All the old posts from the old Your-Japan.com on the Your-Japan Blog Network

After a combination of being lazy in my apartment and being lazy in coffeeshops near my apartment, a few things have come to my attention:

Ok, that’s my list. Hope you enjoyed it. I have a question and hopefully someone out there will know the answer. I want to bring some wine back from America. I know I can bring up to three bottles without charge. Does anyone know what kind of tariff they slap you with if you try to bring in more than three bottles?

Hey everyone. I just wanted to check in and let everyone know I haven’t let this blog fall to ruins just yet. Like the title suggests, the reason I haven’t been writing is that I haven’t really been doing much of anything at all. Apparently it takes a substancial amount of time to switch your visa status from visitor to work visa, so in getting hired on a visitory or "tourist" visa, I’ve gotten a sort of late summer vacation while I wait for my work visa to come through.

Anywho, yes I’m still alive and pretty much just spending my days seeing friends and furnishing my new apartment. Leave a comment if you have a question or are in the Tokyo area and want to grab a drink.

After 6 years in this lifestyle, it’s not often that I come up with a highly effective new method that I’ll actually use myself. But this summer I found just such a technique:

The sexual state phone call.

The idea of sexual state has been around for as long as men have been horny, and has been formulated as a seduction tool by Gunwitch and others in the seduction community. I’ve created an expanded interpretation of sexual state, partially outlined here.

The main difficulty with using sexual state is most guys can’t turn it on like a switch. They’ll flow into and out of states in random and haphazard ways, with results to match. And when they are in great sexual state, they might well be home in their pajamas and in no condition to go out and utilize it.

When every thought of hot women makes you boil over with lust, there is another option. You can just pick up the phone and start dialing.

Dial one of your regulars up first to warm up the voice. Try to persuade her to do something unusual for you by talking in super-sexual tone and never letting up no matter what she says. Stretch all the syllables out in as deep and soothing a voice as you can manage. Let your sexual state show through all the while. Of course always stay positive and confident, which means no verbalizing this directly either.

Once you get to calling random girls you’ve been trying to get to meet you, they’ll object in all kinds of ways. They’ll try to talk about something else and you’ll continue with the super-sensual voice. They may ask what’s up with the voice. They may ask if you are horny, or if you are “tired” or whatever they can think of. Ignore it all. Simply don’t respond to anything that isn’t related to what you want.

And what do you want? Her at your house, now! Let yourself go crazy with the voice, little by little escalating it. Basically you are doing the sexual state pickup, but on the phone. And why on earth not?! Men pay $4.95/minute for 1-900 numbers where women of unknown appearance will talk dirty to them, and men are much less stimulated by voice than women are. You can get a girl very hot and bothered over the phone, even if you’ve never met, or even if she wrote you off as a lamer in the past. Suddenly you’re this guy, up in her ear giving her these hot feelings.

You can really pull some coups with this. By that I mean, if you’ve been doing pickup for a while you know that girls tend to fall by the wayside if you can’t get them to meet you within a few weeks after picking them up. These girls are very hard to turn around, because the pattern is so set. They are “always” busy, even if you invite them out every week for a year. It’s rare to get a turn-around out of one of these girls. But this phone technique can do that.

You might dial up some random girl that has nearly forgotten about you. She may be asleep and in a daze because your call woke her. She may be watching TV with her cat. She may be sitting around being lazy. In any of those cases, when the very first words you say are painted with that luscious, optimistic, gentle-yet-powerful sexual voice, she will within a matter of 20-30 seconds have her own state begin to alter. Within a few minutes she could be as horny as you, and you could be wrestling with her to comply with your demand that she come here right this instant.

Wrestling with a girl is right where you want to be. This is a good thing. If it’s really totally out of the question, she won’t SAY so, she will just refuse to participate in the escalation at all. That’s why you start with regular conversation - in a deeply sexual tone - and wait for some indicator that the feeling is seeping into her. She might just soften up a bit. If she was asleep she may do this nearly instantly, since her mental state is highly fluid upon waking and she has trouble judging fantasy from reality. Once she gives any indicator, you can ramp it up with more sexual tone, demand things, say you want to see her, and optionally go into a story or something to build her horniness by making her imagine things.

