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Before we were flown to Japan for our new jobs as English teachers, we had to endure a seminar in London to teach us the basics about life in Japan. The only good thing to come out of it was that I met several good people, Osaka Dave being one of them. He didn’t become Osaka Dave until we were all in Japan and he was living in the city of Osaka.
A couple of times in each school year there would be a teaching conference in one city or another; such conferences would be a great chance to meet up with fellow teachers from all over the country and let off a little steam. Sometimes, these get-togethers had the feel of a Club 18-30 Holiday with all sorts of drunkenness and bed-hopping going on.
After one such conference in Kobe, Dave invited me and another friend, Paul, to spend a weekend on the town in Osaka. We arrived at Dave’s apartment on the Friday afternoon and settled in with a few beers. Remarkably, Dave had a small amount of hash – enough for two or three joints. Now, drugs in Japan are taboo. Buying a still-warm pair of schoolgirl panties from a vending machine is OK, but possession of drugs is taken very seriously, and what’s more, there seemed to be no difference in the eyes of the law between smoking a joint and taking heroin. With this in mind, we turned down the music before Dave rolled a joint for us to smoke.
The quiet enjoyment of such a rare treat was interrupted by a knock on the door. Dave didn’t think too much of it, although he put out the joint and hid the ashtray under the table. Paul volunteered to answer the door and headed down the passage to do so. Seconds later Paul came back into the room and said, “There’s a policeman at the door Dave.”
Panic set in as we opened a window, hid everything and generally ran around not knowing what to do. You may think this an over reaction, but we weren’t too stoned to ignore the fact that a drug arrest would mean the loss of our jobs and deportation after probable jail time. And let’s not mention that the Japanese police have their famous ninety percent confession rate, nor the fact that Dave had just been telling us about a fellow teacher who’d received a serious beating at the hands of the police.
Once we’d tidied everything as best we could, Dave headed to the door while Paul and I sat nervously waiting to see what would happen. We could hear the policeman and Dave conversing: the policeman’s ever-so-polite sing-song, Dave struggling in bad Japanese. Before long, we heard Dave thanking the officer and closing the door. He came back into the room and explained there had been a mix up of some kind with his post, and for some bizarre reason a policeman had been sent to call on Dave to straighten it out.
Very relieved, we laughed it off, but we waited quite a long while and checked out of the window several times before sparking the joint back up. |
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