No Job, No Apartment.
Day 6:

-OR-

"Gee, I wish I had been wearing pants."

Yesterday I went to Tokyo for a job interview and to look at apartments. The interview went tolerably well. I think I have a fifty-fifty shot at getting a real job in a real school, not at just another conversation mill like the one I just left. Only downside is that the job, if I get it, would start in April. So that's something to put on the back burner.

You know, once I get a stove. And a kitchen. Which brings us to apartment hunting.

Thanks to some really bad phone directions, I spent most of the afternoon hiking all over the neighborhood of Ogikubo. Carrying a 40 pound pack. (One suit, a pair of shoes, all my interview and apartment hunting notebooks and the greatest winter coat ever.) After meeting the realtor and looking at some really underwhelming rooms (a 7' by 10' box with one window and a shared bathroom. The room was upstairs. The bathroom was downstairs. And to get to it you had to go through the kitchen.) I met my cousin for dinner and prepared to take the night bus back to Fukui.

But I was feeling funky.

And not the good James-Brown-George-Clinton-get-on-the-good-foot kind of funky. The been-nervous-and-carrying-heavy-bags-and-haven't-had-a-shower-yet kind of funky. And the prospect of getting on the bus and trying to sleep in a too-small space in a cloud of my own BO was not a pleasant one.

So I went to a public spa.

Maybe you're not familiar with the Japanese bath, and the rituals that surrounds it. You don't just bathe to soak off the crud that's built up around your unmentionable bits, you bathe to soothe your soul and cleanse your spirit. But it's definitely not a private-time-with-aroma-candles-and-Dave-Matthews affair. These are public baths. You and all your naked neighbors. Scrubbing and soaking themselves and talking to each other.

Buck naked.

Unless, of course, you are a gaijin.

Then it's just you and all your naked neighbors. Who are scrubbing and soaking themselves and talking to each other and pretending not to see you.

Buck naked.

Yeah, all right. So it's like the first day of PE class. But instead of your classmates, it's a bunch of middle-aged Japanese men, some of whom may never have seen a real, live gaijin in person. Much less in the nude.

But I figured it wouldn't be a big deal if I just took off my glasses, handled my business and left. If I can't see them, it's no problem, right?

So I got a locker, stripped down, got my towel, and headed off to clean up.

The bathing room was generally unremarkable . There were two big tubs in the room for soaking in, a door leading to the sauna, and a series of little washing stations around the wall for you to scrub yourself clean at before you get in the big tub. All pretty normal except for two things:

The two fully dressed young women working at the massage tables on the far side of the room.

My first thought was that I had paid to go to a massage parlor. But the no-nonsense uniforms and decidedly non-erotic nature of the massages led me to believe that it wasn't anything more than a sauna that happened to offer massages.

In the same room as the baths.

By women.

Where I had just walked in wearing a tea towel, my glasses and not even a smile.


They say the best way to deal with odd or uncomfortable situations is to try and act like the natives. You know, "When in Rome..." Since no one else seemed to care about walking around naked in front of those girls, I figured I shouldn't either. So I walked to the washing station that was farthest from the next dude, took off my glasses, and got cleaned up.

I lathered, rinsed, repeated, and was generally feeling pretty good about my situation when I put my glasses back on. Not only were the middle aged men staring at me, but the girls who had previously been so businesslike were staring too.

You ever want an awkward moment, take off all your clothes and then make eye contact with a fully clothed total stranger of the opposite sex, who had been, until she noticed you, completely engaged in the act of vigorously pummeling the back of some other naked stranger. Who is also staring at you. Along with everyone else in the room.

I'm proud to say I was able to meet their stares, then turn around and walk out. But at no point in my life did I expect to have to stare down a room full of naked people. Much less without the benefit of pants myself.

I've said this before, and I'll no doubt say it again, but my life has really become vastly different in the last year.