The eyelid crease of the beholder

I've always been fascinated by cultural differences in ideals of female beauty. Did you ever stop to notice the eyelid crease above your eye? Some Asians are born with that and some aren't. While in Japan I learned that this crease is considered beautiful. The models in all the advertisements have them. In the cosmetic aisles at drugstores I saw tools for painting on this crease with a pencil. In magazines I also saw advertisements for eyelid crease surgery. It's funny that something so important to many Japanese girls, many American girls have never even thought about.

I am firmly convinced that no matter what a girl may look like, some culture somewhere in some time period would consider her drop-dead gorgeous. I have proof: for one day, I became Japan's Next Top Model.

While walking on campus at Nanzan one day, I got a call from a Japanese friend. She told me that a friend of a friend was majoring in fashion and needed a gaijin model for a school project, and if I would do her a favor by volunteering.
She wants me?? I thought to myself.

Me?

As in me?


Well, okay. Caucasian volunteers aren't exactly common here, so she must be desperate, I thought. My friend's friend took me to meet the girl studying fashion, Rei. During the train ride there she was on the phone with Rei, saying, "Oh yes, I'm bringing model-san right now." It was really weird hearing myself referred to that way, and I started to get really nervous, hoping my looks wouldn't disappoint. I was just in my jeans, t-shirt, converse, and heavy backpack.

Rei met us at the station with two of her fashion classmates. One was dressed like a bag lady, the other had unnaturally tan skin and long blonde curls. Rei wore jeans, a white blouse, and a vest. The three of them exchanged glances.
"SHE'S SO CUTE!!" They exclaimed.
"Isn't she?" My friend's friend said proudly. "Just like a real model!" They seriously went on like that for five minutes.

Meanwhile I stood there thinking "I love this country."

I got to see the inside of the Mode Gakuen design school, which by later this year will move into a shiny, brand-new, spiral-shaped skyscraper. Rei brought me into a classroom which was strewn with clothing, fashion magazines, and makeup kits. Other students there were applying the finishing touches to their own models. I saw one other caucasian model there, a tall French girl with bright red hair, who I thought looked much more like a model than I did.


Rei's project was to design a magazine cover. Her theme was "fall fashion: play with color." She dressed me up in this absolutely ridiculous outfit: black heels, purple tights, a red minidress, a purple turtleneck, a blue belt, a blue scarf, a green beret, and blue nail polish. I looked like an oompa-loompa princess. I had to stifle laughter when I saw myself in the mirror.

"Okay, let's go to the photoshoot location!" She announced.
"Great! Where is it?" I asked.
"In a park about 15 minutes away from here."

Outside????

I turned heads the moment, and I mean the moment I stepped out of the building. I was a living, walking blob of color-saturated gaijin, an oompa-loompa princess walking through the middle of downtown Nagoya. Moreover, Rei got us slightly lost on the way there, so probably a couple hundred people saw me and tried to pretend they weren't staring.

When we got to the park, a professional photographer was waiting with his assistant who had a large suitcase of equipment. Rei posed me by a tree, arranged my clothing, and told me to give a "cute little smile." As the photographer started snapping pictures, it wasn't hard at all to smile because we were starting to attract a crowd. People strolling around the park stopped to watch the "photoshoot" and many of them whipped out their cameras or cell phones and started to take pictures of the scene. I tried not to laugh as I imagined strangers with photos of a very silly-looking me on their cameras.

It was the most awkward, bizarre, and totally fun day I have ever had in my life- totally worth skipping two classes for. Now that I'm back in America, I'm sure I'll never have a day like that again.

About once a day someone asks me why I decided to major in Japanese. I'll rattle off my memorized response about how I love foreign languages, and Japanese people, and I've always had an interest in Asian cultures, blah blah blah. But that's not the real reason.

The real reason is because the Japanese think I'm a model.

Mwahaha.

For a faithful reader

A terrible scan of the result of having nothing to do on a Saturday evening:

My date with an old Japanese guy

Just to warn you, my blogs aren't going in my chronological order anymore, because I'm just writing about memories as they come to me.

