An Hour in TV Land - A Year in Fukushima #8

The following account of my Saturday evening is completely true and totally uncensored.

The clock on the wall was ticking toward 10:30. I had just finished hanging the laundry in the living room. (Just go with it, this is Japan remember.) A familiar snoring reverberated from the bedroom, an unintentional but unmistakable message from the wife that I could go ahead and play Lone Ranger again tonight. Twenty-four hours ago I had sketchy plans to meet up with a buddy for that ever-elusive beer; unfortunately on this day, like most recent days, I had been deep into my work and the fascination of how slow my microchips move, and I forgot to get back to him. So there I stood, all alone, between two racks of wet clothes and my sleeping family. It was 10:25 on a Saturday night.

This, by the way, is not the bad part.

The bad part is, I decided to turn on the TV.

I stepped on train tracks and tripped over dinosaurs as I scrounged around for the remote. Then I fell onto the couch and clicked that baby, hoping for…well, anything. After a moment staring at a blank screen I got up and walked over to our TV with built-in VCR, which you have to turn on manually if that’s how your son turned it off. Then I plopped back down as the picture warmed up.

First thing I saw were three walking, singing pollen spores getting their lights punched out by a psychotic football player spray-painted the color of aluminum foil. After a pleasant jingle someone breathed easier, and the scene switched to a computer-generated garden. A woman in red smiled as she walked along, seemingly unfazed by the line of grinning red birds following her. They had a conversation and sang a song before another woman came on, marching down the street in front of a row of levitating tubes of some kind of crème.

At this I went downstairs and dug desperately for the last two cans of beer in the house. As I settled back onto the couch again I swore to never forget to call another friend.

Now on was a commercial not for a sweet bread factory but for an upcoming program about a sweet bread factory. Stainless steel robots squirted caramel and icing everywhere as canned voices went ‘Ooh!’ and ‘Wow!’ Meanwhile a narrator with a voice that made Alvin and the Chipmunks sound like the three tenors squeaked on about how much fun it would be to make bread together so join her at 6:55pm Sunday evening, right there, for a loaf of excitement. Yes, that’s right. 6:55pm. Sharp.

Switch channels.

Two women in power suits are having a dire conversation while standing on a beach and looking at a photo. Right away I know someone has died. This is because in a Japanese drama if someone dies two women have to go talk about it on a beach. (If someone has been murdered, on the other hand, they have to go talk about it on top of a cliff overlooking the beach.) One of the women has a flashback; she once saved the boy in the photo from a nosebleed.

Cut to half a dozen penguins with backpacks on.

The Japanese school year begins in April, so now is the time for all the proud parents out there to equip their kids with new backpacks. These hard shell suckers are shaped like mailboxes without legs and are going this year for 9,900 yen, or about a hundred bucks. Outrageous, maybe, but well worth it to avoid the shame of being the only one in school not looking like those penguins.

The follow-up was a commercial featuring a desk and two matching bookcases, moving around of their own free will, showing all the different configurations four hundred dollars could get me.

Switch channels.

Two commercials of girls having an inordinate amount of fun, first with their cell phones, then with a squeeze bottle of black sugar ice cream sauce. Next, a guy dressed all in white experiences an emotional catharsis as he prepares an elaborate dinner with what must be the most amazing cooking oil known to man – and sits down to eat it by himself, between two lemon trees.

Switch back to the drama.

The woman on the beach who wasn’t holding the picture is now in the home of a man who is pretending to listen as he pours two cups of sake. The woman refuses; the man takes a loud sip as the woman continues her story. Then to scenes of nosebleed boy wearing a certain necklace, a mystery woman wearing the same necklace, then nosebleed boy in a coffin followed by a quick street shot that someone seemed to have forgotten to edit out. Back to the woman talking at the man drinking her sake but I have a hard time getting a handle on the connection between nosebleed boy, the necklace and that street.

Switch channels.

