Oh, Those Drunken Yakitori Nights!

I Love the Smell of Filet o' Fish in the Morning

My Dad, the Kamikaze Pilot

ATMs Need Vacations, Too
Thanks to Citibank and the competition presented by its 24-hour ATM machines, ATMs in Japan now provide money outside of regular banking hours. But this wasn't always the case.Back in the early 1990s, ATM machines had limited hours. Although they were open later than banks, their hours were only slightly longer -- usually until 7:00 p.m. They were also closed on Sundays and holidays. There was many a time when I tried to withdraw cash after work or on a Sunday and found the doors to the bank locked, with me cursing the stupidity of ATMs ever being unavailable.According to my Japanese friends, the reason was the need for maintenance. In the US, if you went to an ATM o

Halloween in Tokyo: Meishi Man Strikes Again
The Yamanote Line is a Japan Rail surface line that circles downtown Tokyo in about an hour. In the late 1980s or early 1990s, a tradition developed among gaijin in Tokyo to ride the Yamanote Line one full loop on Halloween -- in costume.I was ignorant of this tradition my first Halloween in Japan and purposefully ignored it my second. But in 1993, in my third year in Japan, my friend Dave S. -- Meishi Man -- convinced me to join him and his girlfriend Chieko for the annual circumnavigation of Tokyo. Although generally I avoided engaging in the kind of gaijin activities that said to Japanese, "We don't care about your customs and rules, we're just gonna have fun!," I knew thi

How I Overcame Blatant Housing Discrimination to Rent My Own Apartment in Tokyo
During the summer of 1992, Oshikawa-san informed me that he was retiring as a dormitory manager, and moving to an apartment he had purchased in Kawasaki. For me this meant that, after a year, I'd no longer have a rent-free room in a Canon dormitory to call home and I needed to find an apartment.My friends and adoptive parents Benjie and Junko lived in a neighborhood I liked in Tokyo called Nakameguro, and I figured I'd look there. B&J lived there, it was an easy commute to my office, and it was close to neighborhoods where I frequently hung out, like Shibuya and Aoyama. One Saturday, with Jun

Korea Part II or Life as a Japanese Tourist
My second trip to Korea took place just about a year after the first, under very different circumstances. My switching jobs from Look Japan to the law firm at which I worked next did not require a trip to Seoul for a visa, since I was merely changing jobs, not work statuses. But, as it happened, my law firm selected Seoul for the bi-annual company retreat in October 1992.Company retreats in foreign countries were a product of the Bubble Economy of the 1980s, when the Yen suddenly tripled in value thanks to the Plaza Accords, where the United States forced Japan to revalue its currency to make Japanese goods more expensive in the U.S. and U.S. goods cheaper in Japan. (Fat lot

Detour to Seoul, Korea
Changing positions from an internship at Canon to a full-time job at Look Japan required a change in my visa status from intern to work permit. Because only consulates could process visa changes (as opposed to renewals), I had to leave Japan for the nearest consulate. Since Japan is an island country, it doesn't leave too many options. Most gaijin, myself included, go to Seoul, Korea, which is about a two-hour flight from Tokyo.Many foreign employees of Look Japan had been in this position before me, and the company already had an established routine for handling it. You traveled to Seoul on Sunday, checked in at the YMCA near the Japanese consulate, showed up at the consula