I Kissed a Frog and I Liked it

In a group interview prior to jetting off to our new lives on the orient, we were asked;

“Why do you think there is a higher ratio of men to women who teach English in Japan?”

A boy, who had already expressed that he wanted to come here to, and I quote, “Eat noodles on New Year’s Eve,” shot his hand up and shouted without prompt; “to get married.”

“Correct,” the interviewee replied, confirming our company is in fact a find a bride organization cleverly masked as an “Assisted Language Teacher” provider.

Having assumed the reason to be that men are less emotionally attached to their loved ones than the more loyal female of the species, this naively came as a surprise.

There are plenty of young single women in England, why not just marry one of them?

But what was explained during this early days interview was a sugar-coated version of the true facts.

Within a month of being in the country, set on finding someone doable to tide me over for the year, the reality fast became clear.

Socially awkward and lacking etiquette of any degree, the majority of Western men are incapable of engaging in adult conversation.

Like Medusa, eye contact should be avoided at all costs. The second retinas meet you are their captive for the duration of the evening.

They will rabble incoherent gibberish while you sporadically nod and grunt to show you are listening. Entirely socially ungracious they wouldn’t even realize if you choked and died before their eyes. They would carry on regardless, making as much sense as someone who has eaten a tin of Alphabetti, regurgitated it onto a dinner plate and then proceeded to read the end result.

The only escape is to palm them off on an unwitting passer-by before locking yourself in the squatter until the last order bell trings.

Or feed them more beer. After two more pints, they begin threatening to beat up anything within a five centimetre radius, for no particular reason. But at least the attention is diverted elsewhere.

Inept at making small talk, these awkward foreigners are incapable of striking up friendships on home turf - hence the reason they are in Japan, where just being foreign immediately places them in the same league as Buddah.

With faces you wouldn’t leave alone with a Rottweiler, let alone a room full of schoolchildren, for some reason even a man with the face and manner of a serial rapist, as long as he is Western, is a universal Adonis among the female Japanese population.

This false advertising of Western society has seen many a relationship between beautiful women and Western men, who put Fred West on a par with Eeyore, blossoming into marriage.

Where does this leave Western women?

Gaijin guys are disinterested in white chicks and Japanese men are terrified of our brashly extrovert manner.

The most interest I have had since arriving in this country is a bleach-blonde metrosexual repeatedly shouting “nipples” and tweaking my breasts, a 21-year-old naked boy’s attempts to hump my knee on the beach and a middle-aged Albanian who stalked me tirelessly around an Osaka nightclub late last year. Not to forget the lesbian mentioned in an earlier blog.

During the summer months, the heat saw our desperation accelerating to an extent so great we resorted to crouching on the porch outside a house party, taking it in turns to make out with a little green frog called Derek in the vain hope that there was some truth in the fairytales and we THE princesses to break the witch’s evil curse.

To no avail. At sunrise, disparaged, tired and sober, we aborted what had come to be a futile mission. We only found one frog, which had dried up after hours of abuse.

So the desperation continues.

I would strongly advise fathers everywhere to lock up their sons prior to my touch down on the English concrete of Heathrow.