Lemony Fresh

While I was waiting for the school to admit or deny me, I was still very active in anime fandom. I formed the infamous Lemon APA (based on a joke on the way home from the 1986 Dallas Fantasy Fair). It seemed to me that there were obviously fans of erotic animation and manga but everyone was so uptight about it, not wanting to say they were interested at all and hiding it that I wanted to do something out in the open. Something that would how that people who like such things don’t have to be sleazeballs and disgusting and that the views and interests of such people could be exchanged in a reasonable and intelligent manner. Originally it was going to be a local APA but word got out and I got submissions from all over the place. I had even more people who wanted to buy copies but I was adamantly against that. I wanted people to contribute—to be a part of the thing.

YES!

Finally, I got a letter from the school stating that my application had been accepted and I could start school in April. I sent some more information and they sent some more and they got me the necessary visa and they sent me a photocopy of an apartment catalog with one highlighted and they wrote out how much it would cost to move in and all.
I raced around gathering things and money and finally on April 16th, 1987 I moved to Japan.

My New Life

My new life got off to a not-so-good start when I got to Narita airport and discovered that all my luggage had been lost. It took them two hours to figure this out. The friend I had waiting to pick me up at the airport thought I had died.
We took the slow train into town and she showed me on a map where to go and what train to take. I tried to remember it but I was dead tired.
I was finally in Japan though! Who cares about little details like that? It was a real rush. I went out on the streets of Shibuya and looked around for a few hours. It wasn’t quite the shock that it was before but it was still pretty strange. I was alone this time. No backup.
The next morning, after getting terribly lost and having to take a taxi, I finally got to the school and they told me where the apartment they had arranged for me was and that I should come back the next day. After a long and exasperating trip, I finally found the apartment house. It was called Tama Esty and was right on the bank of the Tama river where the Odakyu line crosses it, a very lovely area which I would like to move back to someday.
I went into the office and discovered that nobody there understood English. Uh oh!
I was extremely lucky that the one tenant who spoke English happened to come into the office right then. Turned out that the school had found the apartment in a catalogue and sent me the listing but never bothered to check on the availability of rooms there. Yet more luck happened my way and there was somebody who was just moving out the next day. I had checked out of the hotel in Shibuya, thinking that I was going to be in an apartment that night. (It was lucky that I didn’t have my luggage then!) The apartment manager introduced me to a ryokan (traditional Japanese style inn) next door to Tama Esty where I could stay for a few days. The old lady who ran the place was really nice but couldn’t understand English either. They wrote down how much it would cost on a slip of paper and I nodded acknowledgement. She then fixed me up with a nice room and told me that I could come downstairs for dinner later, which I didn’t understand so I never did eat there.
I wandered around the area but there were no fast food shops or any restaurants with menus that I could understand so I ended up buying an unknown fried thing and a Coke from a little stall. I went and sat on the riverbank, ate the fried thing and thought,

What Did You Say?

The next day I was brought to the Aoyama Japanese Language School (Aoyama Nihongo Gakuin) where I was to learn the Japanese language. My class was full of Chinese people, mostly from the mainland, and it was very interesting studying with them. They knew all the kanji (ideograph characters of Chinese origin) and every time we would have a writing test they would leave me in the dust because I wrote so slow.¹
From the beginning I didn’t really fit in with with rest of the class. My first complete non-textbook sentence was:

Neko ni noumiso o taberaremashita.
lit. My brain was eaten by a cat.

I thought that this would be different and they would somehow understand that it was supposed to be funny. The teachers thought that this was more than a little strange and discussed the weird American guy at length.
The Chinese students would often get into arguments with each other in class, which would cause problems for everyone. I couldn’t figure out what some of them were there for, other than to just be in Japan.
Progress was much slower than I would have liked but I didn’t know what I was doing anyway so I was not about to complain.
I would go to class from 9 A.M. to 1 P.M. and then wander around the city (usually looking for anime stuff). I would find shop advertisements in anime magazines and search them out. This proved to be very useful because I got to know the train system and the city layout much better than I would have if I had just stayed and hung out with the other students. I also got to see a lot more than just anime shops! I was very interested in this new city I was living in. It seemed so weird. (It still does.)