Tales From the Enkai

(Spring 2008 Issue)

No enkai was quite as exciting as my first, a festive post-Sports Day celebration that became synonymous with a total breakdown of conventional Japanese values.

Like most enkais, three of the male teachers were half-naked, making a human pyramid as we stood in a circle and chanted.  As these inebriated acrobatics were unfolding, out of the corner of my eye I witnessed the gym teacher (a female) launch a full-on assault at the Japanese teacher (another female). There was the meeting of fist and face, the falling of one teacher and a swarm of others who swooped in and quickly escorted the victim out.

It all happened in the blink of an eye; the other teachers went on with their chanting and pyamids,  leaving the poor foreigner wondering what the bloody hell had just happened. The chanting ends and the kyoto-sensei gives a closing speech with the gym teacher crying and howling like a dying whale, her face buried into our kyoto-sensei’s back.

It took a solid day of poking and prodding to get my JTE to explain what happened the previous Friday. It turns out the two teachers had some disagreements about how children should be educated, and the feud spilled over into the enkai. We all went about our business working like all was sunny and gay.  What happens at the enkai really does stay at the enkai.

Adam Lisbon, Kobe-shi 2004-07

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I remember my first enkai very well because I was sweating profusely.  Couldn’t stop, really – a combination of nervousness like never before and the Amazon-esque heat and humidity of Nagasaki in August.  I learned the word doki-doki and mushiatsui and repeated it again and again trying to explain why it looked like I had just showered in between the appetizers and main course.  But the beer tasted great and I was hooked on enkais ever since, even when I no longer got the gaijin discount, and I never missed one in two years!

Scott Hiniker, Nagasaki-ken 1996–98

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We had an elderly magician come and start doing really cheesy magic tricks. When he put on the flapper dress, high heels, fishnets and makeup, the magic suddenly became a whole lot more entertaining.

Another time four male teachers entered the room naked from the waist up and clad only in loincloths and sumo blankets fashioned from porno posters from the 1940s.  They got on stage and, sumo style, shouted the achievements their homeroom classes had attained during the past semester.

Dawn Mostow, Gifu-ken 2003-06

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I once walked into the wrong enkai room at a huge bonnenkai hotel.  I wound up hanging out for about an hour, drinking their beer and singing karaoke, because I noticed that the girls were cuter at the “wrong” enkai.  Nobody seemed to mind me, but apparently my school got worried that I was lost until a couple of teachers heard my trademark enka song coming from the other room.

Matt Jungblutt, Saitama-ken 1988-91

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At one enkai with people from the office the discussion of breast size came up and one of the women at the table, who was well-endowed, talked with no apparent embarrasment about which of the women in the office had the biggest breasts.  I don’t know if it was just Japanese being relaxed or of not making waves and disturbing the wa even in the face of sexual harrasment.  The women in question all looked good, apart from their breast size.

After the bonnenkai, a few of us went to a local cabaret with karaoke and hostesses.  I think the women from our section came along, though what they made of it I don’t know.  The videos for the karaoke were soft-core pornographic (showing just one actress, no one else).

I took a bunch of pictures at the nijikai (I was known as the “cameraman” by the locals because I took my camera everwhere).  When I got the pictures from that night developed, I gave one to a co-worker that showed him dancing with the hostess.  He was smiling, and the way she was dancing, any guy would have smiled. He put the picture in his coat pocket but neglected to remove it.  His wife found it when doing laundry.  Let’s just say it would have been better for him if I had left my camera home that night.

Mike Harper, CIR, Kagoshima-ken 1990-93

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At my first enkai there was a karaoke machine, and I had yet to learn of the shamelessness with which the Japanese publicly indulge in this national pastime.  I soon found myself on stage singing along with a co-worker to a Carpenters song (another weird object of obsession in Japan). I know this may be hard to believe, but before I got to Japan I had never heard of the Carpenters.  So needless to say I didn’t actually know the words to the song  and ended up mumbling and humming along senselessly to the music. The teachers were fairly aghast that I didn’t know, love, and memorize every lyric written by this oh-so-popular American band. I felt like a hen na gaijin that day indeed!

Megan Miller, Hyogo-ken 2000-02

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The most insane enkai blowout I remember during my JET years was one of those classic overnight hotel stays.  We all checked into a hotel maybe half an hour away from our school and went downstairs for a lovely dinner including — and followed by — lots and lots of drinking.  I ended up at the end of a long table next to a crush surrounded by tokkuri (sake flasks) that had been turned on their side to show that they were empty.

