| House parties are not
really part of the entertainment landscape in Japan. Maybe because the
houses are too small, maybe because everyone's so hellbent on being a good
host that house parties are just too much effort. I don't know. Anyway,
since I came here, I'd only heard of one or two successful ones, yet I'd
heard dozens of Canadians mourning the absence. Next to cheese, house
parties seem to be the most commonly longed-for aspect of Canadian
culture, so I decided to host one myself.
For a small city, Takaoka has an incredible number of foreigners,
mostly Canadian, and they all seemed to hear about it one way or another.
Daymon came up from Osaka, about four hours away by train, with another
teacher, and Sandy came from Joetsu. A few other Geos teachers and a whole
bunch of people I never met came from all over hell's half acre, actually.
Two or three of my students came along, plus the requisite crowd of
followers that I didn't know and still don't. All in all there were about
30 people over the course of the night, maybe 20 at one time at the peak,
which doesn't sound like much unless you know I have only one room and
it's the size of a dentist's office.
I do, however, have the biggest balcony I've yet seen in Japan, and I
was determined to fire up the barbecue. Unfortunately, Japanese gas
cylinders don't fit Canadian barbecues. I discovered this about three
hours before the party was supposed to start, with a big bold "Bring
your own meat" on several dozen invitations in circulation.
I considered buying another barbecue, but Daymon suggested buying a
bunch of charcoal and just throwing it into my gas barbecue. I did so,
figuring that if it didn't work I could just blame Daymon -- which is what
I'm leading up to here, actually.
Anyway, we started off the party with a football game in a local park.
It wasn't that easy to explain the rules to the Japanese players, and
there are more than a few rules I'm still a little hazy of myself to be
honest, but the caliber of play was such that I got to be quarterback and
that was pretty cool. It was really hot outside, though, and everyone in
attendance was soon soaking wet in their own stinking sweat, with a
barbecue yet to be attended.
On the way back to my house, locals detoured to their own houses for
showers, leaving Daymon, me, Sandy, and several others on our own at my
place. Daymon discovered there was a public bath near my house, and while
he made ready to go over there, I jumped into the shower and washed off.
When I came out found my living room aglow in a soft, orange flickering
light. The light was coming from my glass balcony door, which no longer
looked like a door but rather a massive medieval fireplace.
"I got the barbecue going," said Daymon. "Just give 'er
a few minutes to die down. Anyway, I'm going to the bath house."
Daymon disappeared, leaving me to tend the flames, which were by this
time shooting out of the barbecue as if from the tailpipe of the space
shuttle. A gas lighter about a meter away from the barbecue exploded, and
for a moment the concrete floor of my balcony was awash in flame. (At this
point Sandy was finishing her own shower and hollering for clothes. Just a
minute, honey, just a minute.)
I thought that an open flame spilling over the balcony wall might
attract undue attention, and decided to put the lid on. Approaching the
raging conflagration with the lid in front of me, I managed to cover it
up, just like plugging a well fire in the oil patch. Flames continued to
jet out of the holes in the sides and bottom of the barbecue but at least
they weren't taller than I was anymore.
I went inside in relief, to the congratulations of my guests. By this
time several of my students were there, and my new boss Kanae, who
actually hadn't officially worked a day yet. I went to grab a drink ...
and heard sirens.
Pretty soon this army of firemen came tromping up the stairs in full
battle dress, pounding on the neighbours' doors one by one. I hollered for
them to come on into my place and see the barbecue, which by this time
really had died down and had a few chunks of meat on it, but they didn't
understand and kept pounding on doors. Finally my boss got their
attention, and they came in to check things out.
Get this ... firefighters remove their boots before investigating
residential fires here.
All the firefighters had radios, and the radios were abuzz with the
word yakiniku -- barbecued meat. But either nobody was listening to
the radios, or they just all wanted to see for themselves. There were
about eight or nine firemen in my apartment at one point, plus four or
five cops, and I could hear more of them pulling up outside. They lined up
to deliver stern scoldings, and since I couldn't understand a word of
them, they mainly scolded my new boss. For about 20 minutes all she said
was "David Brown ... Canada ... sensei ... Geos ... David Brown ...
Canada ... sensei ... Geos ..." It was her first-ever official act as
a Geos employee.
As I stood in the hallway listening to the firemen and cops dressing
down my new boss, I heard someone chuckling at the front door, and I
turned to see Daymon, back from the bath house, chatting with some cops.
What I read on his face was not guilt, not surprise, not even concern ...
it was pride.
Our collective knowledge of Japanese left some leeway to interpret the
stern warning from the firefighter -- it was either "stop this right
now" or "just don't do it again." We chose the latter (to
the consternation of those guests who could understand Japanese).
The fire eventually did "die down," though it narrowly missed
dying down in a cloud of carbon dioxide from a fire extinguisher, and the
barbecue was a howling success.
It was good, in fact, that I just discovered there is going to be
another party here the day after tomorrow, planned without my input or
even awareness. What I meant to demonstrate is that it's possible to have
house parties in Japan, but the message appears to have mutated in the
transmission: it's possible to have house parties at David's house
in Japan.
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