One of the fun things about living overseas is that just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, and you think you finally see what your new home has in common with your old, something happens that couldn’t happen in your home country. Well, it could, but someone would get fired and/or go to jail.
In my case, a good friend and I decided to travel down to Kyoto one summer mostly because we were both bored and we both liked Kyoto. We also felt we should experience more of Japanese culture, even though it was the start of our third year in Japan (Translation: even we had to do something besides play computer games.)
We toured the usual places: Kinkakuji (the Temple of the Golden Pavilion); Genkakuji (the Temple of the Silver Pavilion) and Ryoanji (the Temple of Rocks in Raked Sand). While we were roaming around town trying to decide what Western food to eat, we stumbled across my friend’s Japanese colleagues who were enjoying their teacher trip (at least until we showed up). Having been unable to hide from us, they invited us to dinner, although we got sat by ourselves at the little kids table in a different part of the room and I’m still not convinced we got the full course.
We were then invited to join the after-party, which at first involved roaming around trying to find a bar that could accommodate all of us. We ended up being turned away from a few places and my friend and I volunteered to bail out if our presence was ruining everyone’s evening. Instead, one teacher opted to visit a soapland to, well, get a massage, so to speak. (My US friends, imagine what would happen if that got out: teacher on teacher trip visits brothel.)
After several phone calls, a place was located and we were herded into taxis. As we traveled to our destination, one of asked what kind of bar we were going to and we were told, through a smirk, that it was an okama bar. Since okama meant gay, I think both of us assumed we misheard him.
Our destination, called Club Lactose, turned out to be a transsexual bar where post-op women served as the hostesses and entertainment. Okama can also mean drag-queen, but even that didn’t quite fit. The term for the club was, as I understand it now, a newhalf club.
(Note: Newhalf purportedly derives from Southern All Stars singer Keisuke Kuwata. During a 1981 recording session he asked Betty, one of the people in the studio, if she was a half–i.e. mixed race. Betty said she was half-man half-woman. Because this was a new-spin on the idea of a “half” the word “newhalf” eventually caught on.)
First the ladies did the rounds of the tables and my friend and I got to try out our Japanese (although the version spoken in the Kyoto-Osaka region is much different than what we were used to.) My friend had a dictionary, but all that did was draw laughs when he got caught thumbing through it. The ladies answered questions about their surgery and the condition of their bodies, especially the one who was post-op but wasn’t on female hormones. The entire club was surprisingly family friendly (at least at that point) and it seemed more like a “let’s learn about transexuals” meeting.
The ladies put on quite an impressive music revue, that ended in a surprisingly revealing strip show that my friend and I agree stole from the moment by eliminating any mystery and more or less telling audience members exactly what they secretly wanted to know. The crowd was a mix of ages and genders, including one group that looked to have brought their grandmother along. The next show was going to be the Club Lactose adaptation of the movie Titanic.
To this day I try to imagine what the fallout would have been in the USA if it turned out a group of teachers from a small town grabbed a couple foreign guys and went to a transsexual bar during a teacher trip. It probably would not have ended well for a lot of people.
As for my friend and I, we tried to go back the club then next night to see Titanic, but we couldn’t get in because we weren’t accompanied by any Japanese people.