The honeymoon's officially over.

Last Friday I was talking with my supervisor about random things, and somewhere in the conversation she mentions a typhoon. When I asked her what typhoon she was talking about, she replied, "Oh, the one coming this weekend." I'm almost positive nobody has been talking about the typhoon--my Japanese may still be at a pre-K level, but the word for typhoon is "taifun," and sounds identical, so I would have picked up on it. So I looked it up on the radar and, sure enough, Typhoon Nari is a-heading this way. There was a typhoon gunning for us when I first arrived on the island, and my entire family found out about it before I got to talk to them. I'm pretty sure the same thing will happen with this one.

So today I relaxed, read the last section of Ishmael again, practiced a little Japanese, and just chilled out at the local mall. I had a late lunch, did some grocery shopping, and walked back home. As I was preparing to enjoy an evening reading Wikipedia and thinking about stuff--both of which I do not as a way to pass the time but are things I actually look forward to doing--I got a call from Kurokawa, one of the teachers, asking me if I wanted to go out with him and Murahashi, another teacher. I reluctantly agreed.

It's not that I didn't want to hang out with them--they're probably my favorite teachers here, and their English is very good--it's just that, as we were on the phone, in about five seconds, I saw exactly how the night was going to go. I was all for having dinner and a couple of drinks, telling some jokes, talking about Tsushima, and then calling it a night after a couple of hours. However, I've been here just long enough to understand that you don't just go out for an hour or two with work buddies. It's an all-night commitment. That's the part I wasn't looking forward to.

So we go to a local restaurant, sit at the bar, and a full meal gets brought to us without our having to order at all. (The owner of the restaurant knows all the teachers.) I was still stuffed from my late lunch, so I didn't want to eat anything. Not wanting to offend, I nibbled at each dish. They had saba sashimi, though, which perked me up. My last feeble hopes of having a quick dinner were dashed as the beer we had with dinner was followed by opening a bottle of whiskey for Kurokawa and Murahashi.

As we sat and talked with the owner and each other, the guys went through at least a pack of cigarettes each. I'm not opposed to people smoking--in fact, the faint smell of cigarette smoke reminds me of my parents, so I actually like smelling it in passing. What bothered me was that the ventilation wasn't so hot, and the guys didn't make much of an effort to keep the smoke away from me. I may like the faint smell of cigarette smoke in the air, but I abhor the stench of cigarette smoke on clothing. I sound like a weenie, I'm sure, but I have to wash those clothes once they soak up that smell, when I could have otherwise worn that outfit again without washing it. It's even more inconvenient here, where laundry is a day-long process at best (depending on the presence of sunshine), and that's if the water pump to my apartment cooperates with the washing machine in the first place. There's a typhoon coming, so I probably won't have water for the next few days. Am I blowing this out of proportion a little?

I also noticed that the owner, a cheery old lady who had sat down to talk with us since we walked in, was pouring herself a drink whenever she refilled the guys'. I thought nothing of it at first. A little later, though, while she was out of the room, Murahashi explained to me in slurred English that, in a restaurant like this one, we pay not just for the food and drink, but for the atmosphere and the hospitality.

I immediately thought of Hanamizuki, the Atlanta karaoke bar I went to last year, where you pay cocktail waitresses by the hour to host a group of your friends. During that hour, it is perfectly appropriate to ask the girls questions that, if asked outside those doors, would get you a mere slap to the face if you were lucky. You literally can say anything you want to the girls, and they are required by their job to take it in stride. While there, you also pay for alcohol, which is fine--except the girls drink from the same bottle of alcohol you've bought (in the course of refilling your glasses), and you pay for what they drink too. To put it in perspective, the group of four I was with spent three hours there, bought a bottle and a half of good-but-not-best-name whiskey, and had two of the waitresses keep us company the whole time. The total bill? $500.

Now, I'm not saying the restaurant I ate at tonight is just like the one I was at in Atlanta. I'm just saying that I felt the same sense of awkward resentment tonight that I haven't felt since I was at Hanamizuki. I don't know what I resent more--the fact that you're charged for the company of a proprietor who would have nothing else to do with her time were she not keeping you company, or the fact that people agree to patronize places like this in the first place. I'm not trying to make some ethnocentric judgement or indict Japanese culture or people over this--I'm fully aware there are comparable examples of compensated hospitality in American culture. It just doesn't make sense to me. It's therefore my problem, not theirs, and I understand this. Still doesn't make sense to me, though.

Anyway. Five hours later, we finally left the place. The guys asked me if I wanted to do a little karaoke, and I hope I wasn't too quick to decline. I had spent five hours and thirty dollars for a beer and some hors d'œuvres, my clothes reeked of stale cigarette smoke, and I felt a little sick from eating mollusk and what was translated for me as "squid womb"--I was, in a word, done. Ugh.

I tell this thoroughly negative story to talk about the work hard/play hard mentality of my coworkers. The teachers I work with, as I've been told is also the case with most teachers in Japan, work about six and a half days a week. Kurokawa, for example, worked Friday from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m., and had to go back in Saturday from 7 a.m. until about 6 p.m. Many of the teachers have spouses, of whom I know several that are also teachers, and many of the couples have children.

I simply can't believe that this goes on. It's one thing to work so much when you're single and have nothing but time to spend. I was the most logical candidate of the Inoko management staff (all two-and-a-half managers) to work six days a week, because I was the youngest, and had no family to go home to. I can understand that. (Moreover, I was paid fairly for my overtime, something that does not happen to teachers here, who are salaried in the strictest sense of the term.) But if I had a wife and kids to support, I can only hope that our circumstances wouldn't be so dire that I'd have to work a job that kept me apart from them so much. I know these teachers aren't limited in options--they're all very competent, college-educated people, so finding a job wouldn't be that difficult. I also know it's not just the education field that demands so much of its workers here, so the teachers wouldn't escape by simply not being a teacher.

It's putting in so much time at work that makes them party so hard. Anyone who's worked a double- or triple-shift in a restaurant or otherwise pulled twelve or sixteen hours straight at a job can relate--everyone needs to unwind, to destress. But based on what limited experience I have with this, it seems that partying as hard as they do here ruins the next day, which is either your day off (in which case you've wasted it) or a normal work day (in which case you're useless that day at work, and your normal day-to-day stress gets combined with the extra stress from being hung over). In the latter case, you wind up needing to escape from the day that was itself ruined by your escaping the previous day, and you accomplish that escape by doing exactly what you did the night before. Instead of trying to compensate for all the extreme repression and professionalism by going hog-wild at a bar, why not cut back on the former to render the latter unnecessary?

I'm well aware that I'm about the billionth person to harp on about the oddity of Japanese work ethic. I'm also aware that I'm not sounding very culturally relativistic or properly anthropological about this. Part of this is because I'm ranting, but maybe another part is that I don't think every aspect of a culture is grey area, that some things ought not to be relative. Oh well.

There'll be a positive post to make up for this one. Promise.