The Italians

Wow. That was my first impression, seeing a small group of three Italian men sitting with my friend in the McDonald’s on the second floor of the train station in Tsuchiura. “Wow.”

You’ll notice the lack of an exclamation point. Not a “Wow!” More subdued, sublime, internal. More like a sigh or whisper. “wow….”

My friend, “A”, who was sitting there in the McDonald’s waiting for me with these three men (she had called me, told me she’d met some people she knew I’d like to meet) smiled, and the five of us sat there ~ in a McDonald’s! ~ having a nice little time. These men were in town on a job contract, doing some engineering work for 2-3 months. They were staying at the fancy-schmancy hotel that was just across the street from the language school where A worked.

In a coincidental accident of time, A was leaving work and they were leaving the hotel at the same time. In Japan, foreigners are eye magnets. It can’t be helped ~ foreigners stand out, you cannot help but notice them. So A met the Italians, who said they were going to McDonald’s (the only place they knew to get some food), and invited her along. She called me, and the rest is this story.

After spending about two hours sitting in that McDonald’s, the counter staff eyeing us nervously because we didn’t leave, we finally were shooed out when they wanted to close up. A and I arranged to meet the Italians again the next evening, thinking we’d go to one of the bars we liked, for dinner after work ended at 9:00 for us English teachers. We told the guys how to get there, and they said they’d meet us there. We think that’s what they said. Their Japanese was non-existent, and their English was not exactly precise.

The next night, A and I met up and walked to the bar together. We’d invited another friend, “F”, to come with us so we’d be three and three. We opened the door to this little 26-seat bar and…. Wow! There were now about a dozen Italian men there! We could only laugh! Where had the others come from? Why hadn’t they been mentioned the night before? What on earth was happening… were we in Japan?

Yes indeed. This was the first of several experiences I had, meeting groups of people (okay, men) from a non-English-speaking country and getting to know a new non-Japanese culture, in Japan. A and F and I spent a lot of time with several of these men during their stay in Tsuchiura. We three women were all there on one to two year contracts, and these men gave us some much-needed frivolity. We were hard working English teachers, and we spent a lot of time being serious. These men had no interest in learning English, or really in what we did for a living. When we got together, we just had fun. Lots of laughing!

One thing that I remember about one of these men was a misunderstanding in English. In Italian, “ciao” means both hello and good-bye. This man always got it wrong. It was like the Beatles’ song ~ I’d say hello, he’d say good-bye. He really thought that was the answer when someone said hello. Like in Japanese, when you come home or come back to work after leaving for an errand or lunch break, when you enter you said tadaima (I’m home, or I’m back) and the reply is always okaeri (okaerinasai, if you want to be formal), which means welcome home, or welcome back. So being in Japan and hearing that two-word greeting exchange, this young man said, he thought the answer to hello was good-bye. That’s what he said, anyway.

Did he really believe that? Was he just joking? Who cares!? He was Italian, and…. wow.