Contra indicatory . . .umm, somethings like that

Japan is a conglomerate of contraindications. Nah, ya mesmerised mass o’ martinized malingerers, not CONTRADICTIONS, I mean the stuff they put on Celebrex bottles to tell you what will happen to you should things go wrong.

Anyway . . . to be a gaijin here is automatically suspect but to be a gaijin here in this corner of Nara is tantamount to a crime. That being so, everyone prefers to ignore the criminal in their midst. If the Japanese could whistle, I’d be surrounded by a group of whistling people, all looking at anything else except me. The Japanese are experts at making things they don’t think should exist invisible . . . a young secretary sprawled on a bench at a busy rush-hour subway station, still clutching her Gucci handbag, a pool of vomit next to the bench. Doesn’t exist! (sound of mental whistling!)

So naturally I like to fuck with them. It's like being completely sober and fucking with someone who's smoked two joints of BC Gold. The nervous clerk in the convenience store, barely out of high school, when I, in my near-perfect Japanese (not only near-perfect, but in his dialect) say “Will this do?” (in this case, "Kore de ee'n yarou ka?") holding out a ten-dollar bill.

I can see the thought processes: “omigodomigodomigod it’s a gaijin I’ve never in my life met a gaijin what shouldIdowhatshould I do? He asking me in perfect Japanese if he can pay with this strange money but this is a conveniencestorewhatshouldIdowhatshouldI DO will I get fired if I don’t take his moneymaybe I should get the manager ohmyGOD” and then I let him off the hook. “Just kidding! This is CANADIAN money. Here’s your thousand yen.”

He doesn’t get the joke. But I didn't expect him to.

There are exceptions. In this corner of Kansai (a region loosely associated with Osaka) they speak a very specific dialect with many intonations and verb-endings and phonemes and glottal stops that differ from "BBC-Japanese", so to speak, so they kind of freak, in their own ("Don't-freak-out-DON'T-freak-out") Japanese way when they hear me speak an utterly perfect sentence or have a conversation, with, say, my mother in law about how I forgot the milk and I'd pay for the groceries this time, she'd get it next time.

In English I imagine it would sound something like "Oh christ, I forgot to get the milk . . . do we really need milk? Look, I only have a thousand yen on me. Can you get this one today? What? Of course I'm good for it!" and these people and the cashier are staring at me like I'm some visitor from Beeblebrox and I have magic powers.

Hilarious.

On the plus side, professionals easily recognize that I can speak Japanese and they don't demean me by practicing their English -- unless of course their English is better than my Japanese. But it takes one to know one, and all too often, no one knows anyone around here . . .