Always remember to be constantly imagining what you want to happen (her there with you, naked and doing whatever it is you most want). Use whatever imagery works for you as representing the ideal result, whether that be your cock in her mouth, your two naked bodies sliding against each other, her face writhing with pleasure, you making out with her, etc.

Demand her to come now. Most of the time she will simply be unable to comply, but you want to push the boundaries. But take note that you do not even acknowledge her frame. If she has work, don’t to tell her to skip. Definitely don’t argue why she should skip. Just keep telling her to come and that you want to see her right now. If she’s sleeping, don’t tell her why she doesn’t need the sleep, just keep pushing on the hot button of what you want, keep tempting her with your voice, until you get her going as far as possible. If she even thinks for a second about skipping work to see you, you’ve accomplished something major. Next time you call, you can build on that.

I find with these sexual state phone calls I can get girls to come from remote locations in Japan just to see me. They just eventually crack that way, after 3-4 calls like that.

Do, of course, end the call first and on a high note (common sense), provided you can’t get her to come right away. Try to get her to comply to something. Get her to agree to come meet you. Then get her to agree to a day or timeframe when she will come.

The great thing here is that instead of the flaking dynamic with which more people familiar - where the more you try to get her to meet, the more things stale out - with this method the more you try to get her to meet the more things heat up.

I’d also recommend not discussing actual sexual stuff, because it will take too long from that time to the time you meet and the immediate lust will have worn off by then and she’ll often feel boxed in for having seemingly promised sexual stuff would happen, but not at that moment being horny (as she’s on her way there). That is a very uncomfortable position for her to be in, as I think any woman would tell you, and she will not want to comply with anything at that point.

Just let it be that she is coming to meet you, and that is that. The rest is implied only with your tone of voice.

Try it out on a girl you aren’t that into and see what happens. Even if you have to pretend, remember that acting is just a way to steal the frame from yourself. That practice will help you maintain the frame when talking to her and getting her to comply with your demands to come over.

Using this only a few times (calling multiple girls each time in series), I’ve gotten at least 12 girls I thought were long-gone to commit to meeting me (many living very far away), and so far 3 of these have led to lays that I had ppreviously written off as slim-to-none chance of success. Give it a try!

Back in Elementary school we were taught to take notes and organize information in a variety of ways. Remember Venn diagrams, flow carts, T-charts and spider diagrams? Pre-writing was always the most tiresome part of any essay. I loathed it to the point of putting off the assignment until the last minute, resulting in an interior product and a deepened hatred for pre-writing, birthing a vicious cycle of procrastination and frustration. It wasn’t until much later I realized I could do my pre-writing after the essay was complete, if simply to appease my teachers.

Something about the concept threw me off. Half the fun of writing is shooting off the hip and seeing what you hit. Pre-writing takes a free-flowing, organic process and funnels it down a concrete sluice to a processing plant. That’s how I saw it, anyway.

In any case, this linear thought process training may have left more of an impression on my developing mind then I gave it credit for. Years later in High School literature classes I found myself absorbed in character foils (T-charts and Venn diagrams) and character maps (Flow charts and spider diagrams). The only thing that made Shakespeare bearable was examining how the characters stacked up against one another. Half the fun of "Wuthering Heights" was the detailed timelines and family trees I kept. The wild words trampling across the white, pulpy plains had been wrangled and domesticated. Things made sense. The galaxy was at peace.

