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Dancing Lessons from God
At the time, back in the mid- 1980 s, I was conducting research in Ja-
pan on department stores as the subject of my PhD. Over the years of
my tenure in Japan I have been actively pursuing this and other top-
ics, all while pursuing a life, as everyone else does. When I heard that
a civic center in the Tokyo ward I was living in was offering a free Ko-
rean conversation class to interested ward dwellers, I decided to take
the course and registered with my partner, who was Japanese. A va-
riety of people had signed up for the class, but I turned out to be the
only acknowledged gaijin or “non-Japanese” citizen. For most of the
others, learning Korean meant going from their native Japanese to a
grammatically similar language. I often felt like my progress, as a na-
tive English speaker, was much slower. Some of the students in the
classes had actually had previous exposure to Korean (two I would
discover as the story unfolds much more than I would have imagined
or they would have admitted). For the others, the similarities between
Korean and Japanese meant it was easier for them to master the Ko-
rean language (or so it seemed to me).
As the class continued, we got to know each other better and started
to do things together socially, in particular going out for refreshments
after class, usually to a Japanese kissaten (coffee/tea shop), ubiqui-
tous in Japan’s urban settings. Among those who would go on these
outings were two women with whom I became acquainted and who
will become important elements of the story to follow. At the time,
I thought of them as totally independent of each other. One woman
was slender, with long swinging black hair. She was quite tall by Jap-
anese standards then. The other, about seven or eight years older, was
short, slightly plump, with very short hair and glasses. This woman
was often the envy of everyone in the class in terms of Korean language
acquisition. She always did better than everyone else and seemed to
pick up everything quickly. These two women had (different) Japa-
nese family names. There was no indication of any sort of prior rela-
tionship between the two of them, nor did they ever present or sug-
gest they might have had a prior relationship. As classes progressed,
they did seem to get to know each other, but in the same context in
which we all seemed to get to know each other better as we began as-
sociating with each other in and out of the classes.
