I'm watching Japanese television right now. It's noon on Friday, February 21st, 2003.

Women are packing what look like breadsticks and sausage into what looks like a white bath towel.

One woman looks like she should be cackling and frying ramen on a street corner. The other looks like she just tripped out of a beauty salon in Shibuya. She's got her hands up like a doctor about to perform surgery. Except she's not going to perform the surgery. No way she's going to touch that dirty sausage.

She broke a NAIL!

I behold this, and choke on my milk tea for a solid minute and a half. The Japanese surrealist painter who lives next door is in the kitchen, singing in French and making spaghetti. She ducks in to ask me if I'm alright.

I point at the television. This Japanese woman, who spends eleven months out of the year in France, shakes her head at the quality programming of her country of birth.

The lunacy sharply cuts to a commercial. There's a roundtable discussion show on tonight about hikikomori -- the potentially eventually violent solitude plaguing Japanese kids these years. And there's a concert by one of those thousands of famous Japanese pianists, in Yokohama, in April. Preorder your tickets.

We slash back to the show. The pretty woman's nail is still broken, it looks like. She's flapping her hand as the old crone grabs up another sausage.

*

Last year, my roommates and fellow English teachers -- who spoke not a Japanese word outside "chinpoko?" -- were always talking about how much Japanese TV sucks. Because they commandeered the TV every morning and afternoon and night to eat and watch-and-quote Blue Velvet ("I'll fuck anything that MOVES!") and Tommy Boy ("Fat man in a little coat!") -- and sometimes Billy Madison ("He's gonna shit when he finds out it's shit!") -- I was inclined to agree.

I didn't watch much Japanese TV in those days, and whenever I did, it was always odd scraps of an English conversation show starring a French-Canadian woman and an Indian man, or roundtable discussion in which a Japanese man in a kimono teaches Japanese to a gaggle of odd foreigners, or cooking shows where young girls taught me the meaning of the words "UMAI!" and "UMASOU!" whenever they looked at a bubbling pot of animal parts and noodles, and -- for I woke up daily at the crack of dawn -- synchronized musical calisthenics in which one firm-bodied woman of three never budged from a chair. Once or twice, I caught and was bored by an episode of Detective Conan or Inu Yasha before my roommates yanked away the remote. Once or twice, I stole a twenty-minute interview show featuring Miwa Yoshida of now-split pop group Dreams Come True, or took in an odd poetry gameshow involving old men in kimonos and a laughing audience of twentysomethings and octogenarians alike. I had to shake my head: I'd rather be in a coma. As a bonus, I wouldn't have to worry about cooking anymore.

Now, I live in a room the size of a coffin, I did laundry late last night and ended up with clothes incased in a block of ice, and the resident replica of Julius Caesar's television is my only entertainment of the sound-and-picture-making variety. In these tiny, freezing surroundings, I've realized that I quite sincerely like Mito-Komon and Kinpachi-Sensei. And it kind of scares me.

I didn't know I could actually like these shows. I thought I could only pretend.

Since a little while ago, I've been openly telling Japanese kids at punk shows that I want to be on a television drama. I even have a little speech rehearsed:

「俺は...死ぬまで...死にたくないから...死ぬつもりない！だから...死ぬまで死なないで生きてるぞ！」

("Ore wa . . . shinumade . . . shinitakunai kara . . . shinu tsumorinai! Dakara . . . shinumade shinanaide ikiteruzo!")

("Until I . . . die . . . I don't want to die, so I have no intention to die! Therefore . . . until I die, I shall LIVE, without dying!")

I get applause for this. I then get asked if I've been to any auditions. Japanese people are so polite, sometimes even I can't tell when they're just messing around. After all, it's supposed to be a joke, isn't it? I don't actually LIKE these shows, do I?

It was just Sunday night that I realized how much I like Mito-Komon. My third-year Japanese teacher in college, Dr. Richard Rubinger, was always talking about Mito-Komon. How Mito-Komon, this wandering government official who busts up crime rings in late Edo Japan, always reveals his official seal at exactly the forty-fourth minute of every show.

I watched the show the other day, and kept my eye on the clock in the corner of my computer monitor.

Bang!

There it was.
That I remembered such a detail from college made me slightly proud. Seeing a "44" on my computer monitor just as Mito-Komon unleashed the seal made me realize I'm capable of enjoying this sort of thing.

*

Kinpachi-Sensei has the distinct honor of being the first television show I ever watched in Japan. I was in shoebox room infinitely bigger than my local coffin, at the Narita View Hotel, angry at how many shows on how many networks seemed to care only about Morning Musume. Then I caught sight of a long-haired guy in tweed angrily searching through a teenage boy's room.

