The White Peril 白禍

There's a favorite story on my mother's side of the family: My great-grandmother's sister came from Poland for a visit in the 1950s, and seeing the variety of goods in a typical neighborhood grocery store, she burst into tears.

Japan is a first-world country, so it's certainly not the case that I've become unused to variety. But of course, the brands are different, the diet is different, what appeals to people is different, the cumulative effect of surveying the aisles is different. Coming back to New York means readjusting my eye and palate to New York food sources. We were going to order from Fresh Direct, but last night we passed D'Ag's on the way home, so we stopped in. I'm afraid I kind of embarrassed my friend by giggling at everything, but I couldn't help myself.

It wasn't the type and distribution of products. Even from only coming home twice a year for the last decade, I'm still used to that. It also wasn't that anything and everything comes in 50-gallon-drum size, which wouldn't fit through the door of most Tokyo houses. I'm used to that, too. What got me was the evolution in some specific familiar stuff. The most improbable brands have gone upscale.

Cheer's curvy new bottles look as if they were inspired by ewers from Pottery Barn; I half expected each one to come with a little basin in matching plastic. For detergent containers, they looked invitingly touchable, almost ergonomic. (And, unsurprisingly, they're clearly aimed at the lady of the house, with filigree patterns in the background on each label.)



There are formulations for the stuff inside that I hadn't seen before, too. One is supposedly targeted at dark colors. (The brand concept was developed by "strategy and design teams fully immersed in darkness." Is that the most fabulous thing ever, or what? And I like the way "Cheer Dark" sounds like Near Dark, the Kathryn Bigelow vampire movie that reunited many of the most memorable cast members from Aliens.)

I was utterly bewildered by a product called True Fit:

Nothing can ruin laundry day like finding a favorite shirt has stretched to the point of no return. Help clothes keep their shape with Cheer® 2X Compacted True Fit™.

Love your clothes. Treat them right.

Personally, my solution to clothes that could get stretched out of shape is either to take them to a proper cleaner's or to use a mesh bag in the washing machine, but I love the idea that there's a detergent out there that's specifically formulated for them.

Also, Dietz & Watson? I grew up not far from Philadelphia, and to me, Dietz & Watson means hot dogs and kielbasa. But not anymore. The company introduces itself on its website with this VERY WRONG sentence:

Welcome to Dietz & Watson, home to the World's Best Meat Delicacies and Artisan Cheeses.

Or maybe it's not so wrong. Dietz & Watson was always a local, family-owned company that emphasized homely production values. It's just that it used to be assumed that those values appealed to local just-folks types; now, rebranded as "artisanal," they've moved up in the world.

I love the disdain that drips from every phrase on this page about condiments:

The World's Best Meat Delicacies and Artisan Cheese deserve better than that "same old yellow or spicy mustard, horseradish without a kick or sour pickles without a snap". So we created our Deli Complements™ with just that intention, to complement our meats and cheeses with enhanced flavor profiles to satisfy today's adult taste expectations.

Enhanced flavor profiles! For a range that includes something called "Sandwich Spread." I love it! What next--small-batch Cheez Whiz in earthenware jugs stopped with natural corks? (And psssst! Kudos to your marketing people for choosing the right spelling of complements for this context. Now they just need to tell your webmaster to fix the filename for the image. And guys, this is America: the period goes inside the quotation marks.)



Also, check out the gigantic sandwiches featured on the "Healthier Lifestyle" page.

Sorry. The Dietz & Watson thing really amused me.

*******

It's been rainy for the last few days, and one of the things I always notice about being back from Tokyo is how much better New York looks in the rain. The grey weather can still be depressing, but there's something about the presence of organic-feeling brick surfaces sprinkled through the built environment that makes it feel less off-putting. The relentless onslaught of steel/glass/concrete/tile in Tokyo can really drag you down. And sidewalks in the City are so wide that you can actually navigate down them with an open umbrella without maiming anyone.

Does anyone out there know where my evening shirt is?

Well, what good are you?

I thought I always kept it inside the dinner jacket on the same hanger, but unless it's invisible, it's not there. I hope I didn't leave it in Atsushi's closet when I moved out.

*******

How is it possible for one man to have so many vases? If there were ever any doubt that I'm gay, it's been dispelled by the four boxes of decorative housewares I've just packed. Mind you, they don't include anything you could eat off or store something in.

*******

It's time for me to break a pair of sunglasses. Or maybe lose them. I can feel it. The weather keeps going from sunny to cloudy, so you need them sometimes and then not others. They end up in a pocket or dangling by one slender arm from my bag. I seem to have a thing for dropping them in cabs or putting them down on tables and putting something heavy on them. I school myself resolutely to keep them in their little crush-proof cases, but it never works.