When I first arrived in Tokyo, my friend Pearl was actually gone for a few days, and so her mom met me. I had met her mom once when Pearl and I were roommates in the U.S. Having a daughter my age, Pearl's mom treated me as her own daughter, and took it upon herself to take very good care of me, and made sure I was well-fed, well-rested, and well-entertained. She was eager to make sure I wasn't bored in their little apartment, and was always offering to take me anywhere I wanted. I think she was surprised when I said that actually, I was really tired and just wanted to sleep.
One day Pearl's mom had to spend the day at work, and so she arranged for a friend of their family, Mr. Sakamoto, to take me around Tokyo.
"Have you known Mr. Sakamoto for a long time?" I asked.
"Oh yes Kelley, he's a very good man. I wouldn't hand you over to anyone who wasn't completely trustworthy!" She said.
Mr. Sakamoto was fifty-nine years old, and about an inch shorter than I am. Although I soon found out that he spoke pretty good English, he seemed relieved that I could speak Japanese. He said that we were going to go to some museums and stuff. So I'm going to spend the day running around Tokyo with this old guy.


Okay. Sho ga nai.

I believe the first place we went to was called Asakusa. It was very very crowded. There was a very large temple, where a long street of market stalls sold touristy stuff, "Ichiban" t-shirts, cheap kimonos, daruma, paper fans, and the like. I wish I had had more time to look through them, but it wasn't long before it became apparent that Mr. Sakamoto had ADHD. He zipped around from place to place, briefly stopping to explain interesting points to me before rushing off to the next one. It reminded me of the way I have to run in order to keep up with my Dad while grocery shopping.

The guy had boundless energy. I was really glad that I had decided to drink coffee that morning. Mr. Sakamoto paid for our food and for our train tickets. I was relieved when we stopped to have chicken katsu. Over lunch Mr. Sakamoto told me that his hobby is mountain climbing. He has climbed Mt. Everest twice, once when he was twenty years old and once when he was forty, and he intends to do so again when he turns sixty. He was eager to practice his English with me, and constantly apologized for his supposedly poor pronunciation and grammar, explaining that he had only learned English from tapes. His English was quite understandable though, and he had a great sense of humor.

When we emerged from a subway exit, I saw this building and couldn't help but point and laugh:

Mr. Sakamoto laughed too and said in English, "Looks like sit!" (That's exactly what he said.) That made me laugh even more because it does indeed look like sit, doesn't it?

After a whirlwind tour of Akihabara, and electronics district, we went to the Edo Museum, which was extremely interesting. It covered the history of Tokyo from its beginnings to the modern age. There were many beautiful models of the way the city used to be arranged and the palaces that used to exist there. They even had a small model of a kabuki stage, with mechanical dolls moving around on it so you could see how trapdoors and revolving stages were used during kabuki performances.

If you're wondering what that balloon thing is, that is a replica of a fire balloon. During WWII, the Japanese designed these balloons with bombs hanging from them to float in an airstream from Japan to America. Yes, they were attempting to bomb America. According to Wikipedia:

"From late 1944 until early 1945, the Japanese launched over 9,000 of these fire balloons, of which 300 were found or observed in the U.S. Despite the high hopes of their designers, the balloons were relatively ineffective as weapons, causing only six deaths and a small amount of damage, and they survive in memory mostly as an ingenious and dangerous curiosity."

The WWII section of the museum was especially fascinating. Below were some pictures I took for my grandpa, a machine gun from a B29 plane.

After that he took me to another outdoor museum which isn't really interesting enough to write about. At a cafe afterwards I ordered another coffee.

