Posts (page 2)

Kazuhide is the proudly ignorant Japanese salaryman who extols advise/publicly shames ex-pats in his monthly column in Japanzine.

The Hostess is a former bar flower who published a memoir of her decadent days and nights as a paid alcoholic.

Here is their face off!

Just got an email from my old boss at the ghetto club.

He said "Tokyo's still rainy and humid and won't clear up. Just imagining LA, I feel like going there right now. Relax while you're there, but there are lots of fat people in America so be careful not to gain too much weight. A little bit is okay, but too much and you'll be in trouble when you get back to Japan."

That's a literal translation of what he said.

Gas was almost five bucks when my sister filled up the car just now. She's wondering if perhaps her car getting crushed was a blessing in disguise. Maybe not having a car is a good thing right now.

I feel like everywhere I look, things are in decline. Shops are closing, everyone's having a hard time getting work, businesses are all cutting down. My sister was offered a job twice at the LA Times, and both times the offer was retracted because they were making major staff cuts. My dad had some freelance work processing some psychiatric evaluations, but the company is cutting back on all its staff and doing it all electronically. Yuka's a pastry chef, and she's been having a very hard time holding down a job.

People have been talking about the decline of the American empire for years. Maybe it's finally happening. My twin sister is actually regretting not attempting to make aliyah when she was in Israel. I'm thinking that the smart money's on getting out of this country. Me and my twin sister said that we should establish ourselves wherever we go and then bring our parents out. Can you imagine this upside down scenario? Me supporting my old dad by working as a hostess in some Asian country because America collapsed.

Maybe me and my twin sister just worked ourselves up. We used to do that a lot when we were kids.

Amtrack and Greyhound is the solution to the expensive flights, fuel charges, and my family's lack of money.

This solution was suggested by close family friends, otherwise known as the Rich People. Simon and Mariko have been friends with my parents since way before I was born. They're surprisingly still married. All the other white-husband-and-japanese-wife couples from the old crew have broken up -- Greg and Aiko, my mom and dad, people I can't even remember the names of, they all used to hang out and travel around together back in the day. I don't know if it's a coincidence or not, but the accumulated half-breed kids are pretty much all fuck ups -- no offense. And we were so cute when we were little, running around all over the place with our same faces...

Anyways, Simon and Mariko never had kids, they just became incredibly rich. They live in a huge plot of land in the mountains up in Northern California, and they're retired. Well Simon semi still works, but mostly plays the stock market.

Understand that these people are the same age as my parents. My father literally has no money, no assets, and a whole bunch of debt. He's trying to start a new career at the youthful age of 54. My mother...who knows what's going on there.

Simon and Mariko were very nice to us last year. They gave me and my two sisters 2,000dollars each. They're like our rich relatives. So I don't think Simon was being a tight-ass when he called me up excitedly with the helpful suggestion that I take the Amtrack and Greyhound bus to go see them, "since flights are so expensive."

I remember when I took the Amtrack from Denver to LA, I got stuck in a weird town called Ratone for eight hours. The local bar freaked out at the sight of me (they said I looked way too young, I guess I was barely 21), and when I went into a bookstore the owners made me watch something called Veggie Tales -- Christian stories starring computer animated vegetables.

So I have good memories of the Amtrack. Simon said "you can cruise the train for handsome young men." I said yeah right. He said "true, they're probably all poor." And he's also right, I do have more time than money at the moment.

Here's the lemon tree.

Lemontree

I'm not lying, Kosuke has a brother named Keisuke, and they even had a dog named Mosuke. Enough with the -suke already!

Kosuke and my twin sister went to college together and they're weird best friends. Since Kosuke was the youngest when his family moved to America from Japan (he was six or seven), he's the most American. The oldest brother Keisuke moved back to Japan right after graduating university (just like me!), and is still there. Yuka is in the middle, and being a woman, I guess she finds America more comfortable.

Their dad now works in Ohio, and he was in town visiting Kosuke and Yuka-chan. He offered to take me and my twin sister out for dinner in Monterey Park, which is the Chinese part of town. It also happens to be where we went to high school, strangely enough. There were like five Japanese people, a few mixed race peeps, and the rest were Taiwanese. My best friend was from Hong Kong and we bonded over our inability to speak Mandarin.

Anyway look at all this food! It was really good. Their dad said that because he lives in Ohio, he really misses good sea food. He went crazy over the clams. I drank too much shokoshu and couldn't sleep very well. I used to love that stuff! I guess I still do.

Seafood

Goodluck

Darkcat

5 comments

I couldn't tell, but Leila was a quarter Chinese, and she grewup in a Chinese takeaway in Brighton. Who would have thought?

still fighting the urge to get on the next plane back to Tokyo, but things are getting easier. What will I do anyway? Work in another hostess club?

Things are getting easier. I'm still here.

I didn't realize that Cookie had such a Hokkaido accent. She's the part Ainu girl I worked with who's kind of tough, and who also always goes out with loser foreign guys (well I guess not foreign because now I'm in America! she likes white men who are unfaithful and irresponsible). Obviously we didn't email before and I just didn't notice when we spoke, but her emails now are just completely hokkaido-ed out! It's kind of cute.

I took G's advise and laid out in the sun for a little bit. If I'm still sick tomorrow, I'm going to be mad. There's actually a lemon tree in between our apartment building and the next one. There's kind of a yard. If I took a picture of the lemon tree in the yard with the big blue sky and the palm trees in the distance and showed it to my friends in Tokyo, they'd probably have a heart attack. No matter how poor and how hard your life is, at least you've got the sun and the space here in LA.

