Flying horses couldn’t keep me away

The Sports Day scaffolding has been assembled in the arena. Praju reports students have locked off classrooms down a musty hall and filled them with the fledgling efforts of their massive billboard sized paintings. I see a few third year students wandering the halls like Lady MacBeth, their hands covered in red paint. Leaders have been selected. Classes have been re-scheduled. Starting next week we will have classes until lunchtime and then four hours of Sports Day practice in the afternoons. The Sensei (including me) are busy correcting mid-terms and marking essays, so these half day reprieves come at a good time in the term. We will do busy work inside and through our screened windows monitor the students flapping cards and dancing around in capes. All of us hope it will not rain.

I’ve been on sick leave for the last two weeks, in and out of school. Did you know all the massage therapists at The Massage Place wear white button-up coats that look like chef’s jackets? And solid white polyester pants? And the female receptionists wear baby pink aprons with their names written in hiragana so the little children know what to call them? It’s kind of cute in a cutesy way, and I now associate the color pink with all things medical. There is always pink somewhere in a doctor’s office over here. Pink slippers. Pink massage tables. Pink aprons. Is this meant to be soothing?

Also, there are only male massage therapists and only female receptionists. But hey, when I get a 10-minute foot bath followed by a 15-minute shoulder massage followed by 10 minutes with the octopus electric massage suckers all for 500 yen ($5) I wouldn’t care if it was administered in the 99-year-old woman’s smelly basement. I’ve been in and out of The Massage Place for the last ten days, and yesterday when they asked me how I was doing I was able to honestly say I’m “much better”.

I’ve been home the last three days resting up on the couch, reading, slowly (and I mean really slowly) packing our winter clothes boxes. I strategized. I developed a yoga routine. I figured out when I can go swimming and how often I need to do it. I finished two stories that have been in the back of my mind and eating up space in my sub-conscious. I have, in short, just come out of a spring hibernation. I washed dishes, lengthened my hamstrings and ate leftovers. I also got a little perspective, which makes me freak out a little less when I see on a neighbor’s email “status” the phrase: eight weeks left.

Eight weeks!

Eight weeks.

Back at school I’m eating my sandwich out of a bag that says I may put these things in it: carrots, broccoli, apples, sausage, candy, cheese. We’re getting tempermental plastic over here as summer approaches.

The three Board of Education professionals come in during lunchtime in black suits and power shirts and suddenly all 50 of us, chairs rolling back in our wake, are on our feet and the Principal gives introductions. They roam around all afternoon and then disappear. We did a stretch of “emergency” cleaning for them, if you’ll remember, but I don’t believe any comments were made on how spiffy our shelves were. Disappointing.

The student teachers are also here. There are about two of them to every Sensei and they’re all wearing the same black suit. During the morning meeting they troop into the room carrying their own red stools to sit on. They don’t appear to have any other purpose than just observing. I’m keeping a watchful eye on them.

I showed the second year students my brother’s high school graduation announcement and they gave him the highest praise: “Cool”. They were very disappointed to hear he had a girlfriend. He does have facial stubble in his senior picture, which is something the boys here won’t have to deal with for many more years. The Asian face just does not sprout hairs like a North American mountain man.

I filled one of Johnathan’s old socks with rice and heat it up in the microwave for my shoulders. Several of the Sensei have commented on how “cute” his sort-of-dirty old sock is. I think my parting gift to a few of them may be beautiful cloth bags of rice that will sit sweating in their metal desk drawers all through August and September and October. Until November when I expect a few thank-you notes and anecdotes about healed muscles. These chairs we sit in. They are very bad for the back.

Ms. Delicious is very glad to have me back at school and gave me an awkward side hug this morning. “You are feeling better,” she said. To which I said, “Yes, I am.” I did 30-minutes of yoga this morning, took a shower, made my own lunch and was 15 minutes early to school. “What does this mean, ‘be fired up?'” Kana asked me in debate class, holding out her dictionary. And so I taught them the cheer, Let’s get fired up! We are fired up! and I expect to see it used at Class Match while their classmates are thumping volleyballs over the net.