At the end of the day, Mr. Sakamoto and I met his wife and Pearl's mom at a restaurant. "This restaurant is known for it's local specialties," Mr. Sakamoto said. Since we were near the bay, I knew what that meant: more mystery seafood. Hooray. At the restaurant we sat on the tatami-mat floor, putting our legs in a hole beneath the table. The table was more of a cooking surface, and the center heated up to cook okonamiyaki on. (They're kind of like pancakes.) The dynamics between Mr. Sakamoto and his wife were interesting. He teased her a lot about bullying him around, but she just rolled her eyes and laughed. As an appetizer they set before me a cup of umeboshi (pickled plum) sake and a small bowl of translucent, worm-like fish, their little black eyeballs staring up at me blankly.

My favorite.



Actually the sake was quite tasty. I knew this meal wasn't cheap, and that is was local delicacies, so as usual I struggled through the various slices of raw who-knows-what. Observing that I wasn't exactly scarfing down food, the Sakamotos felt sorry for me and surprised me by ordering a large ice cream sundae. It was delicious, and I felt bad that I hadn't managed to be more grateful for the food.

So that was my day, pretty much.

Home of the Brave

During my time at Nanzan University, I made friends with a freshman named Hikari. Her level of English was about the same as my Japanese, so we managed to communicate by switching between the two languages as needed. Hikari enjoyed watching the O.C., and she would write down English phrases she heard on the show and ask me about them later. ("Kelley, is 'you can say that again' correct English? When do you use it?")

One day I suggested to Hikari that she should study abroad in the U.S. so she could practice her English.
"But America is so scary!" She exclaimed. I was surprised.
"Why do you say that?" I said.
"It looks really dangerous. With September 11th and all, you know." She said.

The longer I stayed in Japan, the more I realized that many people have the same opinion. America is thought of as a really dangerous place. People think that everyone here owns guns and that we carry them around in public places. America wasn't the only country that was traumatized and made paranoid by September 11th- it made a lasting impression on people around the world as well.

Although probably America isn't nearly as dangerous as it's stereotype, I can't really blame anyone for thinking our country is violence-ridden. One night my host father turned on the television and we watched a Japanese news report about a mall shooting in Nebraska. The Virginia Tech shooting made international headlines too. Seriously, it seems like lately there's been just one shooting after another, and every time it happens it reinforces the stereotype of America the Trigger-Happy.

Elementary School Reunion

Lately my blog entries been sort of backtracking through my stay in Japan. So it may be confusing, but that's ok, because there's only like two or three readers out there to confuse.

I arrived in Tokyo feeling deeply, deeply tired.Although I had had so much fun that semester, it left me feeling completely and utterly drained, phsyically and emotionally. While in Tokyo I averaged ten hours of sleep every night. I just felt like every last inch of my body and mind was tired. All I could think about was how badly I wanted to return home. I guess I was Japaned-out. Stuff everywhere was starting to look the same. Have you ever tried to enjoy a movie while fighting off sleep? I kind of felt like that.

Although I was running on empty, I decided to enjoy these last two weeks of Japan as best as I could. One day Pearl and our friend Daisuke took me on a little tour around Tokyo. We went to a famous fish market and also to Harajuku, a section of the city that I had been hoping to visit for many years. By the time evening came around, I was exhausted and just wanted to go home and crash into bed. But Pearl had a reunion dinner with friends from elementary school, so I sucked it up and prepared myself for more socializing.

About five guys and one girl were at the reunion, all of them laughing and joking about the old days in elementary school, gossiping about who used to have a crush on who,do you remember the time you hit him on the head with your lunchbox, or do you remember that one teacher we had together? Those were good times, man.

At first they were kind of uncomfortable with me there, wanting to include me in the conversation but not knowing how much Japanese I spoke. And actually, because I was so tired my Japanese was worse than usual. Some doodles on a notepad aided me. Somehow I ended up drawing a hippo; I don't remember why. The one girl who was there besides Pearl was obviously in awe of me. I think I was the first foreigner she had ever met, and she was totally thrilled. We went to the restroom together (because that's what girls do) and as I was washing my hands, she complimented my oh-so-white skin. I laughed and said,
"In America tan skin is considered beautiful!"
"Really?" She said. "Maybe I should go to America."