*******

I'm not entirely sure why, but I have The Descent in the DVD player, and I'm finding it oddly comforting to have it playing while I'm packing. Given the increasing claustrophic-cave-like-ness of my apartment, you'd think it would make me afraid of confronting a throat-biting humanoid in the bathroom or something, but I actually find it rather cozy. And I used to be of those people who were completely unable to handle horror movies. (When I was growing up, all the talk of demons waiting to getcha we got in church affected my over-active imagination a good deal.)

BTW, if you like suspense and have a strong stomach, The Descent is a great little movie. It's bloody and seriously scary at times, but you don't leave it feeling cynically worked over. It's thoughtful and raises interesting questions without being pretentious, and the cave scenes are very persuasive even though they were all shot on a soundstage. I love hypertrophied old Hollywood glamour-orgy productions as much as the next gay man, but there's a lot to be said for a movie made by people who relied on ingenuity, skill, and conviction rather than piles of money.

On Saturday, I flew into Tokyo as a resident of Japan for the last time. Sometime in the next few weeks, I'll step out onto my balcony and see this view once more, wish Roppongi Hills and Tokyo Midtown their best, and leave the apartment to the cleaners. Then I'm moving back to New York.



If you're a Westerner living in Asia, you have, at any time, at least a half-dozen friends who are trying to decide whether they want to leave or stay. It's just a topic that comes up a lot. Therefore, I was able to draw on a lot of advice, not all of it solicited. Most of the people whose opinions I valued echoed my Belgian architect friend (whose advice I did solicit, since he has a lot more experience with these things than I have): If you have experience working in Asia, you can always find a way to come back; but the longer you're away from home, the harder it is to find a way to return.

So I'm moving back. Taking a bit of a rest, staying with my old roommate in Murray Hill for a while, then getting a new job.

"Aren't you afraid it'll be hard to adjust?" I've been asked (and asked and asked). Yeah, sure. I've been in Japan my whole adult life. (I don't consider college and grad school adulthood--not when you're being funded by Mom and Dad or the Japan Foundation.) But people move to new places all the time. And New York is somewhere I've lived before anyway.

And yet...it's been a long time since I've lived in the States. When I last lived in America, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was still nothing more than a rather bad movie with Kristy Swanson. When the television show debuted and friends started raving about it, we saw it in Japan the way you saw American shows back then: friends sent videotapes.

I bought a few new CDs on their day of release a week or two after arriving in Japan: Bilingual by the Pet Shop Boys and Nine Objects of Desire by Suzanne Vega.

I don't remember which movies I first saw in the theater after coming to Tokyo. I do remember watching Alien Resurrection here when it was released. Japanese audiences are very quiet, so when the Winona Ryder character reappeared after being shot, my spontaneous cry of, "YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD AND OUT OF THE PICTURE, YOU ANNOYING B..." could be heard echoing through the theater until my then-boyfriend clapped a hand over my mouth.

That's how long I've been away. Yes, I see my friends back home at least once a year, and I'm in constant e-mail contact. And there are loads of things that make keeping in touch easier. Everyone has e-mail. (That wasn't true even in 1996.) You can download just about anything. (When was the last time I had to leave the house without 6000 songs stored on a device the size of a deck of cards? I don't even remember.) You can torture people with your vacation photos without even having them printed; just create and online album and e-mail the URL to friend and foe alike. But it isn't the same as being there.

I'm not focusing on changes in pop culture stuff because I'm unaware that there are more important things in life. It just, when you live far from home and contact friends to find out what's going on there, they assume you're watching the news. If someone brings up what Obama just said at a rally the other night, it's because they want to discuss it, not because they think they're informing you about something happening at home that you couldn't have heard about.

It's the new movies and music and restaurants and things they tell you about to help you feel caught up. (Books, too, but despite being someone who reads all the time, I generally have a hard time getting into contemporary fiction, so my friends have learned to stop recommending new novels to me.) Even if you find soap-opera-ish dramas tiresome, knowing that a lot of the people you know are watching Ally McBeal or (now) Grey's Anatomy and gabbing about it at brunch on weekends becomes meaningful. You're not participating in one another's daily lives, but you can at least feel secure in the knowledge that you're not becoming strangers.

So. Three weeks to settle things here. Then however long it takes to get settled back in at home. I'm looking forward to the culture shock in a way. It would be a bummer if America and New York and I weren't different after twelve years. And now that Japan seems to be cool again, maybe I can parlay my experience here into a hip, cosmopolitan demeanor that gets the men flocking to me.

Or maybe I'll just seem out of it.

We'll find out soon enough.