Keitai Friends
Copyright 2010 James Pollard
Copyrighted material. All rights reserved. Please do not reproduce in part or in whole without the express prior written consent of the author.All characters and events in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.
Keitai Friends
Josh stuffed a jar of coffee he had taken from the staff room supply into his back pack, clocked out just after 2:00 pm, took the elevator to the first floor, walked out into the front foyer and headed out of the automatic glass sliding doors into the rest of the day.
Life had been confusing recently and was in a stage of transition and re-evaluation. He had begun life in Japan as a starry eyed, naive English language teacher but was now beginning to uncover a world that he didn’t know could even exist. He had more friends now than before in Australia, had each and every one of their numbers in his contact file on his keitai (mobile phone) and had a thriving business that was starting to eclipse his salary as a teacher.
Still young at 27, he needed to pause on a small stairway to take a breath and shake off the tiredness that was starting to overtake him. The stairs led to a large shopping square that lay in the shadow between three large multi-story buildings. Across the paved area in front of him and over to the left in a small alcove Josh could see the toilet that had become a familiar stop-off for him on the way to the local underground train station. He walked over, quickly glancing behind as he walked in the toilet, choosing the western toilet cubical. He shut the door behind him, put down the seat and without undoing his trousers, sat down, placing the backpack that he was carrying down on the floor in front of his knees. He unzipped the backpack and foraged around until he found the little zip lock bag containing the tiny crystals and the straw he had saved from his last visit to Wendy’s to buy a vanilla shake. A quick but short burst of vacuum strength suction put things back into a new perspective. Recharged, Josh sat for a while, pondering nothing more than the thought that it was pretty cool to just to sit and ponder. After an inconsequential period of time, he packed up, zipped up and left the cubicle with an entirely new take on what was after all a perfectly ordinary setting on a perfectly ordinary day.
Soon Josh was on his way to the station. With a little more energy and determination than he had before, he rode down the escalators towards the Osaka bound entrance for the Midosuji line. Passing his favourite electronics store, he resisted the urge to go in and browse the latest in technology but was sidetracked as he arrived at the entrance to Kinokuniya bookstore. He wanted a copy of the ‘Kansai Time Out’ to read on the train as he headed to Tenoji where he was to meet a former student prepared to purchase the little tablets he had in the other zip lock bag in the pocket of his back pack.
His mood was relaxed. He had conducted similar business transactions on many previous occasions and had become an old hand at it. His clients were the nervous ones, he was cool and collected. Without much thought, he slunk through the entrance of the bookstore and made a direct line towards the English language section. It had moved and was now tucked away in a far corner no longer close to the exit that led immediately to the main meeting area at Hankyu station. He remembered some friends telling him that they thought the section had been moved as a lot of foreigners were stealing magazines and books and just walking them out the door. “Typical, blame the foreigners,” he thought bitterly. “An interesting theory,” but he was sure it was young Japanese students on limited budgets needing texts to study.
Ten years as a cultural showpiece in this country was taking its toll on his perspective and he started to revisit a latent sense of injustice accumulated over time. Josh’s mind started to question everything that had happened in his life recently then moved to dwell on other bitter feelings. His mood darkened somewhat as he recalled countless conversations; police arresting foreigners on bicycles without reasonable cause, presuming the bikes to be stolen; English language teachers being ripped off by unscrupulous employers only to be summarily sacked on word of complaint to unions; foreign bodies turning up dead in apartments and no investigations being launched. “What would the police do if he were caught supplying?” “Yeah, I go to jail and the Japanese guy walks. Bloody Japanese,” he muttered under his breath with clenched teeth.
He had been so absorbed in his own bitter thoughts that he hadn’t noticed his arrival at the English language section. Having been to the store so many times, he was pretty much on auto-pilot. He snapped back to reality noticing how close he was to the main sales counter.
There were three people at the counter being served and two in front of him. He entered the appropriate roped-off opening labelled in English, ‘Enter’. The first person being served finished and the line continued on to be replaced by the next in line and then the next. The magazine he wanted was on the right hand edge of the counter stacked one on top of the other near the line’s exit. The saleswoman at this position finished off counting the change for her customer who promptly thanked her with a respectful bow and a fictional smile then departed to her right. Next in line, Josh made eye contact with the sales woman who made a polite gesture to indicate that he should wait. She then walked quickly to the back the counter and out the back exit, turned right and disappeared.
On any other day, he wouldn’t have thought anything of this. It was usual behaviour for sales staff in a busy store in Japan. However, for whatever reason, Josh decided it was insulting to have been kept waiting. So he went to the counter, picked up the magazine he wanted and started flicking through in an agitated manner - the noise attracting a modest amount of attention. The saleswoman hadn’t returned for what seemed to be an unacceptable amount of time. In reality it was no more that about a minute and half. In his agitated state he began to feel he needed to make a stand against what he was beginning to perceive as discrimination against foreigners. “Who do they think they are? If I was Japanese they wouldn’t make me wait!”
He looked around at other customers, lined up behind him. He was sure that they were laughing at him although they weren’t looking at him. No-one was making eye contact but he felt he just knew what they were thinking. He could tell they hated him, just because he was foreign. A racist diatribe began swirling and expanding in his mind. He hadn’t noticed he had begun to flick the magazine pages with a force nearly tearing the pages. Thoughts kept darting through his head - bitter, angry and resentful thoughts. Frustration accumulated, begging him to act; to make a stand; to show these people how they had made him feel over the years. Josh’s mood snapped viciously and without warning.
He broke away from the counter, still holding the magazine. Without thinking, he slipped the magazine into the inside pocket of his black leather jacket continuing on, at pace, through the maze of aisles, bookshelves and people, towards the exit.
Steaming with anger and a serial killer expression he dodged and weaved through the last crowded walkway. A joyous sense of triumph grew in his mind as he approached the exit leading to the Hankyu station meeting area where there would be a crowd of hundreds. He could blend in with all the other foreigners, escaping with the magazine and satisfying his sense of justice.
His pace slowed as he crossed the boundary between the store and the exit. A sense of anticlimax taking hold as he realised that no-one had noticed nor cared. He walked out into the crowd and felt insignificant, his mood slipping down through a series of gears almost to a state of depression. No longer angry, he paused at a vending machine, staring at the cans but really staring at nothing. He fished around in his right hand pocket for some change and yanked out a handful, choosing a 100 and a 10 yen coin. Feeding in the coins, a red lamp flashed and he pressed it, releasing a small brown bottle of Dekavita
- an energy drink. He hoped it would snap him out of the depressive mood that had taken him over. The thud as the drink hit the dispensing tray triggered a sense of the familiar, shifting his mood closer to equilibrium. He picked up the bottle, snapped the aluminium twist top and sculled a good third of the refreshing drink.
Still facing the vending machine, wiping his mouth on his sleeve he turned slowly to face the crowd. Out of the corner of his eye he saw them coming in his direction and knew instantly that his number was up. There was no place to run in the underground world of the largest train station in Osaka. Umeda station was monitored by hundreds of cameras and he stood out as a foreigner in a homogenously Asian city.