But I was just some stupid boy on a bus

Coming back from Belmont this afternoon, I was re-reading Kim (1901) in preparation for the Kipling panel at Readercon on Friday when I became aware of a catechism going on at the back of the bus. At first I thought there were two voices, although it later became apparent there was a third involved, just not in English. Of the English-speaking, one belonged to a Japanese student whose reasons for being in Boston were some combination of graduate school and sightseeing. The other was the property of a very loud and insensibly curious American whose entire perception of modern Japan seemed to have been formed by bad World War II-era movies. At first I thought he was baiting the student and his companion, but he kept going with a kind of self-absorbed unstoppability long past the point where I would have expected any intentional racist to move into active slurs—honestly, it didn't cramp his style. If the Americans were going to apologize for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, shouldn't Japan have apologized for Pearl Harbor? Wasn't it true that foreigners weren't allowed to naturalize and Japanese girls were forbidden from marrying foreigners? Was the student married? Would he let his daughter marry a foreigner? Didn't Japanese men choose their daughters' husbands for them? How did they feel about Emperor Hirohito getting married? (Yes, I know.) Commoners weren't allowed to marry into the Japanese royal family, were they? And what about geisha girls? Didn't Japanese men visit geisha girls? What about Okinawa?

Despite politely correcting the man's assumption that he was Buddhist, the student was evidently possessed of the patience of about a zillion bodhisattvas, because he kept answering the man's questions: mostly with things like "No," "Not really," "Never," and the occasional "Why would that matter to me?" I couldn't tell if he was laughing from nervousness or because the conversation was so evidently from Planet Mongo. And I couldn't even offer to interrupt without shouting back across at least five rows of seats, which I did not think would help the situation. Eventually the student and the girl who had only spoken in Japanese got off in Arlington Center and the man yelled, "Sayonara!" after them several times. He himself left a few stops later and the ambient noise dropped by a shocking number of decibels. The rest of the bus was very quiet.

I hadn't realized until this afternoon that I need to know the formal Japanese for I apologize for my countryman who is being a fuckwit.

. . . I mean, I also sat across from an older man who spotted my Mission of Burma T-shirt and asked if I knew any of the band, because he was good friends with David Kleiler's father, after which we had a very nice conversation about the Alloy Orchestra and the Coolidge Corner Theatre, which he had helped save in the 1980's, but for God's sake.