To the Eye Doctor in Osaka
All summer I had been looking at things.
To the newcomer’s eye, Japan is a non-stop montage of fuzzy cartoon mascots, pastel mochi, strobing neon, and orange torii gates. Towering billboards beam popstars, fruit drinks, and dinosaurs over the thoroughfare. Cats curl like pom-poms in silent grey temple courtyards. Five-year-old schoolchildren commute by themselves on the subway, their green Suica penguin passes on a lanyard around their necks, leather satchels based on 19th-century Prussian naval uniforms slung over their shoulders. It’s all a cliché, it’s all true. How was I supposed to look away?
I was also being looked at. By night I was working at a Tokyo hostess club, serving drinks and lighting cigarettes and giggling at the semi-understood jokes of businessmen who were paying for the novelty of a foreign woman doing so. At age 23, I had come as an experiment in immersion journalism, or half-baked anthropological fieldwork toward a graduate degree I thought I might pursue. It was also just an excuse to spend a summer in Tokyo.
Century Club was located down a flight of tiled stairs on a quiet side street of Ginza, the neighborhood known for its luxury shops and high-society cafes. The club’s heavy, brass-handled door pushed inward, a portal to a nocturnal world of burgundy velvet banquettes, low tables, and lower lighting. The mirrored pillars revealed a cycling cast of characters, different yet somehow the same since the club opened in the Bubble-era 1980s. The clientele: middle-aged salarymen in suits drinking whiskey on the rocks and smoking. The hostesses: a miniature UN of girls in sparkly dresses, clumsily pouring whiskey over those rocks, lighting those Seven Stars (which they were forbidden to smoke), and simultaneously trying to chat, flirt, wheedle, and pout, all in a language that was not their own. The beleaguered manager, an older woman in a beige Chanel shift, greeted customers with a smile that suggested a chronic headache. A bald chef angrily made snacks in the kitchen, dispatching plates of cheese croquettes, mini hot dogs, and exuberantly-arranged chocolate Pocky sticks to a handful of nervous waiters. Roy, the permanently bemused keyboard player from Ghana, turned on the karaoke machine to take a break after a rendition of “We’ve Only Just Begun” or “Blue Moon.” I watched him sit back and survey the scene: the Russian girl batting her eyelashes at a customer to steal attention from the Israeli girl on the other side of the banquette, the Mama-san passive-aggressively reminding a Peruvian girl about her stockings (the rule was nude, not black), the septuagenarian Toyota executive dancing a delicate foxtrot with a bored blonde.
For a season, one of those blondes was me. Every afternoon, I slipped on my cocktail dress and boarded a train to Ginza. From 6pm to 3am nightly, I was both observer and spectacle, subject and object, consumer and consumed. But my role began to blur as I listened to one customer pine for his exchange student days at the University of Michigan, or asked another to tell me about his deep love for Elvis, or agreed to sing yet another duet of “Hotel California” on the karaoke machine with a third. I told myself this was fieldwork, yet I increasingly felt caught in the grey area between journalist and voyeur.
Of course, I was also on view, a commodity in a complex exchange of value. While I was trying to convert my idea of unhappy middle-aged middle-managers into words for some essay or magazine piece, they were trying to convert me into a sensation, a product of the ambient “exotic” haze the club provided. By purchasing the overpriced novelty of my time, I thought, they were really seeking escape in the blank foreign slate of my face.
And so each night I trudged home on the last or first train, knowing that in the morning, I’d try (and fail) to wring deep thoughts about gender, labor, exoticism, and performance out of my hangover and into my Muji notebook. When I took out my contact lenses in the phone-booth-like bathroom of my 6-tatami room in Kagurazaka, my eyes burned. It was certainly due to the amount of smoke hanging in the club, a nicotine fog I had to wash out of everything, including my clouded Bausch & Lombs. But it was also the fatigue of hours of laser-like eye contact, the claustrophobia of sight-lines crossing, the constant filming, editing, and analyzing of my own ocular documentary in real time.
“For an instant, I was both mortally vulnerable and radically free, because I once again felt that sight could also still be sight, and not just transaction.”