I’m feeling good and it’s great to be back in the saddle where I get to tell T-Rex Sensei, “The magazine won’t carry an item about his scandal,” is wrong, and I get to tell O Sensei that the phrases, “We will clean up the park this weekend” and “we’re going to clean up the part this weekend” are virtually identical, and where Kana answers everything with the phrase, “I am impatient”. How are you doing? I asked the class and Kana shouted back, I am impatient! Well, then, Kana, let’s get this party started.

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Stations of Rehabilitation

“This time is crucial,” the Sensei tell me when I hobble into school on Wednesday. “Please go back home!” And so, while the whole school heads down to the river for the 100th anniversary baseball game, I get in my car and drive to the acupuncturist. He kneads my hamstrings and puts small portable needles in my tight neck muscles, and then I go home where I lay flat on my back for the afternoon. I get up periodically to stretch intensely, so intent am I on limbering myself up and making a day sitting in my chair at school manageable.

Aside from one day to recover from a Gallstone! Attack! in late February, I haven’t taken any sick days in the (almost) two years I’ve been here. Until this week.

Sick days are not taken lightly in Japan. Because the teachers have an abundance of vacation time they’re not allowed to use, they usually put up a couple paid holidays in the face of a sinus infection or the flu. Sick days are left for long stays in the hospital, cancer treatments, back surgery. To take a sick day I must produce proof of purchase in the form of a receipt from the doctor’s office. And this is only for foreigners. In fact, the form I brought back from the doctor’s on Monday–a detailed outline of my condition–is enough for one day of sick leave, but calls are currently in progress to see if it will work for the other day and a half I’ve taken.

The part of this that really fries my pancake is that it’s left up to someone else to judge if I am well or not. I’m treated like an unruly child who has a history of heating thermometers under light bulbs. We’re shaping the young minds of Japan here, we let the students go home after a period of light coughing and a feigned headache, and yet the Sensei, The SENSEI aren’t allowed to leave the building even if a typhoon is howling at the windows. We are, for better or worse, part of a larger organization that needs medical approval for a stomach virus.

[The verdict is in, not much drama to this saga: I have 2 weeks of sick leave. I just have to swing by the doctor’s office tomorrow afternoon to pick up the proper form. And perhaps have a little more spider tape stuck to my neck.]

Truthfully, today I’m not doing all that bad, but that’s in comparison to Sunday and Monday where it felt like someone was trying to screw my skull onto my spine. I sleep with towels stuffed under my shoulders, per the doctor’s instructions, and for some reason that has made all of my muscle tightness and turbulence shoot like an arrow down to my gluteous maximus which makes it feel like it’s stuffed into a tightly woven basket of nerve ends.

I’m like a delicate bird trying out its new wings. Was that a twinge in my shoulder? If I move my neck just so, to stretch this muscle, will it snap back to bite my ear? Is this light pain I’m feeling going to morph into hysterical muscle cramping and knots in my neck as punishment for a day spent typing? I have never been so conscious of my shoulders and neck as an area that needed such pampering. Which is perhaps what got me sent to the doctor’s office Monday.

He came highly recommended as O Sensei’s joint specialist, so after a morning spent whimpering on the couch, Johnathan drove me across town, in the pouring rain, for an evaluation. I was in a mildly hallucinagenic state from the pain and so it all sort of runs together in a blur: the plastic orange chairs in the waiting room that smelled like cigarettes, the old people with tinfoil and wet towels wrapped around their knees, the “stations of rehabilitation” set up around the room like an obstacle course with big numerals marking where you were on the spectrum.

We spent about an hour being “next in line” for the doctor (station 1) and eventually I curled up on the pink couch in the fetal position, and that got us some attention. A few nurses led me to a bed where I kicked off my baby pink slippers and flung my arm over my eyes. About two seconds later the doctor came to check on me. “Neck pain, huh?” he said to me, and then to the nurses, “do some x-rays.” They led me to an adjacent cubicle where I was lined up, shot twice, and then taken back to the resting mat.

