Some etymology.
The word nama.
A vital word for any foreigner to Japan to learn, because it is one third of a very important sentence:
nama biiru kudasai. A glass of beer please.
Like I said, vital.
You can learn a bit about a person and about his opinions and his pleasures and his desires and his fears by finding out the first sentences that he learns to say in a foreign language.
In Japan for me, they were :
Nama biiru kudasai One beer please
Awa nashi No head on my beer please.
Izakaya wa dokudesuka? Where is the pub?
I am sure that if you gave these sentences to Sigmund Freud he could possibly wring some kind of character personality out of this info, but I don’t hold much stock in psychologists.
Nama biiru kudasai. One beer plese.
And I had understood the word nama to mean ‘glass’ .
But in fact, it took nine months before the beautiful Wako was to tell me that this was, in fact, apocryphal.
Nama yasai raw, fresh vegetables – a green salad
Nama sakana raw fish, or sashimi
So nama biiru really doesn’t mean a ‘glass’ of beer, so much as it means ‘draft beer’ fresh from the tap, as opposed to bottled beer.
It is often difficult to directly translate foreign words, but nama really has a meaning similar to ‘fresh’ or ‘raw’.
It is a tangled path through which I travelled to arrive at this knowledge.
* * * * *
During one of my forays (strictly for research of course) to Kabuki-cho (which you’ll remember from last episode is Tokyo’s major sex district) a girl in trackey-dacks and a t-shirt walked up to me and asked me for a light. Before I could tell her I didn’t smoke, she angled conspiratorially toward me and says to me, she says….
‘Nice girl ? Fucky fucky ? Wow wow ?’
Um, excuse me ?
You heard it right ladies and gentlemen : Nice girl fucky fucky wow wow.
God bless. It was worth spending 18 months in Japan just to hear those immortal words. There’s Kabuki-cho right there ; flipping over, asking to have her belly rubbed, right there.
Kabuki-cho. This kiwi guy, English teacher, on about his third night in Japan, ends up paying a small fortune to get into this filthy little Kabuki-cho nightclub.
He knew something was amiss when, on entering the place, he was ushered into a booth.
This little HAB (that’s Hot Asian Babe for the uninitiated), proceeds to undress, and encourages him to do the same.
Next, she bends down, takes a deep breath, starts giving him a blowie (that’s oral sex for the un-Australian amongst you - it also refers to a large iridescent fly with a vicious bite).
So she’s giving him a blowie, but he is blind drunk right, and this is all a bit too subtle for his current sensibilities, so she wraps his old fella up, stands astride him, and climbs on board the love train.
As I said. He is blind. And she’s riding his pony, and ridin it and ridin it, and pumpin it, and thrashing at it, and rockin’ it ‘n’ rollin’ it but, you know that kind of booze-induced numbness, and he just can’t manage that all-important money shot.
So she takes the job in hand. So to speak. And takes a firm grip, and starts really pumping away at it, like a plumber trying to dislodge a really stubborn drainage clog.
You know, you need it like that sometimes.
But he is blind drunk, (as I have said) and even she, a professional, couldn’t burst the dam. Nothin.
So before that RSI started up again, or tennis elbow or whatever they get, she had to give up. Our kiwi friend was shrugging his shoulders, ah well, did you best, you know that kind of mutual embarrassment, I’ve got a limp on, you couldn’t finish the job, sorry about that, I’ve had a coupla beers tonight y’know, all ready to slink out… when the manager comes in.
Well this is a surprise.
And the manager’s bowing, scraping, apologising, and bowing again, in a permanent stoop, in fact.
And gives him his money back.
Now that is customer service.
God bless Japan.
I searched and I scoured this particularly unseemly little corner of the world. But I did not find one burusera vending machine.
So my next stop in my quest for panties: A little shack, nested on the side of a dark distant highway, on the edges of Kanto’s great metropolis.
For next time.