Geri o Shimasu: Adventures of a Baka Gaijin

GERI O SHIMASU!

As a second-year law student at the ripe old age of thirty, I was extremely excited to spend an entire semester living in Tokyo. To see the sites, practice my Japanese, and study international law was living the dream. I had made it through the grueling first year of law school, survived on-campus interviews in the first half of the second year, managed to keep my GPA up, and even secured a summer associate position for the summer of 2008 with an AMLAW 100 law firm. It was now January 2008, and I was ecstaticto have five months to live in Japan and absorb its culture, food, and sites.

However, I wasn't even there twelve hours when the country asserted my status as a gaijin, theJapanese word for foreigner. I had a kidney infection in the December leading up to the beginning of the semester and was required to make the trip there while still on what I can only describe as an ass-load of antibiotics. In an attempt to beat the infection, which had been lingering, I had been on a cocktail of three separate heavy-duty antibiotics for a number of weeks prior to my arrival. In my excitement to be starting my study abroad adventure, one that I had been planning since before I even applied to law school, I gave little thought to the status of my kidneys or my gut, which apparently did not take well to being stripped of its natural fauna and promptly sent off to a new country to recover.

Let's back up a moment. Upon my arrival, my school arranged for temporary lodging in a Japanese-style hotel to incoming students. We were able to book a room at a small local hotel near our campus for up to two weeks at the beginning of the term. Because we were each tasked withsecuring our own housing during the program, this was designed to ease the transition for students and allow us a little breathing room to find apartments in Tokyo. With respect to the hotel, Japanese-style meant that, among other things, there was one communal, multi-stall restroom for the whole floor and a tiny room for individuals to sleep in, each one housing a twin bed. Under most circumstances, I really love immersing myself in a culture. As a welcome to Japan, myschool treated us to a truly excellent dinner. And. I. Ate. All. The. Things. Including the sashimi,the shabu shabu, and anything that came across my plate.1

It was all great... until I woke up in the middle of the night literally having shat my pajamas in my sleep. And it wasn't the well-formed, intact kind, if you know what I mean.

Oh, the horror! The only thing worse than waking up in your own diarrhea is knowing that you need to get yourself physically down a hallway, into a communal restroom and not be spotted by anyone else while waddling and smelling like... honestly, I have no words about the smell.

Why didn't you just change in your room? you ask.

Well, I just didn't have the necessary supplies to clean up that kind of biohazard scene, and I'll leave it at that. After somehow creeping down the hall, making it to the bathroom, cleaning myself

up as I cursed my own body and my life while listening to the happy toilet music (because Japan), I managed to get back into my room and fall back asleep. Until I woke up again and ... yes... I shat myself again. It was probably one of the worst nights of my life. Plus, I was down two sets of flannel pajama bottoms and I'd only been in the country fourteen hours. I think you see where I'mgoing with this.

I figured that this situation would run its course, pun intended, but things did not improve. It was like my body was not just rejecting the food but my very organs. Finally, when the need to rush to the bathroom subsided for more than ten-minute increments, I called my mother over Skype to ask what to do. She's a physician, and for that, I was and am still very, very lucky.

She explained to me the names of the medications I would need. I had one more request, however. Could she look up the Japanese word for diarrhea for me? In case you ever need this information, the word is geri.

Normally, I would have crawled back into bed and dealt with the admin side oflife later, but I had another pressing matter. Given the obscenely complicated requirements and customary payments required to lease an apartment in Japan, I opted for one of the no fuss guesthouses that are very popular. They are an excellent housing option for gaijin, except when said gaijin is required to travel half-way across a city of thirty-six million people to collect the key to said guesthouse and make this trip within forty-eight hours of a projected move-in date, twenty-four of which had already been spent donating her intestines to the Japanese sewer system.

I gathered my cramping body, a paper map printed from MapQuest\ my non-working original iPhone,4 my cash, and my hotel key (yes, a physical key) and did what any sane person presented with my facts would do... get into an exceptionally expensive cab and make the driver deal with getting me to the guesthouse office. Japanese cabs really are amazing, but they make you pay for this extreme convenience, and there's no 'I'm a foreign student dying of intestinal distress discount.' The cab dropped me right at a relatively squat building in the middle of a busy street in

Shinjuku. The sheer size of the city around me was boggling. Sorry, New York, home of my birth,but you've got nothing on Tokyo. It is hard to understand the scale of Tokyo from photos. Thebuildings are taller and denser than you think, the streets wider than you expect, and the people more numerous than you can imagine. Still trying to catch my breath from being smack in themiddle of it all, I climbed the stairs to the registration office, pale as a ghost and trying not to think of the massive throng of strangers into which I had dropped myself.

