the color of its countries

One of a few odd Japanese phrases that asserts itself in my head periodically is "Moshi hentai dattara..." which means "If (s)he's a pervert..."

I'm pretty sure it came up in a class conversation, probably in some kind of "What would you do if someone... ?" scenario. I think it was one of numerous cases in which I succeeded in creating a grammatical sentence all by myself, but the teachers couldn't believe I had the right word because it was a bizarre comment to make, so they tried to extract some conventional meaning from my sentence and frame it correctly for me. I already knew that "hentai" meant pervert, partly because Yoichi and Nick (the boys I mostly lived with in Tokyo) used to accuse each other of it a lot as a joke.

Anyway, I got confirmation that that was the proper way to discuss a hypothetical pervert, and it's actually the only way I remember the conditional structure to this day.

I bring this up because a few weeks ago (maybe just two, or maybe more than a month; time is flowing oddly these days) reports went around the office of some guy who had been sneaking in and snapping photos in the ladies' toilets. It made me laugh, because it seemed like such an old-fashioned way to be taking advantage of nice ladies. More than that, it made me laugh because Sichuan food goes in hot and, like as not, comes out hotter (see 拉肚子), which means that unless he had a coprophilia kink -- entirely possible, I acknowledge, but still probably unlikely -- then I reckon he captured a lot more than he bargained for, poking his camera under the doors of the squat toilets like that.

Gross.

Anyway, for a day or two the female students and Chinese employees were all of a titter about it, and Shirley, the charming and rather feisty girl who makes our schedules, took to ushering me protectively to the bathroom by the arm and standing guard. Which brings me to a new point: I get hustled around by the elbow all the time here. Exclusively by women, I should note; I think the unspoken rules of platonic male-female contact prohibit that sort of thing, along with a lot of stuff I miss, like hugging. I'm still working on translating the nonverbal signals. Where I come from, or at least just to me, taking somebody by the elbow and steering them across the street says, "I have zero faith in your ability to negotiate traffic without being killed, so I'm going to treat you like a child. Silly foreigner." Or else, I suppose, "I am scared to death of cars and I think both our lives are in jeopardy at this moment, so I'm going to cling to you for all I'm worth." Which is more justifiable, actually -- some of the drivers here are hair-raising indeed. But I don't think it actually means either of those things. I think it means almost nothing at all, except perhaps the most casual show of affection between female friends. Maybe not even affection -- maybe just a public demonstration of the relationship or something. Or maybe it's more intimate than I think, and these girls are trying to nudge things along a bit on the intimacy scale using nonverbal cues. Or maybe they really do just think I'm going to get myself killed in traffic, but I'm hoping not.