Arriving

The immigration official at Haneda Airport seemed bored.

'Your purpose in Japan?'

I couldn't very well say that I intended to get a job and spend a year having a good time and learning Japanese, so I said something silly about being interested in Japanese culture.

The immigration official stifled a yawn and asked. 'Where will you stay?'

I pulled out my youth hostel card and showed him. He nodded, indulged himself in a half yawn, and stamped my passport. 'Welcome to Tokyo.'

I was anxious not to use up what little money I had, so I checked into the Ichigaya Youth Hostel in Tokyo. The receptionist had a punctilious military air about him and an intimidating manner. He spoke to me in English and I answered in Japanese. This was to happen to me for decades to come – the assumption in Japan is that if you don’t look Asian, you don’t speak Japanese – however the man at the Ichigaya Youth Hostel seemed inordinately pleased that I had spoken to him in Japanese – even in Japanese such as mine at that point. He probably had more than enough opportunities to speak English and was happy to be able to give it a rest.

‘Welcome to Tokyo Ichigaya Youth Hostel. You may only stay here for three days. You may stay for a further three days, but you must check out first, go some place else, then come back. Do you understand?’

‘Yes. Of course. Absolutely. Three days.’  I have an awful habit of being overly accommodating when I am nervous, but it stood me in good stead with the receptionist. He seemed very impressed with me.

‘Okay. Here are the rules: you get up at 7:30 when the loudspeaker goes off, breakfast is at 8:00, no exceptions. Got that?’

I nodded eagerly.

‘Night time, you come in by 10:00 at the very latest. Otherwise you are in trouble. Okay?’

Once again, I was fine with that. Whatever it took. I’m the sort of person who is perfectly happy to conform to the rules unless I find them morally repugnant. The rules at the Ichigaya Youth Hostel were rigid and seemed petty – especially the one about having to leave every three days – but with hundreds of people in and out of there every month, I could see their point. Besides, I was only going to be there for a short time; I could live with them.

On my second day there I met Carol and Mark, a newlywed couple from California. Right off the bat we discovered that we had lots in common: Mark had gone to university in my hometown, and Carol and I had both gone to ghetto schools in Southern California with poor academic reputations. They too were looking for English-teaching jobs, so we pooled our resources. If I found a good school that needed teachers, I was to let them know, and they promised to return the favor. Carol and Mark found the receptionist obnoxious, and they weren’t the only ones. As we  sat in the reception area and listened to him browbeat a couple of Australian backpackers who had just arrived, one of the other Americans watched in horrified fascination.

‘Jeez, this guy ought to be running a boot camp for the Marines. What’s his problem?’

I'm good at playing the devil's advocate: I  tried to give the receptionist the benefit of the doubt. ‘He’s got dozens of us, all kinds, every day of the week, coming and going. He’s got to lay down the rules or he’d have chaos.’

Another guest, a Canadian woman, frowned. ‘Yeah, but this guy likes it. It’s a perk of the job. He’s obviously a control freak.’

I shrugged. She was right – he was a control freak – but at the same time, I could see the man’s point. Besides, a lot of the kids who stayed there were adolescents; he’d gotten used to their ways and now tended to treat everybody who passed through there as though they were sixteen years old.

All three of us started looking for jobs right away, buying the Monday edition of the Japan Times which had all the job listings, and in the evening, we got together and compared notes. On the days that we didn’t have job interviews, we either went sight-seeing or got errands done. My Japanese ability, rudimentary as it was, came in handy:  I ordered our meals, impressing everyone with my menu-reading skills, and I was able to help other visitors pick out presents for friends back home.  My confidence bolstered by these successful transactions, I decided that it was time to go and make a purchase of my own.

Before leaving California, I had promised my uncle, a neurologist, that I would send him a Japanese pediatric reflex hammer as soon as I possibly could.  My uncle had a mania for collecting things. He had the largest collection in the world of Robin Hood books and memorabilia outside of Nottingham, a huge collection of wind instruments, and miscellaneous collections of stamps, butterflies and other things. Such as reflex hammers. As far as he was concerned, the Japanese pediatric reflex hammer was the sine qua non for testing the reflexes of very small children. For years he’d been hoping for a new one, and I promised him I’d get right on it as soon as I could. With the help of an English-speaking Japanese woman I’d met at the youth hostel, I located a medical supply store not far away, near Tokyo University. I found the shop – a dark little cubby-hole off a side street – and marched right in. I knew exactly what I was looking for as my uncle had described what he wanted very carefully; my Japanese friend had kindly supplied the translation for ‘reflex hammer’ after I had understandably been unable to find it in the hostel’s English-Japanese dictionary. 

What I had not reckoned with, however, was how weird it was for someone who obviously did not speak fluent Japanese to show up and demand something like a pediatric reflex hammer. The shop assistant couldn’t understand me, even though I repeated myself several times. Excusing herself, she disappeared into a room at the back of the shop and came back with a middle-aged man who politely asked me to explain exactly what it was that I wanted. I repeated my carefully rehearsed phrase:  ‘I want to buy a pediatric reflex hammer.’

The shop girl gave the man a What did I tell you? look. He stared at me as though I’d asked him for an x-ray machine, perhaps, or fifty kilograms of caustic soda. Then he smiled nervously. ‘Why?’

‘It is for –’  I stopped short, realizing that I didn’t know the Japanese word for uncle. ‘—my father’s older brother,’ I managed to finish.

The man and his young female assistant gaped at me. ‘Your father’s older brother?’

‘Yes.’

‘I see,’ said the man, looking like he didn’t. ‘Is your, ah, uncle in Japan?’

‘No, no – he’s in San Francisco. He’s a doctor. He likes Japanese pediatric reflex hammers –’ I caught myself. Not likes –  wants!  ‘I mean he wants one.’

The two conferred in low voices while I stood there and brooded. Why the fuss? What sort of trouble could you possibly get up to with a pediatric reflex hammer? It wasn’t as though I was craftily trying to purchase one as a weapon, after all. I wondered how I might have phrased my request to avoid the confusion. I had not yet grasped the importance of context. Elephants are fine in a zoo, but odd in a ladies’ boutique. In that medical supply store, I was the elephant:  hopelessly out of context.  If I’d been a Japanese man in a white coat with a stethoscope around my neck, I could have asked for a pediatric reflex hammer half in Greek, with a mouth full of marbles – and most likely I’d have gotten one.  Since I was out of context here and managing to express myself poorly, no wonder these two looked so confused.

Finally, they seemed to reach a conclusion. The man brought out a catalogue and thumbed through it until he got to a particular page. He turned it so that I could see it and jabbed his finger at a pediatric reflex hammer. ‘Is this what you want?’ he asked incredulously. It wasn’t, but the page was covered with reflex hammers of all different sizes, and it didn’t take me long to find the one my uncle wanted, with the triangular blue rubber head. And I was greatly relieved to know that I had not been asking them for a truss or a filtration system.

I walked out of the store with my uncle’s hard-won reflex hammer, feeling victorious. Five minutes later I recalled with a sinking feeling that I'd promised to send my father a combination grafting and budding knife with a 2 ¼ inch blade and a 4 ½ inch polished walnut handle.