Culture Crash: Notes on a Tokyo Prom

Note: The following is a draft for a forthcoming collection of essays, to be published in May 2008 by Doubleday.

WHEN YOU'RE AN AMERICAN TEENAGER GROWING UP IN TOKYO, the notion of attending one's senior prom takes on a peculiar kind of complexity.

For one thing, I'd never lived in America. (It was from London that I'd moved to Tokyo in 1970 at the age of seven, accompanied by a younger brother, a rather unsure mother, and a father who--having just accepted a position with Gillette--was newly charged with selling razor blades to a country of men with a known dearth of facial hair.)

For another thing, I wasn't even American. (My parents were both born and raised in Winnipeg, a city my dad sometimes joked was "best seen from a rear-view mirror," and to which neither held any real expectation of returning.)

I was a kind of pretender to a throne I could barely see.

And my prom would not offer much in the way of help.



IN THE SPRING OF 1982--MY 12TH IN TOKYO--I was granted admission to a college in "the States" (as we fellow expat kids were in the habit of calling your country, with a hand through the hair and a certain lock-jawed casualness). Having expended much effort over the years in a wobbly search for my own Americanness, the hunt had now accelerated to a full gallop. Such was my determination to avoid becoming part of the small sad clump of kids before me who'd gotten caught staying too long at the Ball-that-is-Japan, made awkward stabs at a life in America, and humbly returned some months later, to toil in soba shops or teach English in some distant suburb, endlessly.

I wouldn't be that, I told myself in bed at night.

But how to fortify against this? Where, then, to find my future self?

Not within the din of 24 hour pachinko parlors located just blocks from my family's sprawling Roppongi apartment, nor in the maze of street signs and alleyways put together in a manner defying all human logic. Not in the sizzling, soy-sauce smell of yakitori stands, in the hot splash of public ofuros, or in the scores of crisp-shirted, black backpacked schoolchildren who over the years had run up to me and shouted, shortly before dissolving into fits of collective giggles, the very first formal English sentence learned by all: “This is a pen!”

Not in the expensively-packaged, beautifully-designed stationery neatly displayed along the shelves of Kiddyland toystore on Omotesando, purchased mostly by young, prim-faced secretaries. “I’m a cowboy kid since 1642,” read one of my favorites. “Every morning for ten minutes a grapefruit rain falls.”

Hints of that elusive something I was searching for weren't to be gleaned even among the fragmented and rather random grouping that comprised Tokyo’s gaijin community in the time I was there. Not in the handsome late-20’s German who sidled up to me and my New Zealander friend Nancy at a Mister Donuts one winter afternoon. As Nancy inhaled a cigarette and we both idly nibbled on French crullers, the German leaned forward and looked deeply into my eyes.

"Tell me," he implored, "Why is it that no one ever talks about how good it feels to take a shit?”

MY DANCE WITH MY OWN AMERICANNESS WOULD BE A BEST-GUESS KIND OF ENTERPRISE--begged, borrowed and stolen, as necessary.

And so it was that the Dear Abby columns in each day's Pacific Stars & Stripes were must- read. Saturday afternoons were organized around Casey Kasem’s American Top 40, airing over the Far East Network. “Keep your feet on the ground and keep reeeeeeachin’ for the stars!” Kasem would coo, while I'd close my eyes and scan the instructions for their secret meaning.

Then there were my Seventeen magazines, delivered three months late and via sea mail and scrutinized behind my closed bedroom door, to the drone of the elevated Shuto expressway just outside my window.

Jayne Modean and Phoebe Cates, sun-dolloped and smiling while emerging from the surf, the self-serious Q & A's on How to Kiss a Boy or Squeeze a Pimple and oh, all that product! The rubber-soled Famolare sandals, the Tom McCann boots, the crème blush that went on white and slowly turned pink on one’s cheeks: perhaps these were the things that might lay claim to my Americanness! Having spent an entire spring fawning over a 12 oz. bottle of Chantilly perfume in Seventeen's glossy pages, I purchased some at a corner drugstore in Winnipeg one summer--and hauled the whole jug with me to school each day come fall.

I was betwixt and between for most of my growing-up life.

“You’re meso-culture kids!” Lavinia Downs, the Dorothy-Hamill-haircutted school librarian announced to a cluster of us. “I plan to write a book about you someday.”

“You’re citizens of the world!” my own mother suggested hopefully.

And while remaining deeply ensconced in my own continuing conundrum, somewhere along the line I seem to have made a decision: to leverage my meso-cultureness for all it was worth. For lack of any other card to play, I’d inhabit the role of an American--as seen through Japanese eyes.