But people in the real world aren’t as simple. Sure, we all have our particularities, our traits and preferences and what have you. But many of these things change week-to-week, day-to-day. You can’t look at Tom’s character as a vehicle for validating Dick’s character. Try to make a spider chart of personality traits and the legs will tangle and mutate very quickly. If anything, most people are like Holden Caulifield. We say one thing but mean the other, mean something but act on the contrary. I guess, if you had to, real people could be summarized with Venn Diagrams, my version of myself on one side, your version of myself on the other, and the "true" version of myself in the overlapping middle.

And it is in this way that I have lived life, searching for the shadow thrown by every ray of sunshine, waiting for the other side of the coin to flip in my favor so that I can put things in order. America is more real in the context of Japan, the personalities and charm of ex-girlfriends become clearer as they increase in number, 2-D gaming becomes more appealing as 3-D gaming becomes increasingly obtuse, etc. And here I am in Japan, being swept from my stoic observation deck on a daily basis by the wild currents of change that run through everything. I need to firmly plant a T-Chart into the ground to regain my footing.

As you may know, there are two (main) positions on the JET program: ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) and CIR (Coordinator of International Affairs). Basically the ALTs "teach English" in Junior Highs and High schools, while CIRs "promote international exchange" at government offices and NPOs. I’m treading on dangerous ground here, but the main difference between the two is Japanese ability-As a CIR you may be the only one in your office that speaks your native language (there are CIRs from Korea, Brazil, Europe, etc) and most of your work involves translating and interpreting. ALTs, on the other hand, work mostly with the English-speaking faculty and as such do not (necessarily) need to use Japanese at work, ever. Get the two groups together at a JET party and it’s an Exxon-level disaster of oil and water.

Elvis, the proprietor of APRE, a Brazilian-born, half Japanese half Italian due of high rapport laments about the good old days. Groups of JETs, a huge swell of 50 people or more would come every weekend, and everyone would talk to everyone and have a great time. Now the JETs tend to keep to themselves and even those that come to APRE splinter off into sects and don’t mingle as well as Elvis would like. This group distinction amuses me to no end.

I wonder if it’s due to my generation of electiveness. Back in the 80’s I assume that most people got into Japan for economic reasons or because they dug Kurosawa or Kaiju/Sentai flicks. This was a time when Nintendo was still an iffy bet at best (R.O.B.? The Power Glove? Power Pad? Come on guys) and the only people that watched anime didn’t know that it was anime (Speed Racer, Kimba the White Lion, come on guys). In other words, people would get into Japan for the same reason people would get into France or Mexico or Germany or whatever. There was an interest, that little spark of culture that set them off, and as a result many more "normal" people ended up in the Nippon Teikoku.

Nowadays most people are into Japan because of anime, or manga, or videogames, or whatever and this is fine in itself. The problem is, this is a very shallow representation of the countries culture, and I will venture the guess that most people who are really heavy into this stuff are not the most graceful of social creatures. Lord knows I wasn’t.

So you take a group of people who are only interested in the first few chews of a bublegum culture, who may or may not be socially stunted, put them in a pressure cooker society where group isolationism is the norm and the result is a gumbo of very confused and alcoholic people. The people that don’t come to APRE wouldn’t go to APRE in their home country; the ones who come do so because it’s all they know how to do (myself included). The vibe is very different, everyone more suspicious of the other and sensitive about a number of irrelevant topics (I try not to tell people I’m a CIR at first because language proficiency is such a pissing contest, but we’re using Japanese style squatters here so there’s no room to wind up, come on guys).

The CIRs I know would never go to APRE. All the ALTs I know go to APRE. You could almost write a sociology thesis on this distinction by itself. To wit: I asked a CIR (to be fair, my Japanese boss but she’s practically a CIR) why they didn’t like APRE. Her answer?
The atmosphere.
I didn’t press her further and had no reason too. Those two words made me realize that I wasn’t crazy, at least when it came to my opinion of APRE.

The ALTs are the frat that I never joined, whose idea of "conservative" is to buy drinks at the convenience store before going to the bar because it’s cheaper. CIRs, by contrast, make you feel guilty for having a beer with your dinner, like at a family gathering where even though your aunts and uncles are standing around with beer coozies you feel more like a desperate teenager then a mature adult.

