Ambushed!

Our Saturday evening began innocently enough. We joined in the merriment at Andrew and Kathleen's going away party in Yokohama with some JETs. The champagne flowed, delicious food was consumed and stories were told.

One story centred around a particular neighbour with a penchant for wandering around the streets butt naked or nearly so and creeping out the neighbours. Ha ha, we all laughed. You poor bastards. Glad we don't have anyone like that in our hood.

At around 9pm, we were sitting in the front room, the curtains were drawn and all of a sudden a face appeared in the window. Aforementioned neighbour, dressed in yukata (it could have been worse) was staring in at us from the lawn.

Jen got quite unnerved at this (like you wouldn't be) and even more so when he began banging on the front door about 10 minutes later. Turns out he went home and returned with watermelon for the melee, but there was no way we were letting him in. One of the guests went to the front window and in the politest keigo (the super apologetic form of Japanese) she could muster, apologised to him and shooed him away. He left, but not before having a tantrum and dumping the watermelon on the door-step.

Aside from it creeping the hell out of us, I couldn't help but feel sorry for the man. I'm sure he just got over-excited by seeing so many foreigners in his neighbour's house and wanted some action. The party's spirit was dampened a little after that, so what do you do when you need some cathartic entertainment? Ha! Like you need to ask!

So after terrorising a bus load of Japanese with our ocker ebullience, we arrived in Kamoi and en-route to karaoke, stopped in for some print-club (puri-kra).

The Puri-kra phenomenon is the crux of most girls (and, strangely, teenage boys) friendships. Friends get together in a little booth, choose a funky background, take some cheesy shots, print them out and bobs your uncle - polaroid evidence of school-girl bonds. Many of my students at school have miles of puri-kra covering their school books, and there are even specially-design albums to house puri-kra collections.

As we were leaving, we got ambushed again by three too-cool-for-skewl teenage boys wanting to have some puri-kra with the foreigners (guaranteed, of course, to secure their popularity). We all sank to new lows with our re-enactment of the "Gets" fool (those living in Japan will know who I mean). I still don't believe I was drunk enough to succumb to that...

One of the great conundrums of the first world is why two of Japan's greatest inventions - Karaoke and Puri-kra will never catch on in Australia. It seems that the Japanese, although a reputedly shy lot, are not self-conscious when making asses of themselves in front of their friends. And f**king bless them for that!