The camera flung around wildly all of a sudden. Everything had been still as a comic book as the guy searched around. That sudden movement -- bang! -- I realized I was in Japan.

The camera was looking at an opened pack of condoms on the boy's dresser.

They were running three hours of Kinpachi-Sensei that night in October. I watched them all, and dined on NyQuil. I took a shower, put on the girly little kimono robe, and drank tap water that would result in my mouth breaking out with cold sores the next morning when I rode the bus back to the airport, and the train station into Tokyo.

*

Kinpachi-Sensei, in the tradition of shows like The Love Boat, loves its peripheral cast. Kinpachi is the teacher of Year 3, Class B at a Tokyo public high school. Every year -- every season -- his students graduate. Every year -- and the show's been running off-and-on since 1979, don't you know -- Kinpachi-sensei gets older. Every year, it never stops getting funny -- the students are intimidated by Kinpachi-sensei's rough and strict teaching style. Every day, they eat lunch in silence as Kinpachi-sensei sits at his desk.

And every night, we lucky viewers see Kinpachi-sensei at home with his loving wife. It's a side of Kinpachi-sensei the students -- like the guy who works part-time at a bookstore and stutters when Kinpachi-sensei comes in -- never get to see.

I'm honestly not too familiar with all the plot lines. All I know is that there are conflicts within the students in Kinpachi's class, and that lots of stuff eventually happens, and it doesn't all deal with exam preparations.

Kinpachi-Sensei is, I suppose, what you could call a Japanese "television drama." Its budget is low, and it runs in a prime-time-slot. Its camera moves approximately once every twenty-two minutes. A lot of the students grow up to act in many other shows or movies. The plots are your standard love-story, drug-story, coma-story comic-book-story fare. Yet, like other Japanese television dramas, which sometimes run (purposely, at that) for only one season, there's a lot of heart buried inside this low budget production. Much as you can spend sixty hours playing Final Fantasy VIII and think, weeks after you finish, that you would have been better off just reading Lord of the Rings with a bootleg VHS tape of Tenchi Muyo! on in the background, these dramas are painless, if not perfect, ways to occupy free time.

Japanese people may or may not have as much or more free time as Westerners do. I'm not sure. I, however, have only free time these days. So I like being able to sit in front of this television at midnight, and watch four hours of reruns of a drama the name of which I don't catch even once.

In the drama, a woman is eating a French lunch with her crush's new secret older girlfriend. When she drops a fork and looks under the table, she notices that the woman's boots are the same ones that were in her crush's apartment the night before, when she stopped by to drop off some work-related materials!

After the sudden, thirty-second commercial break ends, the woman is in a dark little Chinese restaurant with her male friend. He looks a little thuggish. There's some kind of lit-up water-filled lamp in the background. It's purple. The guy sits down, and his leather jacket crunches. He and the girl make small talk over their food. She brings up the woman.

"She was wearing the same boots!"

"Are you sure?"

It's three in the morning when I'm watching this. I'm wearing three pairs of socks, it's so cold. I get some tofu out of the refrigerator, and let it sit until it's room-temperature.

As my tofu reaches a can-eat-comfortably-with-a-splash-of-soy-sauce temperature, a family of a seven, not a single member of which includes any previously shown characters, dines on a big steaming hot pot of nabe.

A cut later, a man emerges from a Tokyo bar where you can both see and hear the train, finished with his ramen and beer. He's talking on his cellular phone. He calls up a woman, and says, harshly, like a man:

"Aitai. Matteru."

("I want to meet. I'm waiting.")

This woman, we see, works as the chef in a little restaurant. She checks her cell-phone voice mail on a break, and hears the message:

"Aitai. Matteru."

And her mouth drops open and her eyes tear up. After two people I've never seen finish eating food the camera avoids and the aforementioned family puts away its nabe paraphernalia, we see this gruff, manly, forty-ish man passionately kissing the restaurant woman in a car in a parking garage. And . . . there's someone watching!

I don't need to have seen the other twenty episodes to know it's the woman's husband, or someone who knows him. Hell, at this point, I'm hypnotized into thinking I might even know the guy myself.

The woman with the boots is now cooking meat cubes with her young lover. The next day, the young lover is toweling off after a workout when the girl who's got her mind set on him shows up in full tennis gear, and talks uncomfortably until interrupted by three back-to-back commercials for Metroid Prime.

I head out to get that soy sauce, thinking:

Mito-Komon gives the interesting history lessons. Kinpachi-Sensei and numerous names-don't-matter TV dramas fill us in on the modern culture.