I only brought about 6,000dollars with me. And that's pretty much all the money I have. I actually had almost zero when I came back from New York in May, so I was a little relieved that I was able to bring that much back with me. My dad was a little disappointed, because he needs me to pay for my share of the rent, etc. Money isn't everything, yo!

My twin sister's car had to be squashed, so she's driving my little sister's car while she's in Cambodia. When she returns it's going to be two cars and four people. What kind of city is LA anyway, where everyone has to have a car?

I'm gonna have to get to know the bus system I guess. If gas prices keep going up, everyone's going to start taking the bus. I hope they do, that will dilute the freak pool.

So this guy is dark-skinned and wide-eyed and doesn't look Japanese at all. But he was born and raised Japanese and can't identify with any other culture. But he doesn't even have Japanese citizenship, he has Korean citizenship! I get confused just thinking about it, so I can't imagine what it's like to BE him.

He's probably emailing me now because I'm half American like him, but I'm ACTUALLY American so he feels like if he gets to know me, he'll get to know the part of himself that he never knew.

Anyway, just typing all this out is making my cold worse.

My cough won't go away.

Two ladies came over today. I've met one of them before, she's a very beautiful woman who's had some depression issues. When I first saw her, I thought she looked like the Japanese movie star Asaka Seto (even though she's not Japanese, she's white).

Anyway she came over, and then immediately fell asleep on my dad's bed. I guess she was exhausted.

Then another lady suddenly called and then came over. This one was a Japanese American lady who is ethnically all Japanese but actually not very Japanese at all and very very American. She doesn't know about or care to know about Japanese culture or language, which is fine. She was a little annoying though, and she didn't stop talking from the moment she came in to the moment she left.

I felt a little bit awkward because I don't know where I fit into my dad's social circle. I'm his daughter, not his friend. Plus he has a lot of women in his life that like to talk to him about their problems because he's so friendly and he listens. Which makes me feel a little uncomfortable.

I guess this is all part of getting to know my dad as an adult. I just feel a little confused about where to start. I feel a little confused about where to start in general actually.

So right now I'm wide awake. I'm as wide awake as Seiji (the cat).

Seiji was a wild thing when my little sister adopted him a year or two ago. I think she adopted him because she didn't want to live with my dad anymore, but she didn't want my dad to be all alone.

Anyway, Seiji turned out to be wild. He couldn't hold himself back from attacking everyone, and my sister and dad had to constantly discipline him. I swear my little sister would sometimes sit on him. He was really attached to his little babies though, and he'd chew on his little Turtley's head all the time. The bath tub was his comfort area, and he used to pick up Turtley and keep him in the bath tub. They eventually started giving Seiji medication to keep him from going out of his mind.

Now Seiji is a house kitty. I'm shocked at how calm he is. He'll just sleep all day. At night he seems a little restless and his pupils are huge and he twitches at every little sound. But he won't move from his favorite night time spot. I swear if I go out to check right now he'll still be sitting there. He fits into our little household much more nicely now, and he does seem to enjoy NOT pissing everyone off. But I feel a little sad because we took his wildness away.

Jesus, talk about a crazy house. I just got off of skyping with Dancer Girl. In CASE anybody still cares about those crazy ladies I used to work with, here's an update.

Mama complained about how rude I used to be to her best customer Kawasaki. He's a big shot at Toshiba, and seriously, Kawasaki is his real name. I just googled him and his stupid disgusting face showed up and I almost dry heaved. He spits when he talks, he is obnoxious and drunk and stupid, and because he's such a big shot, EVERYONE around him bows down to him and lets him say rude, racist, obnoxious, ignorant things. He says these things sometimes for hours and hours and hours into the night, holding his underlings hostage in our ghetto club when they'd much rather go home and sleep.

Plus he gives mama sleeping pills.

Anyway, I hated his ass and I never hid it. You can't expect other girls to treat your own customers nicely, that's one of the reasons why you have to be friendly with your co-workers (even if you're the mama).

Then there's Mia. Who is still drinking too much and passing out on top of customers. She's going to quit though, and spend the summer working in some vacation resort far away so she can lead a quiet life and just work and sleep and save her money and her soul. I think Mia forgets that she's 37 years old. Just because she doesn't look or act it doesn't change the fact that she's GETTING OLD! She says after saving all that resort money, she's going to New York. Don't ask me why. I think she wants to DJ there.

Chiba Girl is still wanting to throw everything away to move to Texas. I just don't care anymore. I'm sick of telling her the same thing.

There's a new girl. Very young, has a young kid, she's from America. She's living with a friend while she teaches English and hostesses. Her friend watches her kid while she's at work. Don't ask me why she came to Tokyo where things are expensive, space is cramped, and life can be hard for foreigners and single moms. I feel like there are some big pieces missing in her reasoning.

I told Dancer to get a new job, at least work somewhere else. She said she'll just stay there until September, which is when she's coming to visit me. I feel like she should quit now. She should have quit yesterday. She can sing, she can dance, she can get paid more in a nicer place. Ugh, that club was so crap.

Thank goodness I'm FREE of that PLACE.

"I think being a hostess kind of messes us up," said Dancer. "What!? No!" I said. "Yeah," she answered. "We stay up when people are supposed to sleep, our lives are all wrong."

When we hung up, Dancer told me she was going to sleep. "What time is it?" I asked her. "Um, 12 in the afternoon."