"Cute American Girls": me and my friend Gail Smith--one a Canadian, the other a Brit--posing at the request of, and along with, a Japanese stranger in Harajuku. May 1981

To assist the pop group Sister Sledge in the promotion of its new single, “All American Girls,” I squeezed into a pair of hot pants and white patent go-go boots and spent an entire Saturday evening dancing on stereo speakers to that single song, over and over again in a series of Shinjuku discos.

For a print ad in which I was to pocket a tidy sum of yen, my bangs and ponytail were so shellacked with hairspray that jumping up and down for four hours one Saturday afternoon--as I and a dozen other kids my age were made to do--failed to prompt either to stir. A few months later, there we all were, in the midst of a popular magazine called Hot Dog, with a caption above us trumpeting: “That’s American Workers!”


"That's American Workers!"

I began appearing regularly on NHK’s weekly "Let’s Enjoy English,” performing surreal skits with the dancing-eyed Australian who became my first boyfriend.



I donned a neon yellow leotard and somersaulted out of a giant apple for a television commercial touting a new department store. On being caught sneaking past a guard, ticketless, to attend a Stevie Wonder concert at Budokan, a friend and I improvised exuberantly. “We’re with the band!” we cried, and a short time later were ushered to orchestra seats.

And on and on it went. With a new pair of cowboy boots, an amusing answer for what I liked to eat for breakfast and the inability to sing or play a single musical note, I was selected to judge a large-scale event at Bukokan called “The World Popular Song Festival.” Thousands would be in attendance, and I’d be assessing the relative merits of Christopher Cross (“Sailing”), Rupert Holmes (“The Pina Colada Song”) and Mary McMcGregor (“Torn Between Two Lovers”), each valiantly attempting comebacks among some thirty lesser-known performers from around the globe.


Modeling hair dye, at sixteen

“YOU'RE LIVING IN A DREAM WORLD, KID,” MY DAD WOULD MUSE. And while my sundry extra-curricular endeavors were indeed a long way from his own teen days selling shoes in Winnipeg, Dad and I were both inhabiting the same planet. In a matter of months, upon his being transferred to America and my enrolling in college there, the chauffeurs and club privileges and twice-weekly maid visits and generous "standard of living allowance" providing by his various employers over the years would vanish.


"Captain Dynamints": my father and his staff, getting pumped up to sell candy. c. 1979

In the meantime, what could we do?

My mom took flower arranging classes and sumie lessons, played paddle tennis, wrestled with her own feelings of strandedness, and volunteered for TELL—the Tokyo English Life Life—a suicide hotline for ex-pats. She also met Jean Boardman, mother of John, a missionary and parent to five, and partner in a weekly weekly bible study group for fellow wives which they called "The Wednesday Wonderfuls.”

It was during a visit to our apartment on an afternoon I wasn't there that John had spotted a framed photo of me and gone on to orchestrate an introduction. At the time he was, as he put it, “taking a break” after a year at the University of Washington in Seattle. Did this secretly mean he was bound for the land of gaijin soba ladlers, I wondered?

But he was too handsome and older-seeming for me to frankly care. On our first date, filled with energy and nerves, I’d brought a glass of red wine to my lips--and promptly spilled most of it into the lap of my white Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. We both found this highly and illogically amusing and soon thereafter, fell in love.

John and I spent much of the spring dashing into random photo booths, endlessly kissing, and now and again endlessly kissing in random photo booths. All of which was heightened by my eminent departure to the lone college to which I'd applied: Sarah Lawrence. My dad, having transitioned over the years from marketing razorblades with Gillette to gargle and Dynamints with Warner Lambert, was now pushing shampoo for Helene Curtis--and in a promotion, would be simultaneously moving the family to Chicago.

NATURALLY THERE HAD BEEN OTHER BOYS AND OTHER SCHOOL DANCES. In addition to my Australian friend, these included Dean Sasaki, the short, socially-awkward, highly-pimpled math genius who in my freshman year had trailed me down a long hallway at school to extend an invite to the Homecoming dance some four months in advance; Jeff Grable, the star long-distance runner on whom I harbored a crush until the precise moment he started to like me back; and Mark Barns, whose easy presence I enjoyed and who subsequently announced both his gayness and a new career as a flight attendant for Quantas Airways within the span of a single month.

But the prospect of attending a senior prom with someone with whom I was actually besotted proved something else entirely. Easy and lovely and grin-making amidst the various layers of odd.

There was nothing in the Tokyo shops resembling a prom dress (everything was ruffled and size zero and looked like it belonged atop a wedding cake and cost a million yen), so I borrowed a tight black polyester number from my sophisticated friend Amy Koch, who was soon bound for Yale and for whom the prom—any prom—had long since outlived any usefulness to her.


