Japan is the land of the “boom.” One year it’s health drinks laced with amino acids, the next it’s ring tones for cellular phones that mimic sounds of the office, like the whining of a fax machine or fingers typing on a calculator. Currently Japan’s experiencing a “coffee boom” as a result of a popular drama on Japanese TV, Yasashii Jikan (Gentle Time), the story of a middle-aged man whose wife is killed when his teenage son has an accident with her in the car. Unable to forgive his son, he moves to Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido and starts a small coffee shop called Mori no Tokei (Clock of the Forest) where people come to find peace and calm. In the show, the customers at the coffee shop grind their own coffee with hand-turned mills, which gives them a chance to relax as they take in the slow aroma of the coffee wafting up. As a result of the show, sales of coffee beans and mills are skyrocketing, and coffee shop used in the filming of the drama is a hit with tourists.
Before I came to Japan in 1991, I took four years of Japanese at my alma mater, SDSU, so compared to most first-time gaijin here I spoke quite a lot of Japanese. I could do many useful things, like ask directions when I got lost (which was a frequent occurrence, as there are no street names in Japan), and I knew just enough Japanese for me to put my foot in my mouth really well. Yes, I’ve committed many faux pas during my time here, such as trying to impress a pretty girl by speaking Japanese to her, but accidentally using onna kotoba, words that women use which are the bane of male students of Japanese, or committing a deadly slip when ordering mango juice, since “mango” is dangerously close to another word (the word is manko, and it refers to the female reproductive area, but don’t use it as it’s really bad). In Japanese hospitals, thermometers are always used in the armpit, but I put one in my mouth, causing much shock among the nurses, who had never seen anyone do such a thing. And then there was the time I bought my wife some pretty flowers, only to find out that I’d bought kiku no hana (chrysanthemums), which are only used as offerings to the dead on special Buddhist days — that really got a laugh out of her.