From these he deduced: my shoulders are lower than they are supposed to be (check), I probably have arm and finger numbness occasionally (check), my neck is chronically tight (check), and all of this points to THORACIC OUTLET SYNDROME. Which I thought was a joke until he showed us the picture book with the English name next to a cartoonish picture of the thoracic cavity. There is no treatment for thoracic outlet syndrome (except The Tea)–there is only prevention. He stuck two graphs of spider tape on either side of my neck, gave me a prescription for The Tea and then sent me on a tour of the rest of the facility.

Nurses stuck hot lights on my small toes (station 2), they laid me on a table and lowered a horrible looking black contraption toward me until an arm shot out and rested near my collarbone (station 3). “This won’t hurt,” they said, turning on the machine. They took off my shirt and rubbed my back with what looked like tuning forks covered in jelly (station 4). I was asked to hold a tuning fork to my jugular while they did this, to keep the blood flowing. Then they showed me one quick shoulder shrug exercise to do (station 5), told me to soak my feet in hot water, and sent us to the exit.

I have to say: I thought I was all into that Eastern Medicine vibe with the natural therapies and rehabilitation clinics around every corner and people walking around with small acupuncture needles stuck to their spine with bandaids. But what I really wanted on Monday was: DRUGS. They gave me a tea meant to loosen up my shoulders, although the jury is still out on whether or not that has aided my recovery. I found that just like every other person in the Western world who falls into a mishap, I wanted a pill that would unscrew my head or at the very least put me to sleep. It was a sad end to the day, trading our pink slippers for shoes and then standing under the small covering of the clinic, me weeping into Johnathan’s shoulders, him trying to comfort me by waving the tea packets in my face. Meanwhile, the rain continued to pour, and is there anything more dreamlike than being in pain while the world is awash in grey and shimmering puddles?

I was in pain. I was in a kind of prolonged intense pain my scoliotic back had never subjected me to before. And it just kept going and going. I hate to be the weak duckling, which is perhaps why it came as a surprise to Ms. Delicious and the Sensei that I’ve been having an 8-year struggle with my back. I’m in the habit of popping a pill when things get bad, but my body has since told me calmly, but firmly, that it’s had enough of that. The pills will not do their duty anymore, and so it means I have to be conscious of my posture and in tune to the natural rhythms of my body, no matter how painful they may be. I’ve brought a pillow to school for my nasty chair, I’m going on walks around the campus with Praju every morning, I’m going to head to the acupuncturist every day after school.

I’m telling you all of this so I can add this advice at the end: DO NOT BE AS STUPID AS I HAVE BEEN. Learn from my mistakes young ones. We’ve had “emergency cleaning” around here the last two mornings in place of reading time. The Sensei shove all the papers into drawers, dust the shelves, re-arrange the magnets on the boards. When we asked why we’re doing this all of a sudden they told us a troupe from the Board of Education is expected for an inspection, hence the urgency. I really wish muscle pain was such an easy thing to deal with, that I could just push a button on my throbbing scapula and my engine would re-set. Instead, I’ve learned a lesson I’ve been trying to dodge for some time now. My body is just a bit more frail than yours or your sister-in-law’s, and even if I tell you–even if I swear to you, looking deep into your eyes–that I can heft the 50 pound suitcase onto the conveyor belt, or that I can type up your 300-page manuscript in an afternoon, DO NOT BE FOOLED. This is just a miscommunication between my brain and my thoracic outlet. My brain wants to go to Amakusa this weekend to spot dolphins with Hana. My thoracic outlet is looking forward to a quiet evening snuggled up with the rice sock.

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Throw that feast…throw it good

For about a year and a half now, Johnathan and I have lived in a state of perpetual fear that the gas pipe to our hot water heater in the kitchen would someday explode (you sense this is going nowhere good). Let me set this up for you. This pipe is wrapped in tinfoil and has been artfully draped about two inches from the smoking blue gas burners on our stovetop. We don’t have an oven, although we do have a microwave that will heat milk so long as the heaters and blankets and toaster and lights are all switched to their off position, so we do a lot of cooking on said stove. Unlike the gasline to our two burners, which we turn off when we’re not about to fry ourselves up some cold rice, the gasline to our hot water heater is always filled with a cloud of combustible air. [Aside: I’m not really sure why we let the hot water heater greedily guzzle to its hearts content considering that it so rarely sparks on command. See earlier posts about us wandering around in our sweatpants, batteries weighing down the pockets.]