Japanese television drama is full of Japanese culture: nabe, udon, ramen, spaghetti, pop music stars, part time jobs, stalkers, cellular phones, the beer-loving manly men who carry them, and their infidelity.

If they made one about girls working at a Tenya Tendon tempura shop, I'd be all for it. I could play an American punk rocker on tour in Japan. Get some slick-haired Japanese hip-hop star to play my agent. And some too-damned-good-looking forty-something woman to play the married manager of the Tenya I visit every day between rocking sessions.

They could call it . . . "FURIN TO TEMPURA" -- "INFIDELITY AND TEMPURA."

My recently-written, soon-to-rock-Nishiogi punk anthem "TEMPURA NO UTA" ("THE SONG OF TEMPURA") could be the show's theme.

You know, The Blue Hearts' punk-rock-plus-piano song "Yume" ("Dreams") was the theme for the "Hito Ni Yasashiku" ("Be Nice to People") drama a few years back.

I was living with a couple of nice people up until January 25th, 2003. That's not to say they became less nice. It's just to say that I'm not living with them anymore. They were a married couple. I had to leave their place because the guy's sister got fired from a job at her own fashion-design company in Osaka, and needed to vacate her apartment on February 2nd.

As any marathon watching session of Japanese drama will show you -- people here do indeed bow about the stupidest things. That kind of courtesy is the kind of courtesy that told me I was expected to leave a week before February 2nd. And leave I did, at six in the morning, all tired after catching the fist train out of Shinjuku Station following a mostly-all-night party with the people of Tokyopia.com. I arrived home to find my two friends sitting at the dinner table. My suitcase was ready and waiting.

Before then, I wasn't exactly a bad roommate. I'd like to think the conversation I made was interesting enough. Every once in a while, while the husband was busy with his computer and financial analysis and I couldn't sleep, I went into his room and sat on the bed with his wife and watched television dramas.

*

On the night of January 20th, 2003, when the television dramas were over, a show called "Music Box" came up. This show ran from two in the morning until long after I went to bed. In the dark, sitting right next to some other guy's wife, I watched a show that consisted of nothing more than random, date-stamped video footage and popular music past and present.

The footage started out in Shibuya of 1999, with camera aimed at backpacks, and an Utada Hikaru song playing. Later themes included socks in 2000, people reading newspapers in 1998, and eventually the whole of Harajuku, 2001.

That afternoon, I'd seen my friend and protegee Masako for what would turn out to be the last time. I didn't get home until after midnight. I watched a little drama with another man's wife, and graciously accepted the gift of a television remote and an invitation to stay, if I wanted, when reruns of some drama about a department store staff had ended. I stayed. She covered up with a blanket.

From backpacks in Shibuya to socks in Ikebukuro to hairstyles in Harajuku, the show's point of view was constantly pulling back. Eventually, at around three in the morning, it became international and classical, and footage of bridges in Budapest glided by under Brahms' Hungarian Dance #6.

Some Gershwin, and the streets of Paris.

The Beatles' "Penny Lane" on a rainy day in London.

Frank Sinatra as cabs flow through New York City.

The Nevada desert, under the song "Desert Rose," from the movie Baghdad Cafe.

I remembered my first serious girlfriend, a married Japanese woman who ended up killing herself. Baghdad Cafe was her favorite movie. For whatever the reason.

I remember the last night I saw her. From three in the morning until eight in the morning, she was sitting in the middle of the bed, staring at the telephone on my desk.

I was studying Japanese literature intensively at that time. I remember looking at the woman, and thinking, "Yasunari Kawabata would know what to think right now."

*

Kawabata once wrote an essay about Japanese people reading on trains. They stand and read. They sit and read. Kawabata said, the first time he saw that, he was pleased: the Japanese people read.

Then, he thought about the situation: who, in Japan, sits at home and reads?

I wonder, now, what would he think of videogames and television dramas? Then again, didn't the early Kawabata get by on numerous romance novels for young women?

Kawabata saw someone reading one of his literary novels on a Tokyo train once. It kind of made him a little mad. A train is a place of forced reading.

Not one television drama -- especially not the one I saw late at night as I ate tofu with Tabasco and black pepper and lemon tea -- approaches the thematic simplicity and brilliance of a Kawabata novel. Yet, like Mito-Komon has taught a great many Japanese children their ninja history, these dramas are not without their sensitivity to literary heritage.

If their way of showing this heritage lies in Kinpachi-sensei bringing a sick kid a stack of comic books, so be it. The feeling is still there.

