Convenience Story

Contains ideas of racism and xenophobia.

Cherry blossoms only bloom in the spring. No one had thought to tell James.

His dream of a blossom-filled life in Nagoya had withered on his first morning in the share house, courtesy of his very welcoming housemate, Kazuki. He may have dispelled the fantasy of a permanent parade of showering pink petals, but he compensated for it by detailing the city’s best brothels and their 'buxom babes' through the power of broken English and Google Translate. This must be the famed Japanese kindness he’d learned about online. Forums espousing the spiritual and social superiority of the Japanese. Who was James to question these wordsmiths who had visited Tokyo for six days in 2017? The linguistic artists who had seen every Studio Ghibli film, even the terrible ones by Hayao Miyazaki’s son. James had no interest in such erotic establishments, but still, it had been incredibly thoughtful of Kazuki. In return, he graciously answered his new Japanese friend's probing cultural questions about the length of English women’s pubic hair, the size of their breasts, and the sounds they made during their climax. A very curious chap.

Seeing the back of the U.K. could not have come soon enough. The air had become toxic. A mean-spirited poison had infected the nation. People were sick, unable to prevent bigotry and hatred spewing from their bodies like vomit. James was a man of peace. A man of decency and justice. He had voted Remain. Britain was not the place it once was. Before the Brexit vote in 2016, it had been a utopia.

He longed for the days of the humble village life of his childhood and teenage years. When he’d visited home last Christmas, his father had told him, “I remember a time when all we had was white snow around here. Pure as you like. Now the snow ain’t ever coming back. Just more and more dirt.”

It was a magical time, lost forever.

The sickness had spread across the world. Europe, America, and Australia had all succumbed. There was still one utopia left on Earth: Japan, the final frontier still fighting the spread of the hateful poison. Though James had never been to Japan, he had been to Waterstones. The glossy covers on books about Zen, Wabi-Sabi, and the Art of Tidying made the message clear: this was a higher civilisation. Everyone lived in peace. Everyone had meaning. Everyone had a purpose. Everyone had 'ikigai'. James had made it his own 'ikigai' to live here. He wanted to have a spirit as strong as Japan’s most famous samurai, its last samurai, Tom Cruise.

He could not understand why more of his fellow Brits were not following the same path. The path to enlightenment. After all, it only took a university degree, a working visa, and around four thousand pounds.

Work began in a week, and he could hardly wait. The job was at an English conversation school for children called SMILE. Strength Mind Integration Learning Education. Rolled off the tongue. The name inspired optimism. The reviews, less so. Bitter ex-employees, he thought.

The hours were to be long, the days off few, the pay low, and the benefits minimal. All built character. All served the soul. He had heard how hard, how tirelessly the Japanese worked, and he promised himself he would not be like those whingeing Westerners online. The keyboard warriors who left one-star reviews were simply too lazy for a proper day’s graft. His father had taught him both the word and the meaning of graft: “People in this country not tough enough to work ten hours a day are the reason Polaks are taking all the jobs.” No, his new compatriots would not be let down by him. He would work with the silent dignity he had read about in the summary of some book on Bushido.

A few precious days of freedom remained before work began. Time he intended to spend discovering the real Japan. Discovering the real James. For the Japanese do not waste time. They honour it. They cherish every fleeting second of it, much like the apparently fleeting beauty of the cherry blossoms.

He made a list of cultural places to experience. Visiting places was not for him. That was what tourists did: visit, look, point, photo, done. Not James. He would make it a point to truly live in the moment, to be mindful, to let his senses overflow and feel the history of the country flow through him. At the top of the list was a traditional Japanese convenience store, or “konbini,” as he'd heard the locals called it.

FamilyMart, 7-Eleven, Lawson, Mini Stop, Daily Yamazaki. Such wondrous choices. How could he choose where to start? They all sounded so marvellous. Each one, no doubt, with its own unique charm.