The meal was more dreaded Unidentified Objects. The room was also thick with cigarette smoke. But Pearl's friends were so friendly and kind that I was enjoying myself. Then suddenly, all of the guys had their foreheads on the table, their eyes shut, and one hand extended towards me, as if for a handshake. I shot a flabbergasted look at Pearl.
"Oh," she said with sort of a drunken slur. "They want you to choose who is the most handsome. Just shake his hand; they aren't looking."
Oh geez,I thought. Why are they doing this? How am I ever going to get out of this situation tactfully?
"Wow, this sure is a hard decision!" I said loudly. The guys chuckled but unfortunately didn't move.
"Onegaishimasu!" They pleaded. It really was a hard decision- Pearl has good-looking friends. So after it became apparent that they weren't going to let me off the hook, I finally gave one of them a firm handshake.
"Ok, you can look!" Pearl announced, and the guys lifted their heads. The Chosen One kept a poker face while the others exchanged disappointed glances.
"One more time!" They decided, and once again slammed their foreheads onto the table and stuck out their hands. But the results were the same, and the unlucky boys finally decided to accept their fate, I guess. I hoped that things wouldn't be awkward between me and the guy whose hand I had shaken, but he was a gentleman just as before.

After dinner we went out to a section of the city that seemed dedicated to karaoke places. Since it was in the evening, the karaoke buildings were packed full of business people waiting to party together and sing their little hearts out. We were ushered into a dark little room with a disco ball in the ceiling and couches gathered around a TV and stereo system. By this time Pearl was quite drunk, and she belted out songs while standing on the couches. The girl with the tan skin sang a song called "Sakuranbo," the chorus of which has been stuck in my head ever since. The boys sang too. I only know "Grandfather's Clock" in Japanese, so I sang that, one song by Evanescence, and one by Avril Lavigne. (Shut up, she's big in Japan.)

Grand finale, part II

Our multi-course meal lasted over the span of five hours. I was so stuffed. So very stuffed. And yet the food just. Kept. Coming.

In between courses everyone chatted merrily and the men in the household chain-smoked like there was no tomorrow for any of us. The next course was shabu-shabu, and as they placed paper-thin slices of beef into the boiling water, Pearl nudged me and whispered in English, "Kelley, that beef is just as expensive as the beef we saw on that TV show last night!" And indeed, it was amazingly delicious.

They brought out more food, delicate slices of sashimi, duck soup with cubes of fat floating in it, lotus root with horseradish filling, beef tongue, green noodles in soy sauce, an enormous crab, and other dishes that I can't remember.

It was a feast. And yet I felt sort of queasy. As gourmet as it was, the food was just too exotic for my American taste buds. I was putting things into my stomach that I wasn't used to and/or couldn't identify. Everything sat in my stomach with an uneasy feeling, not really sure what it was doing there.

While the next course was being prepared, and in between my frequent trips to the bathroom, Mr. Yamagawa explained his various collections of treasures to us. An extensive collection of antique china from around the world sparkled from inside glass cabinets. In other cases, mounds of jewelry were lovingly laid out on display: a necklace of real pearls, a Tiffany bracelet, a gold Rolex watch.

The little boy who earlier had called me beautiful crawled into his father's lap. I heard the man and his wife mention video games.
"Do you play video games?" I asked him.
"Yes, I play an online game called Everquest," he replied.
"Ah, Everquest," I said. "What level are you?"
"The highest one." He said, a little sheepishly.
"How much do you play every day?" I asked. He stuttered. Here his wife butted in,
"From when he wakes up until he goes to sleep!" She said.

The evening reached eight o'clock. We had been eating since three. As the next course was being brought out, I prepared my aching stomach for the next round of Fear Factor. Then Mrs. Yamagawa emerged from the kitchen with a platter of strawberries, cakes, and raspberry tea. The clouds broke and in that moment, the world was beautiful. I gulped down strawberries despite the protests of my full stomach, my taste buds in desperate need of relief.