If the young woman hoarding money from her old husband who becomes the pickpocketing victim of fetishist Gimpei Momoi in Kawabata's The Lake inspired the older woman who cooks Italian cuisine with her young lover in that TV drama at four in the morning, she didn't quite inspire her to the letter. Yet, the feeling is still there.

The pregnant woman returned to her country hometown and her family house populated by her rowdy scheming brothers, one of whom wears a Hawaiian shirt and is tanned browner than I am white? For one thing, her mom seriously turns me on, and at 12:55 on a Friday afternoon, no less. For another thing, she's no Yoko in Snow Country. Yet, the feeling is still there.

Not every Japanese woman who longs, in cute tennis shorts and performed by a pop-singer of some sort, for a long-haired guy with a chiseled nose and eyes bigger than his cheeks, can be Otama from Mori Ogai's original "woman in the window" tale The Wild Goose. Yet, the feeling is still there.

The pitiful woman who recognizes her crush's lover's boots is a stark contrast to what you might find if you turn on a television set in Tokyo in the middle of the evening. There was a show on the other day where five guys who looked like dropouts from Shibuya Hip-Hop Ghetto-Gangster Wannabe University offered color commentary as alien-faced pop-star Ayumi Hamasaki choked down various pieces of sushi and squealed "Oishii!"

I prefer the sweet, pathetic young girl on this drama whose name I don't know to the Morning Musume girls, who pop up in game shows everywhere, to the woman with an orange face and seemingly Amish-inspired bangs (a new hair trend?), who made an idiot out of herself first on a human-fly Velcro wall and second by suffering a heartbreaking defeat at some blinking-lights rhythm game that might just have been humanly impossible.

I can look at the cute young lady longing for the oblivious guy, here in my two pairs of pants and three pairs of socks, and feel a little sorry for her even after the show is over, even after the NHK news is on, and they're showing freshly-drawn cartoon graphics rubber-cemented to poster-board diagrams illustrating rising real estate costs, long after they cut away to show a new and interesting way to add egg to your tanuki-udon. Long after I'm choking with laughter on my tofu when, during the news, the feature lifestyle piece consists of hidden-camera-taped arguments between increasingly older men trying to get their wives to quit pachinko. The subtitles get bigger and louder and more fluorescent, and it somehow makes the reality look more real. Just like the High-Lows sang about in their song "Juyonsai" ("Fourteen Years Old").

There's a show on right now with people playing traditional Japanese musical instruments. Just moments ago, a female author whose name I didn't catch was reading an essay on why high school students should study for their college entrance exams. The hosts of the show are a guy in a suit and a girl wearing a sweater made of torn rags.

Now they're talking about a bank robbery involving Iranians.

Even after the news reruns end late at night, even when that Star Ocean 3 commercial isn't yet old -- and with music by Japanese pop-diva Misia, no less -- even when some show proves in front of my very eyes that the most modest of geeks are not lying when they admit the majority of anime does suck, and suck hard, even when the Shin-Sangoku Musou commercial runs four times in a row, these days, I watch Japanese television, and I don't get bored, not until my Kirin Milk Tea runs out and my tofu has finished being swallowed up.

I have no job. I'm no longer important enough to warrant being stalked by the lowest rungs of the fashionable yakuza ladder. My name is on every English-teaching blacklist. I'm running out of money. I have to stop and wonder, every hour or so: can I eat tonight? Can I spare it?

I end up in a basement grocery store that smells like metallic water, where an old woman is watching a show about Kodiak bears. In the upper-left corner of the screen is an oval-shaped window, scanning the faces of an entourage of pop stars as their hundred-million-yen voices and big blue subtitles proclaim, "SUGOI!" I drop down an eighty-yen pack of tofu and a two-hundred-fifty-yen bag of damaged Kit-Kats. I can't live without my chocolate. The woman couldn't care either way. There's a bear standing up, and turning around, in a zoo, and she concurs with a guy in a platinum suit when she says:

"SUGOI."

Back at home, I see the Romanian Woman who sleeps three coffins down isn't currently using the computer. So I duck in, boot up some internet, and turn on the television. The show about bears is still on -- just no longer about bears: a documentary is challenging numerous men to lean forward in a prayer position, with their chins on their hands, and then, without touching their chins to the floor, fold their hands behind their backs.

Not a single man can do it. They then explain why.

It's because men's shoulders are wider than their hips! Women can do it, because their hips are wider than their shoulders!