Opening his Toshiba laptop, the cutting edge of innovative technology, he consulted the oldest and most reliable guide to Japanese culture: Reddit. The consensus, as he expected, was that they were indeed all marvellous. FamilyMart came out on top by the width of a ramen noodle. A pilgrimage to all the chains would follow sooner or later.

James was pleased to find his nearest store was just 150 metres away, the next 300 metres, 400 metres, 700 metres. What a convenient paradise this place was.

The nearest one had a rating of just 1.7 stars online. Usually, this would come as a shock to him, but in a land this perfect, everything should be perfect. Checking the reviews, with the little translate button, he was sure to find helpful, constructive criticism.

Kirin – 1 Star

The brown guy forgot a spoon for my pudding.

Anpan – 1 Star

The Turkish lady and the overweight lady who work late at night are unfriendly and scary.

GrampusFan – 1 Star

Maybe a Chinese man? Your attitude is too bad. The voice is small and the whole thing is bad. Level at which it would be better to retrain.

Fuwafuwa Neko – 1 Star

I notice noticeable mistakes by the foreign staff. While there are certainly some good staff, I've noticed that chopsticks and hot snack condiments have been left out on multiple occasions. From now on, I'll ask if I need chopsticks, but I would like them to review their employee training.

Momo – 2 Stars

There are some nice foreigners, but they smell a bit too much.

No doubt it was a translation error. Japanese was such a delicate language, not that James knew a lick of it, but something as crude as American technology could never capture the poetic beauty of their words.

Rating be damned. This was the place for the beginning of his cultural quest. This was the place where his path to spiritual cleansing began.

James enlisted the guidance of his new tomodachi, Kazuki, the perfect man to show him the ropes of the wonderful world of convenience stores. After all, who could make a better senpai than someone born of this land?

His camera came with him, of course. Polaroid. It was the only way to capture Japan in its true essence. Fancy digital cameras might make the photos look pretty, but they could never evoke the soul of the surroundings the way a Polaroid could.

A selfie in his kitchen with Kazuki. He would send that to his mum back home. "Making friends already." Maybe she would show Dad. Maybe he’d be happy for him. Maybe he’d forget he’d opted out of the family business to go “teach chinks.”

James left the house wearing a T-shirt with a cat on it. Something was written above the picture in Japanese. Unable to read the hiragana for inu (dog), he assumed it must say cat. Regardless, he was certain the natives of Nagoya would be most impressed.

What a beautiful day for an excursion. Had there ever been such a day back in boring ol' Blighty? Forty degrees and everyone outside baking like jacket potatoes. With the sun this fierce, he was sure he’d finally catch a tan, though no one else seemed interested. The locals were covered head to toe in protective wear, UV parasols at full mast. They must have known something of the sun’s unholy powers that he did not. Looking ahead, he wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his pale fist. Shimmering in the heat was his salvation.

There it stood. In all its grandeur and majesty. A monument in consumerism.

FamilyMart.

Only surpassed in scale by the pachinko parlour towering beside it. James had watched YouTube videos about Pachinko and was eager to try it one day. Gambling was illegal in Japan, and good riddance. He could not stand the stranglehold that gambling companies had over the male population in the U.K. It was impossible to go three minutes without being assaulted by an advertisement for a bookmaker. Pachinko, on the other hand, was most definitely not gambling. For the perfectly acceptable reason of something called loopholes. Loopholes are incredible ideas that make bad things okay. Everyone was perfectly content with the Japanese throwing fifteen trillion yen down these loopholes annually.

So lost was he in the aesthetic beauty of everything and everyone that he barely registered the city’s musical undercurrent: the song of the cicadas, screaming, sizzling somewhere in the heat. On the same wavelength came a voice whirring from a speaker atop a van adorned with Japanese writing and flags.

James asked Kazuki about it, but he found it hard to explain. Something called the Japan First Party. Kazuki seemed embarrassed, perhaps because of his English skills, or perhaps because of the van itself. Either way, these guys had the right idea. About time people started putting Japan first.

