Posted on by Matt Thomas

My Time in Kumamoto Japan I: NOVA and Meeting Sachie

Note: This is the first entry in a new series about my time in Kumamoto, Japan between April of 1997 and December of 1998. What began as a recollection of a short, chaotic teaching stint but became an excavation of place, power, and early adult identity under surveillance. Set against the compressed social ecosystem of a small Japanese city in the late 1990s, the piece moves through NOVA’s glass-room culture, its porous rules, and the peculiar cast of lifers, bosses, and drifters who inhabited it. What emerges is not a complaint but a tonal study: of being watched, of improvising freedom within constraint, and of the quiet luck of finding something real—Sachie—amid a system that often felt artificial.

Epigraph:

Kim You Bore Me to Death

—Grandaddy

I arrived in Kumamoto in April of 1997 to teach English at NOVA, which at the time felt like a pretty wild thing to be doing. Kumamoto is not Tokyo. It’s a smaller city, slower, and NOVA was right at the north end of the Shotengai, basically downtown. Everyone knew everyone, or at least knew of them, which I didn’t fully understand yet.

What I also didn’t fully understand was that I would be living with one of my bosses.

Her name was Sam. She was about 35, from Wales, and she had this story she loved to tell—more like boast—that Donovan had written a song for her mother. I never quite figured out which one. She was in the apartment with me and another teacher, Heather, and she was there all the time. Not just physically there, but present. Observing. Asking. Not in a relaxed roommate way, but in a way that felt like she was always slightly checking something.

NOVA had a loose rule about no fraternization between students and teachers. Loose being the key word. It happened all the time. Another teacher, Cameron, told me a lot of the young women came to find a boyfriend. Whether that was true or not, relationships were constant. There was this big izakaya on the Shotengai where everyone went, and it was basically understood that whatever the rule was, it wasn’t really enforced.

By early June I was seeing Sachie, who had been my student. She was my girlfriend then and is my wife now. I went to her house pretty early on. Her father, Tetsuyo, a gruff, older, very conservative Japanese dad, said he would meet me, but then he went to take a “bath” and didn’t. So I didn’t meet him for months. Her mother, Kazuko, was lovely then and is lovely now.

We couldn’t really spend time together at my place, obviously, so we’d drive around in her car. That was our space. We’d park wherever passed for lovers’ lane in Kumamoto, which, thankfully, was not the Zodiac. No Zodiac in Kyushu, thankfully. We’d sit there, windows cracked, the car quiet, the whole thing feeling both secret and completely ordinary at the same time. That was just how it worked.

At some point I told Joy, another teacher, that I was seeing Sachie, and I told her not to say anything because it was technically against the rules. She said of course. And then, of course, she immediately went and told John G., and from there it got around.

By that point it didn’t really matter. I had to leave, but I also wanted to leave. NOVA felt like a factory. The hours, the structure, the constant low-level supervision—it wasn’t for me. I gave my one month’s notice and in July of 1997 I moved to Washington. Better hours, easier gig, and a lot more freedom.

There were a couple of long-term guys at NOVA, both Brits, both lifers in a way I couldn’t really imagine.

Cameron was the more interesting of the two. We’d go to the big izakaya on the Shotengai—yakitori, big beers in frosty mugs, the usual—but his real place was Madam’s Bar, also on the Shotengai. Madam was the owner, a transvestite, and Cameron loved her. Absolutely loved her. He went there every night.

He took me a few times. It was small and dark, always smoky, with Queen playing on a loop. I drank White Russians and, for reasons that made sense at the time, felt like a bit of a stud. It had its own rules, though. You could feel that pretty quickly.

By Halloween of 1997 I was already at Washington, but I was still around Kumamoto a fair bit, still seeing people. The week before Halloween I went back to Madam’s with Cameron.

“Matty baby, T-shirt time,” Madam said. “You will buy the bar T-shirt. Halloween theme. ¥4000.”

¥4000 was a lot for me then.

“Madam baby, that’s a bit steep,” I said. “I’ve already got plenty of T-shirts. Maybe next year.”

She and Cameron had a quick whispered conversation off to the side. We finished our drinks and left. Outside, Cameron turned to me.

“Matty baby, there’s not going to be a next year. You’re banned. 86’d. Hit the bricks, pal. You’re out.”

“For not buying a T-shirt?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “T-shirts are serious business.”

And that was it. Never went back.

Mark was the other lifer. Late thirties, married, one daughter. Solid guy. He loved his wife in a way that was both sincere and slightly odd in its phrasing.

“I can hack this job,” he’d say, “as long as I can go home each night to my little mouse’s ear.”

I never heard that expression before or since.

John E. was our boss, technically over Sam. He was always in and out—Osaka, Fukuoka, training sessions, that kind of thing. When he was around, though, he had a habit.

When we drank, he would smack Mark on the butt. All the time. Didn’t ask. Just did it. Mark would try to laugh it off.

“John E. baby, maybe not tonight,” he’d say.

Didn’t matter. It kept happening.

One night John E. turned to me. “Matty baby, can I smack your ass?”

“John E. baby, no way,” I said. “Thanks, but no thanks.”

At least he asked.

John G. was an anomaly. Everyone else was in their twenties or thirties; he was in his sixties. He said—said, mind you—that he had made and lost six fortunes, mostly in gold in South Africa. Maybe. By the time I met him he was broke as fuck.

He would fall asleep in class. Not subtly either. Full-on snoring, loud enough that you could hear it through the glass walls. And these were small classes, three or four students at most, everyone sitting there while he just drifted off. You could see it happen in real time.

John E. had a number of supervisory conversations with him. Nothing changed.

Then there was Paul, who wasn’t even at Kumamoto—he worked out of Osaka. I met him during training in late April of ’97, and he was a strange guy from the jump.

He told this whole story about growing up in Arkansas, parents who were abusive, into drugs, no money. Said he ran away at sixteen and found God on the road shortly after. Compared himself—without irony—to St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Claimed he made a living hustling poker, which might have been true, but there was something else in there too. Not exactly dishonest, but… flexible.

He wanted to convert me. That was clear immediately.

We walked all night. Ten hours, maybe more, all over Osaka. Through neighborhoods, through stations, at one point through a huge homeless encampment—post-bubble Japan, a lot of salarymen who had fallen hard. It stuck with me. Paul talked and listened in equal measure, which is its own kind of technique, but there was always one direction to it.

The goal was simple: Matty finds Jesus tonight, come hell or high water.

I didn’t.

A couple of months later he came down to visit Kumamoto. We went to the izakaya on the Shotengai, then another bar—not Madam’s. Different energy.

There was a girl there, Yoko, and she was very clearly interested in me. So she’s all over me and Young Mr. Johnson is getting, uh, perky. I’m kind of nuzzling her neck and all, and Sachie and I are barely dating, not exclusive yet. Cameron leans over.

“Uh, Matty baby, YMJ is looking a little perky there.”

“Ruh roh,” I said. “Gotta go.”

There were a few good reasons for that.

One, I wanted to date Sachie only. I wanted to be exclusive. I told her the next day what had happened and she was like, “Good. Let’s go exclusive then.” So that was that.

Two, Yoko was like nineteen and I was twenty-three, and she had tons and tons of pancake makeup, which just wasn’t my thing.

So I jetted. Walked fifteen minutes home.

On the way I passed Fumachi. Of course, “machi” means street in Japanese, so to me it read FU-machi, which I found hilarious. I tried to explain this to Sachie once and she was like, “Yeah, machi just means street.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “That’s why it’s funny.”

Didn’t really translate.

By the river, as always, hammered dudes were out there pissing into the water. Just part of the scenery.

I get home, it’s around eleven, I’m getting ready for bed, and a taxi pulls up.

Out step Paul and Yoko.

Ruh roh.

Paul’s staying over, sleeping on a futon in the living room, and I’m thinking, what’s the plan here—hook up with Yoko right there while me, Heather, and Sam are all in the apartment? Outta control. Maybe that’s just how he rolled.

Anyway, Yoko took one look at me and jets. She’s gone.

Paul shrugged it off.

“Easy come, easy go.”

We end up playing poker instead. For a little money. I’d played all through childhood, in college, figured I was about a B+.

He wiped the floor with me. Took all my lunch money and didn’t lose a hand.

That’s when I started to believe him.

Looking back, those first two months in Kumamoto feel both chaotic and oddly contained, like everything was happening all at once but also exactly as it was supposed to. NOVA was a factory, no doubt—bad bosses, strange rules, glass rooms, and the occasional existential crisis over whether a black turtleneck and a white short-sleeved shirt constituted a violation of “regs.” I smoked Mild Sevens like it was part of the job description, drifted between pool halls and izakayas, and tried to make sense of a place where everyone seemed to know more about what I was doing than I did. And in the middle of all that, somehow, I met Sachie. That part feels less like chance the older I get, more like the one thing that cut cleanly through all the noise.

It didn’t last long—April to July, just a couple of months—but it stuck. The people, the rhythms, the small absurdities, the feeling of being watched and not quite fitting and also not really caring. I left because I had to, and because I wanted to, and both things were true at the same time. Better hours, easier life, more freedom. But Kumamoto was the start of something, even if I didn’t know what at the time. I never did get that T-shirt.

Dedication:

For my wife Sachie. Glad I met ya baby.

Note: If you like this piece, you may like the pieces below, which take up my time just before moving from the US to Japan.

My Time at Northern Arizona University Part I: Decision and Arrival
On My Interlude Between Hamilton College and Japan, 1996 and early 1997.

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On The Dubious Anna Delvey

Note: This essay reflects on the curious cultural figure of Anna Delvey, whose rise and fall in the New York art and social scene became one of the stranger morality plays of the late 2010s. Delvey—born Anna Sorokin in Russia—gained notoriety for presenting herself as a wealthy European heiress while attempting to secure loans and social capital for an ambitious but largely imaginary cultural venture known as the Anna Delvey Foundation.

The events described here draw on widely reported elements of the case: Delvey’s years moving through luxury hotels in Manhattan, her efforts to obtain financing for a private art and social club, the unraveling of her financial claims, and the now-famous trip to Dubai in which a friend—later a magazine writer documenting the experience—was left responsible for an enormous hotel bill after promised funds failed to appear.

The piece does not attempt investigative reporting. Instead, it approaches the story in a spirit of cultural anthropology. Cities like New York have always attracted individuals engaged in various forms of self-invention. The line between ambition, performance, exaggeration, and outright fraud can sometimes appear only after events have run their course. Delvey’s story is compelling partly because it dramatizes this thin boundary in unusually vivid form.

If the tone here sometimes drifts toward sympathy rather than condemnation, that is intentional. Many urban cultural scenes—especially art worlds—operate on the energy of strivers who are, in one way or another, attempting to become something slightly larger than their present circumstances allow. Most of them eventually succeed or quietly disappear. A very small number, like Delvey, collapse in public.

Their stories reveal something not only about themselves, but about the environments that briefly believed in them.

Epigraph

“For all the crazy people who can never get it right.”
— Drugstore

I. The Entrance

There is a certain kind of person who arrives in a city not merely to live there but to declare themselves into existence. Cities like New York attract them the way bright lights attract moths. They arrive with luggage, ideas, clothes that signal belonging, and an almost reckless confidence that the future will eventually arrange itself around their intentions.

Anna Delvey was one of these people.

When she appeared in the New York art scene, she seemed to possess the basic ingredients required for entry into that peculiar ecosystem: style, confidence, and an air of European mystery. She wore expensive-looking dresses and shoes. She wore aa lot of make up and had her hair done at expensive salons. She seemed for a while to ooze money. She spoke casually about ambitious cultural projects. She moved through hotels and restaurants as if she had always belonged to that world. In New York, that is often enough.

The city runs on confidence performances. Every ambitious young person who arrives there is, in some sense, performing the life they intend to have. The art world especially is full of people who are not yet what they claim to be but are working very hard to become it.

Delvey fit into that theater perfectly.

II. The Vision

The striking thing about Delvey was that she didn’t simply want to attend the art scene. She wanted to build something inside it. Her idea was the Anna Delvey Foundation: a kind of private cultural club and exhibition space in downtown Manhattan. It would combine gallery spaces, social rooms, events, artists, patrons, and the atmosphere of a private cultural salon. A place where the city’s creative and wealthy classes might gather.

The plan was grand. But it also had a strange plausibility. New York is full of institutions that began with the ambition of a single person who simply decided that something should exist and then spent years convincing others to believe in it.

Delvey spoke about the project with total conviction. She behaved like someone who already possessed the financial backing required to make such a thing happen. And because she behaved that way, many people assumed the money must exist somewhere.

This is one of the basic mechanics of social confidence. If someone carries themselves like a person whose financial arrangements have already been verified by someone else, most people will not ask too many questions.

III. Hotels

Hotels played a central role in the Delvey story.

Luxury hotels are perfect environments for people living inside ambitious performances. They operate on the assumption that their guests are legitimate. The bill will eventually be settled. The credit line exists somewhere. The guest’s presence itself is treated as evidence of solvency.

Delvey floated through some of New York’s most expensive hotels as if she were simply another wealthy European visitor temporarily residing there while arranging various cultural affairs. The lobbies, the restaurants, the rooms—all of it provided a stage set that reinforced the story she was telling.

Hotels also create a particular social atmosphere. Everyone is temporarily suspended between identities. People are traveling, negotiating, arriving, leaving. It is a place where someone can exist slightly outside the ordinary structures of verification.

For a while, the performance worked.

IV. The Father

Like many figures who construct elaborate new identities, Delvey carried with her a somewhat murky origin story.

She spoke of family wealth. Of connections. Of a background that seemed to hover somewhere between Russia and Germany, between modest beginnings and more glamorous narratives.

Her real childhood was more ambiguous. Her father had worked as a truck driver and later operated a heating and cooling business. It was a respectable, ordinary life. But it did not contain the European aristocratic wealth that sometimes appeared in Delvey’s stories.

This kind of ambiguity is not unusual among people attempting radical self-invention. The past becomes something flexible, something that can be rearranged slightly in order to support the person one intends to become.

In cities like New York, such reinvention is practically a tradition.

V. Dubai

The most extraordinary episode in the Delvey saga took place far from Manhattan, on a trip to Dubai. Delvey traveled there with a friend—a magazine writer who was documenting the glamorous world that Delvey seemed to inhabit. The trip was meant to be luxurious: private villas, elaborate dinners, the kind of extravagant travel that confirms a person’s social status.

For a few days everything unfolded according to the script. And then the bill arrived. The charges for the trip reached roughly $60,000. Delvey’s payment arrangements suddenly failed. The promised wire transfers did not appear. The hotel demanded settlement.

And the friend—the magazine writer who had been invited along for the ride—found herself responsible for the enormous bill. So Delvey left her there. Super bad business Anna baby.

It was a moment that perfectly captured the strange mechanics of confidence artistry. The performance works right up until the moment when reality insists on payment.

Someone, eventually, must pay the bill.

VI. Collapse

Once the financial machinery began to fail, the unraveling accelerated. Banks wanted documentation. Hotels wanted payment. Institutions that had briefly entertained the idea of supporting Delvey’s foundation began to ask more detailed questions about the supposed trust fund that would finance it.

The answers did not exist. The performance collapsed. Delvey was eventually arrested, tried, and convicted of fraud.

VII. The Strange Sympathy

And yet the Delvey story produced a strangely sympathetic public response. Perhaps it was because she had not simply been extracting money for luxury purchases. She had been trying, in her own improbable way, to create something. A cultural institution. A social space. A downtown hub for art and ambition.

The plan was impossible, but the ambition was recognizable. Many people—especially those drawn to cities like New York—understand the impulse to reinvent oneself, to construct a future through sheer force of belief. Delvey simply pushed that impulse far beyond the point where the arithmetic could sustain it.

VIII. Coda

In the end, the most interesting thing about Anna Delvey may not be that she fooled people. New York has always been full of people attempting improbable social performances. The interesting thing is that, for a moment, she came very close to building the life she imagined. And perhaps that is why stories like hers continue to fascinate us. They remind us that the line between visionary and impostor is often visible only in hindsight.

Dedication: For Anna baby (you’re hot BTW) and all the beautiful strivers out there. May your world-curated art spaces someday come true.