Figure skating sweetheart Mao Asada takes a bite out of a circular chocolate bar thing and smiles at me. I don’t want to risk becoming a figure skater and I reach for my beer instead. Next up is a Nissan commercial featuring some kick-ass computer graphics and something called ‘Drive Life’. Then we go live to the figure skating competition going on right down the road in Tokyo. The next group of skaters is out on the ice warming up, most of the cameras following Daisuke Takahashi, evidently Japan’s best chance at home-spun glory. Interspersed among replays of Daisuke’s practice jumps and close-ups of his styled yet loosely rebellious hair are shots of a white guy going through his final triple toe loopy-loops and a young Japanese kid wearing something that I can only adequately describe as double chiffon. I know it’s part of the deal for these guys to drape themselves in sparkles and silk, but I think even a couple of the other skaters were laughing.

This may have been the reason they went back to commercials so soon.

On came a series of short clips of people from all over, from San Fran to New Orleans to Nigeria, playing whatever instrument and singing ‘Stand By Me’. Before I could figure out why, I was transported to a convenience store where I could witness first hand the sharp quality of Mitsubishi’s security cameras. I wondered how many people sitting at home watching TV right then might be in the market for a higher quality security camera. Next up was a cell phone commercial where the members of SMAP, Japan’s most annoyingly ubiquitous gods of pseudo-talent, are flying through the lower atmosphere on one of about three dozen airborne freight containers. At first cooly composed, they begin jumping from one brightly-colored box to the next, way up high in the sky. That song ‘Come on baby, do the locomotion’ is playing, which makes SMAP’s fake antics even cooler if that is possible.

Before returning to the skating I was treated to twenty seconds of the most voluptuous cartoon women I have ever seen. They were frolicking in a tropical paradise in their cartoon bikinis when a guy with chiseled muscles and green hair rode a massive cartoon wave to shore. They celebrated something, overlaid with the name and logo of one of Japan’s pachinko chains.

Pachinko, in case you are not aware, is a sort of pinball game that has taken Japan’s chain-smoking male population by storm. Maruhan, Dynam, Niraku and Jumbo are some of the biggies; they build huge cement boxes and fill them with rows upon rows of these machines and blare this uniquely obnoxious music which evidently has the capacity to drive out of people’s heads every thought but one: god, more pachinko please.

Back to the skating, and the white guy is already into his routine and wiping out.

Switch channels.

With no Super Bowl, slam dunk contests or hockey fights to ward off the winter blues, and now with the spring sumo tournament on the chopping block, Japan looks eagerly toward the beginning of baseball season. This means fifteen minutes of spring training highlights, thirteen of them devoted to rookie Yuki ‘Yu-chan’ Saito, brightest new member of the Nippon Ham Fighters starting rotation. Yu-chan didn’t pitch on Saturday due to a tummy ache, but earned some quality media attention for standing out on the field talking to his teammates before the game and, later, ignoring hundreds of adoring fans as he walked out of a building and got onto the team bus.

I switched channels when they went to Japan League soccer highlights. I like soccer, quite a bit actually, but J-League is painful to watch with some of the uniform color schemes they come up with.

TV personality 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano is dressed in a red and white bathrobe, baring his belly, a samurai wig on his head as he…ugh, forget it.

Switch channels.

It’s 10:55, which means the weather report. There is a weather report five minutes before every hour all day long in Japan. They will even interrupt a special report about the weather to show the weather report, usually sponsored by an eyeglass store but today we are getting the forecast along with a view of a car dealership in Koriyama, accompanied in the background by the inimitable voice of Steve Perry.

Spring looks to be on the way. Until Tuesday.

Switch channels.

A guy who looks a lot like Orlando Bloom is taking himself much too seriously as he walks in a circle, sporting some of UniQlo’s latest fashions (if that isn’t too incongruous a term). Another guy, then a girl, looking as intense as Orlando, walk in their own circles before we get back to – Yes! It is Orlando Bloom. And you can bet he shops at UniQlo, just like Michael Jordan used to eat Big Macs even when he wasn’t being paid $8 million for it. Another pachinko commercial (a cheap rip-off of the Matrix) and suddenly it’s time to crack my other beer.

