The promised special post for King Bear's special event

Monday, November 17th: it was the night of King Bear's fancy reception in a fancy Tokyo place that Veep and Stanley had described to me in the vaguest possible terms two days previously. I meet Stanley at the station near the school. He is once again wearing his Ephesians tie. He seems happy about my expressed interest in his past as an assistant director at a movie studio [I forgot to mention this in the previous post, but he revealed this to me at the school festival. Pretty interesting for a boring old English teacher!], and he quizzes me at length about my taste in motion pictures. He tells me that Akira Kurosawa wasn't "really Japanese", which I gather is a commonplace over here. He reveals that the Cat majored in English poetry, and from there we move on to a short quiz on my literary tastes. Stanley is a self-professed "creative type".

Eventually the subject of conversation shifts, as it inevitably must, to our overlords in the Bear family. King Bear, he explains, is a "kind of crazy guy". I never cease to be amazed at how, despite their obsequious face-to-face behavior, the Japanese seem ready to lay into their professional superiors whenever they have the chance, although in this case it doesn't seem too unreasonable. But King Bear has a redeeming feature: he is intuitive, intuitive to a degree that defies rational explanation. For instance, Stanley explains, the mascot of our school is a polar bear, a polar bear looking at the North Star—(I have never noticed the North Star on any of the school's literature but I do not press the point.)—the very same animal and celestial body worshipped by the Native Americans! And the Japanese and the Native Americans are in fact closely related peoples through a certain tribe whose name I didn't catch (if anyone else has heard about this oddball theory and can clarify please let me know). King Bear, of course, knows nothing of the history of the Japanese people, but he can sense this connection, and this is invaluable for the school.

Stanley is now starting to worry me a bit. Until that point I had looked to him as an interesting and potentially friendly—albeit a bit unctuous—ally in my dealings with Veep and Canett, but I'm not sure I can handle this kind of talk. After we get to Ikebukuro and eventually find the appropriate Toyko Metro line to take, conversation moves on to the subject of religion. Stanley dramatically reveals to me that he is "something of a rarity in Japan" because he is a Christian. I briefly wonder whether it is appropriate to tell him that his tie gives him away. He tells me that his wife is, of all things, a Pentacostal minister, but that since she has taken over at the church, he and his friends have all stopped going. This is a wacky story I didn't quite manage to get to the bottom of. He explains that Japanese politics is intimately tied to Shintoism, although I don't quite understand how. Then he says, "You know that humanity goes through three stages of knowledge: mythology, religion, and science. But eventually we realize that science cannot explain everything. Hinduism is the religion with the most scientific approach to understanding the world." This is because, he claims, modern science has hypothesized regularly recurring Big Bangs and Big Crunches for the universe (although I'm pretty sure recent discoveries about the rate of expansion of the universe have led this theory to be discarded), and Hinduism posits something similar.

By now I have become significantly more quiet, which is a good thing because we have finally arrived at our destination, in Tokyo's business district, next to the huge moat-encircled Imperial Palace complex. King Bear's blowout is being held in the Emerald Room, on the eleventh floor, which also hosts the Gold Room, the Silver Room, and a couple of other similarly-themed chambers. On the twelfth floor there is a wedding chapel.

Stanley and I are ushered into a side-room, where bento dinners await us (they're pretty good). While we're there, Stanley tells me that I am going to be introduced, in blatant disregard to any semblance of truth, as a visiting researcher on the subject of hospitality, and that I am again going to be shoved in front of a microphone and be asked to make a short speech, during which (this time) I will have to profess my eagerness to study Japanese hospitality. After a month here I have given up trying to conceal my displeasure when I am asked to do things like this. Stanley seems sympathetic, but has nothing to offer other than the usual enjoinder to just go through with it without dwelling on it. The main aim of the evening, he reminds me, is to take photos. He is brutally honest and tells me (while asking me not to take this in a bad way) that Veep is hoping for me to be the "mascot" of the school for the year.

