It was a dreary, cold day in May. In Tokyo, we have the distinct pleasure of celebrating lovely weather for around 9 months of the year. This day was an exception. It was a day where all that begged to be done was a quick dash out to the convenience store to purchase some tea and bento boxes, and then an even swifter sprint back to the apartment where a space heater, warm blankets, and my parents waited for me. I had been waiting for their arrival since I had left Canada the previous August. Each day I spoke with them, the anticipation of their arrival grew to a point which was nearly unbearable. I wanted their visit to be perfect. I wanted them to fall in love with Japan the way that I had. My need for their visit here to be unforgettable created a claustrophobic feeling inside of me, namely because I wasn’t terribly confident in my “Japan skin,” due to the fact that I could barely communicate my basic needs to those who were able to fulfill them. My parents’ trip to Japan had infinite possibilities for disaster, and I of course worried incessantly about each of those possibilities as their arrival grew near. But they were here now. And things, for the most part, were going quite smoothly. I had, in typical Lauren fashion, tried to fit too much into the span of each day due to my fanatical love for this city and enthusiastic hope that I could show my parents every nook and cranny that had taken me 6 months to discover. At the end of each day, my parents were exhausted like marathon runners, their feet swollen and rebelling against the bodies that had betrayed them. So, this day, a day for rest, peppermint relaxation foot baths, and old episodes of “The Amazing Race,” was warmly welcomed by all of us.
My dad was sitting on my newly-acquired broken couch (which was also doubling as his bed during his stay in my pod) that was graciously given to me by a friend before he left Japan. If you laid down just right, which I had learned and taught Dad to do, your spine missed the perilous landscape of springs that jutted out from the fabric like a bed of nails in a Criss Angel TV special.
“My ears feel funny,” Dad said.
“What do you mean, they feel funny?” Mum and I asked in horrified unison. We both tend to panic anytime somebody around us complains about any sort of relatively benign symptom.
“I don’t know, they just do.”
“Well, shucks, Dad. How funny?”
“I guess they’ve been feeling funny for awhile. It’s probably from the plane.”
“We should take you to a doctor, just in case. Lauren, where’s the nearest doctor?”
“…Uhhhh…” I had no idea. But I couldn’t show my weakness. I didn’t want to alarm my mother with my total lack of knowledge about the Tokyo medical system. This was my chance to show my parents that I wasn’t completely useless in an emergency situation. I can’t imagine how many times Mum and Dad had pictured me accidentally (yet mildly) maiming myself and being utterly unable to navigate my way through the language barrier and safely to a hospital. So I did what any sane 20-something would do in a situation like this — I harnessed my limited Japanese skills and Googled “Tokyo Clinic.”
Lots of hits. Good.
Closed on national holidays. Not good.
Japan is the land of national holidays. It just so happened that my parents were here on a week that was composed entirely of national holidays (In Japan, it’s called “Golden Week”). This meant that all of the clinics that I was able to find within an hour train ride of me were closed for the day. Lame. The list did, however, mention that there were a handful of emergency clinics dispersed around Tokyo for instances such as these. After a few more Google searches, to my delight, I learned that there was a holiday emergency clinic located at my home station, only a few blocks from where I live. I gave myself a high five for my awesome navigation skills, notified my parents that I had saved the day, and we set out for the clinic in the next few minutes.
One thing about me is that I am tremendous at getting to places I have been before. I am also fantastic at getting back home from places I am simply by retracing my steps. On the other hand, I am not very skilled at finding places on Japanese Google Maps. To put it bluntly, I had no idea where we were going. I knew that the emergency clinic was somewhere near the station and probably located in the same building as a supermarket… At least, that’s how it appeared on the map that I had pulled up on my phone. So, we made our way to the supermarket building, and I ran a quick, umbrella-aided lap around it to see whether or not I could find a clinic. On the last wall of the building, I looked up, and using my under-confident Japanese reading skills, I made out, “クリニック”= kurinikku (clinic). I had done it. The hard part was over, and dad would be okay. We soggily tromped up the steps and made our way into the clinic. The dingy, empty, understaffed clinic. I walked up to the reception desk. With the help of my trusty Japanese-English dictionary and my spectacular penchant for charades, I expertly communicated (well, to me it seemed flawless, but to the lady on the other side of the desk, it was probably something more resembling threatening behaviour) that my dad’s ears were sore by pointing to my ears, holding my head and shaking it around making a wincing face, and finally by saying “Ear pain! Ear pain!” in Japanese.
The poor lady seemed to be on board for the first little while, as I was shaking my head around and making maniacal facial expressions, but then as I began talking about my ears, her expression switched to one of utter confusion. She said something in Japanese that I couldn’t understand, which I met with a blank stare. She politely asked me to wait a moment, walked to the back room, and brought out a doctor. I was relieved. What quick service! Only in Japan!
The doctor introduced himself to us, and then proceeded to tell us, in broken English, that this was, in fact, a mental hospital. He then asked me what kind of help we needed. My face flushed with embarrassment, but being the good daughter I am, I asked my dad if he needed any mental help for his ears. “Aside from the ringing,” I said, “are you hearing any voices telling you to do strange or maladaptive things?” He assured me that he wasn’t having the kind of ear trouble that a psychiatrist could help him with, so we apologized to the doctor for wasting his time and asked him if he knew where the emergency clinic was. He pointed out the window. It was directly across the street. At least I was close.
Things turned out okay in the end, but I will forever remember the day that I almost had my dad committed into a Japanese mental hospital.
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