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Although I have lived in Japan for several years, I still don’t have a real Japanese friend. Acquaintances and clients, yes, but a bona fide friend, no. There are many reasons for this, too many to go into here, but it is not because I have any particular personality defects – I don’t enjoy dressing as an adult baby or deem motorbike engines to be an acceptable topic for conversation or anything which might similarly be reasonable grounds for my friendless state. It is suffice to say that I don’t have a Japanese friend but that I would be more than willing to have one, should the right person come along.
Recently, I had the rare occasion to get chatting with a Japanese fellow who was in no way connected to my work, and what’s more I’m fairly sure that he wants to become my chum! I think this because, after a swim in my local pool, he struck up a conversation and gave me his business card with the suggestion to e-mail him sometime. The problem is that, although he is certainly open to the idea of a new friendship, I’m not sure that I really want to be Hiroshi’s friend. I might not be fighting of friends with a shitty stick, but nonetheless, I like to think that I have maintained some level of standards about the sort of people with whom I would willingly choose to socialize.
There are several reasons why I’m hesitant to let this budding relationship blossom. The first is that Hiroshi has made it abundantly clear that he likes talking to me because he enjoys getting an opportunity to use his English. He peppers his conversation with the phrase, “It is my pleasure to talk in English with you!” Usually this would have me running a mile, because oftentimes it is people who can barely put a simple sentence together that insist on speaking English with me. But Hiroshi’s English is excellent. He speaks very fluently and has no problems understanding me. His English is much better than my Japanese, and therefore, were we to talk in Japanese, I would probably be like one of those painfully irritating language leeches I try so hard to avoid – trying desperately to make him understand my Japanese when it would just be simpler for both of us to use the language which most facilitates communication. He may just want to get to know me to practice his English, but at least we would be communicating in the simplest way. It wouldn’t be in any way bothersome to either of us.
More troubling than his reasons for seeking friendship however is the fact that he is a single 46 year-old man who doesn’t drink and he wears Speedos. I am no spring chicken, but I am still in my thirties, and somehow forty-six still seems like an age more suited to a person that my dad should be friends with. And were my dad to come home one day and say he had been asked out for dinner by a single Speedos-wearing man he had only just met in the gym Jacuzzi, I would, quite frankly, be somewhat aghast. I mean he gave me his business card when I was dressed only in my underpants, for heaven’s sake!
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