The "professors" gathered in King Bear's emerald lair tonight, it turns out, are essentially pretty important people who have given one-time addresses to the students at the university (I am guessing something like a commencement speech). And it is time to go meet them. I stand in the corner of the decidedly not green Emerald Room as Veep gives her usual yelping introductory speech, and then I am in front of the microphone. I speak for ten seconds, pretty quietly, raising my voice in as sarcastic a manner as possible to say that I am looking forward to experiencing Japanese hospitality first-hand. The audience is appreciative and chuckles. I leave to thunderous applause. Veep follows me out, making her usual sycophantic remarks to whoever is standing nearby ("上手なスピーチですね！" — "wasn't that a great speech?"). Two of the VIPs come running after me , eager to present me with their business cards. One is a jovial fellow who is president of a publishing company. The other is a tall, sallow fellow who is, according to his card, "chairman of the bord" [sic] of what I assume is a large securities firm. He seems horribly distraught when I tell him I don't have my business card on me.

Stanley and I return to the side room where we get to eat a second meal: since there were a few no-shows at King Bear's party, we get the full multi-course treatment (although in total I only manage to nab myself three glasses of wine). Between the salad and the dessert, we all return to the Emerald Room for the photo op. I smile with various more Japanese people, meet a Russian lady who is looking for a school abroad to send her daughter to (I give her a glowing review of the Lycée International), and speak to a mild-mannered middle-aged lady with excellent French, who is a producer at a TV company and has made "special programs" on a bewildering array of subjects. She also warns me against government censorship: "only 30% of what you read in the newspapers is true — but c'est la vie!"

Then it is time for the closing ceremony. Veep makes a short speech, during which she gets unusually animated even for her. After she steps down, Stanley remarks that she sounds like she's making a political campaign speech. Then comes King Bear: clearly a good speaker, in the children's-TV-program-presenter vein, kind of like Mr. Mumbles at the elementary school. While he is speaking, Stanley tells me we are going to have to do a little "kind of dance". Before I have time to process this information, though, King Bear raises his voice, holds his two fists in front of them and then thrusts his elbows behind him three times in a row, shouting, "Ga-teng! Ga-teng! Ga-teng!" As I stare in disbelief, he asks the audience to join him, and after another short exhortation, the whole room shouts, "Ga-teng! Ga-teng! Ga-teng!" and thrusts their elbows in the requisite fashion.

Then King Bear introduces a new dance, which involves thrusting your hands into the air three times while shouting something like, "Toyuyu! Toyuyu! Toyuyu!" He explains the deep meaning of this dance; from the gestures I gather that something is trickling down from the heavens between his fingers. Then the audience joins him in a Toyuyu. After this individual members of the audience come up to the microphone and offer their own exhortation followed by a Ga-teng or a Toyuyu as they deem fit. A few more collective dances and the ceremony is over.

I am being driven home in the same car as King Bear and Veep (our driver is a big guy who is pretty important at the high school—Stanley wryly remarks to me that here this guy is, probably going to get a medal from the Emperor in a few years' time, and he has to be King Bear's chauffeur). Before this, though, we are given a five-minute tour of what I assume is a culinary school in the basement of the building across the street. On the ride home, I listen to Radiohead on my iPod—unsurprisingly they're the band I turn to when I'm in a bad mood: I listened to them a lot when I was writing my MPhil thesis. Veep asks to have a listen, so I hand her the earphones, but I'm not sure she really knows what to make of it.

When we finally arrive back at Kotesashi, I snare Veep on the sidewalk and tell her, emboldened by the wine, that we need to have a little talk about what exactly I'm going to be doing here. As I try, diplomatically and in simple English, to explain to her that I don't like being introduced as something that I clearly am not and that I don't see the point of putting my name on prizes for junior high students [this is something Veep and Canett explained they were planning to do—clearly the result of hours and hours of plotting in Japanese in my company], she gets her deer-in-the-headlights look and then launches into a speech about how the elementary, junior high and high schools all want me to teach for them, and how she can't manage everybody and so on. She is totally freaking out. I try to reassure her, tell her I understand her troubles. We agree on the need for an interpreter and part on those terms.

******

Post scriptum: Several days later, at the elementary school, I was talking to the Cat about Stanley's past in the film industry. "Ah yes!" says the Cat. "Yes, Stanley used to make movies of a certain…" and then here, when I am expecting some sort of euphemism "… pornographic nature, do you say?"