Hostesses
The more misogynistic the society is, the more polarized the dichotomy of good girls and bad girls. The misogyny puts women in their places of good and bad so that […]
Miso soup – pizza complex
Back home, the only men I knew after leaving junior high school were my father, grandfather, uncles, and teachers, with whom I barely talked. Now I spoke to men at […]
Not a romance
Most customers came to see mama, and they had known her for many years. Mama set certain boundaries with them. She’d ban them from Kubo if they misbehaved or made […]
Bad customers
Not all customers were pleasant, of course. There was a solo customer of about 60 years old who would throw obscene words at us and took delight in seeing our […]
The Matsuokas
The Matsuokas was a father and a son. The father single-handedly built a business of manufacturing and distributing construction machinery. His son first worked for a different company to gain […]
Good customers
There were customers I liked because they treated me as a human being. The engineers from a mid-size IT company came with their CEO, who was once an engineer himself. […]
Customers of Kubo
Besides mama, there were 5 or 6 staff worked in rotation. One of them was a boy, Hiro, also a college student, and was a relative of mama. He mostly […]
Mama
Kubo was a “pub,” but not the “public house.” In Japan, “pub” referred to bars opened in the ’70s – ’80s that catered to salary-men. They served alcohol and bar […]
Pub Kubo
Tutoring one high school student was not enough to sustain my unruly lifestyle in Tokyo, so I searched for an additional source of income. I came across a hand-written hiring […]
First part-time job
My approach to the choice of part-time job lacked humbleness, the desirable quality in young people in Japan. Other school peers found their part-time jobs at restaurants, fast food shops, […]