Yakitori Nights

For a while I was starting to believe I was cursed to haunt the streets of Gurgaon, and the drastic change of scenery to Tokyo was a welcome relief, of course I continue to live out of a suitcase but for once even the suitcase is enjoying itself. Japan provides visiting Asians various levels of awe and shamefulness,  if you thought all that bowing was just movies then you are wrong, it still happens and in copious quantities and everybody is referred to by their name and suffix ‘san’ (our ‘ji’) and unlike our north Indian friends they really mean and act the graciousness of the language!

Like the mysterious Bermuda triangle Japan lies in its own triangle of idealness and everything here is gracious, detailed oriented and abhors bad quality. The kids are shockingly well behaved, the weather turns lightly bad during the weekdays and it becomes gorgeous over the weekends and holidays, people match the weather by wearing grey and black on the weekdays and transition to pastels (west would definitely declare them gay)! And everyone here is dressed immaculately with layers, colours , bags, shoes and styling gels, damn where do they hide their poor?

Universally a crow is known to have a shrill crowing in the ‘Ka-ka’ there are sufficient hidden ‘r’s but not here, here they can lull you to sleep! The dogs are designer, I almost thought these were the newest Honda Aibo robot with fur and all they don’t bark, they complement and fit well in the Louis Vuitton (LV is rage here women take loans to buy them) bags and if something happens that make them bark then they immediately bow their heads in shame for having done so.

I guess having a disease here is foreign, their food is healthy, bland and they don’t even know what diabetes is! I couldn’t find sugar substitutes even in Starbucks!! But whatever little they made in sugar free they took it to the next level … Asahi Beer Zero! Oh Alcohol here is plentiful, and the Japanese quality makes their whiskey, beer as good as the Scots  make their scotch or Belgians make their beer!  Their cuisine is fun to eat, restaurants aplenty and fortunately they eat the same set of animals as most Indians do which makes it a treat to eat anywhere in Japan.

The language is complex though, over engineered like everything else, adopted Chinese symbols (kanji), a script (hiragana) for writing natively Japanese stuff and a script for writing imported stuff (katakana) all used in the same sentence … go figure! But this has its hilarious moments in translations; like most Indian languages Japanese is a subject-object-verb (SOV) language while English is (SVO subject-verb-object) and unlike our 200+ years of colonization, English is here is brand new! Not that we don’t screw up but it’s funnier here; oh and by the way  they sound south Indian sometimes … biru (beer), taberu (table). Now you also know why you don’t hear English words in Japanese language, it’s not that they have a word for every English word it’s just the way they pronounce that one would never recognize unless trained!

I had this paranoid feeling that there is something wrong with the place and it’s not what it looks like but after two weeks I discovered that though it suffered from some of the Asian weaknesses related to gods, spirituality and women (in their psychological contemptuous thinking) but otherwise they are the most advanced, dedicated, detailed and work worshiping set of people on the planet today.

The cynic in me in the absence of finding anything to be cynical about turned to conspiracy theories of the supernormal kind. I believe that this place is cursed to be single minded in their approach to life and be seriously service oriented, which would explain the fact that a sweeper will use long tongs to collect cigarette butts stuck is tile cracks one by one and people in general will follow the procedures/queues for everything, the trains will be accurate to the minute and they will believe that it is their fault if they have been unable to understand you or serve you! But like everything there is a flip side, this living puts them under tremendous strain and when alcohol liberates them on Friday nights you see what pain they hide.