The Japanese like their gaijin ('foreigners') to have big noses. I worked for a number of months at a university in the far southern Japanese city Kagoshima whose foreign population mostly consists of snub-nosed Chinese and Korean immigrants. Only a handful of Americans and Europeans live in that city. Most of these are employed teaching English in local secondary schools. Because of this, unlike Tokyo or Osaka, gaijin are infrequent patrons of the city's several gay bars.
When I dropped in one of these establishments, the bartenders and patrons were invariably polite and curious about how I had come to live in Kagoshima. My Japanese improved enough to answer the stock set of questions always asked: Why was I there? What did I do? Was I married? Didn't I find Kagoshima people friendlier than other Japanese? Did I like Japanese men (or food, or drink, or housing, or the weather, etc. etc. etc.)?
But I always sensed my new bar-friends checking out my nose. Gay Japanese share our folk belief that big nose equals big penis and I was frequently apologetic that my nose is of modest dimension. I did very soon learn the phrase anata no chinpo wa okii desuka? ('is your dick big?'). I wasn't telling. Amerika-jin were still scarce enough in Kagoshima that people wanted to check out rumors of Western endowment. I once met a young American wandering the entertainment district. He was handing out flyers for a strip show later that night. He claimed to been enslaved by a crooked Japanese entrepreneur who had brought him to town to strip at a local club for Japanese woman hungry to see white naked flesh. This boy looked gay to me. He invited me to a performance but I didn't want to get in the way of those eager women.
I made friends with Eichiro who was one of the handful of people in Kagoshima who spoke English well. Eichiro had taken English courses in New York City and had worked at his uncle's Japanese restaurant in Glendale, California. He met an American boyfriend in Hawai'i, and the two of them had returned to Kagoshima to be near Eichiro's mother. Back home, he had taken a job as a bartender in a small place that catered to Japan's growing numbers of professional working women. (Young Japanese women are fascinated by gays.) I hung out there, too, hungry to talk English.
Eichiro was 30 but was obviously going to remain perpetually, terminally cute. I would walk downtown to the bar, drink a couple of glasses of hot shoju (Kagoshima's infamous sweet potato brandy), and then leave before 11:00 pm so I could catch a bus home. (Kagoshima's city council is in cahoots with the taxi companies--public transport stops about 11:00 and drinkers have to fall into taxis when the bars close.) Eichiro and I soon developed a routine. Each time I was making to leave, he would beg to follow along and check out my chinpo in the darkened stairwell.
"No, Eichiro, you are married." He was, too. A lesbian minister had married him and the American boyfriend on the beach in Waikiki. But Eichiro would claim to be so frantic for gaijin chinpo that he could even forego the shower he normally had to have after sex. How so Japanese, I thought. Good bartenders always know how to make one feel special.
I was lonely for Americans so I called up the boyfriend one day and asked him to lunch. He insisted on eating only at McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Mr. Donut, or Subway--the four US chains that have found their way to distant Kagoshima. We met at Subway. I didn't like boyfriend much. He whined about Kagoshima and the Japanese. He did have a mother-of-a-nose, though. He and Eichiro were planning a return to Los Angeles where they would live by selling the Japanese antiques that they had accumulated over two years in Kagoshima. Boyfriend left first and Eichiro followed a month behind. I said my goodbyes.
But a few weeks later, Eichiro called me at my office. "Eichiro! What on earth are you doing here?" I asked. He had arrived at LAX where US Immigration immediately arrested him and threw him back on the next plane for Japan. He was on the blacklist, having overstayed his previous visa by 18 months. I helped Eichiro fill out the immigration lottery form that the American Embassy in Tokyo had sent him as his only chance for a US Visa. It didn't seem very promising to me.
I left Japan soon afterwards. Six months later, when I returned to the US, I sent a postcard to Kagoshima addressed to Linda--Eichiro's bar name. It came back marked "unknown." I started calling the 28 Japanese restaurants in Glendale one after the other but gave up, feeling foolish, after a dozen or so. Eichiro--where are you? I sure hope you've found your way to the land of the free, the home of the big nose.
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