Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

On Saturday, I went to a wedding.

I think its now clear to me that along with every event in the Japanese culture lexicon, comes a footnote of “see also: bollock drunk”. Of course, a wedding is a better reason than most.

The actual ceremony had taken place earlier in the day and was a family-only affair. I was invited to attend the evening party, along with a few hundred other people. The wedding party was at a place called “Sun Palace” in a nearby city, and seemed to had been built with the purpose of hosting these types of functions. Everything looked beautiful, from the brightly lit fountains outside to the marble swathed interior.

The bride and groom (incidentally, it’s the groom that I know) were paraded around in a variety of traditional and modern wedding outfits - the poor couple didn’t sit down for the entire party. Beer was liberally dished out, and an odd combination of sushi and Chinese-take-away style haute cuisine was fed to us.

The father of the bride got incredibly drunk and climbed on stage with his wife and the brides’ parents, to give a congratulatory speech. He opened with “I’ve become quite drunk” and it sort of went downhill from there. This would have been funny (well, it still was) were it not for the fact that the brides parents were rigid and statuesque, seemingly having not touched a drop of alcohol in their entire lives.

The hired coaches that brought us back to the village were alive with incapacitated drunken evilness. Having used up my quota of luck for that day, I happened to sit next to one of the most inebriated men there.

Now, in Japan, same-sex platonic physical contact is not something that is taboo. It’s not unusual to see two boys hugging, girls holding hands, boys pinching each others bottoms, etc etc. Society has dictated that this is acceptable conduct, and it’s simply a way of showing companionship.

Oh how the true horror of this came crashing down on me in that bus ride home.

The banter with the drunken 60-yr old man had dried up. Whilst talking, his hand had moved onto my knee. No big deal, this is something that has happened to me lots of times before, and I have also observed it on countless occasions. It was a fairly innocent, hand-on-knee-then-smack-repeatedly, whilst-laughing-at-your-own-jokes kind of thing. However, I noticed that he had not taken his hand off my knee after the conversation had stopped. Although I was saying nothing and looking out the window, the other me was looking directly at the hand and screaming “ARRG. ARRRRRRG”.

After an agonising silence of about 2 minutes, he breached my personal threshold for same-sex, platonic, “we’re besht mates, uss”, physical contact:

He patted my knee, and gave it a gentle little rub.

Perhaps sensing my discomfort, or perhaps reacting the natural venom that my body started to secrete due to the panic, he retracted his hand soon after that and promptly fell asleep.

I went home and bathed in window cleaner.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 20th, 2003 at 3:56 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.