The White Peril 白禍

This week is Golden Week, a bank holiday, so Atsushi is coming back to Tokyo for five days. I work Saturdays until early afternoon; we figured I'd be gone before he got in from the airport, dropped his heavier stuff off, and went to his parents' place (thirty miles away, which is negligible within the Tokyo megalopolisaurus) overnight. I'd see him tomorrow when he comes back.

So of course, I ran into him near the station. Just enough time to go back to the apartment together and to be told that he has an appointment at the dermatologist's, after which his parents are expecting him for late lunch. C*ckteasing J@p.

I adore my friends (obviously, or I'd go be friends with different people), but I wish I could get them to stop treating me like a terminally-ill patient. I know that Atsushi's being transferred out of Tokyo won't be news for much longer, now that he's been gone a month today. I'm also genuinely grateful for the support.

But I swear: I've dealt with and oriented myself toward the fact that I'm not going to be seeing Atsushi more than twice a month for a year or two. It abrades me, but it isn't the end of the world. What will most assuredly make me lose my mind is spending another night out being asked every ten minutes whether I'm okay. My four or five very closest friends know that I like to deal with my hurts in my own way, but "the guys" in the larger sense don't seem to, and saying so in response to an offer of concern would sound as if I were telling them to buzz off.

When these things come up, I never know whether the problem is cultural (in that my Japanese is good but not perfect, and understanding people's expectations is frequently much harder than just learning to speak colloquial Japanese) or individual (in that even people who grew up together can misinterpret each other). Often, that's kind of freeing. Having grown up in Oprah-era America, I know how crazy people can drive themselves when trying to analyze every batted eye and stray tossed-off remark as the key to one's soul. Here, I more or less have to assume that a specific perceived slight from someone who overall treats me with kindness and respect isn't worth fixating on.

Not that clapping someone on the shoulder and wishing him well is a slight. It's just that knowing that people are going to spend the evening feeling sorry for me makes me not really want to be around my own friends. And that makes me feel like a kvetchy ingrate who doesn't deserve them. I don't seem to have much choice but to smile and say, "Well, he's coming back for Golden Week; that's only a week away. I hope we'll see you around so he can say hi." I only wish people knew I meant it.

Today was the day to quake-proof the bookshelf; there's a brand of hardware called Magnitude 7, for the kind of earthquake it's supposed to last through (that's the Japanese scale, not the Richter Scale). Precisely because so many people object to nailing and drilling holes, you can get fittings that work by pressure between the ceiling and the top of a piece of furniture. I sounded for joists and didn't hear anything solid--wood or metal, though it wouldn't surprise me to learn they're made of PVC in Tokyo these days--for a good two yard * two yard square of Triscuit. This raises the disturbing possibility that I live in a joistless building, but I'm ignoring it. What is this life without some risk?

Also finalized the placement of breakable objects by fixing them with Anchor Wax. We can't go beyond risk into rashness, after all. No angry earthquake goddess is taking the Baccarat away from this household unchallenged!

Susanna Cornett has nearly settled into her new digs in Alabama. She doesn't miss New Jersey. (Duh.) I'm glad (and sorry I didn't tell her that this here site is up and running). I basically finished the apartment today--the spare room is still the trash room for a few more days, but they don't pick up recyclables like corrugated cardboard and fiber packing sheets until Friday. I love the place, even if the most important part is missing.

Despite the basketweave-embossed beige wall vinyl that makes me feel as if I were living inside a giant Triscuit, I've been able to integrate the rest of my stuff with what Atsushi's left over to make it look as if we both live here but I use it more. Most couple's houses look that way, anyway. It was tougher than I thought, though: for a few hours today, it was starting to get that creepy death-shrine look. You know, as if there were a chair and a side of the bed and a shaving brush at the sink that were waiting for someone who's not coming back. But we're okay now.

