Tuesday, February 27 

The taxi driver had to phone Nagase Integrex to find out where exactly to go, but did in the end get me there.  He suggested waiting for me, but as I didn’t know my schedule I told him that wasn’t a good idea.  Nagase Integrex had been very helpful in helping Nanosurf obtain the rights to the name Nanosurf, and I enjoy the “duty” of visiting the company and smelling the machine oil and marveling at how clean their manufacturing halls are.  My only disappointment is that I can’t look up in those halls and see my name on the overhead cranes. 

Nagase Integrex makes high-precision grinding machines and their current special project is making the mirrors for the Okayama observatory.  After again showing each other how our product line-up has changed in the past year and a delicious Japanese lunch with almost no splashes from my soba (buckwheat) noodles, I headed back to the hotel, dead tired, and plunked down for a nap. 

I had hoped to meet my friend Yuko that evening, but we got our wires crossed and so I ate out with Mr. Nagao from Nagase.  We went to an Italian place, where we had Hida beef, mushroom cream soup, noodles with a four-cheese sauce, potato-cheese gratin, and what was labeled “helshiipohk” – healthy pork.  I’ve rarely had pork with so much fat and salt, so I’m left wondering what was healthy beyond the Japanese belief that pork is healthier than beef.  But it tasted like something out of this world. 

After the restaurant we went to a sunakku, a snack bar, which turned out to be the one we’d visited two years ago, and the mama even recognized me and remember I was from Switzerland.  The girls were different – I don’t think girls ever work there very long.  A snack bar is a place where Japanese salarymen can go after dinner to relax, drink alcohol, eat a few snacks (hence the name of the place) and chat with a hostess (which I would have thought would be cheaper at home, but nobody asks me).  This particular sunakku also boasted karaoke equipment with a reasonable selection of songs (but no Johnny Cash).  First mama hosted us for a while, until President Nagase came on in with a German guest and a number of employees.  One of them, Morimoto, sat down with us, the others in the larger karaoke corner.  Mama moved to them and we got Aiko.  Soon talk turned to whether I was married or had a girlfriend.  This is not, by the way, an unusual question for a Japanese to ask.  When I said no, and somehow evaded the “why?” question that followed, I was asked how I liked Japanese women – for the second time that evening.  That’s where I wish I could speak English and be well understood.  I wish I could say that even though as a whole Japanese women are of course beautiful, I plan to marry only one woman, and that project is completely disconnected from how much I appreciate the women of a certain nation.  Or tell them that I don’t think of women as a group, but as individuals, and for that reason the nationality and ethnicity of a woman becomes a secondary issue.  Instead, I have to give half-baked evasive answers such as “Japanese women have one problem: they don’t live in Switzerland.”  Of course Aiko said she wouldn’t mind living in Switzerland, especially when she found out we were born the same year.  Then, because I’m in a grey zone where I don’t know what is joke, harmless flirtation, or intention, I need to explain that geography isn’t my only criterion either.  All the while, because of my Lent decision, I’m drinking Oolong tea like there’s no tomorrow, so I suppose this obvious reminder of my difference in belief means that when I say I think religious convictions need to match up the topic ends.  I think giving up alcohol for a while is just bizarre for a Japanese.  Fortunately, karaoke comes along and provides a distraction as one after the other launches into songs like “Stardust” or “Desperado.”  When it’s my turn, I pick “It’s Now or Never,” not because I’m that good an Elvis impersonator, but because trying to karaoke “Hotel California” taught me to choose songs I know well and that have a clear melody.  It was just a bit high, so that the “It’s” always sounded like a strained “huts.” 

I’m wired from all the oolong tea, and then back in the hotel it hits me: I won’t be able to drink alcohol at the nomikai (drinking get-together) we’ll most likely have with my old colleagues at Nippon Steel.  That’s annoying.