As is the nature of accomplishing anything in Japan, I completed the ridiculous amount of paperwork involved in renting a room. I had already pre-booked it online, but this did not actually reduce the amount of paperwork, which was mercifully in English due to the fact that guesthousescater to foreigners. I was required to complete all paperwork in person at the office, and theyhelpfully had some desks set aside for those of us slogging through it all in hopes of getting a keyto an apartment some time before we died of old age. The Japanese love of bureaucracy truly befuddles me, and I'm a lawyer, so that's saying something. I thanked whatever Shinto gods kept me from having another intestinal episode while I was waiting and stepped, finally, with guesthouse key in hand, back into the crazy, busy streets of a completely foreign city to which I had barely seen let alone acclimated. I looked around me trying to get my bearings and spotted what looked like a convenience store across the narrow block. Score! It was a pharmacy.

I attempted to enter through the pharmacy's sliding doors only to find that sliding doors in Japan are not automatic. They are operated by touching a panel where the two doors meet in thecenter. Slamming my face into the door as I tried to enter didn't help the Japanese perception of me or my skull. After some searching, I successfully found the button to push to activate the door.6Inside was a diminutive man in slacks and a button down with round glasses. He was organizing the shelves with a solemn expression on his face, and I could see that he worked there.

"Sumimasen," I said. (Excuse me)

"Hai", he said. (Yes)

"Geri o shimasu," I said. (I translate this as I have diarrhea, but literally it means I do diarrhea, which I'm sure only added to the horror for this pharmacy clerk)

"Oh ... so desu ne?" he asked. (Oh ... is that so)

His face registered no change of expression at all, but I knew enough about Japanese peoplefrom language lessons and cultural studies to know that this was a socially ingrained reaction to someone sharing something completely inappropriate with them. He really, really wished I hadn't said what I had said.

"Hai," I replied. Nothing like doubling down on the awkwardness. (Yes or, technically, that's correct)

Look, I spoke some Japanese, but at that point it was relatively limited. This was the first conversation I ever had in Japanese with a Japanese person in Japan, cab driver notwithstanding. The cab driver mostly communicated with smiles and bows. Needless to say, this was probably the mostmortifying conversation that either of us had ever had, and I had just walked into a glass door, so Iwasn't starting from a position of confidence. I suspect that clerk still remembers me about as fondly as I remember that day.

After digesting my announcement for a moment, he silently led me to a section of the pharmacyand gestured with spread hands to a shelf of medication near the ground. I tried to ask him which one, but he just gestured insistently, not meeting my eyes and then backed away, leaving me to sort out the options myself. None of the active ingredients of the indicated medications matched the names my mom had given me. I should probably have considered myself lucky that they were even in Roman letters and readable. It was such a good day. Not wanting to risk guessing incorrectly, I just picked up one of everything and took it to the counter where the clerk rang up my purchases completely silently. I couldn't tell if he was embarrassed for me or scared of me. Either way, the silence followed me all the way to the street. I'm sure he was glad to see me go. At least I managed not to walk square into the door on the way out.

From there, I suffered a super uncomfortable series of train rides back to my hotel. This was my first ride on the Japanese train system, which I really, really love. It's clean as a whistle, always on time, and gets you almost everywhere you need to go in Tokyo. At this early point in my relationship with the trains, however, I spent my time praying silently to myself that I was on the right train headed in the right direction and would somehow be able to find my way back to my hotel room in Mita. I didn't really have the cash for another cab ride. The cramps came and went, but the Shinto gods spared me and the other passengers on the Oedo Line from another pants-staining. The train and a fifteen-minute walk later, I called my mom again and cursed the fourteen-hour time difference. She got onto the computer and looked up all the names I read her until we sorted out what I had brought and at what quantity. She marveled that anyone saw relief at all from the dosages, a common theme in Japan, where even antibiotics are dosed low, sometimes requiring multiple doctor visits. As an example, my friend Becky, after the same welcome dinner, ended up with a bacterial infection that required multiple rounds of antibiotics to resolve, because the initial dosages prescribed weren't therapeutic by American standards.

"Just take three now, and then take another one every time you feel the urge," she said. "Even if it's right after. Take them until it stops."

Like a good thirty-year-old girl suddenly living in another country with literally no clue what to do next, I listened to my mommy and popped anti-diarrheal tablets like candy. Even with the pitifully weak medication, it did eventually (not for a while) stop. And I did move into my new-to-me guesthouse apartment half-way across the city in a third direction from both the leasing office and my hotel.

Even today, the happy toilet music still haunts me mockingly.