The prom itself was held at the Tokyo Hilton, in the Pearl Ballroom. I was a “prom princess.” The theme for the evening was Journey’s “Open Arms.” On the menu was beef "poivre” (this latter word in quotes). The band consisted of a handful of our bearded high school teachers, who called themselves Ibid.

And I know this mainly because the details are listed on the prom program, which I still have.

From the Hilton, John and I and some friends piled into a taxi and drove toward the discos (Tsubaki Ball, Lexington Queen, Nepenthe) near my apartment in Roppongi, to which “cute American girls” such as me and many others had long been granted free passes. We drank drinks with names like Violet Fizz and watched our fellow Japanese club-goers dance soberly and frantically to their own reflections on the mirrored walls around them.

On our way out, our photo was snapped by an aging handlebar-mustached guy by the name of Bill Hersey, who wrote a column called “Partyline” for The Tokyo Weekender.

“In and Around the Big Mikan,” the caption under the picture read when it came out a few days later. Beside us was a picture of Sylvester Stallone, in town to promote “Rocky II,” inspecting the rock gardens at the Okura Hotel.

Dawn found me sitting on John's lap along the steps of the Singapore Embassy as together we watched the sun come up. While I went off to college, John would remain here--to model, to teach English and to figure out what next.

“Wait for me, Jen,” he whispered. “Just for a year.”

I kissed the tears off his eyelids and considered. I told John I'd wait.


A few days later and after a lifetime of longing, I’d moved to America--to this country I'd long viewed as an intense and faraway crush, a seductive near-stranger from a strange land whom I hoped would not turn away once we were finally introduced.

On my first day at Sarah Lawrence, I clomped into my Philosophy of Religion class wearing an outfit closely copied, to the best of my efforts, from the pages of Seventeen: Calvin Klein jeans zipped so tight I could barely walk in them, high-heeled Candies sandals with one-inch platform soles, a gold metal cinch belt resembling an uncoiled garter snake, snapped together at the ends and worn over a polyester blouson top.

And several pounds of of makeup. To my unspoiled 18 year-old skin, I’d applied a thickish coat of pancake makeup (Cover Girl) to go along with now-weighty black eyelashes (Maybelline) and purple-glossed lips (Bonne Belle Kissin’ Sticks, which I wore around my neck, on a rope). My hair was freshly washed (Lemon Up!), conditioned (Agree) and blow-dried, and I’d carefully twisted its fine strands ‘round a stingingly hot (Helene Curtis) curling iron to give myself two perfectly symmetrical “wings.”

With their unshaved legs and eyes lined with khol, my classmates quietly took note.


That fall and into the winter, I sneaked weekly calls to John with a credit card number handed to me by someone who’d stolen it from—or so I was told--the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. On those pale blue, light-as-tracing paper tri-fold international mailers, John would fill every inch with his compact, comfortingly familiar back-tilting script, writing at least once a day. (A stack of eight letters once lay in wait once, each spelling out, one letter per letter, I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U.)

My roommate—a slope-shouldered, sad-eyed, shorts-wearing, long-haired girl named Ellen from San Antonio, Texas, who on being introduced had casually shown me an invite from her own mother to a “house cooling party” to celebrate a third divorce—was in the habit of inviting her two best friends over to your prison cell of a shared dwelling in the evenings. And while together the trio sat snorting cocaine long past midnight, by turns reading “Dante’s Inferno” aloud to one another, I lay in my flannel nightgown under my covers, curled up in a semi-fetal position with my back to them all. “John Boardman, John Boardman, John Boardman,” I’d silently repeat.

Being wholly unused to tipping (never done in Japan) and never much good at math, it took several long seconds to calculate what 20% of anything ever was.

Ordering spontaneously at a deli proved a performance art I was similarly unschooled in, prompting both anxiety and a spate of secret in-line rehearsing. ("Turkey on rye with a slice of tomato and some slaw and hold the mayo!")

In Central Park one Saturday afternoon, I ran up to a man I took to be Japanese. Before I could stop myself, I threw my arms around his neck and explained that I’d grown up in Tokyo, that I missed that city very much.

The man froze and held up his right hand. “Ah, sorry--me Korean,” he replied hastily before turning away.

John flew to Chicago for Christmas. On Christmas Eve, shortly before nudging into the pew of a famed church on Michigan Avenue for carol-singing with my parents and siblings, we'd book a room at a Best Western for a single golden hour, and have sex for the first time.

