i know you are all dying to hear...

well it just occurred to me that i’ve been putting off writing about one of the most bizarre things i’ve encountered in japan. no, it’s not the knots of fish sperm sacs for dinner. nope, not the beautiful, lacquered sticks that every japanese person has on hand to clean their ears at a second’s notice. not even the game shows that are on every channel all night long with people dressed up like animals or babies engaging in all sorts of dumb behavior. it’s the gyno. if you’re squeamish, or just not interested, you can stop reading now. so we’re always bitching about the lack of romantic possibilities around here, which inevitably leads to talk about the lack of sexual prospects around here, which recently lead us to a discussion of the gynecologist. i was way over due for an appointment. in america, we consider it normal to have a yearly check-up of all relative parts. i went to a close japanese friend, uchiyama sensei, to ask her advice on how to go about accomplishing this in japan. she thought it was a bit odd that i wanted STD tests and she quietly asked if i was having problems. no, just wanna check. same questions about the pap smear; apparently we’re younger than the average woman concerned with her cervical health in this country. she made some phone calls at my request and reported back to me about a ladies’ clinic down the road where we wouldn’t need appointments.
it was a hot saturday morning when carrie and i reluctantly drove to the non-descript building under a huge, pink billboard with a baby on it. we’d done our homework and had lists of vocabulary we thought we might need; herpes, gonorrhea, menstruation, vagina [i’d previously only known the crude word which would probably have been frowned upon]. carrie’s japanese is less than fluent [sorry carrie chan] so at reception i was charged with explaining why we’d come. she handed us each a clipboard with a questionnaire that we couldn’t begin to read. she walked us through each question and as i’d tick off an answer, carrie would do the same on her sheet. eventually it appeared the woman was getting suspicious because our answers were identical. we assured here we were in the same condition and this look came over her face. carrie and i realized at this point that we probably looked like a new lesbian couple coming in for STD checks together. we began to laugh and it only accelerated when i noted that carrie was wearing a do-rag on her head, the international symbol for butch lesbians [not p.c. i know]. luckily the receptionist didn’t appear to understand our crude jokes.
we waited for what seemed like days before carrie’s name was called. she asked if we could go together in an attempt to minimize the chance of a huge misunderstanding and maximize the hilarity. we were lead to a desk where we met the tiny, female doctor who used to exact wrong color of lipstick to haphazardly paint her lips. we explained what we wanted and again were greeted with skepticism. she wasn’t sure why we asked for all these tests but said she’d complete them. we enter an adjoining room where carrie has her exam. [utterly hilarious. i’ll explain later.] then, for formality’s sake, we return to the desk for a few seconds before going back into the adjacent room for my exam. that’s when i took a ride on the “space natul”.

no stirrups here. two divots for your thighs, a strategically placed hole and a bunch of plastic like strange, great-aunts refuse to take off of their living room furniture. as soon as you mount the chair, a pre-recorded warning [i think] is played…this is where it starts to feel like demented disney world...”please keep your hands inside the space natul while the ride is in motion”, i imagined the voice saying…carrie and i are laughing uncontrollably. then you hear it power up pneumatically…whoosh. the chair rumbles to life and begins to rise, turn and spread your legs simultaneously. the exam room has three walls, the forth being a curtain hanging from the ceiling that descends to about waist height. as you reach full spread, tilted almost supine, you come to a stop which triggers a light on the chair that gives your crotch a heavenly glow. at this point, the curtain is resting about your waist, your upper half in the exam room, the lower half on the other side of the curtain facing a hallway. no lie. there are people walking by; you can see their feet only. while the lack of face-to-face contact is meant to spare humiliation, i found it so unnerving. poke, prod, a bunch of Japanese i don’t understand. [not being able to see who you’re talking to is infinitely difficult for me when trying to talk in Japanese. it makes the phone really tough too.] more pneumatic whooshes…another warning as the chair begins to dock…”please wait till the ride has come to a full and complete stop”. we return to the desk and as we talk the doctor gets a panicky look. ‘oh, no. you wanted a pap smear too? i forgot. please go back to the torture chamber’. this time around, i swear she was talking to me about Kentucky fried chicken.
i know you’re all dying to know. yep, clean as a whistle. wink, wink.