The FamilyMart doors opened as James and Kazuki approached, as if they were conscious. A cheerful jingle played as the doors slid apart. What a joy it must be for the employees, he thought, to hear it every time someone came or went. All day, every day. They were greeted by one of these konbini overseers, who mumbled a few words of Japanese that James couldn’t understand. What he could understand were the sweet, oily smells of fried bits of animal carcass, dipped in batter, caressing his nostrils.

As they entered, two middle-aged Japanese men, each carrying a pack of cigarettes and a tall can of Strong Zero, were leaving. The men stepped aside to let them in. James, unsurprised by the kindness of strangers here, turned to them, gave a deep bow, and offered his best "domo arigatou gozaimasu." He had spent the entire fourteen-hour flight perfecting the phrase. Yet the men didn't seem impressed. If anything, they looked actively unimpressed. Perhaps his bow wasn’t deep enough.

They pushed past, one spitting out in a low voice: "baka gaijin".

It sounded familiar, but he couldn't quite place it.

The two men trudged back out into the heat. Two more pigs for the roast.

“Koko no kuuki wa mukashi wa kirei datta. Baka gaijin ga yogoshita mae wa na,” the second man muttered to his chum.

James took a basket, a smile spreading across his face, his first successful interaction with the natives. Three large screens above the counters played a video of Jigglypuff singing to a chicken, which then transformed into a bucket of fried chicken. How wondrous, he thought. He turned to Kazuki. No smile from him. The Japanese, stoic as always.

The convenience store contained everything he had dreamt of and more. Chocolate, crisps, sandwiches, socks, notebooks, alcohol, batteries, Uno, umbrellas, eggs, chicken cartilage balls, and even comic books for children whose covers displayed busty women in their underwear. All these cultural treasures, unique to the land of the rising sun. All of it, under one roof. There was even a toilet and a public fax machine.

As he filled his basket with snacks and odds and ends he didn’t need, he glanced at Kazuki. “What did those men say?”"

Kazuki inhaled sharply, tilting his head with a grimace.

"This man... not nice."

"Why?" James slid six packs of Kit Kats into the basket.

"One man, he say 'baka gaijin.' It's..." He hesitated. "Stupid foreigner. Very sorry." Kazuki put his hands together in front of his face apologetically.

James furrowed his brow. That couldn’t have been what he said. He added twelve mini bars of Snickers to the basket. So quaint. Not like the big, bulking bars back home. "What did the second man say?"

Kazuki grimaced again, almost in pain. "English very hard. Very sorry. He say, I remember... mukashi, time before… kuuki air… kirei clean."

"I remember a time when the air was clean." James pieced it together and echoed it back. Two packs of Doritos dropped into the basket. Avocado and cheese, how exotic.

Kazuki nodded. "Air is very clean… pure? Now… very many baka gaijin… air dirty now. Very sorry. Not what I think. Very bad man thinking."

There must have been some communication problems. There had to be. Poor Kazuki. His English wasn’t perfect, but he tried his best. “Kazuki-san, arigatou gozaimasu,” James said with a bow.

At the till, the clerk with faint bags under her eyes rang up all the delicious products he could hardly wait to try. It was hard to believe he could get so much stuff for so little of his English money. The cashier's name tag read "Ono", which sounded Japanese, but her features looked more Chinese. Definitely Chinese.

When she handed James his change, she did so without a smile or a “thank you.” It gave him a dirty feeling he didn’t like. If they’re going to work in Japan, the least they can do is smile at the customer. He wouldn’t forget that in his review later. He’d tell Mum to show Dad the review.

James and Kazuki left the store not just with two bags of snacks, but with what would no doubt be a lifelong friendship. The unification of British and Japanese at long last. He snapped a Polaroid of their reflection in the store window to commemorate the event. Flakes of cigarette ash fluttered under the neon convenience store sign, gracefully floating through the thick summer air. The beauty of the burning ash was fleeting, as it fell to the floor, the light extinguished, the bloom over.