Hajime, the masseuse, graduated from K-Town’s high school so-and-so many years ago. He was an English course student and remembers O Sensei, who was “very scared”. He asks me if I know the names of the soccer coaches, and sadly, I do not. Instead we talk about the other ALTS who come here, how they’re funny or kind enough to give them English dictionaries. All the while Hajime is shaking my shoulders or twisting the back of my thigh so my answers come out shaky, with the air forced out as he makes his way down my spine. Then, after all this small talk, he kneels by my head so I can see my lone pair of socks in their plastic container out of the corner of my eye, his white knees kneeling directly underneath me, the whole thing framed by the pink plastic hole I’ve got my head pressed into. “Now, I touch you all over,” he says. He puts his hand between my shoulders, “this is hard. This is most hard.”
I try to nod, but between the pink mat under my chest and the forehead barrier, I’m not really able to move my head. Instead, the fake leather makes awkward stretching noises. “I know,” I say.
Hajime squats for another minute, pulling on my head, and then comes to my side, bends over so I can see his face and says, “change,” moving his hands to indicate he wants me to flip over.
“So, Hajime,” I say when he’s got me in a half nelson, his forearm jiggling the side of my breast as he rotates my shoulder, “do you like what you do?”
Hajime digs his fingers under my shoulder blade, pulling a tight muscle out of its shell. I suck in my breath. “I love it,” he says. “Really, really.”
Johnathan and I have been saying for awhile that we should try an acupuncture clinic down the street from my high school. It rolled over onto our 2008 to-do list and maybe because it’s a pseudo-new year’s resolution, and maybe because it’s 2008, The Year of the Mouse! and it means I have to start grooming and stretching my hamstrings the way they’ve always deserved to be stretched–we made an appointment for last Monday.
The clinic was a brightly lit, cheerful place with a combination of plastic and real ferns. Five or six bepto-bismal pink massage tables were set up in a row in the back of the room. The front was partitioned off into a curtained area that hid a machine with octopus-like tentacles wrapped around it, and the reception desk. When we got there a nervous boy in a high school uniform and a middle-aged woman were sitting on a white leather bench, sandwiched between two leafy plants. While we filled out the standard where-do-you-hurt-when’s-your-birthday forms, the masseurs led people to the pink tables and rubbed shoulders, torqued knees, made people hold shrugs while they pushed down on their shoulders.
We looked around for a barrel full of used acupuncture needles. I checked the base of the plants, digging through the top soil. Johnathan peered into the “dressing room” until a receptionist came up behind him and forced us into the room to divest ourselves of our sweaters and coats and scarves and winter wear. Not wanting to miss out on the point of our visit (although I had indicated, by way of “careful circling” on a hand-drawn sketch of a naked man, where I had “the pain”), Johnathan resolved to ask the receptionipost where the actual acupuncture happened, and if there was any way we could get some. Things disintegrated from there and ended with Johnathan pointing at his neck saying NEEDLE, NEEDLE, HARUNI (the name of the place), NEEDLE while the receptionist glanced nervously over her shoulder and I pretended to be engrossed in the part of the form that asked me if I’d ever had a he-li-ni-a, until Hajime, the masseuse came over to resuce us, saying we were just going to start things off with a nice simple foot bath, did we have any questions? Foot? Bath? Did we understand? and we just nodded meekly and shuffled in our socks around the corner.
What will shock you is that, later, we were both complimented on our Japanese ability. You’d think people who speak Japanese “great!” would know how to ask for acupuncture, and yet the compliment I received was given, by Hajime, in English, after we’d been speaking English for at least 10 minutes. “Your English is great!” I said and he waved a hand, “no, no, your Japanese is great!” Normally I would bask in the glow of this, but it’s kinda hard to take someone seriously when I had to wonder does he think we’ve been speaking Japanese this whole time? What kind of a massage place IS this?
We were given clear plastic tubs and told to remove our socks. Following the example of the high school boy, we also rolled up our pants (layer one) and long under wear (layer 2). We washed our feet in a small corner shower and then were led to 2 short stools in front of a long metal trough full of water. We soaked our feet there for at least 15 minutes while they either debated what they should do with us, so simply forgot we were there. Gradually we became aware of a loud machine hum from a curtain behind us (adjacent to the pink tables). I tried to peek inside, craning my neck in what I’m sure was a damaging way, but all I could see was a mess of wires and a table full of cotton balls. “There’s a whole vat of needles in there,” Johnathan said, “you just can’t see it from your angle.”
“So there IS acupuncture here,” I said, pointing at a barely visible BASICS OF ACUPUNCTURE poster. It had sketches of the pressure points and a curving, yellow spine. “The question is, what do we have to do to get behind that curtain?” Johnathan asked. In the time our feet were ripening we saw the frightened receptionist head behind the curtain two or three times, each time pulling it taunt behind her. We could see her shoes shuffling around a table. Then there’s be the click of a switch and the whirring of a machine. She’d come out, give us a look out of the corner of her eye and then go back to the patients waiting with the plants creeping into their laps.
Hajime came back not long after that and led us to the massage tables. For the next 15 minutes he stretched and pulled and pried my muscles in ways I’m too scared to try. He finished by pinning my shoulders against his chest so tightly I could feel my collarbone pressing against my skin. “Now,” he said, “over here,” and he led Johanthan and I behind the front curtained area where four octopus-like suckers were stuck onto our backs. Then we were left for another 10 minutes with them pinching the skin around my spine. The frightened receptionist finally came to remove them. “Sounds like Darth Vader,” Johnathan said as she released them from my back and pulled them out of my shirt. “Well,” the receptionist said in Japanese, “it’s over.”
And so, internt, for $12 and a plane ticket to Japan you, too, can visit an acupuncture clinic and NOT ACTUALLY HAVE ANY ACUPUNCTURE. I’m not complaining–the follow-up visits are only $5, and from what we could get out of the frightened receptionist, there is no weekly limit. As a testament to Hajime, I wish to note that the day after the pink leather massage, I did not have to take any pain medication for my back. Maybe, as Praju says, I just need to be mentally convinced that I’m getting acupuncture. My head can tell my body this is working and my body will be all, oooohhh…yeah, Hajime’s the bomb.