After that night, I decided that I didn't want another bite of Japanese food. I was never more looking forward to the belated Thanksgiving dinner my family in the States had promised to cook for me. "They'd better not pull a joke on me and bring out sushi," I thought. I would not be amused.

My last dinner in Japan was a grand finale

I never really wrote about my last day in Japan, which included potato sake, a gold rolex watch, Japanese woodblock prints worth thousands and thousands of dollars, and chain smoking Japanese men.

Where do I start?

Okay. So I was staying with my friend Pearl in Tokyo. Her parents had to make an emergency overseas trip for New Year's, so they asked their friends to entertain Pearl and I on the day after New Year's. So Pearl and I went to their house for dinner.

The previous night we watched a TV show were celebrities were blindfolded and then served two versions of the same food: a cheap, corner-store version and a high-end gourmet version. The celebrities had to guess which one was the expensive one. In one round they were given beef made by a professional chef, costing about $300. Then they tasted supermarket beef. Not all of them guessed correctly.

As we walked up the hills of the neighborhood, slightly lost, Pearl briefed me. "The Yamagawas have a beautiful home," she said. "Mr. Yamagawa is a professor at Waseda University, and Mrs. Yamagawa is an excellent cook." The neighborhood was obviously upper-crust. The houses were very big (well, big for Japan. They still had no front yards.) with Mercedes-Benz parked in the driveways. Later it was pointed out to us that the family Prime Minister Koi Zumi and the family of Empress Michiko also live in this neighborhood. I mean this was some serious, serious real estate. And I was going to have dinner here.
A plaque outside a home, with the family name of Koi Zumi.


We were warmly welcomed. We bowed and repeated "Happy New Year" many, many times. There were Mr. Yamagawa, his wife, their two sons, a son's wife, and a grandson who was about four years old and super cute. They sat us at the dining room table and promptly served us a very delicious and light soup with sort of a lemony flavor which Mrs. Yamagawa made herself. Little did I know this was just a foretaste of the culinary doom that was awaiting me.

With her sharp sense of humor my friend Pearl soon won over the hearts of the Yamagawas, and Mrs. Yamagawa called her "like my own daughter." I sort of sat there and tried my best to keep up with the conversations. The little grandson was sitting next to me. When Mr. Yamagawa tried to bump his grandson out of the seat, he was obviously unwilling.
"Oooh, it's probably because he wants to sit next to a beautiful girl." His grandmother giggled. "Do you think Kelley is a beautiful girl?" They all egged him. Shyly he said,
"Yes, she's a beautiful girl." Everyone laughed. It was too cute.

Next we were brought bento boxes of traditional New Year's snacks, everything drenched in a sort of sweet soy sauce. Gingerly I transferred Unknown Edible Objects onto my plate and into my mouth. They also brought us little bowls of shiny orange fish eggs, about the size of the pearls in milk tea. I had managed to avoid eating fish eggs during my entire stay in Japan but could not do so now. The juices burst out as the eggs popped between my teeth. I discreetly passed my bowl to Pearl's side of the table. Next the Yamagawa's busted out a large bottle of expensive sake, a rare brew made from fermented potatoes. They offered me a very, very small amount, which I couldn't even finish because it had probably the strongest alcoholic taste I've ever drank. I could only take a few sips before I knew it would make me feel sick.

In between courses Mr. Yamagawa seemed to take pleasure in showing Pearl and I the many treasures contained within their home. Actually their home wasn't all that fancy, and was actually kind of small. But they had many expensive things, including a gargantuan flatscreen TV. Mr. Yamagawa brought out a box of delicate Japanese woodblock prints.
"How beautiful!" I said. "These look really old."
"Yes, they're originals." He said, beaming.
"ORIGINALS???"
Any museum would accept these beautiful works of art, most of them at least two hundred years old. I couldn't believe I was holding them in my hands. Mr. Yamagawa pointed at certain ones and told us how he had paid ten thousand dollars for them.

I'll have to continue later. Must do homework now.