So what do you want to do? Go out, get rowdy, party till dawn? Or maybe go to a cafe, sit back, relax, and talk about jazz records? Interpret instructions on how to play drinking games to a mixed group of Japanese and Westerners or have a discussion group comparing Haruki Murakami and Ryu Murakami? ALT or CIR? You can have either depending on your mood, and there is something extremely satisfying about that comfort.

APRE

I did it. It didn’t take me long, but I found my way to the ocean

Artist’s rendition. Actual clenliness of beach may vary.

Uchinada beach is about 30 minutes away from Kanazawa by train. You can’t see it in the picture, but the place is a veritable Coney island lined with bars, stages, DJ towers, and deck chairs. You also can’t see the dangers of the beach by the picture-namely, jellyfish, Reggee music, and APRE.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Since the beach excursion a few weekends ago I’ve been having intermittent fun with my fellow JETs and whatever Japanese people happen to be around. Hanging out with fellow English speakers is a slippery slope. You can wake up one day to realize you just spent every night of the past week at the bar socializing with your fellow Westerners and have nothing to show for it aside from a fleeting sense of security and an increasingly doughy midsection. This is the "Golden Cage"-you’ve trapped yourself, but your surroundings are quite plush so what’s the hurry to escape? And hey, why bother learning Japanese when most Japanese people speak English anyway?

But only the crazies. Well, that’s not entirely true. Plenty of ‘normal’ people speak English. But it’s the ones that really want to speak English, the ones that flag you down on your bike and get in your way in the checkout line really bother me. There’s something distinctly un-Japanese, un-rational about these people. It has nothing to do with culture, and everything to do with common sense not to hold a person up who is trying to juggle a weeks worth of groceries in their hands. It wouldn’t be so bad if there was some rhyme or reason to it, but these people just appear out of nowhere and scare the hell out of you. Like getting kicked while you’re sleeping or getting sideswiped in a rainstorm, it’s a jarring encounter that puts you on the defensive. And it will happen to the foreigner at APRE, where the loonies circle just out of your field of vision like gurrilla sharks waiting for their chance to strike.

The thing that has held the most sway over my life and attitude since my arrival has not been the people and experiences I have had, but rather the books I’ve been reading. On the airplane I began "Dogs and Demons," a well researched account into the social malaise of modern Japan. I cannot recommend this book to anyone who wants to enjoy Japan any more then I can recommend "The Cather in the Rye" to people who want to enjoy the companionship of thers. Though I’m sure the book is by no means infallible, the truths presented are undeniable; their implications incorrigible. It made every day "Goddamn Japan" day. Goddamn Japan, if you all love nature so much why is there so much trash everywhere, goddamn Japan how can you tell me there is no racism among Japanese people when you make all non-ethnic Japanese born here register as foreigners, goddamn Japan how can you all be so skinny when all you eat is rice and coffee and bread what am I supposed to eat, goddamn Japan come up with something else to cover on the news I’m tired as Asashoryu, goddamn Japan fix your sun this country is too hot. And so on, with the inanity gaining momentum.

So I cut myself off, stopped reading after the chapter on Kyoto Station (I used to go there all the time without considering how it split the city in two and doomed the cities historic districts and now my boyish memories are forever tainted, goddamn you book) and proceeded to consume a novella I hated in Junior High but convinced myself that I must have been wrong in doing so:

The Great Gatsby

Somehow the fast paced, party-till-dawn and meandering lifestyle seemed extremely relevant. Now I’m through the better half of "High Fidelity," which has put me in a very British and whimsical mood to the chagrin of those around me. Well, at least I’m having a good time. At this rate I’m going to start making Mix Tapes for people, but first I’d have to find people with comparative musical taste. Way too much Top 40 and club music around me.