In my fridge, by the way: soy milk, noodles (two kinds), miso, some really long and skinny leafy green, pickled vegetables (three kinds) and a little plastic tub filled with sour bite-size plums called umeboshi. No wonder I’ve lost twenty pounds over the last year and a half.

Back in the living room a well-known female TV personality is screaming the praises of another pachinko parlor. She seems to think she can put a little James Brown in her step. She finally shuts up, only so I can listen to a black guy and a dog sitting at a sushi bar having a conversation about a cell phone deal. Then five seconds of this dancing egg singing a jingle about FTV, the station I didn’t know I was watching, followed by two young boys dressed like color-blind golfers talking about how much fun they had at Tokyo Disney Resort.

Next, an actual program: A show called ‘Everyone’s Opinion’ – which tells me I may see people expressing themselves, perhaps even publicly disagreeing. This is exciting. Until a cartoon drawing of a flower-laden city park appears, a gentle pop song playing in the background as a woman with a voice like warm honey begins reading from the cartooned postcards that appear on screen one by one, sent in by people who are very politely against something or other.

The show is soon over – not many people willing to have their anonymous opinions read tonight – and I get two more pachinko commercials.

Switch channels.

A show with two extremely dolled-up girls going gaga over a website about Tokyo life, written by and featuring some fake face female blogger. On the home page, under the apropos title ‘東京大好き！’ is the English translation, in big bold letters for the entire nationwide viewing audience to see: ‘I fucking love Tokyo!’

Switch back to the skating. Daisuke Takahashi is in the middle of his routine. Seriously, just once I want to see a skater come out in jeans and a t-shirt. Among the advertisements lining the rink is a sign that reads ‘The Four Continents Championships’. At least they’re honest. Major League Baseball should take the hint on this one. Daisuke finishes and skates off, looking none too pleased. Ah yes, an immediate replay of a spectacular wipeout. And yet he’s still in first place. On his team warm-up jacket is the name and logo of one of his sponsors, a cosmetic company.

Cut to commercials. A girl is passed out on her pile of schoolbooks, woken up by a marching band of yellow people parading across the top of her desk. She drinks something yellow and feels much better. Then two consecutive pachinko commercials.

Switch to a normally-dressed Beat Takeshi, who is speaking with a panel of guests about a woman who died just that day in Kyushu, her accident involving a big hole in the ground and some nearby construction equipment. Everyone is standing around the hole, looking down into it. No one is doing anything. Then Beat and Company move on to a story that, as far as I can tell, centers on a pair of girls who stole some soy sauce.

Cut to a commercial of a 50-something guy getting the once-over by a perky young girl walking her dog. He smiles and runs his hand over his hair, then suddenly he’s in the barber’s chair, then a close-up of his rich scalp, then a very confident nod of his head as he talks to someone on the phone.

11:15 seems like a good time for the national weather report.

Switch to a drama, or maybe a movie, featuring three white women speaking Japanese in a nice home. Cut to three men having a very serious conversation, also in Japanese, in a dank warehouse. Back in the nice house there are only two women now; one of them hands the other a pad of paper and a pencil. ‘Draw a picture,’ she says in perfect Japanese. ‘Okay,’ the other one says, and starts slamming the pencil point against the page as the first woman watches, blank-faced. Back to the warehouse.

Switch channels.

Commercial of two guys running through a snowy forest, jumping over fallen logs and sliding down three-foot embankments before suddenly throwing themselves across a ten-meter-wide ravine, river rushing by a hundred feet below. One guy slips and begins to fall, the other catches his hand and they start screaming ‘FIGHT-OH!’ as death is averted. They finish by letting me know the taurine shots disguised as the vitamin drinks they are chugging are what kept them on the happy side of disaster.

Commercial for Dynam Pachinko.

A mountain goat and an unidentifiable rodent are talking on a mountaintop about a loan.

100 people in pajamas have taken to the street to adore their joint medication.

Jumbo Pachinko.

Line of grinning red birds following the woman again.

Commercial for iPhone 4, starring a grumpy cartoon man.

Niraku Pachinko.

