Sincere apologies to my friends or to basically anyone I’ve ever met who has asked me ” Are people surprised that you can speak Japanese? ” as this is my standard, example “pull it out at dinner parties ” story. I’m rolling out this old familiar friend again. This was a story from my mid-twenties while I lived in Kobe. I was in Japan on a working holiday visa, teaching English in the daytime and pretty much using 80% of my wages to pay for nighttime Japanese language lessons and 20% on peach flavoured alcoholic canned drinks from Japanese 7-Eleven.
The idea of being able to understand a language without anyone always really intrigued me.
And not even in the “invisible woman superpower” way that you might think… more in an overhearing-things-that-are-completely-none-of-my-business, my own romanticized ‘confessions of a taxi driver’ kind of way.
I was able to start my secret listening trick even earlier than I thought..maybe after 2 years of living in Japan… because, as anyone who has studied a second language will know, the comprehension and listening part falls into play way earlier than actually being able to participate in an actual conversation.
I think the thrill of wanting to overhear the stuff I’m not really meant to overhear, falls into the same pervy section of my brain that loves to people watch too, actually. How did that person get here today? Why do they look grumpy? How is that person walking so confidently? Would that group of girls be the kind of group of girls I would get along with? I wonder if those two people are having a secret love affair? Shall I make up the history of their secret love affair? Or, more importantly, why does their portion of dessert look so much bigger than the one I ordered?
But, back to the sneaky, stickybeak fun that is overhearing things that are not thought to be (or probably not designed to be) comprehended by me….
Luckily, 98% of the time in Japan , I’ve only ever heard very nice things* said about me or directed towards me, even when people thought I couldn’t understand what they are saying.
Maybe they were just more clever at waiting until I was out of earshot?
Or maybe..just maybe.. just as I’ve learned along the way… Japanese people are just very kind.
And I must admit that I’ve found them to be particularly kind to this female “outsider”…. in a small Japanese town…. who is just trying her very best to work out how to carry her groceries home, get her homework done on time AND get back to her lifelong search for Japanese loo paper that is more than 2 ply…
*One particularly memorable exception was my first subway ride with my two kids on my own. Two business men next to me I heard chatting about my how cute my kids are before then commenting that I looked like I at least probably used to be cute too. ( Insert my inner happy warm feelings to be immediately followed by a slump and an “oh, man” sigh.) Ahh.. hahaha…haha.. ha . ha. hardy flipping ha.
But the story I’m referring to in this particular post was the day I was riding on the lush Hankyu trains into Sannomiya for drinks and mess with friends.
( Just a heads up, I’m not a train freak but if you know the Hankyu green, velvety seats with the little toasty, sleep-inducing calf-heating function built in… you’ll know just what “lush-ness” I’m talking about.)
For some reason, I had to join my friends late and the carriages were almost empty as, being Friday, the majority of the passenger traffic was heading back home in the opposite direction.
Japanese trains carriages are so quiet. It’s so lovely. No phone calls allowed and phones in general are to be switched to silent mode, or “manner mode” as it is aptly called in Japan.
But this day, there was quite a bit of chat going on.
There were around six or seven university-aged boys standing up in the middle of the carriage. ( I keep wanting to write “uni” instead of university as that’s how we say it in Australia but, one time, a Japanese friend mistook my Aussie abbreviation for the Japanese word uni, pronounced like oo-knee, meaning, sea urchin, and the whole story just got extra weird for a hot minute…) The boys were chatting and laughing and nudging one another loudly. The few of us ( a handful of businessmen, some grannies and me) sitting on the long strip style seats, facing into the carriage.
On most Hankyu trains, the seats are just two long pews running along the carriage walls, they leave more standing room in the middle and, therefore, the carriage can hold way more people.
Kobe isn’t like Tokyo and foreigners, like me, don’t exactly blend in. Especially in a carriage with hardly anyone inside.
And, after I got on the train, the boy’s conversation seemed to have changed paths to things relating to foreign women. I’d sparked a new topic to bide the time.
