2.1 A Date in Tokyo/Anti American Rant

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Ali and Kimura

World’s Fair 1939

　

Chapter 1: Hajimete no Day-toh (“1st Date”, song title)

Kimura debates whether or not to call Ali. He knows he is attracted because she is Caucasian and blonde. He guesses that in the male is a gene that ups the desire for a female recognized as racially different. But he also knows Ali has what he values more than the usual foreign femme mystique: a sense of humor, a good intellect and a willingness to help. She seems the kind who, if your car got stranded with blocked gas line, would roll up sleeves and fix it, or else help push it to top of hill. She was? Something he could not put finger on but that had him around hers. Meeting Ali reminds him of facts of his life. He had started his foreign news job against his diplomat father’s and social-climbing mother’s trying to marry him off like prize bull to an aristocrat’s only daughter in order to carry on a name. He considers himself a staid bachelor and not someone who carouses with Geisha or pub girls. He sublimates sexual interest to hard work and the joy of intellect.

   Abruptly terminating internal debate he picks up phone and dials. 
  
Seconds later her squeaky voice is saying. “Kim, I recognize your voice. Hi.”

   “Will you lunch with me?”

   “Yeah, wheah?”

   “Well, it is ten now. Is twelve-thirty OK, at the Coffee Shoppe by you?”

  Her tinkling voice replies: “ Bei mir bist du schoen, Kim.  Know the song?”

   He sings it in German.

  “Hey Kim, thou art brilliant. Better yet, Thou swell. See ya at Ye Olde Shoppe.”

So begins Kimura’s experience with Ali’s unusual way of speaking. As one who speaks Harvard English, Kimura is alert to patterns of American English. In Ali, he notices an ability to switch between slangy Bronx American and the educated English she acquired growing up under her uncle at Harvard University. She says ‘an’t’ instead of the less quaint ‘ain’t’, uses unorthodox word shortenings like Hon for ‘Honey’ freely, and she creatively intersperses her English with French and German words.

Kimura is sitting at a little round glass-top table in a typical Tokyo coffee shop: a cubbyhole of a place entered through street-level door and a 5-stepdown, past a cute little cashier who oversees several cozy tables for two.

   Ali drops into a chair across from him.
  “An’t it noirish?” she quips with insider smile. Ali is movie-mad, and she is referring to the dark, intimate surroundings that remind her of film noir, the dark Hollywood crime movies. “Just the place I’d expect Satan Met a Lady. Have you seen that one?”

   “I prefer Dashiell Hammett's original Maltese Falcon. As for the actors: Warren William is no Sam Spade and Miss Bette Davis is too high class to make a believable shanty Irish Bridget.”

   Ali looks at Kimura with new respect. It is rare to meet a fellow freek, a word she says with mental double-e. “Gee Kim. Ah love Bette whatever she does. Djya see her in Jezebel?”

   Ali is dressed in tan belted skirt and matching blouse, appropriate for the warm spring of Tokyo but risqué in the view it gives of bare knees when she sits, as now, right leg over left, her usual pose when meeting someone who happily stimulates her. Her blonde hair is cut just so as to nestle her shoulders with a cute beauty-parlor inward curl. As Kimura contemplates its shade, it occurs to him it is not Harlow but Gogh yellow like Vincent van’s picture with the sun shining on those flowers. It gives a feeling of him and her as a lay in the hay. He suppresses it.

   Their conversation shifts to America. Kimura, hoping to impress the American Ali, falsely assumes a Yankee-phile pose. Ali, however, is something that in 1939 is called ‘crackpot’, an out and out atheistic conservationist and anti-American; a futurist whose seemingly far-out opinions in 1939 may seem unbelievable to a less experienced person than Kimura.

   After good-mannered listening to his praise of U.S.A. as the freest, most democratic and happiest place on Earth and of its people as combination Presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, Ali takes her turn.

    “Now hold on Kim. A little admiration is a dangerous thing. I said that, not the Pope.” She laughs at her silly allusion to Alexander Pope's famous aphorism. “I’m American but my folk were Huguenot and it explains why patriotism repels me. Whenever I hear anyone praise the USA I wanna get up on my Camay soapbox and say, ‘Look, I know the damned place is freest, richest and most beautiful. But what does any US citizen living today have to be so damned patriotic proud of? Did today’s Americans by bravery and good sense make a free country? Did they work hard or give brilliant ideas to make it rich? Did they arrange Nature there to be so B-U-T-full? Look at the facts, matter a fack'ly. 
 The Caucasian Euros who control USA come from the worst social types: cut-throats, malcontents, jailbirds, fortune seekers. And what’d they find for starters?  The red-skin Injuns! And what’d they do to ‘em? First abuse their hospitality then cheat ‘em outa their land as per example of the isle of Manhattan for $24 wortha junk jewelry. And when the Injuns complained, the Euros conquered and killed ‘em by overwhelming brute force and guns and cannons against bows and arrows.”

   She pauses for coffee and strawberry tarts to be put down on the table by a tiny Japanese waitress in serving-girl black dress.

   “Don’ get me wrong, Kim, I an’t no goody-goody. Ah’m happy ta live off land liberated by killin’ Injuns. But let’s not wax lyrical over the foundations of the USA.

   “And then colonists in the South bought and brought black people from Africa and, while slavery was outlawed in England, the white Americans grew rich on the blacks' backs. ‘S’cuse m’poetry.”

   She stops to drink her coffee. “Well, we hada have a Civil War to get ridda slavery. Thank my atheist goddess, my folk came from the North so at least I don’t have that guilt. But when I hear a white southerner rant about how wunnerful it is to be American I wanna vomit. Yeah, I know you can’t blame the kids for the sins of gran-mere and -pere – ‘s’cuse m’bad French – but those southerners are the worst. The whole south is still Jim Crow seventy-four years after the end of the Civil War to free the slaves.

   “And democracy? Inherited from England and the French Revolution but mostly corrupted by politicians fooling the boobs, you know, the stupids.

   “And natural beauty? Stolen from the Injuns and made ugly every day since the Euros arrived. And any attempt by conservationists to stop the rape of the land is opposed by the greed-balls who wanna cut down all the timber and use all the oil and coal that oughta be left for our children.”

   Follows a moment of silence.

Then Kimura says “Well, Miss America, your exception proves my rule. If America could give birth to you, it must be truly wonderful even despite the truths of what you say.”

   “Oh, Kim, you’re rare. You make me feel t’home.”  They clasp hands across the table.

   Stop while ahead, an inner voice tells Kimura. He excuses himself to leave, saying he must get back to work – a lie.
  To read on, click 2.2 Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial/Trucker's Saturd...