Study of machismo

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While women’s promiscuity relegates them to the bad girl position, that of men’s enhances their machismo. The epithet given to the former is “slut,” while to the latter, it is […]

Hostesses

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 […]