From there we jumped in a cab to karaoke.  He was already in the cab when I got in and he put his arm around me.  I was totally loaded by that point, and so when he said, “You turn me on,” my brilliant response was to say, “Me too!”

We arrived at the karaoke place, sang some songs and drank some whiskey, got even more lit.  We all took cabs back to the hotel and I ended up ralphing in a wastebasket because I had overdone it.   I think earlier in the evening I’d even seen our gym teacher peeing on a bed in the designated mah-jong room.   Don’t know what that was all about.

Anyhow, needless to say the next morning I was wrecked and cursing the fact of my ever having been born.  I went down to breakfast and looked askance at the fish and nattou in front of me, wondering how on earth I was going to get any of that into my mouth without hurling.  The sight of the raw egg didn’t help either.  The crush came wandering in with a bright smile and said, “You look terrible!”  “I feel like death,” I replied.  He laughed and sat down with me.  I absently played with my food but could not have a real breakfast.

So what did we do for our next activity?  Bowling!  That’s right kids, bowling with a hangover.  My head was exploding, but I went (no choice because I didn’t have independent transportation home) and, miraculously, I beat everyone.  Don’t know how that happened.  I still have the score sheet printout somewhere.

Anyway, after that was over we all did return home and I was deposited in my apaato to recover.  That took about a day of lying in bed asking, “Why God, why?” and swearing not to ever let it get off the rails like that again.  The next week my crush asked me if I remembered anything that had happened and when I confirmed that I had, he went ahead and asked me out.  Who knew a drunken, slightly illogical confession could lead to a beautiful relationship?

Anonymous, Dokodemo-ken

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One time my coworkers proclaimed me drunk and unfit to drive after having one sip of a drink to taste it (literally, one sip, not a shot, not even a tablespoon — probably about a teaspoon worth, really… I knew I would have to drive later on that night), after having finished my meal, after having stopped at another ramen shop on the way back to school since the teachers decided there wasn’t enough food at the enkai, and then after having finally made it back to the school where my car was.

Now, Japan has a zero tolerance policy, but here I was after having approximately a teaspoon worth of a drink with an alcohol content on par with beer, two meals and three and a half hours later, and they told me I was unfit to drive as I had been “drinking.” While I would never endorse driving under any influence of alcohol, the process of our bodies metabolizing alcohol was apparently a great mystery to these teachers.

As a result of my sip, I was dropped off at home and left to walk to school to pick up my car the next day that it wasn’t raining (it’s about a four-mile walk which I did indeed make the next day that it wasn’t raining, three days later).

In contrast to my experience, the popular conversation of the enkai that night had been how many times over the years the vice principal drove home drunk. Me being demonized for a sip, two meals and over three hours later, and his being deified for his drunk driving shenanigans over the years left me with a bitter taste in my mouth, and it wasn’t from any sort of alcohol.

Curtis Edlin, Hyogo-ken 2007-Present

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Believe it or not, my CIR enkais were pretty dull (except for the times my bucho would get rip-roaring drunk and hypothesized at length about my future wedded to a cute Japanese girl).  I guess it was nice having a co-worker live vicarously through me, if only for that evening.

Justin Tedaldi, Kobe-shi 2001-02

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My Board of Education-sanctioned farewell party was held at a hostess bar.  I am not a man.  Why my BOE thought it was appropriate to have a party honoring a twenty-three-year-old female at a hostess bar—and have the gall to tell her it was expected that she offer to pay for half of it—is something that still baffles me.

I’m not being entirely fair.  Before the hostess bar, I had a very nice banquet dinner with the entire BOE, in which I was presented with a beautiful navy yukata with a strawberry print.  All the other women left soon after that.  I was asked by my English-speaking supervisor if I wanted to continue the party.  Well, yeah, of course I did.

So the hostess bar.  It took me a few minutes to realize what it was.  I had read about them, had my male JET friends describe the male-only enkais that occurred in them, but had never visited one myself.  It didn’t look any different from the snack bars, so it wasn’t until I realized that the women who worked there weren’t Japanese that I figured it out.

There were four women.  They were dressed in more revealing clothes than most mama-sans, but weren’t overly sexual.  Two of the women were Filipino, and as such spoke better English than most of my JTEs.  One of them took a liking to me, probably because I wasn’t about to fondle her, and sat next to me to chat.  I decided to stay, at least for a little while.  It was like a sociological experiment.