When I quit, it was partly because I knew I had to return to a different job in another country in a few weeks. I didn’t want to admit it was also because I was overwhelmed trying to triangulate who I was anymore, a tourist or a scholar or a spy, in a hall of endless mirrors.
So I left. I had a few trips left on my JR East rail pass, and picked a route almost at random. I had a vague plan to see a local punk band playing in Kobe, and decided to stop in Osaka for a night on the way there. I’d heard that the world’s first capsule hotel, built there in 1977, was one of the few in the country that admitted women. I arrived by shinkansen, and found my way to Capsule Inn Nanba. Before retiring to my beige plastic pod in the retro hive, I picked up a bottle of travel-sized contact lens solution from the konbini next door. For the first time in months, I fell asleep before 2am and did not dream.
The next morning, I inched out of my chrysalis and showered in the communal bathroom, using a bucket and handheld sprayer in the sento style. When I put a contact lens into my right eye, I felt as if I had been punched. A peek in the mirror revealed the white of my sclera turning beet-red. Frantically flushing my eyeball in the shower, it dawned on me that I’d made a grave mistake in not examining the bottle more closely. I must have bought hard contact solution instead of soft—I had essentially put bleach in my eye. I crawled to the front desk dripping snot and tears, and apologetically tried some combination of the words “sorry,” “please,” eye,” “doctor,” and “hospital.” The panicked capsule innkeeper called an ambulance.
I lay on the white stretcher in the back of the ambulance, listening to its dainty siren bee-booping through the gridlocked city and cursing myself for being stupid, illiterate, and uninsured. Soon, two nurses were helping me onto my feet and into the building. The hospital was Osaka National, the doctor was you.
You were a man, in a white coat, in your 40s. I started again with my broken Japanese, but you spared me the humiliation with your perfect English. You projected a calm confidence as your gloved hands cupped my face, opened my eye wide, and flushed it with cool drops. You tipped my head from side to side, peering deep into my cornea with a penlight, photographing my retina with a laser camera. You assured me that the contact lens I imagined still lurking, eating away at my iris, was gone, and that with some continued rinsing and prescription drops, I would be fine.
In your office, dim except for the flashlight and the camera and the illuminated letter chart, I don’t know if I ever really saw your face. I don’t remember your name, because in an act of unwarranted kindness, you didn’t give me a bill. You simply handed me a little white paper bag with the eye drops I needed, and the two nurses took me back down the elevator and onto the street.
There, I blinked in the sunlight. I put on my ¥100-store plastic sunglasses and began walking without a destination. I strolled along the Umezu river canal, its water glinting with morning sun, and came upon a seafood restaurant with a Cadillac-sized crab sculpture on its sign. The crab’s giant, spiny animatronic legs normally waved, in warning or welcome, but right now, this early, they were temporarily at rest. I peered through the window tank at the real crabs beneath the sign. They rested in murky water, waiting for diners who would surely come. They continued to wait as I finally looked away.
I’m sure you don’t remember me—there are plenty of expats and travelers in Osaka, even if only a few of us are foolish enough to bleach our own eyes. But all these years later, I often think back to those brief minutes in your office where you held my head and washed my vision clear. It was an act both mundane and profound. I have never felt so stateless, so genderless. Just a human body, a bag of delicate membranes and the synapses connecting them. For an instant, I was both mortally vulnerable and radically free, because I once again felt that sight could also still be sight, and not just transaction. This reset was the gift you unknowingly gave me. I have never forgotten the way you held my gaze, and then released it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Samantha Culp is a writer, producer and creative strategist based in Los Angeles after a decade in greater China. Her work examines the changing flows of global culture, emergent creative economies, and mobilizing storytelling for social change. As a journalist and critic, her writing has appeared in publications such as the Atlantic, New York Magazine, the New York Times T Magazine, Travel & Leisure, and Artforum. Since its foundation in 2009, she has been a contributing editor of China’s leading art magazine, LEAP (艺术界). In 2018, she was awarded a Literary Journalism residency at Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada.
Read Samantha’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Header photo by Andre Benz