Forests of Endor

Simple questions are the most dangerous type of question.

“Mashu Sensei, do you want to go mountain biking?"

Simple answers are far more diabolical.

“Yeah, that sounds exciting. When do you want to go?”

But perhaps this is a lie. Questions will always be inherently neutral. Answers can kill people, though. While some will manipulate questions in attempts to force demeaning answers from people, responses more often than not set off a chain of consequences, good or bad, that few pleading the fifths could. In a world of metaphors, questions are like skeleton keys, while answers are like locked rooms. Put the key into the correct lock, and you open up a door to an adorable room filled with cuddly pandas. Choose wrong, and you also open up a room with pandas, but in this case the pandas are zombies and you are allergic to bears.

This story begins after our office’s daily morning meeting. Five days out of seven, I start my mornings with a meeting, and five days out of seven, these meetings are the most useless portion of my day. However, I always act like I understand their Japanese. I stand when everyone else stands, turn and look attentively when the principal is speaking, and take notes in a day planner, though actually I am just recording dreams I had about my best friend from school stealing souvenirs from Harrison Ford. (Side note: No Bryan, I haven’t forgiven you for embarrassing me in front of H.F. in my own home.)

With my ability to understand only basic Japanese verbs and nouns, my boyish good looks, and an abundance of curly locks, during these meetings I am essentially the equivalent of a labrapoodle in a sports coat. I imagine the teacher who sits across from me is thinking, “Aw, that’s adorable. He is pretending he can understand people language. And look, the puppy’s stamping the students’ homework. Who’s a good boy, who’s a good boy?!” This wouldn’t be so bad if, like a dog’s job, my profession rewarded me with frequent bite-sized snacks hidden in a workplace cupboard that I couldn’t reach, though I suppose I might be disturbed if it did. Actually no, I have little shame, and appreciate snacks of all shapes, sizes, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and religious creeds.
After one meeting in late summer, the kendo teacher — kendo is Japanese sword fencing — who sits at the desk kitty corner behind me, spins his chair around greets me.

“Hello, Mashu Sensei,” he greeted me pronouncing my name in using Japanese phonetics.

“Good morning, Ken Sensei.”

“What will you do the fall holiday?”

“I do not know. What will you do this holiday?”

The corners of his mouth turn up in a grin. “Do you like… mountain biking?” he says.
“Yeah, I like mountain biking. I liked mountain biking in America.”

This was first my first mistake.

“Oh, really? Do you want to go mountain biking with me this fall holiday?”
“Yes, that sounds fun.”

And that was my second mistake.

“When?” I said.

“Maybe Sunday. At 9:30 o’clock.”

“Okay. So Sunday at 9:30?” I say, subtlety hinting that the “o’clock” was unnecessary in that sentence.

“9:30 o’clock.”

And for about the 377th time, my attempts to curtail this behavior had failed.
The kendo teacher’s name is Ken, whom I more often than not refer to as Ken Sensei (i.e. Ken teacher). In many ways, Ken Sensei is like many Japanese people. He is very polite, works too hard and long for too little pay, and when free time permits, drinks a lot and doesn’t hold it all that well. But then again he is different. He is nicer than most people. And when you combine the kanji, the Japanese characters, of his name with his brother’s, Go, they form the word “Goken” meaning “Fortitude,” which makes the two of them sound like a cool version of the Wonder Twins.
He also tends to get confused more easily than a lot of Japanese people, or in actuality, anyone I know. My favorite example of this is when my friend Mike came out to Ken. But Ken forgot. While this is potentially excusable since both parties were consuming copious amounts of alcohol — and booze, the bane and boon for drunks who misplaced their cell phones and Verizon employees who replace them on commission respectively — my friend had to come out to Ken. Three times. The conversations generally went something like “Ken, I’m gay,” and Ken responding “same human, same human,” and concluded the next time they met when Ken would ask “How his wife was?” and my friend would say, “Ken, I have a husband — you know, who is a man,” and Ken eventually responding again with “same human, same human.” Oh, and no one can chalk this up to lost in translation. These took place in Mike’s fluent Japanese and Ken’s native Japanese tongue.