A few days ago I made a fish curry that Johnathan refuses to eat anymore after one time when I made it so, so salty, and we both still forced it down. Now he can’t get the taste out of his mouth. When I make a curry, the smell of onions sort of hangs in our confined air. It’s pretty pungent, and when going from one warm room to another the smell sort of whallops your nose hairs. Which is why I didn’t immediately notice a foul smell when I left the warm bedroom to go the bathroom. I did notice Johnathan was boiling a pot of hot water for noodles, and from my vantage point on the toilet I could see that the pot was pushed a little far back on the stove for my taste. In fact, it was touching the tinfoil gas line. So I quickly pulled up my underwear and long underwear and purple sweatpants, zipped up my sweatshirt and stepped out of the toilet. I waddled my padded legs over to the stove and yanked the pot away from the line.

I got my nose down close to the bubbling water and took a sniff. It smelled way worse than onions, so I gave a holler and Johnathan burst out of his exercise room, headphones askew. We immediately noticed a thick gray non-onion like fog in the air, and it was quickly ascertained that the flame under the pot had been traveling up the side and licking a little hole right through the tinfoil. We snapped off both burners and slid open the door to the balcony. I braced myself, expecting a galacial front, but it turned out it was almost warmer outside, and we’d been sort of freezing ourselves out in our concrete box by keeping all the windows closed and covered.

Johnathan pressed his ear to the singed pipe and could just make out the hiss of released gas, so we officially twisted both gas lines to the off position and Johnathan heated himself up some leftovers for dinner. We sequestered ourselves in the other room (and left the kitchen/balcony door open all night for good measure) and the next morning Johanthan called his supervisor who informed us that this was serious. A repairman was dispatched in due haste.

I am pleased to report that our stove was moved forward about half a foot and the pipe in question is now tinfoil-less and resides at a respectable distance behind it. We made it through the night, and the air hasn’t smelled like either onions or shishkabobbed metal in days. In fact, my closest brush with fire came a day later at the acupuncturist. I was soaking my feet in the scalding metal trough when the energetic owner and Hajime beelined over foisting on us a plate which held what looked like dozens miniature cigarettes. They pried one off, stuck it to the skin between my thumb and forefinger, and then lit the sucker on fire with a long black lighter. The owner had apparently gotten really excited and stuck them up and down his arm from his shoulder to his wrist. It was a form of ancient Chinese fire massage. The light burning is supposed to act like a kind of acupuncture.

In other news, K-town’s graduation is this Saturday, and so the flower arranging club has invited us to make creations with them (a request we sadly had to turn down as we are in the market for pictures and other paraphenalia for the graduating English club members). T-Rex Sensei extended the olive branch in class the other day by inviting me to a graduation party I’d not only signed up for but paid for a month ago. “Graduation falls on this Saturday,” he said, “and afterward we will throw a grand feast. Will you join us?”

And I–knowing the life-threatening danger I’d be in if I tried to throw such a feast on my own rickety gas stove–said I would.

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3-2-1 Shock!

If I’d know that all it took to make friends with Japanese people was frequenting the local osteotherapy clinic, I suppose I wouldn’t have waited until the dead of winter 2008. Every time we go the owner invites us for “real” sushi; Hajime, my recurring massuese, gives Hana and I turtle-shaped (and flavored?) candies; the pink aproned receptionists shout hello and good-bye and ask if the octopus suckers stuck to my vertebrae are too powerful or would I like to level up?