Back around to the fake face blogger girl with the potty mouth. She’s in screeching hysterics with a small group of fake face friends, first out in a city plaza then in her apartment. They can barely shut up long enough for blogger girl’s white boyfriend to comment about how ‘It’s great she has an outlet for her creativity.’ Then a shot of a computer screen and someone’s comment of ‘I think Maiko’s eye make-up is really pretty.’ Cut to fake-face Maiko with a dozen other girls, all in a line, their arms interlocked, none of them with real hair or real lashes or real skin on their cheekbones.

Switch.

To a Dynam Pachinko commercial.

A commercial for a show about a wedding.

A herd of talking reindeer; three guys still in the warehouse; talking reindeer again on a different channel; a show featuring Yu-chan’s fans, who are all wearing pink neck warmers because Yu-chan wears one and it makes him look so much cooler than those silky sparkly figure skaters.

With this I down the last of my beer and turn the TV off.

I swear I will never again forget to call my friend.

Love Rules In Japan

The Choco-Laws of Valentine's Day

I'm sitting in my usual chair in Conference Room 201. Four Japanese people are sitting silently in their places, looking at me with nervous expectation. Time once again for English class here at the manufacturing company.

"Hello everyone!" We English teachers are so glib. "How is everyone doing?"

Silence.

"So can someone tell me what day it is?"

I believe, maybe foolishly, that someday, someone will answer without being called on by name.

This is a great first question for class, by the way. It's an easy way for the students to switch into English mode, and it lets me know what day it is.

Scanning the four faces in front of me to decide who to pick on, I see that Michiko looks particularly nervous. Doesn't she know what day it is? The three guys in the class are staring at her too now, all of them grinning like I just called on her.

"February fourteee-eeen," one of them says, not to me but to Michiko.

And it hits me. Valentine's Day!

There's no sign of any chocolate in the vicinity of Michiko but I'm salivating like a Pavlovian dog. Because I know she knows the rules.

Not Because I'm a Pervert

As February comes to Japan it’s hard to miss the excitement of Valentine’s Day. All up and down the archipelago department stores and supermarkets explode with red and brown boxes of chocolate-covered love.

On the surface it looks like your typical Valentine’s Day in any number of countries around the world.

But in Japan, where people show affection about as often as they take a day off from work, the enthusiasm for Valentine’s Day seems utterly illogical. I love my adopted neighbors, but really, I've seen houseflies show more passion. (It's true, I have. It was weird.)

There is an explanation for the incongruousness. And it's right where you'd expect: in a thorough set of guidelines that tells the entire population how to properly express their mandatory feelings.

By Japanese rule, women are expected to give Valentine's Day chocolate to every male they normally associate with, like bosses, co-workers, and (ahem) English teachers. Men are expected to do nothing but rake in the truffles.

In other words, being someone's Valentine in Japan is not a matter of being the object of their affection so much as being an object in their proximity.

A Little Bit of History

The confectionary company Mozoroff is said to have introduced the concept of Valentine’s Day to Japan in 1936, with an advertising campaign targeting "those grabby foreigners." Long mired in a climate of muted self-expression, these expats were only too happy to propagate the chocolate-covered scheme, reuniting with their libidos for better or for worse.

The wider Japanese population, on the other hand, had no idea how to handle the strange feeling of having feelings. They would only begin to enjoy the amorous effluvium years later, once the rules for doing so had been developed and disseminated and committed to memory.

Interestingly, an error in the translation of an early Mozoroff advertisement may have led to the unique Japanese custom of the women giving chocolates to the men. Thanks to that other unique Japanese concept called gaman the women decided not to cause a fuss. (It reportedly took the men less gaman to keep their mouths shut.)

Love Rules

On Valentine’s Day in Japan the mark of true love is known as hon-mei, the highest form of chocolate in the land. Traditionally a woman would make this chocolate herself, wrapping it in paper with the precision of a neurosurgeon and presenting it to her (presumably) one true love, who in turn is expected by state ordnance to recognize all the effort and labor that went into this box of bon-bons and conclude that the woman deserves to have children.