The Sunday morning arrived. I got up, walked to the station, and took the local express to Omagari, Ken’s hometown. We met in the parking lot. He looked “genki” (e.g. healthy) and ready to take on a biking adventure. I, on the other hand, was dragging from a long work week as director of The English Club’s plays (a plot filled with twists, tragedies, and an inability for anyone to say “tornado,” which was often pronounced “tor-nade,” starring a nearly all girl junior high school cast attempting to perform Snow White, which I will save for another time). However, lacking a realistic excuse to cancel (“sudden emergencies” are rare when you are single and without family in the same hemisphere) I had to persevere. I hopped into his car filled with bikes and an electronic Japanese-English dictionary and we began our one hour drive to the biking course.

Conversations, the kind that lack liquid courage, tend to be especially intimidating for many the average Japanese-English speaker, though in their defense, I rely on an over abundance of hand gestures and dances to communicate pre-school-level thoughts to clerks, restaurant employees, and train conductors, as I am terrified to try out my own (very limited) Japanese skills. However, after being here for a year and talking with a multitude of speakers, I have plans for all ranges of conversations. If they are mostly fluent, I talk at a slower speed with the slang removed (Japanese people just don’t understand the mean of “back of my grill, yo”). If they are really bad at English, conversations are always based around food. Once, I had a conversation that went something like this:

Man: “Do you like ramen?”

Me: “Yes, I like ramen.”

Man: “Do you like sushi?”

Me: “Yes, I like sushi.”

Man: “Do you like natto?” (Fermented soy beans)

Me: “No, I don’t like natto.”

One should note that this went on for about ten minutes, and “the man” was the fifty-year-old vice principal of my school.

There would be a lot of talking on this trip. I needed to be easy, but not patronizing (his English was good enough to almost pursue his dream of moving to Canada and being a kendo teacher/lumberjack. Well, until his mom forbade him from leaving the country), so I started off with easy questions fluent speakers ask each other. How was work? How is coaching? What did you do last weekend? Even though I knew about the week of testing at school and the upcoming kendo tournament, I did it because it’s a good warm up, and because I genuinely did care about those things (maybe things have changed since the last time we spoke). As anticipated, Ken happily told me about kendo practice and a kendo tournament, and even though it was not complex, I enjoyed listening.

The longer we drove though, the more my stock questions (What are your hobbies? What movies do you like? Where did you go to college?) dried up. Sometimes one question will be particularly difficult for us to answer. For example:

Ken: Mashu Sensei. Let’s go to combini (Japanese for convenience store) for cup noodle.

Matt: Okay. But I have — (oh god, think of a simple word for allergy, think of a simple word for allergy) an allergy — (oh god, how do I say this. MSG. Maybe flavor, spices…) to MSG. I will get something else though.

Ken looked concerned. He grabbed the electronic dictionary. This made his once safe driving along the twisting country highway precarious, as he tries to spell the word allergy. Which, because it’s filled with so many “Ls” and “Rs” is about as difficult as telling someone how to spell a word by describing the shapes of the letters
(“Okay, first squiggly line, then downward like cross in the middle…”).

Matt: Ken sensei, Dozo, dozo! (i.e. please allow me. I take it and show him.)

Ken: Ahhhhhhh! Al-lr-egy.

Twenty-five minutes had passed. I feared an upcoming awkward silence. Desperate for questions, I asked, “Ken Sensei, can you drive a motorcycle?” Not part of my repertoire of normal conversation, but a scrambled attempt to keep the conversation alive with a smidge of inspiration from the bikers who passed us. He replied, “They are very scary.” I said something like “But they are very cool.” He looked at me and said, “In college, big motorcycle accident.”

“What?”

“I was asleep.”

“Asleep?”

“Asleep? For how long?