Last week I had one of the rotating masseurs, Yamamoto, who was kinda obsessed with my legs. Johnathan warned me about this guy, and although it all worked out in the end, he did spend an inordinate amount of time massaging the inside of my thighs. And the side of my butt. But here’s why I forgave him: as if my magic, he stuck his thumb into the flesh of my hip and hit a hot muscle button that I’m always digging around trying to find. I yelped. Yamamoto calmly counted to ten and then let up. It was like he’d found the lost and forgotten leg extension button. I swear, I came out of there two inches taller instead of all hunched and shriveled with cold. (In the interest of blogistic accuracy, I do feel it necessary to report that Yamamoto pulled down Hana’s pants to buttcrack viewing level while he attached the suckers to her hips: bad massage form.)

Speaking of Hana, the massage always seems to be a relaxing event for her. She lays there placidly while they prod her wounded hip. When they attach the electric suckers she lounges face-up on a soft bench with a towel draped artfully across her eyes. She dozes. Meanwhile, I’m on my stomach, my face pressed into a sweaty pink hole and Yamamoto pulls my arms straight out like Superman. My shoulders are a board, he announces, and pokes at them with the tips of his fingers. Then they’ve got me face planted onto a yoga mat, the suckers chewing at my neck muscles, and when I come up at the end of ten minutes my hair is rumpled and my forehead and nose bear the imprint of a papertowel. My hear is beating too fast from the electric pulses, and I feel light-headed. I stumble around the corner to Hana who has whipped up her stray hairs and is beaming, refreshed. Meanwhile, one of my pantlegs is rolled up to Huckleberry Finn level, the other has unrolled halfway down my calf, my hair sticks to the side of my sweaty face, and I’m holding a ball of dubiously clean socks.

And yet still, these people seem to like me. Yamamoto makes Japanese small talk while he re-aligns my spine. Can I use chopsticks? Do I know Japanese comedians? Will I see the cherry blossoms? He asks about a famous Japanese actress and when I admit I don’t know her he stops kneading my muscles and yells, “shock! shock!”

I rarely see people my own age at the massage place. It’s mostly the osteo-crowd, and occasionally the owner’s children who stand at the door in their stockinged feet and stare. On Saturday there was a young woman a few years older than me who had exceptionally tight hamstrings and was contorting her face in pain as the owner stood on the table and leaned onto her bare leg. A toddler in a green, fur-lined parka dozed on one of the back tables. There’s a kale garden outside the clinic, and I’d never realized what an amazing tri-colored and at the same time stiff rose the petals made. It looked like a tie-dyed rose laced with barbed wire. When I came out of the locker room after hastily snatching my scarf, Hajime was straddling a pink table, showing the young woman black and white topograpical maps of her feet on his computer screen.

The heart clock had ticked away an hour while we were there, and we had to rush to make our train. Hana had her bike, so I jogged along beside her on the way to the train station. She reached out her hand and grabbed my wrist and I wished I could pop wheels out of my shoes so she could tow me. I mean, leg extensions are one thing, but inspector-gadget like contraptions popping out of my appendages would have really made my day.

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Seasons: winter

We live in a refrigerator. Frozen meat on the counter takes days to defrost. The batteries in our hot water heater get so cold we walk around with them in our pockets, trying to warm them enough to heat the water to wash our hands. Last night, while trying to make tapioca, my feet and fingers froze in the middle of whipping the egg whites. I had to rush into the other room and defrost my hands in front of the heater. Crusty egg whites, newly melted, made my palms slick.

Now that debate is over I’ve been making the round robin of clubs. Last Friday Praju and I invited Hana to tea ceremony and the three of us trooped across the school to the traditional room. The room, we soon found out, isn’t heated. The girls sat with their legs tucked under their skirts; the pleated fabric connected girl to girl across the room, so the rows they sat in were one long navy ribbon. They brought us steaming bowls of green tea and we gulped them down. “It was so hot when we came before, in the summer,” Praju says. “Now it feels so good.”