Some women would attempt to pass off expensive and elaborately-wrapped store-bought chocolate as hon-mei, but such side-door attempts at love were only met with suspicion if not outright scorn (politely expressed). Recently, however, to the relief of countless women and the delight of many a confectioner, the taboo of such false affection has received official governmental mitigation, proffered case-by-case in correlation to how expensive and elaborately-wrapped the chocolate is divided by the man's TOEIC score.

(You All Have to) Be My Valentine

In the Japanese workplace every woman is expected to give giri-choco ("obligation chocolate") to all male co-workers in a specified desk-radius. Failure to do so results in punishment, the swiftness and severity of which is largely unknown as Japanese women are warned (by powers no one has ever actually seen) not to test the system.

Women are further advised in a memo circulated on February 4th (or the previous Friday if the 4th falls on a weekend) to bring a stash of emergency chocolates for the men who show up to work early on the 14th and reposition their desks to maximize their intake. In 1987 a woman in Yokohama tried to complain to her boss about the whole situation before she realized he had moved his desk to the Tokyo head office for the day.

The unseen powers have further kept people’s feelings in order by establishing an acceptable price range for this level of intimacy. This index of regulated generosity is invaluable to any woman, for if she goes too high-end with her truffled obligations she risks the embarrassment of appearing to be whoring out multiple hon-mei.

Conversely, if a woman tries to get by on the Valentine’s Day cheap she’ll be accused and scorned for giving everyone cho-giri-choco, designated in the ‘No Co-Worker Left Behind Act’ of 1991 as the ‘very obligatory chocolate’ reserved specifically for the accounting department and any other geeks normally outside the social desk-radius who, until 1991, got nothing.

Acts of Chocolate Revolution

Despite the seemingly overriding adherence to the rules of love and affection, there are those in Japan who are simply hell-bent on bucking the system. In recent years an officially non-estimated number of men have been suspected of giving their favorite females hon-mei chocolates and other tokens of affection on ‘Barentine’z Deh’. Memos flew like mochinage but no one could locate any documents outining the penalties for such transgressions.

To counter the risk of complete Valentine's Day anarchy the Japanese Diet handed down the state-sponsored concept of gyaku-choco, or reverse chocolate. With this the courage of all men was unleashed and they openly stormed the supermarkets and confection shops with their newfound governmental permission to express themselves.

At about the same time teenage girls had also begun testing the limits of Japan’s tolerance for unchecked displays of warmth with the unruly practice of swapping sweets and treats with their female schoolmates. Recognizing the unstoppable nature of this wave of unrest the Diet quickly instituted the term tomo-choco, or ‘friend chocolate’, and order returned to Japan’s emotional landscape once more.

Most recently, consequent to the Kyoto Agreement, the Japanese government encouraged the practice of giving boxes of eco-choco which, compared to hon-mei choco, came with an average of 2.4 kilograms less packaging, ribbons and stickers with misspelled English terms of endearment. This of course sent the packaging, ribbon and sticker industries into a tizzy of ‘Change?’ while upending the ability of the general populace to determine the proper level of suspicion for store-bought hon-mei. Thus eco-choco was slow to catch on.

The Equal Chocolate Rights Amendment

For years Japanese men reveled in their lack of mandated responsibility to return the affection and
expense that women, through negative reinforcement, were highly encouraged to extend. This until the National Confectionery Industry Association lobbied to make men pay back with standardized gratitude all the pure, heartfelt generosity shown to them by all the women who had no other choice.

Thus was born the state-sanctioned and socially-compulsory ‘White Day’. Now every year on March 14th (a bonus for me as this is also my wife’s birthday) men dutifully fulfill their heart-shaped responsibilities by reciprocating on every hon-mei, giri-choco and cho-giri-choco they received. (There are urban legends of underground Valentine Agents doing random checks on this, compelling men to keep accurate logs of the value of each choco they receive and give.)

In a strange twist it was decided that eco-choco would not be repaid, on grounds it would double the packaging, ribbon and sticker waste. With this women quickly abandoned the idea, putting the final nail in the eco-choco coffin.