The male BOE members got very drunk very quickly, and the other hostesses bustled around bringing constant fresh supplies of food and drinks, along with the karaoke mic. “Hello Ms. Alexei!” said one BOE member repeatedly, his tie around his head like Rambo.  He wanted my attention to be on the English song he was singing, but I was asking my Filipino friend about her family back home.  “Hello! Ms. Alexei! Ms. Alexei!”

A serving of kimchee appeared next to me, and my friend began to feed me. “No, that’s okay—”

“Ms. Alexei! English song!”

My friend then took a napkin and wiped my mouth.  I looked around, and saw at least two of the BOE members had ladies in their laps petting their heads.  The men were watching me get fed and cleaned like a toddler.  I wasn’t nearly drunk enough to make this palatable.  I think I lasted at my hostess-bar party for an hour.

Alexei Esikoff, Fukushima-ken 2001-02

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In general, my schools’ enkais pretty much just involved teachers getting plastered and then drunk driving home to their families.

Earth Bennett, Aomori-ken 2000-02

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You know those scenes in the movies where a big cake is wheeled into the room and out pops a scantily clad lady shouting “surprise!”?  Well, at one memorable enkai in rural Tottori-ken, that lady was me.  Only with more clothes.  And less frosting.  And I didn’t yell “surprise!”  You see, out where I lived, we had limited forms of entertainment, and the standard enkai fare of drinking a lot and playing sekuhara with the secretaries got old pretty quickly (especially when the guys went out to drink almost every night of the week).  So, for the BIG parties (I’m talking Bonenkai Big here) we would make the trek into the nearest city 45 minutes away, rent hotel rooms, and make a weekend of it.

Well, this one bonenkai was well under way in the party room at an onsen hotel when my co-workers discovered that the raucous party going on in the room next door was none other than our own town culture center (I worked for Town Hall).  The guys in my party wanted to join our two parties together.  But, just going next door with an open bottle of Kirin Ichiban didn’t seem like a big enough splash.  This was, after all, the Bonenkai.  So, they formed a drunken huddle to figure out the best way to party with the culture center.

Let me interject here briefly on the male-female breakdown of my office. This party was attended by about 25 employees of the Planning and PR Division of Nichinan Town Hall, 4 of whom were women, including me.  The other three ladies were older, and only attended these parties out of obligation.  As soon as the nabe was packed away and the men turned to shochu and whiskey, the ladies went upstairs to bed.  Sensible women, really.  I’m not sure why, but I always stayed at the party, even after the other office ladies had left.  So this leaves me with a room full of bored, drunk, Japanese men, one of whom just had a “great idea” for bringing our party next door.

See, we had this huge cooler that we had brought to the hotel with our own beef for shabu shabu (farmers bring their own food).  Now that the cooler was empty, it seemed perfectly reasonable to put someone in it and “deliver” it to the party next door for their own shabu shabu.  Well, who better to stuff into a cooler and present to your colleagues, than your 22-year-old blonde gaijin?  Clearly I had consumed my own fair share of Kirin at this point, because this seemed like a logical plan to me.  So, I stuffed myself into the cooler, someone squeezed the top on, and four hefty guys picked me up and stumbled next door (note to self: never be carried around by drunk men who are prone to bang into things) to give our friends from the culture center a “special delivery.”  At which point, I popped out of the cooler yelling “Happy New Year” (in English, of course) and carrying two bottles of local sake.  The whole room burst into cheers. I felt like a rock star (until the next morning, when I felt like an idiot).

And that’s how I ended up pretending to be a woman in a bikini jumping out of a cake.

Clara Solomon, Tottori-ken 1999-2001

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Somehow, my teachers were convinced that their black ALT must be some pro athlete; too many bad American ’80s movies, perhaps.  It never failed.  At every enkai, every male teacher would line up, smallest to tallest for:  “Marc-sensei vs. [fill in this week’s school] chugakko suuupaaaaa arm wresting challenge!!!!!”

Discovering beer to be a clearly inferior choice for fuel, I met bicep failure by the time I faced the kendo coach.  Yes, the one whose arms you’d mistaken for two smuggled ni-nensei.  I actually bested him ONCE, and my reward?  Face off with the ONE healthy kyoto-sensei.  You know, the marathon runner who’d be up for a “light” 20K run back home AFTER the enkai.

Surprisingly, not even flashbacks of Stallone’s masterful Over the Top performance could pump me up for the feat.  No love lost, though.  The next day, we’d all just laugh and make pancakes.  Fun the first time, but two years was just pure abuse.

Cultural ambassador?  Cocky pop.  Cultural ass whippin’.

