By CX
How about something lighthearted for a change? The challenge as it was was dinner. We, my sibling and I, had to get something to eat—because it was late and, because it was late, we were hungry—and we silently agreed that getting something from a convenience store was a sort of admittance of defeat. Getting a bentō, some melon bread, bottled green tea, rushing to our family friend’s apartment where we called home for the week, eating/drinking said bentō and melon bread and bottled green tea in said family friend’s apartment where we called home for the week: a comfortable but stale (stale because, on our own, we’d had so many of those kinds of dinners already) routine—rang in our ears like a kind of anti-Nietzschean “No!” We wanted, had to, do something, small as it was, we were foreigners (basically) in a foreign country, an experience (small as it was) was necessary. There’s nothing more stressful on two idiot vacationers (I put it this way so as not to insult all those on vacation/tourists, critiqueable as the whole enterprise is—rowdy and rude tourists forcing the cutting off of roads in Kyoto; swarming an innocent Lawson just because it lined up somewhat aesthetically nicely with Mt. Fuji, etc.—that’s not what I’m here to do, not right now anyway; though, and I’m showing my hand here somewhat, I used the word “basically” earlier because I—not my sibling, who was born elsewhere—was originally from here, here being Japan, if the use of the word “bentō” didn’t make that clear, though I cannot in good faith call it, here, Japan, “home”) than to feel like they are “vacationing” improperly, like the feeling most post-college graduates feel post-college graduation: if one could re-do their college years, I feel most would.
We, my sibling and I, had just gotten out of the station and all we had to do to get home was walk there.—How I miss walkable cities!—We were hungry (as mentioned), did not want to just get a convenience store dinner (as mentioned), and found our options at our train station either too exhaustive (more like exhausting) or wanting. Did we really want to sit down at a place that served stuff like tonkatsu or even udon or ramen, places that might require a waiter or server who would, on occasion, check up on us, requiring us idiot vacationers to at least attempt to scale a language barrier we barely between the two of us had the skills to scale—sure, things like Google Translate exists, but consider the, maybe not social anxiety, but rather social shyness that can grip anyone who found themselves a fish out of water. (Imagine how embarrassing it is to be that fish, flopping for its life!) We didn’t have our folks with us, who knew Japanese and knew it conversationally well—we, my sibling and I, were on our own that day, negotiating trains and transfers to sightsee on one of our last few days on this trip. Akihabara to Kabukichō to elsewhere till the day’s September sun swapped out with Tokyo’s psycho-neons. We were on our own. And fast food joints like McDonald’s felt too, I don’t want to say “easy,” so I’ll say “ubiquitous”; it would be like, well, going to Japan to go to McDonald’s, even if they have novelty menu items, novel to our i.v.’s taste buds, anyway, even if this station’s McDonald’s was still the same McDonald’s that was here when I was here as a kid, growing up, here, as a kid, in Japan, so there would have been at least a point of nostalgia in at least this particular location’s favor. Even then we rejected the notion. But the spirit of the idea persisted: we could point at the menu, pay there at the counter, keeping the necessary language barrier scaling at a minimum, and eat and relax inside: this would basically be considered a Success in our book! But if not the harsh reds and yellows of McDonald’s, then where? How about a softer green and white instead? We saw it on the other side of the station. MOS Burger.
Hell. Yes. MOS Burger here was about as ubiquitous as McD’s, but is of the country we were touristically invading, so as authentically Japanese as sushi. The last time I had MOS Burger was on Japan Airlines, on another trip, years and years ago. Hardly the real thing. And, look here, as we approached, an A4-sized flyer taped horizontally to the window from the inside: “ENGLISH MENU INSIDE”—this glowed and beckoned as an oasis does in a desert. A burger is as warm and familiar as a family friend. I looked at my sibling and we summoned the requisite courage and then stepped inside.
