Joggingu (ジョギング)

When I was an exchange student in Japan, school was, well, kinda an afterthought.  Yes, the whole purpose of my stay in the city of Nagoya was to study, and I DID study; I studied in the streets.  Because my number one prerogative was drinking, and subsequently making a complete asshole out of myself.  Luckily, in Japan, you can get away with almost anything on the account of “being drunk”.

I lived off campus in a part of the city called Seto.  The neighboring town was Asahi, home to the beer of the same name.  That meant cheap beer.  Cheap, potent beer.  For as often as we drank, there was one type of Asahi sold in a blue label can, and just a single can (usually consumed on the train to or fro school) and you were a’buzzin.

Getting to school for me, and the three other exchange students I lived with, took about an hour and a half each way.  It took a long walk to the train station, followed by a train to the last stop, and then a bus up a gigantic mountain, traversing through winding precipitous roads and quiet farming villages to get there.

The rest of the exchange students–forty or fifty of them–all lived on campus.  They came from some unique places: Alaska, Australia, Taiwan–plus there was a pretty high volume of Koreans, who, despite being university students, inexplicably wore Mickey Mouse pajamas to bed.

One particular night, we decided to drink back at the dorm.  I’m not sure if drinking there was allowed, but it sure wasn’t encouraged.  It was poised to be just another ordinary school night, peppered with some mild drinking and nothing more.  Nobody expected anything unusual to come from it.  But it did.

Our squad was comprised of myself, a guy from my university back in the states (Garret), a Korean lunatic (Ho Yung), and a completely docile Japanese guy (Yohei).  There were several supporting characters along the way.

It started off innocuously enough; a few beers being sipped over conversation.  Yohei was still pretty quiet at this point.  Ho Yung…well, you could never tell what he was thinking.  He had a certain gleam in his eyes, which normally led to bad things, like him throwing a bicycle at several members of the yakuza the week before.  Ho Yung had been a cannon-firer for the Korean military earlier in his life, and for some reason or another, he had some screws loose in his head.  Suddenly, Ho Yung stood up and went off to his room.  When he reappeared, he was holding a carton of soju, Korea’s answer to sake.

I felt bad.  I had nothing to offer in exchange–nothing except for good ol’ fashioned American ingenuity.  I inquired if, perhaps, he had ever shotgunned a beer?  Not surprisingly, he hadn’t.  Nobody had, outside of me and Garret.  Ho Yung declined, but Yohei was not spared.  And thus began the downfall of Yohei.

After shotgunning a few beers, we decided to up the ante.  I went into the kitchen, found a dust-ridden red funnel used for vacuuming, did a poor job at cleaning it, and turned it into a makeshift beer bong.

We passed it around, and around, and around–raising the stakes each time.  One beer.  A beer and a half.  A beer mixed with soju.  All sorts of disgusting thing being poured into that tube and funneled straight to our livers.  When we ran out of beer, we didn’t let that stop us.  We opened the fridge and found someone’s illustrious supply of beer.  Finders keepers!

And then a bottle of whiskey matriculated, seemingly out of thin air.  We were hitting it straight from the bottle.  Our thirst was unquenchable.  We seeked every ounce of alcohol in the building.   Barging into people’s rooms, drunkenly demanding they hand over their alcoholic beverages, in exchange for their pitiful, sober lives.  Needless to say, this did not go over well with–well, anyone.

It was simple really: if you weren’t with us, you were against us.  Against our reign of terror.

We cleaned house.  There wasn’t a shred of alcohol left in that dorm after we were there.  The common room looked like it had been hit by a tsunami.

Tables were flipped over, chairs were scattered everywhere, and there was a wall of beer cans preventing anyone from entering the kitchen.  Seriously; a fucking wall.

Feeling the constraints of the building, we made moves outside.  By this point, Yohei, who had once been a good, self-disciplined atypical Japanese boy was slurring his words in between heavy drooling.  We propped him up against the wall and left him there as the rest of us developed a plan for acquiring more alcohol.  It was going to be tough, being this late and in this secluded of a place.  Thirty seconds later, I turned to check on Yohei, and to my amazement, he was completely fucking naked.

He started running towards us.  I winced in terror.  But before he could reach us, he stepped in a sewer grate and his ankle bent in half.  Almost instantly, his body hit the pavement and he started howling in pain.

Now we have a dilemma: seek medical attention? Or get him inside and in bed?  The fact that he was stark naked made this a very difficult decision.  Nobody wanted to touch the guy.

After a good ten minutes of deliberation and trying to pass off the responsibility, our consciences kicked in and we, all the while steering clear of his exposed, flapping wiener, managed to drag him inside and throw him into the first bedroom we could find.  Of course, this was after the fact that everyone living in the dorm had seen him fully nude.

Yohei had had a rough night, so we decided to honor him.  Me and Garret headed outside, to the scene of the incident, and we got fully undressed ourselves.  And then…

We went for a jog.

Wearing nothing but running shoes, the two of us galloped enthusiastically through the mountains, as if running in the nude was an common, everyday occurrence.  In fact, after the initial laughter, we didn’t have anything on our minds except getting a good jog in.

This late on a school night, the mountains were pretty deserted anyway.  But every few minutes, we would see car headlights start peaking from around the corner in front of us.  The car engine would get louder and louder as then finally the headlights would hit us, casting a bright glow around our fully exposed bodies.  Garret and I, staying totally in character, abstained from cracking even the smallest smile.  I can only imagine the state of terror/confusion for whoever was being that driver’s wheel.

We ran far.  We headed in one direction for nearly an hour.  As we started to sober up, we suddenly realized that we had to run back.

Becoming sober and realizing you are far as fuck from home, with no clothes, in some random mountains in Japan, well… certainly not the greatest realization one can make.