Espresso, Lattes, Rats!

By Ohashi Jozu, SHIMOKITAZAWA HILLS – Shimokitazawa, Tokyo. The summer of the American hipster. Black oversized chunky Williamsburger glasses leap from face to face, sucking all the shopping value out of a young Japonaise girl’s face and replacing it with…Ugly Betty!

Espresso, Lattes, Rats!

Jaysus, there was the cockroaches (about yey high), the bloody African killer crows (yeyer), and now the whole of sweet Shimokitazawa Hills in Little Tokyo, in the heart of big Tokyo is swarming with festering foaming feverish rats.

In the past two weeks I’ve seen a rat every day.

Now I see one every hour. There’s one…now.

Where are the crows to swoop down and bite the rats in half between their bloodthirsty jaws?!?

The cockroaches have been sealed inside my bathroom. They shriek no more.

The wholeby of nearby funky villa Shibuya reeks of le grande poo poo.

Summer is here. Summer is…gone!

Dear Mr. Foreigner, if you ride the Tokyo subway I will step on your foot! I will crush the bones of your toe with my umbrella. I will lick your face and breathe the foul breath of our foremothers out my nose at you. I will unleash my propaganda newspaper in your face and slash open your eyeball. I will be the last person to squeeze into the train, runnning, running running like the Tokyo Olympic athelete I saw on tv last night and pushing little old ladies like me down the stairs to their deaths.

It’s great to be 75!

I will follow you to the office and jam my bony body into the elevator and block the buttons with my grey misshapen head so you can’t get off at your floor and you get in to work late and you lose half your pay as punishment.

I will not brush my teeth and I will follow you and breath on you and step on your feet until you walk no more and then I will press the buzzer of your tiny shoebox apartment with paper thin walls until you show your face and then I will berate you in the most casual language about your flaws.

You will try to escape and fool yourself that you have blended in and bought yourself a piece of the glamour, the allure of espresso, but you will fool only yourself.

Am I right?

About Ohashi Jozu

Ohashi Jozu is a seasoned business affairs columnist. His 37 years with Japan's premier financial trade newspaper The Nikkei Weekly earned him kudos from Princess Masako, Seattle Mariners' slugger Ichiro Suzuki, and the widely-respected deceased American writer Norman Mailer, who once called Mr Ohashi " a living embodiment of Japan's samurai spirit - a white-knuckle roller-coaster ride of a human being." Ohashi Jozu has two daughters, Koari, and Sadako. They are attending junior college and hope to become flight attendants.
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