I used to live in Osaka, and I found a lovely local izakaya near my apartment.
I made friends with the owner. I learned how to play shogi there with some of the regular customers. I tried various foods for the first time, such as ocha-zuke and yaki-onigiri.
One day I was sitting at the counter with my Australian friend. We were just drinking sho-chu and chatting. A middle-aged Japanese guy came and sat at the counter, next to us.
He tried to engage us in conversation, but at that time my friend and I did not speak Japanese very well, and the newcomer didn’t speak English well either. We were not too interested in talking to him, and just exchanged a few smiles, said, “Hmmm,” a few times, and went back to our drinking.
Then the guy seemed to get annoyed that we were ignoring him. He tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around to look at him. He held up one of his hands, which was missing two fingers.
“I am yakuza. I am your friend,” he said.
There was a pause for a moment as my friend and I gazed at his missing fingers.
“Umm, hey, great! Yeah! Let’s be friends!” we said. Suddenly we didn’t want to make this guy angry.
He bought us some more alcohol and we drank together, trying to communicate in a mixture of broken English and broken Japanese. The man’s wife and son were also in the izakaya, but they had been sitting in other seats away from the counter. The yakuza guy called them over. His son seemed very young – maybe about 13 years old. The son and the father exchanged some very harsh words with each other. The father was asking his son to take off his shirt and show us his tattoos. The son didn’t want to do it, and shouted angrily at his father. The father shouted angrily back, seeming to threaten his son with violence.
Eventually, scowling, the teenager lifted up his shirt. His shoulder and arm were covered in huge dragon tattoos.
The poor boy had no chance to choose a different life for himself. He might have been smart enough to be a lawyer or doctor. But he would find it difficult to be anything else in life but a yakuza because of those tattoos, and that father.
I hope my own son is clever enough to walk a different path than his old man has. “Stay away from sho-chu!” is my humble advice to him.
Vocabulary:
to tap someone on the shoulder – to touch someone lightly on the shoulder in order to attract their attention
broken (English) – (English) which is not fluent, or basic and containing many mistakes or pauses
to scowl–to show an angry or bad-tempered expression
one’s old man – one’s father (casual)
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