I do wish, while I understand that bland beiges and greys are probably the best bet for builders who are kitting out apartments to be acceptable to a variety of buyers, that someone in their design departments would bear in mind that not all neutrals go together. Our bathroom has a cool-toned grey floor and warm-toned beige bathtub, a combination that can only be pulled off if done with a lot more cheeky wit and confidence than was the case here. I'm going to try to brazen it out with a collection of glass bottles in odd shapes and a spectrum of intense colors, but I'm not sure it's going to work. I have extra throw pillows and throws, of course--one acquires such a lot of them by ten years into adulthood--but you can't use those in the bathtub.

My, my, my. So much for my not, as a friend remarked to me recently, turning out to be yet another "gay blogger." Just wait till I put all three of you who might read this to sleep with my agonies over houseplant selection. The magenta-and-yellow orchid I bought the day my stuff arrived is getting lonely.

I love most things about living in Japan, but here's one that I don't: if you work for one of the stodgier companies, you can be informed in March or September that you're being transferred to another office, effective in a week or two. It's kind of an extension of the practice of having new management track hires do rotations through sales and operations in their first few years; you belong to the company as if it were your clan, and it gets to tell you what to do. Depending on your organization, you can be moving every two to four years until you're middle aged.


And so it is that Atsushi was told on 10 March that he was leaving Tokyo for the far end of Kyushu on 24 March. He'd worked at the same office for four years; he's still single in his mid-30's; he's already done a two-year stint abroad. We knew he was an obvious target for relocation somewhere outside commuting distance from Tokyo. Like a lot of people who've been stationed here for several years, he owns an apartment. There was no question what had to happen: I moved into his place from my pied à terre three stations away so we've got a household for him to return to on monthly visits. That we couldn't live together while he was here because his parents and colleagues would have started to wonder what was going on, but it's perfectly fine for me to live here now, in the guise of a helpful friend who's sparing him the necessity of letting his house to strangers, precisely because he's not here, is not one of life's little ironies I'm inclined to find humor in right now.


But trust me--lots of others have it worse. There are married couples with children in this very situation twice a year. The opportunities for education in Tokyo (the power center in politics, economics, and culture for Japan--imagine DC + New York + Cambridge in one megalopolis) are superior to those in the provinces. Also, it's hard to unload an apartment in an existing building--partially, I think, since the construction industry is still building as if the bubble hadn't burst 15 years ago, but that's a topic for another day. All of which means that a number of couples have husbands who are off working in Sendai, or Sapporo, or wherever, while the wife and children hold down the fort in Tokyo and see him once every six weeks or so when he flies back. It's such an unremarkable thing that there's a word for it: 単身赴任 (tanshin funin), or "going unaccompanied to one's assignment." Perhaps it's not as difficult as we'd imagine as Americans: a lot of childrearing here is done by the educational system, and the friend/closest companion model of marriage isn't traditional. But for couples who think of themselves as a team, even if romance isn't part of the psychological support they rely on, it has to bite. It sure sucks plenty for me, and I have a flexible enough job that I'll be able to see him twice a month or so.


This kind of thing happens all the time. I don't mean my boyfriend's moving away to Ultima Thule; I mean simultaneously admiring the way the Japanese subordinate themselves to collective goals and thinking they're crazy for doing it. What I've described is certainly not as hard to bear as what military families go through when the enlisted parent is deployed somewhere, or what poor families go through when Dad has to spend months out of the year up in mining country to keep everyone clothed and fed. The thing that makes it so...weird...both in the conversational sense of "strange" and in the original sense of "spooky"...is that this is what graduates of elite universities, the people with the most mobility and choices in the power center of the second-largest economy in the world, think perfectly normal to sign onto at the end of college, knowing exactly what they're getting into. Yes, things are changing somewhat--switching jobs is much more common here than it used to be. And people who feel stuck are far from unknown in America. But the distribution of such attitudes among people with the resources to choose is very different. If I were a sociologist, maybe I could write the millionth book trying to explain Japan to a Western audience.


***


Flamin' Norah. Interrupted by the nightly call from the man himself: he left the office at 11:45 for the fourth day in a row. That's another thing about being transferred: you get to spend quality time getting to know your new clients during the first few weeks. What that poor darling goes through to keep me in the style to which I've become accustomed. Time for me to get back to devising saucy new color combinations in decorative fabrics so he has a beautiful apartment to come home to.

For three days in May.