Now, in the defense of the boys, not once did they appear to talk about me in particular. But my presence as the only foreign woman did certainly spark the conversation of “Would you like to do it with a foreign women? Just once? Just to.. you know… try it out.” ( just the normal stuff boys talk about, nothing too risqué – it’s still Japan, man. )
Now this is overhearing, book-writing, girls talk over cocktails later GOLDEN conversation content. I thought it was hilarious. I stared at the floor as I wanted to remember every morsel to then report back to my friends breath-by-breath the very moment I reached the bar.
But the whole vibe was just super awkward.
They were loud.
If you’ve been to Japan you know that this is very unusual. If you think it might be uncomfortable for passengers in any other part of the world – you need to multiply it by a gazillion and you have it at a Japan level.
The other passengers were sweet enough to think I would be awkward and they were awkward for me.
The old lady a few seats down was shuffling in her spot awkwardly and two other ladies were whispering to one another with serious, embarrassed faces on.
They were so lovely.
They were embarrassed for themselves but more so for me.
The conversation continued and the responses weren’t even juicy enough to really even remember – just some Japanese equivalent of Beavis and Butthead style snorts and chuckles and comments like ” Yeah, I would.” “Nah.” “Have you?” “All the time, man.” “I’m a rockstar” ( okay..I totally made that last one up.)
But it was nearly my station and the carriage was dead silent. Just those guys chatting away about their imaginary international sex endeavors ahead, the train announcement and middle aged business man standing by the far train door, facing outwards and awkwardly half kicking his briefcase, which was on the floor between his legs, from one side to the other.
Before I stood up to get off at my stop, I looked around and made eye contact with one of the whispering women. She immediately looked down. Embarrassed for me, clearly.
I wanted to blink some kind of lady morse code at her with my eyes. Especially as I was now almost outside of my body retelling this story – and the storyteller in my brain had started to think the whole thing was tears-almost-rolling down-my-cheeks hilarious.
I wanted to send her a secret message “It’s okay. I actually understand Japanese. And they don’t think I understand. And every overhearing, comprehending, awkward element of this story is deliriously funny to me.”
But then, just before I got off the train I decided to get uncharacteristically ballsy ( well, uncharacteristically ballsy for mid-twenties me anyway) ….
Maybe it was the fact that I was having this internal, funny story already playing out in my head. Screaming and laughing… all inside my head.
Maybe it was because I’d been teaching little kids in the mornings and my teacher voice had done her warm ups and stretches for the day… she was ready, man…
Or maybe ( and by maybe for this one I mean definitely) it was because I’d consumed a large Chuhai ( a Japanese alcoholic drink made with soft drink and sake and sold for the deliciously student friendly price of 130 yen per can…) while putting on my makeup for the evening….
But I decided to exit via that far carriage door instead of the one next to me.
That meant exiting next to the briefcase shuffling business man.
That meant walking past those boys.
And, as I walked past… I just said to them, relatively quietly “Sometimes people know what you’re saying. Just saying…”
One of the boys spun around right away with absolute horror and all the blood had drained from his face.
He was mortified -so much so that I almost instantly regretted being cheeky enough to say anything at all! I’d damaged the poor little mini-man!
You could practically see the cloud-like speech bubble about his head and in the bubble was main screen of a slot machine.
And he was back clicking in his brain – thinking back to all the things I had just heard ( Must note that he was also just as culturally confused by the confrontational fact that I said anything at all regardless because I’d completely proverbially hand-grenaded him a ball of foreign forwardness.)
I’d like to think that the boys stood in silence for the rest of their train journey once I got off ( But, in reality, one of them probably just made a fart joke and they all went right along with their lovely Friday evening….)
My favourite part of those “last words” as I deliberately squeezed past the boys on the other side of the train was the response of that awkward business man standing by the door. He heard what I’d said, looked at me ( as shocked as the train ticket window guys do when they are looking down and I ask a question before they’ve started looking up and nearly fall over when there is blonde foreign me, standing right there) and let out the deepest, most gratifying Santa Claus style “Ho Ho HO!” belly laugh.
It echoed through the whole carriage.
It was sensational.
Footnote: In the movie version of my life, I then take Japanese Santa Man out for drinks with my girlfriends, we sing karaoke all evening, we still send one another New Years cards and catch up for a coffee and cake “setto” whenever I’m in town.
