Random Memories #62 - things I wish I'd kept or photographed - part 1

Some memories exist fully formed in my mind as "stories" of life in Japan. Others are little fragments which are jogged back into recollection by some random circumstantial experience. Those fragments tend to come and go randomly and I often feel that if I don't grab them and trap them in words, they may flit away forever as the chances that some stimulus will compel one to come forward again are rather low.

When I remember such things, or my husband does, one or the other of us will say that we wished we had kept some little memento of the experience. That would help preserve the memory in a more concrete manner, not to mention leave us with some neat little object around which to tell our story.

This post is about those little things which I wish I'd either kept or photographed during my years in Japan. Some of them are things which are hard to believe existed as they were idiosyncratic even in that country. Some of them were a product of an age that has passed by. All of them are the kinds of things which we did not experience at home. No memories that I can offer are more "random" than these. Warning: if you are someone who is made uncomfortable by talk of the three-letter "S" word, then you may want to skip this post. I don't use any profanity, but I do use technical words for male and female anatomy. And I apologize in advance if any disturbing ads load as a result of this post's content being misunderstood by search engines.

Here are some of these little fragments:

The pornographic vending machine

You may read this paragraphs title and think I'm speaking of a machine selling pornographic materials such as magazines or pictures. Though such items were in the machine that I saw, it was much more than that. If I had had a camera at that time, I would have taken pictures, but this was before I owned one (before 1994 when I bought a QuickTake digital camera) and definitely before I carried one around with me.

My husband and I were walking toward the West side of Asagaya, the neighborhood in which we lived for 23 years, and wandering around a largely residential space. This was, very likely, in 1990-1991 as it was before I had gall bladder surgery in Tokyo. We were still exploring the nooks and crannies of all of the confusing streets when we noticed a well-lit vending machine under a stairwell of an apartment building. It was twilight so it stood out a bit and we went over to investigate.

We were still at that stage of life in Japan when we carefully inspected the contents of many of the vending machines as we weren't yet familar with all of the Japanese drink types like "Boss" coffee or Dydo cocoa or whatnot. Beer and soft drink machines were the norm, of course, but this appeared at a distance to be another type of animal.

The machine we saw was quite wide and the objects within were relatively large and varied in size. As we approached it, it became clear that it was filled with wonders meant to appeal to prurient interests. In addition to a handful of pornographic videos and magazines depicting fully naked slack-jawed vixens in moments of carnal ecstasy (but with hands or other objects obscuring their most private of parts), there were marital aids. It wasn't just a garden variety offering of "vibrators", but also a very large and freaky-looking artificial vagina and a pump-style object which either was meant to enlarge or engorge a male member. I couldn't read any Japanese at the time so I'm not sure what sort of promises it was making.

If I could travel back in time, I'd certainly give my younger self a camera and take a whole roll of film of the contents of that machine. It wasn't only that such objects being peddled in a vending machine was so strange, but that it was situated in front of what looked very much like an average Japanese apartment building. Certainly, I could see such a thing placed in front of a love hotel, but this place did not appear to be such an establishment. Perhaps it was a building designed for men who lived the Playboy lifestyle, or at least one sans all of the real bunnies. That would be the only way to explain the value of such a machine to the inhabitants.

Q-Dial Pens

One of the things I've mentioned in another post was the way in which our mailbox was frequently mail-bombed by flyers. Toward the end of our stay, it was usually for services that would come and haul your large trash items away for a fee, cleaning services, health clubs, beauty treatments, or restaurants. In the early days, we saw a lot more flyers related to sex-related services.

Though we couldn't read the flyers very well, we received them for so many years that my husband (who studied Japanese for several years in a school and got pretty good at kanji/Chinese characters) figured a few of them out. One of the most common ones offered a list of pornographic movies for rent or purchase. Another offered the equivalent of a visiting masseuse, though I'm pretty sure she was going to rub a lot more than your back. My memory about the financial information on those flyers is fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure there was some mention of tips or bonuses that could be paid for extra service.

Beyond these items, we sometimes got a ballpoint pen. It was always a yellow pen with blue writing and blue ink and said "Q-dial" on it in English along with Japanese writing. For quite awhile, we just took our free pen and used it without worrying about what was being offered. After a few years, we learned that "Q-dial" service was either phone sex or a way of calling one of the ladies that would come and rub your body in various ways. I don't recall whether it was call girls or girls you call, but I do remember that it was related to sex servicing.

My husband and I have both thought on occasion that we should have saved one of those pens. It would have served both as a reminder of Japan, and of an era in which such services couldn't be had via the internet. The times, they have changed from a primitive era in which men rode around on bicycles dropping papers or free pens into everyone's mailbox in order to meet their needs for certain types of gratification. Based on what I hear about Japan these days, men have lost most of their interest in that sort of thing.

Not all of my memory fragments pertain to sex. Next week, my mind will be out of the gutter... well, maybe not, but at least I won't be parading its location in the next post (at least, that's not the plan). To be continued...

