Having been in Japan for a couple of weeks, I was becoming accustomed to not understanding anything that was going on. When I was younger, I had traveled a bit through Europe, which is certainly foreign, but not nearly as foreign as Japan. Having taken a soupçon of French in high school (voulez-vous couchez avec moi c’est soir?), I could sort of make my way around, slowly deciphering signs and figuring out rudimentary directions. I did manage to get my wife into the emergency room in Spain without being able to say much more than mañana and taco – actually, that whole trip was linguistically entertaining.

My wife, otherwise known as G (she and I share the same first name, so we refer to each other as “B” and “G”, for fairly obvious reasons), and I took our honeymoon in the beautiful beach communities of Costa del Sol, the Spanish shore of the Mediterranean. It was kind of dumb going there, as it entailed traveling for over a day to get to an environment that was almost exactly like the one we left in LA – a hot, deserty, scrubby place near the ocean where everybody spoke Spanish. I didn’t know Spanish, but G took a couple of years of it in high school, so I was relying on her to get us around. She was a seasoned traveler – had spent a year in England – so I thought I was in good hands. Good hands, yes, good tongue, not so much. Little did either of us know that she’d go completely mute when actually faced with a native Spanish speaker. So I’d leap in with my best Franish (French being at least related to Spanish) and get those hands waving and we’d be able to get from point A to point B. Several times I’d be proud of myself for figuring out how to ask a particular question (“what time is the train to Madrid?”), only to be met with an incomprehensible answer. Or, like the time I successfully ordered dinner in Spanish, thoroughly pleased with my sophistication. The waitress came back and said, “be careful, the plate is extremely hot”, which came out like “blah blah blah plato blah blah blah caliente” and I grinned widely, said “gracias” and grabbed the plate from her, nearly scorching off my fingerprints permanently, and dropping it on the table, while the alarmed waitress reeled off another few blah blahs which, properly translated, meant something like “what the hell is the matter with you, moron, I told it was too hot!”.

There’s a wonderful story I heard years ago about a guy who had traveled to Turkey. He knew a little bit of the language, but was always struggling to learn more. One night, he was out on a hill and noticed a beautiful full moon. He pointed up to it and asked somebody there what the word for that was. She replied, “parmak”. Ok, moon is parmak, he filed it away.

Later that night, the overhead light in his hotel room burned out. He went down to the desk to see if he could get another bulb, but he didn’t know how to say light bulb in Turkish. Travelling through foreign countries, you become adept at emplying every trick you can think of to communicate and the locals will often be quite obliging if they can see you’re making an effort. So, he decided to employ a little poetic license and, pointing his finger to the ceiling, asked the clerk if he had an “electric parmak”, pleased with his metaphor. The clerk looked at him nervously. He repeated his request, thrusting his finger up helpfully. The clerk started looking more and more alarmed while he kept pointing and requesting an electric parmak. Only later did he learn that parmak actually means finger, not moon.

So anyway, traveling through Europe can be a challenge with only a dim recollection of rudimentary French classes, but it is doable. The signs can be deciphered. You can read a menu, more or less. You can figure out the bathrooms. And, if you wear dark clothes and keep your mouth shut, you can almost pass as a native, or at least blend pretty well into the crowd (just stay the hell away from other Americans and you’ll be alright). That’s not an option in Japan. It’s more like being on another planet than being in another country. There isn’t anything you can wear that will disguise the fact that you’re bright white and a foot taller than everybody else. Even Japanese dogs looked at me funny. And forget trying to piece together enough of the language to get around. If you’re lucky, some of the signs might be in romanji, or roman letters, instead of kanji, the stylized pictograms of traditional Japanese writing, but even that doesn’t help much. There’s so little to hang on to, and navigating your way around the city and accomplishing such relatively minor tasks as ordering lunch or getting on the right train can be enormously exhausting and trying experiences. Plus, not only are the languages different, the cultures are almost entirely unrelated. There are all sorts of things in Japan (vending machines that dispense hot cheeseburgers or used underwear, Pachinko, hostess bars) that have no real analogue in America. Some prices are entirely reasonable (if you’re careful, you can eat a good meal for under $10 and you can spend all evening soaking, scrubbing, and relaxing in the local sento for about $3) and others are completely outrageous (we paid $75 to drive for a couple of hours on a toll road and buying a single melon can set you back well over $100). Plus, lots of the customs are completely different. You drink differently, eat differently, sleep differently, and go to the bathroom differently. You can drunkenly piss on the side of a temple, but don’t blow your nose in public. And why snack on chips and a Coke when you can munch on a bowl of sweetened dried clams and wash it down with some refreshing Pocari Sweat?

I had gone there as a fabulous 30th birthday present (best present ever), organized surreptitiously by my wife, to visit my friend Bob. Bob and I were close in high school, at Interlochen, and I stayed in touch with him over the years. He had actually invited me to move out to Japan with him upon my graduating from Hampshire College (he was just finishing up a stint at Oberlin), but it was much too scary a proposition for me. However, I was delighted to go visit him for a couple of weeks. All in all, it was a spectacular trip, and, because he lived off the beaten track in Kyoto, I got to experience Japanese life like few tourists do, eating in small, out of the way places, going to the markets and the local sento (which quickly became my favorite activity). It was a wondrous experience, but it was completely exhausting. I was always slightly off balance by everything, struggling to make sense of so much stimulus at once. And it isn’t just that the language and the culture are completely different, which is taxing enough. Everything is different. The houses are different, the cars are different, the shoes are different, the automatic doors are different, the cats are different. The food, the television, the movies, the stores. Everything.

So, when I traveled with Bob to visit his girlfriend’s apartment just outside Osaka and met her younger sister, and she confessed a rabid fanaticism for Beck, well, I didn’t blink an eye. Sure, why not? You eat dead fish eyes for breakfast and watch sumo wrestling, why not have a thing for Beck? It was only on the plane on the way home that it struck me how strange that was. It has long been recognized that Japanese schoolgirls are on the absolute bleeding edge of cool – Wired magazine has a regular “Japanese Schoolgirl Watch” column dedicated to spotting new trends. Tomoko, Bob’s girlfriend’s sister, not long out of short plaid skirts herself, was apparently still plugged into the zeitgeist, because, although he was but a small blip on the cultural radar, seemingly destined to be a future Trivial Pursuit question, Beck was just about to take over the world, as improbable as it seemed (and, frankly, still seems).