They send a "TARENTO" ("Talent") correspondent in a black wig, big cartoon glasses, and a doctor's white lab coat on the bullet train to Osaka. He struts into a TV studio, and finds a certain well-liked producer. He tells the guy, "We've heard rumors about your hips." The producer accepts the odd challenge, and passes, and six guys who are going to go home in eleven minutes and sleep on a mattress of ten-thousand-yen bills exclaim, from that little oval window,

"SUGOI!"

I snort up some more cold tofu. When the show ends, it's Will and Grace dubbed into Japanese. The one gay guy calls himself "Atashi." That's . . . well, that about sums it up, doesn't it?

*

I remember watching LA Confidential in Japanese with my friend's wife. It was that night that I started work on my now-finished, sooner-or-later-to-win-the-Pulitzer-Prize postmodern novel of boredom in the 21st Century, "take a vacation, detective."

We watched the movie in Japanese for ten minutes, in the dark, before this guy's wife set the remote on my leg and told me I could press The English Button if I wanted.

My TV here has no English Button. I have to either listen to odd dubs, or change the channel. Changing channels works best. I didn't come to this country to watch shows I can watch at home, after all.

That night I watched LA Confidential with another man's wife, there was an English Button, so I pressed it.

I pressed The English Button, and Kevin Spacey was Kevin Spacey again. We turned on the Japanese subtitles. The guy's wife liked watching movies better that way, anyway. She wanted to practice her English.

So did the punk rock girl who had TOTALLY lived in San Francisco. She and I were browsing underground vinyl shops in Shibuya's Dogenzaka Hill when we somehow ended up at a Tower Records. She picked up a copy of LA Confidential on DVD, and said it was one of her favorite movies.

I said, "It's 5000 yen?"

I then told her how, in America, DVDs are only ten dollars. She said she could believe it.

"They don't have Japanese subtitles, though."

*

Right before the late night drama reruns pop up on NHK or TBS or whatever thrills you, news reporters scour the streets with microphones and silly random questions, or gameshow hosts make drunken men make drunken phone calls to their sober, lonely wives, or some big tall scary white man does some morbid combination of both of the above, in mangled Japanese, and it's always subtitled. The subtitles are always big, always bold, and always fluorescent. They pop up sometimes one word at a time, or sometimes half a line flies onto the screen for dramatic effect. Some kanji are bigger than others. Sometimes there's a heart or a star at the end or the beginning of a line. So it is that even in a documentary in which a young pop star sits on a street corner and writes flash-songs for passing college girls kind enough to take the time to sit and talk, the Japanese television production geniuses who brought you commercials in which a woman's ultrasound reveals she had a giant gummy bear inside her uterus inject drama into the real. That drama makes me feel warm right down to the tips of my chilly toes, late in a cold Tokyo winter night.

Some anime with a frame rate so low I looked more natural walking two weeks ago when I was homeless and with two sprained ankles drones on, and I start wondering what the lead character is going to eat for dinner the next night.

Kinpachi-sensei points a piece of chalk at a delinquent student who's three episodes away from committing an act of vandalism gone horribly, tragically wrong, and I can feel someone fearing something else.

And there's that pathetic girl, in a rerun of the episode where she jogs up in tennis shorts to the long-haired man of her obsessive dreams. I'm cold, I'm lonely, I need a blanket -- well, I need a bed, first -- and this girl's got a whole apartment in Tokyo to herself. Can I call her, and ask her if I can move in? I'll clean up while she's away. I'll cook her pasta every day if she buys the groceries. When she's sad, we can turn her little television on and watch footage of a rocky sand and white propellers in the Nevada desert wind, and until past the time everyone in their right mind is sleeping, I'll listen to her talk about her problems in short sentences, as she nods her head and covers her eyes, and gestures, gestures, gestures. Those hands, those nails: you ought to be modeling watches.

I think about things like this over my tofu, and under my layers of clothing and a four-foot ceiling that makes me wonder what Being John Malkovich sounds like dubbed into Japanese. In the dark, in front of a computer, and behind a frosted window, until the muzak of "Let it Be" plays over the weather map in the NHK morning news and lulls me to sleep, young fictional girls in tennis shorts who come up just short of literary, and just a centimeter more fun than obligated viewing become people whose phone numbers I could, at some time I don't have the guts to see out, call up and invite out for cheap tempura.

The desire to meet and eat with a person who isn't real, though could be -- it's about equal to the thought that hits me at four in the morning, just before I realize I should go to bed: I pray that at some all-night diner in Tokyo somewhere, this show is playing, to keep boredom out of the way of a smoking salaryman who missed the last train, whose cell phone is turned off, whose briefcase is stowed under the table, whose green tea and soba noodles are hot, whose worried wife is at home on their bed watching the same exact thing.

- Tim Rogers
[ Email Tim ]