The Prius and the Brazilian

It was a Prius, one of those cool hybrid cars. They cost 3 million yen. That's almost twice as much as the other taxis on the road which come in at about 1.8 million. Actually, it's the same price as the classic Toyota Crown, that luxury car. It's funny that a car that is saving so much petrol and running so much more economically is still a luxury item. But that's the world. As Dilbert was saying today "pay weasels to lie about how environmentally-friendly your products are and then eat lots of bad food so that you die before the Earth does."

It does have a nice big boot comparable to the size of the Crown. Or perhaps bigger. Both of my suitcases fitted it, one on top of the other and these were serious size cases, the kind that come in at 27 kilos on the airport scales and you're nudging your foot under the edge of the scale to try to make it come down so that they don't try to charge you 1% of the first class fare for each extra kilo. It always seems totally arbitratry to me about who they charge and who they don't. There was a large arrogant black lady in front of me once who had to take out her credit card to pay $300 on the spot, whereas we, with our heavier-looking cases, got a smile and a nice seat. Wonder what Dilbert would have to say about that. Did blacks manage to move up in the world only to be discriminated at the first-class rate?

The cases fitted and my other bits and bobs that I was moving from one place to another fitted in the other compartments of the car. I seem to spend my entire life lugging stuff. I sometimes think that it's my destiny. If it's not a 20 kilogram guitar amp, it's a few boxes of books for shipping out. I bought a cart the other day, but the cart and I never seem to end up in the same place at the same time. Even today, I was carrying a heavy guitar in a big case (actually my beautiful new double-neck guitar and mandolin) on my bicycle. It got progressively heavier until I arrived at the guitar shop, which was closed. In desperation, I went to a friend's apartment which was nearby - the first time since I was about 11 that I've called on someone's house without letting them know first. He very kindly allowed me to store the instrument there until tomorrow. I just couldn't bear the thought of bringing it back home on my bicycle. It was cutting into my hand. One of these days, I'm going to buy myself a car. First, of course, I should probably get a driving license. In the meantime, this blog is going to be busy.

Anyway, back in the Prius, after doing his usual speel of explaining the environmentally-friendly Prius, he asks me where I'm from. This is an improvement as that usually has to be my question, and realistically, a Japanese person in Japan should be more interested in where a foreigner is from than vice versa. After all, there are a lot less of us - probably 123 million less at the less census.

But he asked me and he was genuinely interested, because the funny thing was that all of his old girlfriends had been foreigners. And funnier really was that he used to be a rock musician, playing around Japan: Tokyo, Osaka, places like that. And of course, the rockstar thing attracted the foreign girls or at least opened the door to them. His first girlfriend was Italian. The next was German and then he went for a Brazilian who was a great singer and they played together. It's unusual for a Japanese person, especially a man, to ever date a foreigner, but to date three of them might extraordinary. It's not of course. It becomes a pattern, and if a Japanese guy dates one foreign girl, the probabiliy is that he will date a few more. It gets into the blood - the Oriental version of going bamboo, I guess. Most of them eventually outgrow their foreign loves - or are outgrown by them. It's generally the Japanese women who stick the whole race. Perhaps that's a sign of the greater patience of the Japanese female - after all, you need a lot of patience to put up with the average foreigner.

So he put on the stereo and that Prius had a fine sound. He always listens to it low, but for my benefit, he put on an old 60's track called Simon Says. I'd heard it before, a long time ago, but somehow it made so much more sense when I listened to it in an environmentally-friendly Japanese taxi, introduced by someone who played it in rock and roll bands thirty years ago with a cute Brazilian at his side.

I unloaded all the stuff; the suitcases, the plastic rubbish bags that were filled with stuff that is probably rubbish but I haven't checked yet. I gave him a meishi and scribbled my blog page on the back, telling him to mail me sometime if he has a look. He doesn't use the Internet much, so in the meantime, he invited me down to listen to music in his Prius. He's at Tsurumai park all the time - the only guy with a Prius - so I'll recognize him. It sounds like a fun way to spend a day.