Having to listen to club music when you go out is like over salting your food. It destroys the original intent of the event (relax and have fun) and at the end of the day only serves to make you feel bloated and tired. I mean, "Pulp Fiction" was such a corker because Tarentino wrote the energy he felt from "Misirlou" into the script, so is it too much to ask them to take off Reggae remixes of Coldplay and put on something that’s gonna pump me up?

Which brings me back to APRE: The Golden Cage lined with old club hits and rasta records, the sad comforting fact that it doesn’t get any better then this. There is an APRE on Uchinada beach, and there is also an APRE in Katamachi. For the better part of a week I somehow ended back at APRE every night and I don’t know how I should feel about that.

Objectively there’s nothing wrong with the place. It has no cover charge, cheap drinks mixed generously by a cool staff, free billiards, a lounge, and great food (real hamburgers! Not this meat-mixed-with-onions-served-on-a-hot-plate nonsense, but a juicy burger in a bun!). It’s a Western bar all the way, with huge TVs and an open party atmosphere. It’s foreigner friendly, and as such many of the clientele are up for a chat (and not just to mooch you for your English) so it’s an easy place to make friends. In short, the perfect place to spend your weekened, birthday party, weekday, every day, etc.

So what’s my hangup? I don’t know. I can’t put my finger on it. If I forced into a debate discussing the pros and cons of APRE I would be mascaraed. There’s just, something about the atmosphere. The lights are too bright. There’s something sketchy about the management lurking just below the surface. The place has a weird aura that preys on people. It’s all intangible and barely noticeable so I should just ignore it but it’s still there and I can’t stop thinking about it, even when I’m having a perfectly good time.

Maybe it’s the way the place feels like a Western bar, but isn’t a Western bar. Where’s my Heffenweisen? My jukebox? My ambiance? My Misirlou? They played it once, actually. I pumped my fist in victory, jumping halfway out my seat to yell excitedly at the person sitting across from me.

"Holy shit! Yeah, so Grindhouse opens here soon right? Well one of the directors, Tarentino, he wrote Pulp Fiction while-"

And then it’s gone. No DJ cross-fade, no segue, not even a subtle fade out. Just, gone with an audible screech. Someone took it off without a sideways glance. Probably afraid that they would spoil the party. I can’t remember what they put on next and it doesn’t matter except for I’m sure I didn’t care for it. Times like this get under your skin in the wonderful way that reminds you why you’re alive and why you love the things you love, hate the things you hate. Goddamn Japan.

Perhaps it was Ross Jeffries, the great pickup sage of old, who coined this phrase. It’s a good maxim for life, based on the old Golden Rule. But it’s ESSENTIAL if you are going to get into the pickup lifestyle.

I know many are here just looking for ways to have less handicaps with women, so they can get a nice girlfriend, wife, or maybe try out some fun adventures just so they can say they did it and have no regrets when they are older. Those people will find what they came for.

Some guys, however, want to be able to have many women and live a high-rotation lifestyle with a lot of sex with a lot of hot women. There are two ways to do this, based on my previous post.

1) Be Mr. Pimp - a guy who uses women and learns how to get them to put out fast and has no regard for them later. If you go down this path you may get many, many women under your belt, but you’ll be damaging them and yourself in the process. Guys with sincere hearts soon figure out that something is wrong with this lifestyle and end it, believing they aren’t cut out for this "pickup" stuff.

2) A guy who has the same skills and understandings as Mr. Pimp, but instead uses them out of the pure desire to give women pleasure and happiness. He may and probably will lay chicks as fast as possible, since this is the surest way to avoid them running away before they can experience what he has to offer, but he takes responsibility for always leaving chicks better than he found them. This is the harder road at first, but down the line it’s the only one that can really be maintained without becoming, frankly, an asshole and a chronic user. Keep in mind that this type of guy may also have very high numbers of women, such as 20-30 per year, although maybe not quite as high as Mr. Pimp because Mr. Pimp will have one-night-stands and get into girls he only has interest in for a single night. But I would think a hot new women every two weeks is enough for just about anyone who is really taking proper care of his women and seeing them a decent number of times before letting things fade out.

