i'm definitely not asian enough for asia

i don't know why it didn't occur to me. i guess i assumed that tokyo is this hip, cosmopolitan place with hip, cosmopolitan people; foreigners backpack all the time there! even though my japanese is at barely even a pre-school level (do they even have pre-school in japan? i should find out.), i could probably get by. i've completely forgotten how to read hiragana and katakana, but... what the hell. may the wind be at my back, ride into the sun, blah blah blah... next thing i knew, i was flying over the pacific ocean and smack dab in the middle of a scene from blade runner.

cool.

then i learned that it was all fun and games until i opened my mouth. at first, it seemed like the surprised look on people's faces as the garishly nasty american english poured out was maybe an isolated incident. i wasn't saying anything obscene (as far as i knew) and even though i didn't always have access to a mirror, i didn't appear to be growing a second head or third eye. or at least, there wasn't one there a second ago.

after a few interactions with the locals in tokyo, i could almost feel the second head growing out of my neck. i think maybe the second head must have been hideous. i was starting to recognize a pattern.

the pattern went as follows (you'll have to imagine more broken english on their part and freakishly wild gesticulation on my part):

i would enter a store/restaurant/place of business and the employee would smile at me and say something exuberantly in japanese. i'm sure that they recognized that i wasn't japanese, but despite this, i also know that there's a large asian population in japan, who, more than likely, speak japanese. knowing this, i would make an embarrassing attempt to say that i only spoke a tiny bit of very poor japanese.

"uhhh.... sorry? i.. ummm.. nihongo wa amari..."

every time i tried to sputter this out, i could see the expression on their face change from benevolent camaraderie to... something else entirely. in between phase one and phase two of their emotional shift, was a giant, saucer-eyed expression of surprise; the sudden realization that i was not what i seemed. it was little like that moment in 'alien' when everyone suddenly realizes that the thing coming out of john hurt's stomach was not the meal he just had. every time i saw this expression, i tried to quell the odd feeling of wanting to flee the scene. i was committing some sort of unintentional cultural crime and the guilt on my face totally gave it away.

"ah!" they'd exclaim once they regained composure, "where are you from?!"

"san francisco," i'd reply, as if the city had somehow seceded from the rest of the united states.

they would nod for a second as they confirmed and absorbed the fact that, yes, i wasn't asian-asian. i was some weird, rare hybrid that they had never encountered before. it made me think of my old petty officer in jrotc who was of japanese descent and spoke with a thick, southern-comforts louisiana drawl. it took me almost two years to get used to that accent coming out of his word-hole, and yet here i was, being the same cultural mind-fuck to complete strangers that i wanted to buy food from. i would probably be more entertained with this notion if it weren't for the fact that it took me two hours to find a restaurant with an english menu. this usually meant i was starving and trying to hide being completely and dangerously irritable.

"and you are travelling with friends?" they would ask, their huge benevolent smiles melting away into confused, but pleasant grins.

"no. i am travelling alone."

silence.

there would be a longer pause than the one between the last question and response and they would just stand there, studying at me for a bit. was the second head doing something obnoxious?

"ah! you are a student!" they would declare. of course! of course this space alien must be a student coming to observe them!

"ummm... nnno." since i had no idea how to say "visual effects film editor" in japanese, i would usually just leave it at that and hope that they didn't walk away from the conversation thinking that i was some homeless american loner wandering the streets of tokyo ready to eat their babies and ravage their culture.

as we closed our interaction and went our separate ways, i would feel my neck for a moment and find that the second head had quietly gone away.

 

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