A disaster from the first! Of the two of us I could scale the language barrier a little better, though this is saying very little, but so I handled what I could of the communications anyway. We were greeted as anyone would be greeted stepping inside a Japanese restaurant-establishment—you can imagine it, I’m sure. In very stilted Japanese I asked if (as if I had not just seen the sign outside) they had an English menu. The young man—maybe a teen, maybe early twenties—managed to catch my linguistically distorted drift and nodded and hunched somewhere behind the counter on his side to attempt to locate said English menu. Perhaps you, like me, can sense when someone is trying to look for something and realize they can’t find this something and then pause to intake this particular datum (a further hunching of shoulders, said almost-in-horror pause itself) and then continue to try and find this something, usually in vain. Perhaps you, like me, can sense this. I sensed this. The young Japanese MOS Burger part-timer then stood up straight and turned around and asked his fellow young Japanese MOS Burger part-timers if they knew where the English menus were. You did not need to know any Japanese to know that this was what was going on. In fact one could easily imagine the scenario leading up to this very moment going something like this: A manager or some other part-timer moved the English menus elsewhere in favor of more necessary work-related materials, like probably tape or something, if such English menus ever really existed, because, while we were indeed in Tokyo, we were so far away from the touristic, metropolitan epicenter of Tokyo (our family friend’s apartment was in a more residential area, for the purposes of this story this meant in essence we were as far as any farming town) that even a franchise as ubiquitous as MOS Burger—ubiquitous as the Mountains and Oceans and the Sun—wouldn’t expect that English menus were really necessary in this particular location, this far out from Shibuya Crossing. Who’d be this far out and not know enough Japanese to secure themselves a meal? Well…
“Hey, you know where the English menus are?”
“English menus?”
“They’re supposed to be under here, I don’t see them under here.”
“Should be there, no?”
“I don’t see them under here.”
“Um—wait, I think I…”
“I see tape here.”
“I moved them—hold on.”
They were probably saying something like that, I think.
I watched three MOS Burger employees scramble through their kitchen to try and find these English menus for three minutes, sweating as I was, never mind that a Japanese September is hot and humid as shit, the last thing any conscientious i.v. would want to do in Japan is fuck up any kind of socially normative script. This was what we, my sibling and I, were doing, basically. And then (finally!) the first MOS Burger part-timer (I don’t know why I’m assuming all these employees are part-timers, to keep things breezy and lighthearted I’m not going to go back and fix this) returned to the counter and pulled out his phone to type into Google Translate (the very thing we tried to avoid having to use!) that no English menus existed. I figured that was the case. Though the MOS Burger part-timer’s phone’s Google Translate told us instead that “NO JAPANESE MENU EXISTS”—with the bold seriousness of some black Gothic gate—we, my sibling and I, did what we could to not crack and laugh at the absurdity of this translation, this situation at large.
Considering, well, that the challenge as it was was dinner, it really didn’t take much outside of pointing and using what little Japanese I did know to order us two of MOS Burger’s MOS Burger (“The chilled tomato slice goes perfectly with piping hot meat sauce and freshly grilled patty.”—as the MOS Burger website reports—hey, there’s an English menu there!—and this is true.) and we sat and waited and then got our food and ate. It was our poor first MOS Burger part-timer from the counter who served us our food; not that I want to use the word “poor” here, as in, “Oh you poor thing!” because I’m not trying to belittle or impress any kind of pity onto our first MOS Burger part-timer from the counter, whose customer service now took on the air of being genuinely concerned for our ultimate fates, but we sort of did subject him to something. “Poor thing.” I was thirsty and did want fries, but I didn’t have the heart to attempt to order a set for myself. Whatever was easiest to order, was what we ordered. We smiled as movie characters who just survived some kind of hilarious but still physically dangerous hijinks smile. This is no advertisement for MOS Burger but hey, the burgers were good.
All this to say what exactly? Who knows. Perhaps the ubiquity of multinational burger franchises, the ubiquity of burgers themselves, the ubiquitous idiocy of tourists themselves, or the idiocy that latches onto you when you assume the role of “tourist.” Latching and then subsuming. Melting everything in the tourist’s gaze down from substance, history, context, to mere spectacle. How unfortunate! If I have to invent a point outside of writing this for zuihitsu-writing’s sake then let me say this: Everyone’s an idiot sometimes, our responsibility to others, then, is to minimize the amount of these times as possible, in one’s lifetime. It’s nice to be nice. Eat your vegetables. And at the very very very least, have at least a working proficiency of the language of the country you are about to (touristically or neo-colonially or otherwise) invade, to spare yourself any personal embarrassment, as inevitable as embarrassment is, even if the challenge is something as necessary as dinner. If you’re going to be a monster, be that thing.
About the Writer:
CX is doing what they can. All of their writing-things can be found also on Many Masks Press, and other places like other places.
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