We can’t stop talking, and The Sado Sensei gives us disapproving looks from across the room. Later, when we leave, I bow and tell her thank you, and she admonishes me, you’re really supposed to be quiet when they’re serving tea. I know, I say, I’m sorry. I feel jittery, from the caffeine, and don’t have the relaxed feeling I got when I came alone last year. Saki, a 1-1 student, sits next to Hana and gives a running commentary. We ask her which she likes better: tea ceremony or flower arranging. “I feel relaxed at tea ceremony,” she says, “I’m quiet and watching.” This, opposed to the flying scissors and bright petals in flower arranging. The other girls coach each other. We sit in a box around one student who is officially learning. She scoops water and washes the bowls and whips tea with a wicker brush. The other girls have pretend sets in front of them and they remind each other: right hand here, two swipes there, turn the bowl twice. Hana picks up her bowl and twirls it so she can see the design of fans embossed with gold. Saki gasps. “No, no, one turn.” Hana points at the fans. “Can’t I look at them?” Saki shakes her head. “After,” she says, then, picking up her own bowl, “do it like this.”

We wait around until they serve tea to everyone, because that’s when the sweets come out. It’s a little monotonous, watching all the girls go through the same routine, but I can see how long it takes to really pick this up, to memorize it so you’re not weeping in a yellow yukata at the Culture Festival. When I first went to tea ceremony I stayed until the end–nearly 7 o’clock–because I didn’t know how to leave. “So many of us have that problem in Japan,” Hana says, “learning how to extract ourselves.”

When we go to the acupuncturist it’s only us and the grandparents. Grandmothers struggling out of sweaters. Grandfathers in polyester pants. The old people grunt at us. The staff is thrilled to have us there, and all of them turn to Hajime to translate, even though we tell them we speak Japanese. “Put your arms in front,” my new masseur says in Japanese and then, to Hajime, a couple of tables over, who is twirling Hana’s knee, “how do you say ‘in front’?” I tell him I understand and he pushes down on my arms while I try to hold them straight as Superman. Then he tells me to shrug and again shouts over to Hajime. Our conversation boils down to him speaking in Japanese, and me responding in English: because it’s what he expects. The acupuncturist’s office is in a new building, the only one we’ve been to with central heating. Between the foot bath and the towels they smother us with while they search out the hard muscles, I finally feel warm.

Last week Johnathan bought me the largest bag of mandarin oranges either of us have ever seen; it was 300 yen. I swear it has at least 100 oranges in it. I’ve been eating them 5 or 6 a day for a week and I’m only a third of the way through. A student haiku:

One day, very cold nnight
I ate oranges in kotatsu
Orange peels like a mountain

Our kotatsu is covered with a half-finished puzzle. My new sewing project is spread across the top of that. Orange peels and kotatsu–that says winter in Japan to me.

But we’re coming up on Strawberry Season, and Hana has brought to my my attention Kurume’s “Strawberry Princess” and “High School Hero” awards. The 2nd place High School Hero is a boy I know in the third grade. He grew up in America and became the default leader of the English class. The first place boy, we all agree, looking at the photo in the magazine Hana bought at the convenience store, is “not cool”. “My students tell me he just has a lot of friends who voted for him,” Hana says.

In the magazine there are also hundreds of thumbnail sized pictures of Coming of Age Day. The new 20-year-olds are dressed up in kimono with white fur collars, and they’re standing in front of temples across the prefecture. “I wish I was 20 and could do this,” Hana sighs. “I told my students and they said I should do it anyway. ‘No one knows how old foreigners are, anyway,’ they said.” The girls faces are whitened and blushed across the cheeks; they look like dolls with their hair glossy and slicked back. In tea ceremony, we ask Saki what color kimono she wants to wear when she turns 20. She gets a dreamy look in her eyes. “Pink,” she says, “it’s so cute.”

One of the top three girls for Strawberry Princess is in the same class as the 2nd place High School Hero. There’s a picture of them, together, with their friends, and I can name all the students in the photo. I can’t believe no one told me about this. I want to blow up the picture and put it on the bulletin board and wait for the third year students to find out. The only equivalent I can imagine is like a city-wide Prom King and Queen contest. Only the winners from our area go on to a national competition. Our kids have the brains and the good looks. What more could I want out of a high school?

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Pink leather massage

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.

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