A couple weekends ago I went to Guam.  I have a friend who’s a stripper there for a few months.  I wanted to see her.  I wanted some sun and some warmth.  And Guam’s only a few hours away by plane.

Originally, I wanted to go the weekend of the 24th because we had an extra day off on Friday for Labor Thanksgiving Day (It’s a lot more like Labor Day than Thanksgiving).  But because of that one extra day, tickets were around $1,500 and most flights were sold out.  I would have had to take a 9-hour wait in the Philippines.  It seems like all the businessmen in all of Japan were going to Guam on that 3 day weekend to look at titties.

So I decided to take a couple days of vacation and go the weekend before.  Tickets were only a bit above $400 and I got a direct flight.  My company told my schools that I was going home for a bit, since that is apparently a lot more acceptable than taking a vacation.  Since I had a bad cold a couple weeks before, everyone freaked out thinking that I was going home because I was really, really sick.  Because people don’t just take off for no reason.  I’m getting the feeling that it’s a lot more culturally taboo to take off work and have fun than it is to grope young girls on the train.  I bet Japanese businessmen to the latter a lot more than the former.

Guam is a very, very strange place.  There are a few native Chamorrans, mostly living in poverty.  It’s mostly populated by Navy and Air Force troops.  The rest are strippers, prostitutes and Japanese tourists.  The main strip in Guam is lined with luxury hotels as high as you can see and accommodated with glittering water parks and beach fronts.  Along the edges of the road are tourist trap bars and restaurants and high-end fashion malls.  There are at least two Chanels, Louis Vittons, and Burberries in a three-block stretch.  In between such decadence are loud, dimly lit strip clubs and all night massage parlors.

It felt nice to have the tables turned a bit. I only had to speak Japanese once and that was just to tell some lady to wait a moment because she was about to take the table that was supposed to be for my friend and me.  Instead of being the one wandering around desperately hoping to find someone who spoke my language or to find a menu I could understand, it was the Japanese who were confused.  But not much.  Popular “Western” restaurants like TGIFiday’s  and Outback Steakhouse had Japanese menus.  The luxury market of Guam seems mainly to be targeted to the Japanese tourists.  Most stores have Japanese speaking staff.  Since Guam is technically part of the US, it runs on US currency.  But many places accept yen.  Since I was technically in the US, I was hoping to find some cheap clothes that fit me.  But in the tourist area, I mostly just found Japanese styles, in Japanese sizes, at the equivalent of Japanese prices.  I guess the Japanese wives shop till they drop during the day and pass out in the fancy hotel while their husbands go and spend an equal amount on strippers or full body massages at night.

There were so many Japanese people.  In the tourist area of Guam I sometimes forgot I was in Guam instead of one Japan’s of the south islands.  Kanji, katakana, hiragana.  A lot of times the Japanese tourists still gawked at me as if I were the foreigner.  Ack!  Tall blonde freak!  Gaijzilla!

Outside of the high-end shopping area, the main tourist attraction seemed to be Kmart.  I shit you not.  On the plane ride back to Japan, everyone was trying to stuff all their brimming plastic Kmart bags into the overhead compartments.

But in Guam, the Japanese are only well taken care of in order make it easier to take their money.  I do experience racism and discrimination in Japan, but we were definitely giving it to them in Guam.  Many of the seedy places in Japan explicitly refuse foreigners.  In Guam, they let them in with open arms, they just charged them a lot more money.