He counts in his head. “Six months”

“Six months. You were in a coma for six months.”

“Yes, very scary.” He smiled. His left canine, the broke one, the one that I thought was probably chipped during kendo training (though I suppose you can’t say chipped when the whole bottom half is broken off) now seemed likely caused by his comatose body skidding across the pavement; I don’t know for sure. It always seemed too rude to ask.

He was a little nervous, but smiled again and said “Motorcycles are scary.”
I agreed with him.

Closer to our destination, somewhat after the disturbing conversation about motorcycles, he pointed out a hospital.

“My daughter was born there.”

“When was she born?”

“Last month.”

“Congratulations! You must be very excited.”

“Yes, I am very happy. But she is sick. She is at that hospital.”

“Why?”

“Ummm… Her blood is sick. She is very tiny.”

“Oh my god.” (My second ‘oh my god’ of the day.)

“I come here every night after kendo.”

“Every night? But Ken, this hospital is more than an hour away from our school.”

“I am always tired.” And he smiled again.

If this was the case, he did a good job of fooling me. It’s hard to pep up a conversation after something like “My infant daughter is dying.” But somehow we did. For someone who had faced a great deal of strife, he was more than taking his life in stride.

After probing into the history of Ken sensei, we arrived at the mountain biking area. He parked and pulled out the various pieces of wheel and frame from the car, and with a speed and precision that rivals his swords skills, assembled the two wheeled beasts. I began to realize there are more important details he neglected to tell me about his past or I forgot to ask about. I got on one of the bikes to test it out. “Wait,” I thought. “Why is this so springy?” In my mind, mountain bikes had gears on them. I mean, this had gears, but this bike looked way more expensive than my blue Bianchi 21-speed from fifth grade.

Another car descended from the mountainous roadway and pulled into the parking lot; it was two friends of his. He mentioned their existence on the way there, but besides saying that he hadn’t seen them in five years, I knew little else about them. They got out. One was a skinny, balding Japanese man, the other a portly (skinny by American standards of course), stout man. I introduced myself in what Japanese I knew, and soon after, Ken and his comrades began to change in the parking lot. As they put on their spandex racing suits and biking shoes, the contrast between their proficiency levels and mine was evident even to the densest person on earth, a title which I was contending for.

Later they would confirm that all three of them had once been semi-professional mountain bikers. I, on the other hand, in my white T-shirt, hoodie sweatshirt, and red gym shorts, was not a semi-professional mountain biker, or if I was, I decided to look the part of a student ready for his tenth-grade gym class, to throw off the competition. Yes, surely I had chosen such unorthodox dress solely for the purpose of hustling and demonstrating to these simple Japanese folk the American man’s ability to dominate any physical activity.

And then we were flying down the cedar tree-lined trail, approximately twenty-four inches wide, straddled to a bike. When I was not praying to the lord to help me return to my home that night perhaps only moderately injured, I was recalling an incident that my dad told me about either my uncle, cousin, or friend. I don’t remember the details, but this person, a biking aficionado, once was in a mountain biking tournament where he flew off his bike and smashed his head into the ground. And while he was wearing a helmet, and thus was okay, the impact cracked it into two separate pieces, quite possibly saving his life. Ken asked me if I had a helmet before we started, and I told him I didn’t (i.e. he didn’t tell me that I desperately needed one). Feeling that some sort of head protection was required, his solution was to hand me a baseball cap. I appreciated the gesture as I traversed the trails forgotten by both man and beast; I am certain that in an accident, perhaps one like my uncle’s, the half centimeter of cotton/polyester blend would have acted as convenient fast-acting gauze for any lacerations beneath.

