer.