The Time I Walked a Japanese Street Dressed As A Hobbit

       I just finished an extensive edit of the book.  I would like to say thank you to super-reader Peter Johnsen for his honest and incisive criticism.  The more I rewrite the book, the more excited I get to launch it.  With a lot of very exciting books coming out in the next few weeks (Sam Harris’s Waking Up for one, Stephen Pinker’s The Sense of Style for another), it is a good time to be a reader.  My book won’t hold a candle to either of those, but maybe it will be able to hold a match to them.

Today I would like to give you a little taste of the things you will find in my book.  This particular story will not be in it, but there will be many others much like it.

                                       

    It might be a little hard to tell what’s going on in that photo, so let me explain: it's me a buying popcorn at a movie theater dressed like a hobbit.

   Let me tell this story right.  

    I love The Lord of the Rings.  At one point I was as big a Lord of the Rings nut as you could find.  I read the books multiple times.  I even read The Silmarillion multiple times.  The Silmarillion is essentially the Old Testament of Middle Earth, minus all of the nasty ethical injunctions.  It tells a creation myth.  It describes a Middle-Earth specific Angelology.  It contains an Edenic Fall, a genealogy of the elf, dwarf, and human races, a description of the origin of orcs and goblins, a backstory for Sauron, and the details behind the forging of the Great Rings.  It is a wonderful compendium of myths written by a historical person whose actual grave you can visit whenever you want.  It’s also very boring.  I read it twice when I was in high school.

    The books were good, but I was more about the movies.  I watched them dozens of times.  I must have seen The Fellowship of the Ring, specifically, fifty times.  There was a point when I could recite the majority of the three hour movie from memory (unfortunately I can’t do it anymore).  A few friends and I went to the premier of The Return of the King dressed as hobbits.  We were outclassed by a guy in chain-mail carrying a foam battle-axe, but it was downtown Seattle and I thought we held our own.

    I didn’t know what to do with myself when the movies stopped coming out.  Slowly, my love for the series faded, sinking into the sediment of my unconscious not unlike the One Ring in that one lake after that one battle.  The one where the guy cut the Ring from Sauron’s finger?  The guy refused to cast it into Mt. Doom, wore it around his neck and it made him crazy, then was waylaid by some orcs on his way back to Gondor?  He got shot with a billion arrows and dropped the Ring in a lake?  It sank to the bottom and sat there until Smeagol found it?  You know what I’m talking about.  My love for the series got buried like that.  It lay there, unnoticed, for three and a half thousand years - no, wait, for about six years - until, when chance came, it ensnared a new bearer – wait, I mean… what do I mean?  The Ring – er, my love - came into the hands of the creature Gollum –

    Sorry.  I got possessed for a second there.  It seems like I haven’t totally forgotten all the lines.

    At any rate, I didn’t think about The Lord of the Rings much after high school.  But then I heard they were planning on making movies out of The Hobbit.  I didn’t know how to feel about that.  Three movies?  Out of the Hobbit?  How are you going to get three movies out of The Hobbit?  What if they suck?  What if they turn out like Star Wars Episodes I, II, and III?  I decided not to get my hopes up.

    I ignored The Hobbit until just before the first movie was released.  One day, I saw a trailer and the opening bars of the Shire theme activated long dormant lines of code in my mind.  Old feelings rose from the muck of the past and I remembered what The Lord of the Rings once meant to me.

    I was in Japan when it came out.  A group of friends and I made plans to see it on opening night.  It had been almost ten years since a different group of friends and I dressed up as hobbits and were embarrased by a forty-year old man in a dwarf costume at the Cinerama.  I wanted to honor the memory of that fateful night, so I decided I would dress up this time, too.

    I scrounged the city for hobbit garb.  I had a white collared shirt and a tan vest.  I found a pair of baggy brown corduroys with an elastic waist-band at Uni-Qlo (the Japanese Old Navy).  I found a light brown shawl in the women’s section of Mu-Jirushi (another cheap Japanese clothing store) that I could use as a cloak.  I found a plastic sword at the Daiso (a dollar store).  I was ready.

    You’ll notice that I didn’t say anything about shoes.  That’s because I didn’t wear any.  Hobbits don’t wear shoes!  They have super hairy, heavily calloused feet.  I wasn’t going to ruin my costume with shoes.  

    It was December and bitter cold outside.  My feet were neither hairy nor heavily-calloused (enough), but my only choice was to pad along the frigid sidewalk to the movie theater.

    Going out without shoes in the middle of December is a very bizarre experience.  I recommend trying it at least once.  I don’t think I’ve every felt as acutely out of step with society in my entire life.  A voice in my head was screaming at me to go home and put shoes on, and not because my feet were cold.  I felt like a total wacko.  When people go out in the middle of December – when people go out during any month – they wear shoes.  It’s one of societies most basic rules: No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service.  Going out without shoes is not an option, unless you live on a beach.  I would have stuck out less with pink hair and a nose ring.  Add to my bare feet the fact that I was wearing brown corduroy capris and a woman’s shawl as a cloak, and you’ll understand how much courage it took to make the ten minute walk to the theater.

    But nobody said anything.  Nobody even looked at me.  I was worried that I might be denied entrance to the movie theater, but the guy at the ticket counter didn’t even blink.  (This practiced disregard to public aberrations is a theme of my book).  I got my ticket, bought some popcorn, and walked into the screening room as if I were a totally normal person.

    In America someone would have said something.  “Hey, sweet shawl, Jackass!” maybe, or, “Aren’t your toes cold, bro?”  Something.  Someone would have at least pointed and laughed.  But in Japan?  Nothing.  Maybe they’re just so used to people dressing up as anime characters they don’t even notice.