And miracle of miracles, it was more than I’d even hoped. Better. For the next four days, until he returned to Tokyo, we surprised and delighted ourselves with how easy and fun and ecstatic, really, it felt to be together this way. Like we’d been at this thing forever! The watchful, uncertain gaze of my mother barely registered; John and I would kiss her on the cheek and gaily skip out the front door, then scurry giggling up the back stairwell of my family’s pre-war Near North Side apartment building and on a concise patch of gray cement floor next to a fire exit, do it.

In March, John called tearfully to Bronxville to blurt that he’d been sleeping with one of his English students, a woman who happened to be named Yoko. Just wait for me, Jen. Over a long and confusing period of months, John and I would part.

John and Yoko married, bore a son together on whom they bestowed a peculiarly British name and within a few years, divorced. John next wed a (as he explained her) "farmer from Thailand" named Apple and some years after that, the Russian hostess of a Shinjuku bar. He’d remain in Japan, working in customer service for a series of Tokyo hotels and later as a seller of sports equipment. If he was bothered by a continuing “meso-cultureness,” he didn’t let on. What he did share, in an email written many years later and in reference to the prom, was this: “That night heightened both my feelings of being deeply in love with you, and my sense of insecurity as a missionary kid dating ‘out of my league.’”

On graduating from Sarah Lawrence, I interviewed with a Japanese television network at Rockefeller Center, making full and unwitting use of—as I was informed by telephone the following week—“the language of gangsters.” (Having foregone the formal study of Japanese in favor of Spanish in high school, on my mother’s advice that the latter prove “more useful,” I now only now came to understand the true consequences of picking the language up on the street.)

I was hired by Nippon Television as an associate producer, contingent on enrolling in language classes at the Japan Society.

My new boss, the head of the network’s New York office, was a short, kindly, older gentleman with coke-bottle glasses and a thicket of white hair. His name was Sumii—Sumii-san, we called him—and he favored expensive double-breasted wool suits and throwing lavish cocktail parties at his airy apartment overlooking Lincoln Center to which the staff was frequently invited. At work, on being asked for guidance on a delicate matter, Sumii-san was likely to furrow his brow, stroke his chin thoughtfully, and declare in heavily-accented English: “Fortunately or unfortunately, I could not say.”

For nearly three years, as an associate producer and then as a the office's “creative coordinator,” I helped produce such must-see items as a documentary on cattle mutilation by UFOs, a musical event from the United Nations featuring a young Lenny Kravitz (then calling himself “Romeo Blue”) and Run DMC, and a special appearance with Mike Tyson and his wife-of-two-minutes, Robin Givens. I'd also regularly escort groups of visiting Japanese executives to television conventions in places like Las Vegas--where I was also responsible for choosing girlie shows for them, and me, to see at night. It was my job to laugh when laughter was expected and remain unfazed by offbeat demands. I'd opt to leave the network only on being asked, in 1989, help develop a live New Years Eve special from the South Street Seaport. The suggested theme? "Happy New Year, AIDS!"

The normal life as the exotic thing, I’d scrawled on a yellow post-it some weeks after having left Nippon Television. I’d tucked the post-it in my wallet and kept it there, as a kind of talisman.

While riding the F train to Rockefeller Center on the way to work that fall, I'd be struck by a dashing, high-cheekboned, tousle-haired man I’d first spotted mid-commute several months before, when a robust comment he’d made to a stranger had made me smile. He worked as a photo editor at Newsweek, he told me now, and was also an artist, and while sharing impassioned details of his latest project (something about collecting dead florescent tubes from subway yards, and donning Tyvex suits to trespass on hazardous waste sites in Queens), I wouldn’t quite understand him and would be secretly delighted by this. I’d surprise myself by falling in love with him, this man whom I’d instantly assumed to be the naughty type, the kind with whom I was certain I'd embark on a lively foray with a clearly marked expiration date.

After some years we married, and some years after that produced two intelligent, quirky, surprising and wholly individual daughters together. Eighteen years later, amidst the bruises and bleeding hangnails and now-and-again tedium of any long relationship, I still loved very much this man from the F train, this man who’d remained present even in those moments when every ounce in both of us wanted to flee, who still dipped me in public and made me belly laugh in bed at night, and who on rare and unexpected occasions still struck me as so handsome that I’d momentarily forget I was even hitched to the guy.

Eighteen years later, I’d manage to calculate tips quickly, think up orders at the local deli, refrain from jumping into the arms of unsuspecting Koreans, talk to my neighbors in a language we seemed to mutually agree upon, and feel quite certain I deserved to live in Brooklyn as much as anyone did.

Eighteen years later, I’d open my desktop drawer and discover that old wallet, and in it, the post-it. The normal life as the exotic thing.

I'd stare down at the post-it sitting in my lap and and know I was blessed.

While understanding full well that I’d always be longing for then.