Kliban Cats, and an August 5, 1987 Postcard

The picture showed two young men with nearly identical beards standing in a driveway leaning against a red car with ample foliage behind them. Tito was wearing a T-shirt which said, "Sex, Mice, and Rock and Roll," that showed a trio of Kliban cats playing musical instruments. His brother was wearing a shirt which said one word, "Sumo," and displayed the ample backside of an even heftier than usual Kliban cat wearing a mawashi (a special thong worn by sumo wrestlers). It was raising one leg in preparation for a traditional stomp. Tito was wearing shorts and his brother was wearing jeans. Both were very thin. Tito was wryly smiling and his brother's expression made it seem as though he'd be caught saying, "Take the picture already!"

This picture was included in a "photo history" that Tito sent me to tell me about his life and family. I remembered the shirts because I liked Kliban cats, too. The concept and execution reminded me a little of Robert Crumb's "Keep on Truckin'" art, though it was better because it showed big, fat, striped cats - my favorite kind of cat.

I sent hundreds of postcards to Tito, but few of them probably had artwork he enjoyed as much as this one.

A Breakup, and a March 19, 1984 letter

I was in the middle of the final semester of my sophomore year of college and in the process of finally deciding my choice of major (psychology). Tito was working at a credit union not too far from his home and received a telephone call from his long-distance girlfriend at the time, Jo. In response to the letter posted here, he had sent her a cassette tape letting her know that he'd decided to end their relationship.

Jo had originally called his family home and they informed her that he was at work and gave her his number there. Given the nature of the call, Tito told her that he'd call her back when he was on his lunch hour. After returning home, he spent his entire break dealing with Jo's hysterical reaction to his choice to break up with her. She pleaded with him to give her another chance, but he had made up his mind. He did his best to explain why he felt things had to end in a gentle, but firm way. After some time, he said, "I don't know what else I can say," and she replied with, "Say you'll try." He had been trying over weeks of being given the silent treatment. She only wanted to talk now that things were over.

The letter I'm posting is the catalyst for Tito's decision to end things, though it wasn't the only thing. The rest of the story is detailed in my book and there is another letter that preceded this one which was hysterical and vague. That letter came out of the blue and was followed by Jo's refusal to talk to him for three weeks until this letter came along. It may be unfair to reach any particular conclusions, but I felt this entire situation was an attempt to manipulate Tito into financing a trip to California (again) for her. I'm not even sure if the first letter and subsequent refusal to speak to him weren't a way of creating tension to increase the chances that he'd foot the bill for a vacation for her, but I'm inclined to be cynical based on my experiences with Jo.

Record Shopping in Tokyo, and a picture from August 1987

Tito went record shopping more weekends than not during the length of his stay in Japan. It was a very different experience compared to shopping back home in multiple ways. The stores tended to be cramped with narrow aisles between record and CD bins. There also seemed to be two types of record shops. One carried mainly domestic (Japanese) releases and the other was much broader in scope and had the Western artists that he and I favored. The small-ish neighborhood that he lived in (Kita-senju) only had the type of shops that focused on Japanese music so he traveled further afield to the bitter shopping districts to look for collectible goodies for both of us.

During one such sojourn to Shibuya, he took his brother along and had him take photos for me to see what sort of circumstances he was operating in. I couldn't read anything, but he did his best to describe the scenes in the pictures on his cassette tapes to me. One thing he told me was that some shops had a large number of promotional posters for new releases. He learned enough Japanese to request one of these posters when making a purchase and started up a large collection for both of us. The items that flowed between us were more than just material objects. They were ways of connecting our experiences at a distance.

This is one of the pictures that he sent me showing him standing on an overpass holding some of the booty from the day's efforts.

Arbitrary Decisions and an August 5, 1987 letter

Much of what Tito encountered while working in Japan pointed to irrational and arbitrary decision-making and it was often annoying. One of the earliest frustrations was his superiors refusal to disclose the address at which he'd be staying once he completed his training. This not only left me with no place to send my correspondence to him, but also meant his parents couldn't mail his trailing possessions for about two weeks. Since they were sending them seamail and he was only going to stay for a year, that meant he would be receiving them after an even more significant chunk of his time there had passed than necessary.

Over time, it became clear that what seemed arbitrary was less that and more about holding on to flexibility until the very last second. It was possible that they had had experiences with teachers who flaked out during or after training and they didn't want to give out the address until they were sure Tito was actually going to be at the school. If he flew the coop and his mail started arriving there, it could have represented a complication.

It was also possible that they wanted to keep the possibility open for reassigning Tito to a different school or putting a different teacher in that apartment if they didn't like his performance during training or simply changed their minds. Tito was the first teacher at a new branch of the school and for most of his year in Japan, he was the only native English speaking teacher there. After Tito completed his contract with AMVIC, the next person who moved into that apartment worked at a branch far away from Kita-Senju so they clearly weren't concerned with placing teachers near the branches they were working at.

In this letter, Tito updated me on how things were going, and how hard it was to extract even the simplest information from the Japanese people representing his school.

Dieting, and an August 5, 1987 card

I had a little book with lists of food and the calories they contained. This was back in the days before everything you ate had nutrition information and there were no digital means to track your fitness or eating. Every morsel that I put in my mouth was written down in a notebook with a calorie total next to it. If I wavered in my devotion to this irksome task, a picture of myself at my most rotund had been pasted into that very same book as well.

After two years of this sort of recording, I started to relax a bit in my eating, but not in my exercising. I had started to play racquetball for up to two hours with whatever willing opponents I could find and allowed for the occasional pizza or cheesecake to creep into my routine. I did this less because I couldn't bear banishing these treats from my life than out of a desire to be a "normal" person who ate these types of things. I managed to do this and still continue to lose weight, though I did panic when I got sick and couldn't burn more calories with copious amounts of exercise.

I had an eating disorder during my childhood and young adulthood, and I swapped it out for a different type of disordered behavior in college. Instead of compulsively eating, I started compulsively exercising as fear of not continuing to lose weight and to eventually be physically rejected by Tito when we finally met face to face gnawed at me.

I wrote this card from a Pizza Hut and it wasn't the first or last time that I talked about what I "indulged" in and how I was going to rein myself in later in compensation. I often felt that I had to prove to him that I wasn't going to return to my former weight by explaining such adjustments.

August 4, 1982 letter

When I compose these posts, I go through my files of scanned correspondence, find one that I want to share, and read it until a story or thought relating to that letter, card, or photo pops into my head. I then share that store and the scan. Recent events (the pandemic) have made it nearly impossible for me to bring up my old memories from the past and I haven't posted stories because I've been (unsurprisingly) eaten up with anxiety and fear. However, I don't want to stop sharing materials related to my book because I'm blocked about background stories so I decided to just share without an accompanying story sometimes. I'm hoping this will  help me get back on track. I hope you're all safe and well, and we can all get through this together.

Today, I'm sharing a letter which was written during the time period in which Tito had just moved to Japan and was training in Okayama. This was a time period in which he couldn't receive my correspondence (as he was there temporarily and would move to Tokyo when his training was done). I was used to lavish attention from him as our long distance relationship started and his time to leave the U.S. neared, and then there was mostly silence. This was a shock to my system, and this letter reflected that.