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We had Danjiri festival last week, which is probably the most famous festival in Osaka, located mere blocks from my current residence. It consists of large packs of Japanese people pulling these huge, ornately carved wooden caravans. The festival has it’s origins in harvest, so I assume the carts originally carried food, but now they carry drunk Japanese men playing drums, flute and dancers on the roof, going break-neck speed around corners. It’s common for someone to die each year, although no one did this year. I thought that was a joke when I first heard it—why would they continue something that killed…it’s Japan. It’s hard to explain why it’s so cool, but it is.
I actually got to pull one of the floats for a while—there’s like 50 or more people pulling on ropes that extend for like 50 meters. The corners are the only time they go really fast—they stop, line up the pullers around the corner, and then scream, “soorya!” to the drum beat, which is just a 4-4 time beat with three quarter note beats and a rest, like a horse galloping.
Anyway, this story has a soap opera part to it. Here goes.
So there’s this girl, (that I don’t have a crush on, come on guys) and she had a boyfriend when she came to Japan—I’m still trying to figure out these people that do this. I saw it happen in college and now. You know, if you want to give the long distance relationship an honest shot, I respect that, but some people don’t even try, and that’s just cruel. Why don’t you just play volleyball with the dude’s heart…SPIKE!
Okay, so like I said, there’s this girl, Miss A, and she decided after the incredible resilience of living without male companionship for three weeks to ditch her man of a year for this clueless asshole, Mr. E. For all of my women readers out there, which I’m guessing are just my mom and grandma, I have a question: why do girls like guys that are ass holes? Is it really that attractive? Because I can definitely be an ass hole, but I’ve always though it was harder to, you know, think of others, try to make people feel good about themselves, help people, and, I don’t know, not convince a girl to leave her year-long relationship so that I can have sex with her for a couple weeks and move on, which is what the gentleman Mr. E did.
Of course, they’re both at the Danjiri festival together because they’re mature adults. We see the festival, hold some crazy small chicks that they sell for some reason, ate some omlet-soba noodle thing (the food here is really creative), and throw back a few beers. One of my friends here kept successfully bumming beer off the Danjiri beer carts—dude’s haul their own beer and other alcoholic drinks. The guys with a beer in one hand, a cigarette and a hand on the rope pulling the float are my favorite.
When I first met Mr. E, I immediately disliked him. I immediately dislike a lot of people, but I usually come around after a while. But he had such a foul aura of such oppressive arrogance, with this wooden smile over his face, the kind of person you usually see selling used cars or drugs or running an illegal pornography business. It was like when Harry Potter met Luscious Malfoy—I wanted to hit him from the first time I saw him.
So we do the scene, and then Miss A wants to go home and doesn’t know where the train station is, so being the nice guy that I am, I offer to show it to her. So I take her back to the station, and, for someone who went to Harvard, somehow managed to talk about the most superficial aspects of our experience here. At least she’s a very attractive girl, or it would have been a wasted twenty minutes.
So I get back and Mr. E says, “Oh, you’re back.” His wooden smile has been replaced by something more genuine—an expression of anger.
“Did you think I was going home, or something?”
“No, you just didn’t want me to walk her back is all.”
“Hey, where’s this attitude coming from? I was just trying to be nice,” I said, our other friends were starting to notice now. There were maybe eight other people. We were standing at the side of the street while a Danjiri passed by, the drums thumping their gallop-beat. They have lanterns on the front of them at night, so they were really a spectacular sight.
“And I can’t be nice?” Mr. E said back, a sneer growing out of his own insecurity over his sensitivity.
“I’m sure you could be very nice. Why don’t you start by buying me a beer?”
“Fuck you, man,” he creatively responded.
“Okay, I’ll buy you a beer. You can get the next one,” I get surprisingly calm when I get into arguments over nothing. Quite the opposite of when I feel I’ve been offended.
“You got something to say to me? Just say it. Don’t be a pussy.”
“I already said it: I’ll buy you a beer. What else could a man want, other than a free beer?” I was starting to falter here, and my wit failed me.
“Fucking pussy,” he repeated himself. He likes to talk about female anatomy. He walked away from me at this point. I’m sure he could have hurt me in a fight, even though I’m a good head taller than him, but I didn’t let it escalate to that.
Mr. M and I met up with two Japanese girls we’d met earlier—and yes, they’re just friends. Mr. M has a lady in America and the girls both have significant others as well. We took a lot of “for fun” pictures, as is the Japanese tradition, and ended up at a bar. I was really tired, and no one seemed to be interested in talking to me, as I wasn’t interested in talking, so I slipped off without saying anything and no one seemed to care. Usually I get a text message, as everyone has each other’s cell # here, but nothing. It takes a very strange person to enjoy talking with me, and so far, I haven’t met any in Japan.