To make sure the men were not just responding robotically to the profound emotional foundation of Valentine’s Day the Industry created the term ‘sanbai-gaeshi’, or ‘three times the return’. With this the men are obliged to spend three times what the women spent, in a show of raw and honest gratitude confirmed by an elaborate system of bar code technology and comparison guidelines.

In the spirit of patriotic animosity South Koreans have not only adopted Valentine’s Day and White Day and proceeded to spend, by official accounts, ‘a lot more’ than their Japanese counterparts, they’ve gone further and set aside April 14th as ‘Black Day’. This is when everyone who got the shaft (or didn’t, as it were) on Valentine’s Day and White Day goes down to their local Chinese restaurant for a dinner of black noodles.

The Korean Confectionery Group is looking for ways to introduce the concept of cho-giri-choco to the common workforce but the Black Noodle Underground has so far been able to stymie their efforts.

Consummating The Choco

Despite the extensive choco-policies there does exist in Japan the natural human ability to let the emotions flow rampant. After all the rules and regulations regarding the various levels of choco have been adhered to and one’s affections have been properly displayed and officially received, Japanese people, like all sugared-up lovers, do take to the bedroom.

According to reports submitted by the Japan Love Hotel Conglomerate, this fiery release of passion takes place every year on society’s self-administered day of consummation: Christmas Eve.

End Note: As a Westerner of genuine emotion I do not subscribe to the one-way protocol of Valentine’s Day in Japan. That is why, as I sit on the couch waiting for my wife to finish changing my screaming kid’s stinking diaper, I am going to save the last two chocolate-covered strawberries she made for me so she can try them. Then we are going to cuddle up and watch the movie I rented: Fight Club.

Luck & Sardines - A Year in Fukushima #7

I am in big trouble.

Something bad is staring me right in the face, and this time it has nothing to do with my son, my short attention span or personal injury (or, most recently, all three). It has nothing to do with anything I’ve done, actually. In fact, it has absolutely nothing to do with anything that has even happened yet. But I am on a collision course with destiny, and there is no getting around it. That is why tomorrow I am going to jump on the horn and set a date with my local exorcist.

To most outsiders Japan is a safe, peaceful place, decorated with cherry blossoms and veiled in a kimono of serenity. Not true, my friends. This country is a dangerous, devilish place.

Take my friend Eriko. She’s a pleasant mix of gregarious, intelligent and modest. She works at a bank, travels abroad on her own and goes to the gym regularly. She’s confident yet self-effacing, and has probably never crossed the street against the light. Yet recently she did something to warrant a trip up the road to Fudohsan Shrine for the ominous yakubarai ritual.

Recently, Eriko turned the dreaded thirty-three.

Japan maintains a traditional belief in ‘yakudoshi’, years of bad luck, nay, calamity, which must be warily regarded and properly tended to. Yakudoshi are said to bring illness and misfortune to people of certain ages - 25, 42 and 61 for men, 19, 33 and 37 for women – and in their respective years men and women pay a visit to the local Shinto shrine to be cleansed, body and soul, by a man with a funny hat who waves a long stick over their heads. Okay, I shouldn’t trivialize this revered rite of yakubarai like that. The stick is actually good quality bamboo, with carefully folded strips of paper attached to one end to make a spooky swishing sound as the priest (with the funny hat) exorcises the demons of catastrophe that entered the poor person’s body as he or she was making a wish and blowing out their candles.

As with many old beliefs and traditions, Eriko doesn’t put much stock in the whole yakudoshi idea; her mother, however, would hear none of it. I asked Eriko if she felt any different now. She said no. Personally I’m glad she agreed to be exorcised. My wife skipped her 33-year yakubarai and what happened? She ended up getting engaged that year to a guy who holes himself up till all hours of the night thinking he’s going to make it as a writer. Talk about misfortune.

Yakubarai-ed out of Eriko, those devils are now out there looking for someone new to possess. I turn 42 this year, and you can bet I’m going to be right at the front of that yakubarai line come October. I’m bringing some extra strips of paper too, just to make sure I get a good swoosh.