Marc Carroll, Gifu-ken 2001-03

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Shortly after I became a CIR at Kumamoto City Hall’s International Exchange section, they had a kangeikai to celebrate my arrival.  Though most of my co-workers were friendly right from the start, there were a few (especially men) who seemed to be taking a while to warm up to me.  I chalked it up to cultural differences and figured that time would do the trick.

Knowing that alcohol was rumored to have a way of speeding the process along, I was looking forward to the enkai that night.  Sure enough, once the beer and shochu started flowing, in their drunken hazes my once reticent colleagues began telling me stories about their lives, asking me about mine and even putting their arms around my shoulders in companionship, some even attempting this in English!

Great, I thought, I’ve finally broken the unspoken barrier that has existed between us.  I looked forward to a bright new office where I could be myself and not feel like I was treading on people’s toes.

I headed to work the next day in a good mood, ready for my new workplace.  However, when I got there I was in for a huge shock.  The co-workers I thought I had bonded with so much the night before barely even looked up when I came in.  I felt like we were back to square one even though according to my perception, the night’s festivities had brought us closer.

I guess what they say about what happens at enkais stays at enkais is actually true!  Down the road, I came to develop positive relationships with each of my colleagues, but it was a process that took a couple of enkais to accomplish.

Stacy Smith, Kumamoto-ken 2000-03

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At my first enkai here, my vice principal got drunk, or at least pretended to get drunk — he’d only had the equivalent of about two glasses or one large bottle of beer by that point (though he would continue to consume more). Once thoroughly “drunk” (in Japan it seems to me that many people associate holding a beer bottle with being drunk even if the cap is still on, and they often seem to regard being “drunk” as being a legitimate excuse for just about anything — including things which would otherwise be considered sexual harassment) the vice principal decides to spend the rest of the night asking me about, well… my… physiology down there.

The remaining hour of the enkai was pretty much him hounding me with the same question over and over: “Is your…,” [makes strange masturbatory gesture] “…all right?”   “Is your…” [repeats strange masturbatory gesture] “…okay?”

Honestly, I have no idea how to respond to that.  Besides being shocked at the question, I had to think to myself, “Define ‘all right’…‘all right’ in what way?”  And, then, for whatever reason unbeknownst to me, everybody else at the enkai thinks his questions are THE CUTEST THING EVER. So, unfortunately, this kind of drunken debauchery led me to try to avoid enkais any way I could.

Curtis Edlin, Hyogo-ken 2007-Present

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My welcome enkai at Nishi-chu was the night before my first day teaching at the school.  The welcome party was pretty good, although I had learned that the principal was considered a very serious and highly respected man, the message in short was that I should be on my best behavior around him.

Later on in the evening, I realized that I had left my keys at the first of the three drinking establishments to which I had been taken, and after another treacher drove me by there we realized it was closed and locked. How the heck was I going to get into my apartment?  Another teacher called his house and told his mom to set out an extra futon, we’re gonna have a foreigner at breakfast.

We drank at his house until at least 2:00 a.m.  I woke up the next day feeling horrible, wearing the same clothes from the night before, and I had to go to a new school.  Everybody would quickly realize that I was wearing the same clothes and hadn’t shaved.  My “host” teacher told me we had to go to the principal’s office to explain that I would need to go get my keys sometime during the day.  “Great,” I’m thinking. “The one guy I’d actually most like to avoid is the guy I’ve got to go and see, to tell him my that my irresponsibility was about to screw up his schedule because I would be out of the building for an hour or so to get my keys and get cleaned up.”

I waited outside his office while the teacher explained to him what happened, until finally I was summoned in.  The principal had a very serious look on his face, and then it lightened.  He smiled and proceeded to tell me this incredibly long story about his first enkai and how the next day he wound up at school the next morning with “tatami-face” after sleeping on the floor of a colleague’s home.  I was golden — the toughest principal in the town had given me the okay because I apparently duplicated a mistake that he had made when he was as new to the work world as I was.

Matt Jungblutt, Saitama-ken 1988-91

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I have to admit to being incredibly jealous of my fellow ALTs when I lived in Japan. While my JTEs were unbelievably sweet and generous in buying me presents, taking me to dinner, etc., they never once had an enkai at either one of my schools!  What were the odds?  I had my friends relive the madness at theirs for me but, let’s face it, unless MY kocho-sensei’s eight beers deep and happily singing Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” at the top of his voice, it’s just not the same.

Nandita Ray, Saitama-ken 2004-05