Most guys assume the pickup lifestyle is about #1 above, but it’s only that way if you choose it to be. I’ve met some guys in Japan who have had many hot women, but they are lively primarily under the Mr. Pimp frame, and hence they feel deep down they are just wasting their time in life and they’ll show really depraved attitudes about women at certain times. They also tend to attract low-self-esteem girls.

The reason I’ve been able to keep this lifestyle up for 6 years and not get burnt out or bitter is because I have (mostly) stuck to option #2.
Are you saying, "So what? That’s the least of my problems. First I just want chicks to put out for me and stop screwing ME over." Well, this is the most relevant thing for you still. It’s what underpins all that we’ve talked about.

If you are an evil bastard already, you can continue that way and get lots of chicks and use them and such, and if that is your definition of success, you’ll do fine.

The problem is, I think most of my readers are not evil bastards. They are good people who want to make one or more wonderful women very happy. This is their core personality. If they go against this and try to be Mr Evil-Pimp, they will always stall out in the end, usually before they can taste any real "success" at all. Ironically, many techniques are the same whether you want to be good or evil, at least on the surface. But your basic personality underpinning all that is where the strength of these methods really comes from. If you are a good person, you will only have real success if you can work out in your mind WHY you want to have this lifestyle and why that would be a good thing for you AND for all those you come in contact with. Do not sweep this part under the rug. Think carefully, for as long as it takes to determine how or even if it would be a truly good thing for you to pursue. If you aren’t 100% certain that you would increase the happiness in the world by beginning this lifestyle, DON’T.

I still think people look at me, whether on this blog or in real life when I am "on the pull" and think, "That guy must have a flippant attitude about women, and couldn’t really be making them happy in the long run." Many girls think this especially, until I explain it to them. That has led to us having sex more than a few times! The reason is that I fully believe in what I’m doing and have 100% committment to it. That is what allows me or anyone else to have sex with many women without burning out and having to sour search all the time. I love what I do, because I love women and they love what I do for them.

And guess what? It’s not always smooth sailing. I’ve made some mistakes and on occasion failed to leave them better than I found them. In these cases I always do my very best to follow up and remedy the situation. If it’s a girl I layed once and there were just no sparks flying at all, I will still see her at least once more just to give her that respect of not doing a one-night-stand. If I ever ended on bad terms with a girl (VERY rare, but it happens), I will keep checking on her and making sure she recovered OK, and if not I will talk to her and meet her and make every good faith effort to set her back to normal, for as long as it takes. The reason this rarely happens is I am very careful how I manage relationships so as not to create painful break-ups in the first place.

Why go to these lengths? Just so I can feel like a good person at the end of the day? Not just that. These things, however unrelated they seem, are what keep me going strong year after year. Think about it: whenever I approach a girl I don’t just have to pretend she is better off with me than with any other guy she is likely to find, I KNOW it. I know she is going to come out of whatever interaction we have better than how she came in, and quite possibly a whole lot more sexually satisfied than she ever has been before, and knowing that gives me my confidence and my congruence.

If aren’t sure why you’re in this, you should not be in it. I have said this lifestyle is not for the lazy. It is also not for those who refuse to understand their own motivations. It is not for those who don’t have a definite positive purpose in the world in taking this lifestyle up. Think, friends. Take a sincere look inside yourself and sort out these issues within your own mind. Just like with overcoming last-minute resistance, if you don’t have your position fully figured out and fully justified as being right, acceptable and good for you, for her and for the world, none of this will work and you’ll go around in circles always looking for more and better techniques. Conviction that you are right and doing good will make approaching a formality, girls will open automatically, you can use all techniques will full confidence and congruence, and you can lead with certainty all the way to sex and into whatever relationship
you wish to pursue.

And all this without learning any new techniques, just by looking at yourself and deciding 100% where you stand and why.