99 Bottles of Beer

"Dinner together or be drunk?"

This is a message I received from the junior high school vice principal's daughter. They're my kind of family.

I forgot how much alcohol is an inegral part of Japanese socializing. It is totally normal and acceptable to go down ten or so glasses of beer while at dinner with your boss, his boss, and the boss of everybody, his wife. Granted, the glasses are pretty small. I went to the Parent Teacher Association graduation party, and everybody had a rosy time. But if I were counting honestly, I would have to say each person probably only had two or three 12 ounce bottles of beer over a two hour period.

This is not much to a bulky Anglo-Saxon.

It is a lot to a petite Japanese person.

The PTA enkai was pretty funny, mostly because my students' parents look an awful lot like their kids. It was a little like looking into a distorted futuristic mirror that showed me exactly what twelve-year-old Seiyuu would be like in twenty years, and after three rounds of henpai (that grand drinking game, where you pour for your neighbor, and they reciprocate, and you reimburse, until the bottle is empty and you have to Thor-style it to the waitress: "Another!").

I made the mistake of being able to identify match a few parents and students without asking, and this meant for the rest of the night parents wandered up to me and said, "Quick! Who'm I? Can you guess?"

Sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm slightly apalled at the hints they give.

"I have a daughter," one dad tells me. "She's kind of big."

"You mean tall?" I try to be diplomatic.

"I mean chubby. Fat. Big." Followed by an illustrative gesture.

Nice.

These introductions are always followed up by personal questions (let's face it - every question in Japan is a personal question: how tall are you, how much do you weigh, do you have a boyfriend, are your parents dead?). "Do you have children?" one mom asks me. I have about two hundred by now, if you count students. "No, not yet," I reply. "Are you married?" "No, not yet." "Do you have a boyfriend?"

If I did, he probably would be pissed off that I went to Japan for a month without him.

"No, not yet."

Surprisingly, though, when you talk to younger parents, they are very patient with you.

"That's okay," one mother tells me. "I didn't get married until I was in my thirties. You have to wait to find a responsible, hard-working man, who is financially stable. Nobody wants to marry poor."

I'll drink to that.

As the evening passes, you get up and move around to talk to other people, to drink with your superiors, and express gratitude to the right teachers. The principal came around to chat with me, knock me over with a feather - she's a nice lady, but we're not what you might call convivial with each other - and before we'd gotten two sentences out, some old dude plopped himself down and began chatting with us in extremely thick Tosa-ben.

The Principal translated into standard Japanese and I must have been pretty blotto by then, because I do not remember anything he said to me, although I remember he seemed to have a marvelous time conversing.

I am a great conversationalist.

At the end of the evening, I sneaked over to the sixth grade teacher and said thank you for being such a good teacher. This class was really tough - there were a lot of students and they did not work well together before he came along. In fact, two years ago when I met them, I worried that they were on the breaking point - something that most of the teachers also thought at the time.

By the time we broke up the party with the single unanimous hand clap (which must have an official Japanese name, but I sure don't know it) most folks were swaying, happily-red-faced, and ready for Bedforshire, myself among them. As I walked out the door, the junior high Vice Principal stopped me and asked, "When are we going to izakaya? Maybe get drunk together?"

Like father, like daughter. I really missed this place.