Dear Vice,
Me and my friend Chris had just arrived in Tokyo and were looking for something to do. We went to a bar and some guy attached himself to us for the next half hour. He was a conceited, pale, peering creature from some shit hole near Chicago. He had shoulder length hair that he had sculpted into what he referred to as a manga (which he pronounced 'marngar') style "that the Japanese girls loved." This style involves having all your hair standing on end except for a sweeping fringe covering one eye.Being in a country where no one speaks English starts to lower your standards for conversation and we were, in retrospect, quite excited about speaking to him. It emerged that this cretin had been teaching English until his company went bust and he had become a 'butler'.He told us that the butler phenomenon involves Western men dressing up as comedy butlers with retarded hair-dos, and then acting like servile little turds toward attention starved Japanese women. He suggested that we come to his bar later that night for the 'International Party', a monthly event where Western men come to the bar for free food and drink to act as a lure for the above-mentioned women. So we went.We were expecting a strange but laid-back party with happy interracial mingling, but on arrival at the fifth floor of a grim apartment block (few bars in Tokyo are on street level), we were shown to tables where we were allocated two dull and dumpy women each. This was not going to plan.The bar was run by an Asiatic equivalent of James Brown, who patrolled the tables perspiring and forcing everyone to have lots of fun. He was welcoming and friendly in the most unnerving, overbearing way possible. The American who had lured us into this awkward hole was flitting around wearing a clip-on bow tie and being a sycophantic little worm. Thankfully he was too busy to say much to us.Playing the girl-rating game soon becomes dull in Tokyo because about 80 % of the girls are between a 7 and a 9. In spite of this strong average the girls and women at the butler party were uniformly plain, awkward looking, and irritating 4s.The only highlight was an obese, bald, black guy from America who seemed to have got the wrong end of the stick. He was eyeing up the butlers as he seductively licked chicken fat from his podgy trembling fingers.After ten minutes of painful questioning Chris gave up and proceeded to work his way through the chicken wings, leaving me to feign interest in some girl's job at a car manufacturer's logistics centre. After about two minutes I gave up too and joined Chris, who was by now balancing a pyramid of chicken bones on a paper plate.We hadn't gone to the party in the hope of picking up fit Japanese teenagers, but we had hoped for some excitement or alien experience. What we ended up with was indigestion, flat beer in plastic cups, and an experience tantamount to babysitting a group of semi-retarded young mothers.We were left feeling guilty and embarrassed that we had been conned into pissing an evening in Tokyo away for a few warm pints and cheap party food.BRUNO
Me and my friend Chris had just arrived in Tokyo and were looking for something to do. We went to a bar and some guy attached himself to us for the next half hour. He was a conceited, pale, peering creature from some shit hole near Chicago. He had shoulder length hair that he had sculpted into what he referred to as a manga (which he pronounced 'marngar') style "that the Japanese girls loved." This style involves having all your hair standing on end except for a sweeping fringe covering one eye.
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