Best Day EVER

I find this in my neighborhood.

In the park.

Close to where all the love hotels are.

I picture a foreign man with a Japanese woman, both young and relatively good looking, leaving one of those hotels, slightly uncomfortable, yet holding hands. They walk to the nearby park where they hug one last time. The man takes out his card, writes this message on the back, and gives it to the girl before kissing her goodbye.

Now that he is gone, she turns to head home. It’s a long walk and she’s cursing herself for having missed the last train. The least he could have done was offer me money for a taxi, she thinks. Would she have accepted it, though? No, she wouldn’t have. She pauses, looks at the card. “Best day ever?” she asks herself. “Meh,” she answers and tosses it to the ground.

Milk Run

The other evening, I saw something that one rarely sees if ever—especially in Japan—and, to be honest, I'm a little shaken by it.

As I was walking to our local Lawson's to pick up some milk, I saw a young couple standing in front of a building. The man was wearing a suit; the woman a beige sweater and skirt. The woman, who looked to be in her mid 20s, had her right hand placed gently on the man's chest and was talking softly to him. What is she saying, I wondered. With Elbow (the band not the body part) in my ears, I couldn't hear anything, so I pulled the earbuds out as I approached them.

And then, just like that, the woman brought her knee to the guy's groin. He keeled over and she kneed him three more times in the chest. And because the best time you should kick a horse is when it's down and can’t fight back, she started pummeling him with her fists.

I was about 20 feet away from them now and was conflicted. Do I intervene or do I let it pass? In this Age of Believe Women, anyone passing by would probably assume that they guy somehow deserved it. But, having been the recipient of similar violence in the past and almost stabbed I might add, I know that there is often more than one side to the story. Fatal Attraction ring any bells?

As the man crumpled to the ground, the woman turned away and started walking towards me. I was tempted to ask her what happened, to hound her like a paparazzi with question, but held my tongue. We met at the corner of an intersection and finding ourselves in each other's way, we did that awkward do-si-do that you do when you repeatedly step in the way of someone like you've got some kismet thing going on . . . But then, that couple probably thought they had fate on their side, too, when their relationship first began.

A lesson to us all, I thought, as the woman passed and I continued on towards Lawson's: that pitter-patter in one's heart can quickly become a throbbing ache in the groin if you don't play your cards right.

Before I entered the convenience store, I turned and looked back. The young woman was walking with determined steps in one direction; the guy, staggering in the other.

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I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of this story. Everyone, include me, has assumed that the guy was somehow at fault. So, what if it was a man clobbering a woman like that?

Of course, the man would be wrong, everyone has told me. A stronger man should never be permitted to attack a weaker woman.

What if it were two men of equal strength?

Well, clearly the man who resorted to violence first would be wrong.

So, why does this chick get a pass? Where is gender equality when it’s a woman raining blows upon a poor defenseless man?

Nah, the guy’s clearly a pantywaist if he can get owned that easily.