The scenery was beautiful. Maybe. I don’t know really. The only chance that I had to appreciate it is when I was walking my bike up steep hills (in shame) or when I had literally tipped over going around a corner at a cautious two mile per hour, in one instance scarring my leg on the bike cassette in the process. Actually, that walking, tipping, and falling over happened a lot. So yeah, the scenery in many parts was beautiful, especially when I was not worried about a ravine or eroded trail leading to my demise. But the biking. Contrary to my understanding, mountain biking is not like biking in the city or on country roads. Are trees hanging over the trail ready to clip your head? Who needs to move them when you can duck underneath them at breakneck speeds? Is there a fallen tree on blocking the trail? Forget about it! Just have some mountain man cut a slit six inches wide, but still big enough to ride through (Hell, the wheel is only like an inch wide anyways). Roads muddy and covered in roots? Don’t worry, that’s what they call “technical challenges” in the business. Mountain biking is like riding a speeder bike through the forests of Endor in Return of the Jedi. You dodge. You weave. All while going a billion miles per hour. Throw in some guys chasing you in milk-jug armor and some tiny bears with spears cheering you on and essentially there no difference. Except I didn’t have the Force. So my trial, by comparison, made Luke Skywalker look like a pansy.

Things were doable. Until “the double dogleg.” To those unfamiliar with this golf term, a dogleg is a hole where the fairway, instead of going straight or curving gently back and forth, makes an approximately forty-five-degree turn, making an “L” shape. The double dogleg, as I dubbed it, parallels this golfing phenomenon, as a certain portion of the biking course also possessed a notable forty-five-degree left-hand turn. This was not uncommon for my biking excursion. I had ridden successfully around several of those twists. However, this turn was situated on a forty-five-degree downward slope, hence “the double dogleg.”

Ken noticed that I was nervous as I approach the precarious incline. He gave me instruction like lean your butt back, use the breaks, but don’t slam on the breaks. The others went first. They rode the hill with ease; they are semi-professional bikers, remember. Taking the ’80s band a-ha’s advice — “It’s no better to be safe than sorry” — I went for it. But half way down, realizing that I was going too fast, and that a-ha’s advice may be questionable — when was the last time you heard from a-ha — I panic. Instinctively, I slammed on my breaks and in a testament to Newton’s First Law of Motion, my butt and bike seat disassociated from each other and I flew over the handle bars as if I was sliding to score the winning run in the World Series, albeit in this case, a futuristic World Series played entirely in the air. I’d find out later from a native English-speaking mountain biker that the term for this technique is called “Superman.” For those who are curious, this is not only a proper noun, but a verb – superman, supermanned, supermanning.
I landed on the ground and rolled up onto my feet. I was scratched up and my wrist was a little sore, but I am immediately gracious that my neck I was intact. The others, with terrified faces, checked up on me.

“Are you okay?”

“Okay.” I smiled. I didn’t consider that a lie. I was not great, but I was not dead. I am pretty sure that is Webster’s Dictionary, fourth definition for “okay,” right above “the feeling of spending a spring night sleeping on a bumpy beach."

The rest of the course was difficult but less eventful, which I am sure my mother, who is hearing the purposely omitted details from the original account of this trip for the first time, is relieved to hear. We got back to the parking lot and rested. I was grateful to be done. But then Ken asked a question. Remember, the dangerous kind?

“Mashu Sensei, do you want to go again?”

But questions aren’t dangerous.

“Yeah, I can go again.”

The answers are.

I wanted to stop. But I had too much pride. I didn’t want to let down Ken, who had chosen to spend one of his about ten days off a year with me. One more time couldn’t be much more terrifying than spinning your chair around and asking someone to go with you on an afternoon outing, or taking a fifty-five-minute car trip with some quirky American you could only half communicate with. So I rode on. Back into the wilds. Back into the forests of Endor. And even though the second time happened to be more frightening than the first (knowledge of the obstacles did little to alleviate the fear), there were fewer spills and hikes of shame, and no supermans. I will admit I just walked my bike down on my second attempt at the double dogleg, but the others agreed that was a good idea, and we finished the second loop in success.
We celebrated our arrival back at the parking lot with a cup of instant coffee heated on a propane burner as I showed off the bear-claw-shaped scar on my right leg, a memento courtesy of questions, Ken and my stepmotherland.