I started off a recent class with a series of celebrity photographs and asked the students to identify what they had in common. The celebrities included Ellen Degeneres, Portia de Rossi, Angelina Jolie, and Ricky Martin, so perhaps you already know the answer…
My articles have created a rather disparaging image of Japanese men, and somewhat unfairly I think. After all, most of my friends in Yashiro are middle-aged men, and they’re not all that bad. I kind of like how many of them enjoy drinking, crack filthy jokes, and are generally easier to get along with than many women. The local men had been gathering every night at a nearby shrine to drunkenly prepare the mikoshi for the fall festival, so I decided to crack a few beers myself and hear them out.
My ambivalence towards the Japanese blind date, goukon (aka konpa), stems from participating in a few this past month. They are extremely unnatural and childish, and yet rather amusing after the fact. You are forced into a seating plan, usually a boy-girl pattern, so you can’t escape from a less-than-desirable person like you would at a bar back home.