In the meantime I can’t be complacent. Just this week my family and I had to ward off a separate slew of demons, which we did by whipping peanuts around in the annual Setsubun ceremony. Setsubun translates into ‘between’ or ‘splitting’ the seasons, meaning Winter and Spring. ‘But it’s only February 3rd,’ you say? That may be true, but it was in the 60’s yesterday. Something’s going on here, and I’m not about to buck tradition.

As far as I’ve seen everyone celebrates Setsubun on February 3rd. According to a book my wife pulled out, however, Setsubun can also land on the 4th. For fifteen dollars I’d have to believe the book, but a co-worker of mine assured me Setsubun was always and only on the 3rd. Evidently Japanese people can’t agree on the appropriate day to throw beans out the windows and doors of their homes. There seems to be no question, however, that it is appropriate to throw beans out of your windows and doors. This they do while shouting ‘Oni soto! Fuku uchi!’ which means ‘Devil out! Good luck in!’

It’s good fun for the kids, but the adults take on a bit more somber attitude when the beans start flying.

I suppose there’s room for debate as to whether tossing roasted soybeans onto the sidewalks and streets and parked cars will keep the demons of bad luck away, but I’m taking Pascal’s Wager on this one. Particularly with all the snow we’ve been having (until this Thursday of course when Spring arrived) I am long overdue for a good bicycle accident. And if firing peanuts into the neighbor's garden is going to keep my tires on the ground where they belong then bombs away it is.

To complete the bean toss formalities everyone is supposed to eat as many beans as their age, but my son got a little carried away and chucked too many of them off the veranda. I didn’t sleep well last night for this, but today before breakfast I went outside and, to my delight, found plenty of peanuts scattered about, presumably courtesy of the neighbors, and I wolfed down enough to get back to the luckier side of Setsubun.

The Japanese, sure as they seem about the effectiveness of the bean thing, take no chances with the devil. So for dinner last night my wife grilled up a batch of iwashi, aka sardines. ‘The Oni don’t like the smell of iwashi,’ she explained. Which now makes me think these feared bearers of misfortune aren’t so tough after all, despite the fact that these particular sardines are eight inches long with mouths like piranhas. But hey, Superman had his kryptonite, the Japanese devils have iwashi. Plus I like fish anyway, and these overgrown anchovies don’t waft any worse than any other finned or tentacled supper so why wouldn’t I take the extra precaution? Then as I was scraping the bones into the garbage my wife snatched up the fish heads. ‘These go outside on the front door,’ she said with a straight face. ‘To let all the demons know our home smells like iwashi so they shouldn’t even bother trying to come in.’ Right then I knew we wouldn’t be having any company that evening, devils, demons or friends.

Now that the demons have been effectively warded off, it is time to go full force and bring the good luck home. This is accomplished by eating norimaki, a long rice roll wrapped in seaweed, all in one go while facing a prescribed direction (this year it is south-southeast) and making not a sound as you keep chewing and swallowing and chewing and swallowing and practically suffocate from the effort.

I just checked; going south-southeast from Fukushima, Japan sends me out into the Pacific Ocean, over the Marianas Trench and past a thousand Polynesian islands, all the way to Antarctica. Yakudoshi indeed.

While doing the dishes I came across a stray iwashi head. After all the beans and sardines and compass point rice rolls I wasn’t about to flush my good fortune down the drain by tossing this one fish head in the trash. So outside I went to hang it on the door with the others. While I was threading the string through its gills a pizza delivery guy whizzed up on his moped and bounded up to the door next to mine. Obviously not all Japanese subscribe to the traditional beliefs of their ancestors, I guessed. If this girl next door still lived with her mother she’d probably be eating iwashi and rice rolls too. And, in certain years, heading off to be exorcised, just as Eriko had on the firm advisement of her mother. But the younger generations seem to be slowly abandoning Japan’s rich traditions.

As my neighbor opened her door the delivery guy took a peek at the label taped to the pizza box.

‘Double anchovies?’