Japan is a place of extreme emotional ups and downs.

From the confusion and exhaustion to the surrealism and the exhilaration, this place compresses every feeling, just as it has compressed its inhabitants; I seem to feel everything at a force with a magnitude 10 times of that in America. This is good, and bad.

I get lonely. But not now. Only when the guys from Oregon are touting their masterful use of the language. Only when the idiots from my University are standing around practically having an orgasm because their Japanese culture fetish has finally been realized. Only when I realize that I’m being stared at my 95 percent of the people who pass me.

That’s a lot of only’s.

However, as I said, this is a place of extreme ups and downs, and at this moment I’m riding a wave of hubris that I certainly don’t deserve to be cruising upon. Who cares.

Tonight I went out to dinner with Franc, from Nebraska; a laid back 27-year-old ex-military Fabio look-a-like who, despite the qualities I just mentioned, is one of the most amiable people in the dorm, though he is the quintessential womanizer a drinker even in solitude. Franc and I were joined at dinner by our tour guides from earlier, Takayuki and Masashi.

It was amazing.

They were the Japanese equivalent of Franc and I. Not that we look similar, or that they we had common interests, no, the parallel feature was their level of English and our level of Japanese—and that fact that we all had a desire to learn the others’ language.

Needless to say, dinner was insane. It was like some giant starburst of knowledge exploded in my head and a million little contrails spilled down from my mind. It just tickled me all over. The conversation was splotchy, across the board, but my confidence has been boosted in ways that I can’t even begin to describe.

“TITS!” he yelled into the crowded 4th floor restaurant.

“BLOWJOB!”

Masashi wanted to learn all the bad words that the English language possessed, and though there were a lot in store for him, it was somewhat hard to share them all. This is because, when there is no common ground from which to derive slang, how does one know what the other is searching for?

Through hand motions, of course.

Yes, it was a lewd dinner.

Perhaps the most humorous part was when I nearly spit my “Blueberry Supli” non-alcoholic cocktail across the table into Masashi’s lap—and he wouldn’t have been able to blame me, either—Franc had just said “Onani” in a voice much louder than a verb of it’s scope demanded.

“Onani” means masturbate, of course, and it isn’t the most formal language, either.

But then again, Franc had about three Japanese beers in him.

Of all the words they learned, “Tits” was their favorite. The two were absolutely obsessed with “Big Tits.” They confessed: it’s because all Japanese women have small tits. They were convinced that every woman in America was a Pamela Anderson. Franc and I decided not to inform them of the truth.

The entire conversation took place over one of the longest meals I’ve ever eaten. We started with drinks, beers for them, grapefruit juice for me. Then the “Potato” arrived. Potato refers to Japanese French fries, which reminded me of the modest portions one might receive at an shitty American joint like Village Inn. But the Japanese were even more stingy.

There were no ketchup bottles for the “Potato,” only a tiny dish about the size of a silver dollar. Masashi and Takayuki couldn’t explain it.

As we munched on our fries, the conversation wandered… from strip clubs in Shinjuku and their Nebraskan counterparts, to prostitution prices from Hawaii to Shibuya to Las Vegas. They asked us for pickup lines. They asked us when clubs in Lincoln opened and closed. They asked us where we are going to masturbate in the dormitory.

Keep in mind, please, that this entire conversation was conducted in a brash mix of Japanese and English with riotous laughter throughout.

Yet, we weren’t simply schoolboys using playground potty-mouth for all three hours, to be sure. By the time our entrees had arrived we moved on to different topics. (But I won’t lie, we eventually strayed back to the dark, and more interesting side.)

I ate vegetarian Yakisoba, and I’m not going to try and guess what the others ate. Yakisoba is a noodle dish comprised of carrots, cabbage, onions and some kind of sauce. I’m not really sure what’s in it all, but who cares.

The most interesting thing I ate, though, was pickled eggplant, served with a sauce (I forgot the name and forgot to write it down) that would put Wasabi to shame. When I first grabbed a bit of it with my chopsticks, it didn’t even cross my mind to test the sauce before slathering my slice in the thick, yellow stuff. Masashi and Takayuki held their breath and watched eyes wide as I swallowed it down, waiting the whole time for my reaction to allow them to release the boisterous laughter they had been holding in..

I reacted as expected: watery eyes, burning mouth, and a quick slug of some strange orange non-alcoholic cocktail to wash the taste away. It was funny, really.

As for the pickled eggplant, it was a bit thick tasting for me, but not bad.

After all of this, Masashi ordered more food. I think two more plates of odd tasting things for us to share, and some Yakitori for himself. I’ll spare you descriptions… I’ve got you salivating enough already.

So yes, it was a wonderful night.

While the pretentious Oregon fucks went out to Shibuya with one of the R.A.’s and her lovely Japanese friends, Franc and I just headed to downtown Kawasaki city and ventured to the fourth floor of some strange building for a dinner I won’t soon forget. Masashi and Takayuki promised to come back soon.

I made the Kangol, Wavecap wearing Masahi promise to take me to Shibuya for the hip-hop clubs, but I think he wanted me to have a stronger desire for Shinjuku and that strip clubs that he swears he’s never been in. Either way, this is hopefully the beginning of a great friendship.

The thing that’s so hard about it is the language barrier. It makes it great for learning the language, but at first things are all surface related. We can only talk about the superficial. Which is fine, though there’s so much more that I wanted to say to Takayuki and Masashi. I wanted to compliment their clothing and their eccentric bags (eccentric to me of course), I wanted to tell them how badly I’d love to show them my hometown and, more to the point, how cool I thought they were. This stuff is hard to say without really having a good handle on the language.

Walking through Kawasaki City with Masashi and Takayuki, and gauging their reactions to other Japanese people made me wonder: are they nerds? Are they actually as cool as I think? What do these other Japanese people, who seem to be a bit different, maybe, think of these two natives leading around some tall, white foreigners.

This is essentially, the hard part of being a foreigner, and I think, something that will force me to master a language.

You cannot get a proper feeling of the character of someone unless you can truly communicate with them. Granted, I can feel the intentions of Masashi and Takayuki very clearly, but I can’t get a grip on their relative position in Japanese society as succinctly. It hit me when we were sitting at the restaurant and I had just taken a large bite of Yakisoba. Moments later our table erupted into laughter.

My mind paused for a second as I looked around. I wanted to determine what others were talking about, if we were acting appropriately, if we were being too loud. I wanted anything. The body language of the others in the restaurant told me nothing, and all that was left to reach some kind of understanding was their speech, which I was hopeless to understand in its entirety.

Then the waitress came.

When she was there, I so badly wanted to know what Masashi was saying to her, and how she was responding. Was there a twinge of annoyance in her voice? Was she simply hurrying through his order like any customer? Was she paying extra special attention to him? Did she like him? Did her voice sound as if she was talking down to him?

I couldn’t tell, which makes the relative place of my two new companions in society impossible to decipher.

But I like it that way.

It makes me carefree.

Also, I saw the biggest dragonfly of my life today. It was blue, had a tail like a scorpion, and didn’t seem to care when I walked within inches of its golden, reflective wings.