- Reunion dinner for teachers who visited Austin.
Reunion Bath and Dinner
This evening Murakami-sensei asked that I go with her to a dinner reunion of teachers in the private school association who had chaperoned the summer trip to Austin. Akamine-sensei offers to watch JQS; she has a son the same age that he can play with. She picks us up and drops me off at the hotel on Beppu Bay where the dinner is being held.
Murakami-sensei is not in the lobby and after waiting awhile, I ask the receptionist what room the group is in. Murakami-sensei is not there either. However, three men in hotel yukata (summer kimono) greet me enthusiastically and say that they are on their way to take a bath before dinner. They leave me alone to change and to wonder if we are all going to take a bath together.
These are the three men, strangers to me, that I got into the elevator with wearing only a “bath robe” (yukata). After our baths, we women change back to street clothes but the men remain in yukata for our dinner party.
As the four of us get into the elevator, I think, in the US there’s no way I’d get into an elevator with three men I didn’t know wearing only a thin, cotton bathrobe. When we get to the third floor, one of the men points me in the direction of the women’s bath.
Whew! A separate women’s bath. And it’s beautiful, overlooking Beppu Bay with a little rotenburo (outside bath) on the balcony. The best part is that the rinsing off station has shower heads with hot running water. (How I wish our apartment had hot water!) I treat myself to a luxurious shampoo before slipping into the tub for a good soak. Murakami-sensei shows up and we bathe and chat together before going down for dinner, drinking, and my first attempt at karaoke.
Murakami-sensei and I are feeling no pain after bath, dinner, and karaoke.
2009-12-10. I find a letter describing this same story.
Postmark: Beppu August 1989
JQS says he doesn’t feel like he’s in a foreign country. His life is pretty much the same. I don’t agree at all. The difference really hit me in the elevator a couple of days ago I went to a hotel in downtown Beppu for a reunion dinner of some Japanese teachers who had gone to Austin last year. Ms. Murakami was suppose to me me there with two other Austinites. I did some shopping first and got to the hotle a little earlier than scheduled but frazzled. I didn’t see anyone I knew and the hotel clerk didn’t speak English. “Eigo no sensei?” (English teachers?) I muttered, not having the slightest idea what to say. The clerk’s face lit up and he motioned me to follow him up to a room on the fifth floor.
No one was there but shortly afterward two men in bathrobes (yukata — summer kimono) showed up and introduced themselves. The could speak only a little English but they did manage to ask me if I wanted to take a bath before dinner. Now there’s nothing I desire more after work or shopping than to take a bath. Ms. Murakami had mentioned that the hotel had a hot spring bath and to bring a change of clothes. So I agreed and they got out a map of the hotel and showed me that the bath was on the third floor. In the picture it sure looked like the mens and womens baths were all together but it was too late to raise demurrers. And though I don’t usually mind nude bathing in mixed company it’s a little different when it’s with people I work with.
They left and I changed into a yukata. It was in the elevator that it occurred to me that I’d never get into an elevator of an American hotel wearing only a thin bathrobe (me, not the elevator). As it turned out, the baths were separate. The womens bath was a huge pool that I had to myself. looking out onto Beppu Bay. Best of all it had a hot shower, shampoo, and cream rinse. It was wonderful. I was still relaxing in the bath twenty minutes later when Ms. Murakami found me. I went with her to have another bath, this on on the roof outdoors. Then we had dinner.
After dinner, each person had to give a speech. Then they hauled out a VCR and a mike. Japanese men love to sing songs in front of each other. One man got up to sing. A music video, with the words in subtitle, played the accompaniment. It’s hard not to laugh at them because they take it so seriously. I had to leave early because [Akamine-sensei] who was babysitting JQS was picking me up. They insisted that I sing before I left. Now I can’t sing. And they searched in vain through their video collection finding songs I didn’t know. In the end I agreed to sing, a cappella, the only song I could thing of the words to because it comes on the Kamegawa PA system every night at 9PM and JQS and I sing it at home: Home on the Range.
Notes from 2009
I find it interesting that not only did I not use the word karaoke (which today is in the English dictionary) but that I had to explain what it was in such detail.