Won't Miss #8 - vending machine blight (reflection)

As I remarked in the original post, vending machines are everywhere in Tokyo. I had also been told that, even in the countryside, banks of machines sometimes stood in the middle of nowhere. More than one Japanese person told me that they saw them as an incredible waste of energy. I wonder if, in the face of strict energy conservation after the Fukushima meltdown in the wake of the March 11, 2011 quake, such machines were removed. I know that vending machines in Tokyo were being frantically re-engineered to reduce their carbon footprint. This was something I heard firsthand from employees whose job it was to make such machines (such was the nature of my work in Japan that I had access to such people on a regular basis).

The truth is that, I think all cultures have various visual blight and wasteful energy consumption. Sometimes it is trash on the lawns of rural homes. Sometimes it's ugly newspaper distribution boxes. Sometimes it's graffiti on city streets and walls. Now, I think that banks of gleaming machines were really not such a bad thing after all. It could very much have been worse. The "worst" part of it all, in retrospect, was the valuable sidewalk real estate that they sometimes consumed in areas that sometimes were congested with heavy foot traffic. I now find that I actually regard the total suffocation of some areas with vending machines as a bit of nostalgia rather than see it as an annoyance. 

Will Miss #7 - weird vending machines (reflection)

I didn't buy any of this, but I'm guessing it feels wet. (This machine was stocked a few months after the March 11, 2011 earthquake, when people were terrified of drinking tap water but the bottled water shortage had eased off.)

Japan is known the world over for its copious and odd vending machines. The neighborhood that I lived in in Japan, Asagaya, at one point had a vending machine full of marital aids including fake vulvas. That was quite awhile back, before I had a digital camera, and I sincerely wish I'd taken a picture of it when it was around. It was absolutely on the fringe of weirdness, and that's saying something for a country that sells bread in a can and condoms in street accessible vending machines.

There are vending machines here at home, of course. They are huge monolithic and sleek drink machines as well as beat up and vandalized newspaper ones. Other than that, it's a bit of a wasteland and what little there is, is far less interesting and variable than what I saw in Tokyo. 

I truly do miss the weird vending machines, but I actually miss even the more mundane ones like the drink machines which carried a greater variety of beverages and rotated out the options much more frequently than those I have seen here. 

Random Memories #18

One of the first things Americans are surprised at when it comes to vending machines in Japan is the fact that alcoholic beverages are available in them. The reason this is surprising is that anyone, including underage drinkers, can sneak up to one, buy some booze, and run off and get loaded. Most of these machines are within view of a store, but some of them are not. Even those that can be seen from a store aren't exactly watched with the keenness of a hawk. Most of them are "set and forget".

It was my experience that kids were introduced to alcohol by their parents slowly and few of them viewed imbibing it as taboo. Since drinking is a very strong part of Japanese culture, it is expected that children will grow up to drink alcohol, not that they will abstain nor that it would be considered virtuous to do so. In fact, consumption of alcoholic beverages is so much a part of business culture, that not being a drinker is a disadvantage and definitely makes one the nail that sticks out. So, I don't think anyone was really fretting about kids getting their drunk on as a result of these machines being present.

This machine is a 1987 machine and the main difference between it and current machines is the size and the price. The interesting thing about the price is that it seems to have gone down just a tiny bit. And when I say the "size" is different, I don't mean the cans themselves. There have always been enormous cans and bottles of beer on offer. I am talking about the size of these vending machines. This machine is bigger than most current ones. What is more, they were once much more common than than they are at present in Japan.

The reason for both the minor price reduction and the shrinking size and frequency of machines selling booze was that the law changed at some point during my stay in Japan and convenience stores and markets were allowed to carry it. With "konbini" that are open 24 hours and located on  nearly every corner in Tokyo, anyone wanting to get pie-eyed could just pick up a brew with a pack of dried squid with cheese by popping into a shop. The demand for such machines evaporated when the availability of alcoholic drinks increased. 

It's worth noting that the number of liquor stores also has shrunk, at least it seemed so to me when I was there. This is an interesting change in Japan because it was a rare case of the number of vending machines going down rather than up. The trend has been toward greater mechanization, not less. For example, for much of my 23 years in Tokyo, kiosks were small manned shops on station platforms. By the time I had gone, many of them had been replaced by large vending machines. For beer, the vending machines have been disappearing in favor of manned shops selling them. Of course, this has more to do with the fact that Japan hasn't yet mastered the art of the total self-serve supermarket or convenience store. Give them a few more years and an even more shrunken population and I'm sure they'll get there. 

Will Miss #365 - capsule machines

Things may have changed since I was living back home, but most of the capsule (or bubble) machines that sold little plastic balls with an item inside were designed for kids. Not only that, but the stuff you got in them was pretty crappy and tended to hold ones attention for about 15 minutes then end up mashed into the carpet of your parents' car when you returned home. In Japan, there are plenty of capsule machines for kids, but there are vast numbers quite clearly designed to cater to the tastes of adults.

They sell very peculiar items which cater to esoteric tastes in these capsule machines, and I'll miss them.