Ep. #21 Dating Japanese Girls and Understanding their Culture with Smash and Johnny Rocket

[Angel Donovan]: Hey, this is Angel Donovan with another episode of Dating Skills Podcast. Today we have a couple of guys from Japan and they’re the guys who wrote a book called Japanese Girls - The Guide. And it’s a book I have reviewed personally a little while ago and I really found it like pretty much the best thing I’ve ever read on Asian women, like full-stop in terms of dating. So I’m really glad to have them on the air. I wanted to get them on the air to see what they’ve got to say about Japanese girls. Hey guys.

[Johnny Rocket]: Hey. Hey.

[SMASH]: Oh, just keep going. Just keep going with that good stuff.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[SMASH]: [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Giving out the love, giving out the love. So I’ve got SMASH here.

[SMASH]: Hi there.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. I don’t know if you can tell where he's from from his accent, I guess. So SMASH has been in Japan for five years. And we’ve got Johnny, who’s been in Japan for 15 years.

[Johnny Rocket]: Yup, I’m a London boy originally, but been out in the Far East for, like, say, well, just go over five years now.

[Angel Donovan]: Great, great.

[Angel Donovan]: Needless to say, if you’re listening to this and you’re not interested in Japanese girls, this is probably not going to be as useful to you. But I would say that what we’re going to discuss today is kind of relevant to Asian girls in general. And we’re not just talking about Asian girls who are actually living in Asia, we’re also talking about the ones living abroad, and we’ll go into that in a little bit of detail, like the differences between that, later.

So guys, what I thought we’d start off with today is just talking about kind of communication and cultural differences and like starting off with, I mean, because I think this is one of the first things that confuses someone. For someone who’s like potentially been used to like approaching Western women or other Asian women even, like he approaches a Japanese girl and it doesn’t go quite the same, right? So like what would you call like the major differences in the way she’s communicating? Not necessarily like she’s actually different, but maybe she’s communicating differently. So what’s your kind of view on that?

[Johnny Rocket]: SMASH, old boy.

[SMASH]: Hello. [Laughs] You’ll know it’s SMASH from the British accent. But I just want to say before we get into anything, just a kind of a general disclaimer, this is just going to be about an hour-long podcast, so we’re going to make a lot of generalizations about Japanese people.

[Angel Donovan]: Of course.

[SMASH]: And obviously, everybody’s different. We totally appreciate that. We don’t see the Japanese as one great big autonomous entity and we don’t look down on them. We certainly don’t talk about them as if we’re better than them or we’ve got a handle on exactly what they’re thinking. But for ease of use, we’re going to talk about Japanese girls and our experiences and generally what the truth is behind these things.

[Angel Donovan]: Excellent.

[SMASH]: Also, when we talk about Japanese girls from our point of view, we’re not going to refer to us in terms of white guys or even Western guys but non-Japanese guys, because in Japan the culture is sliced between Japanese people—indigenous Japanese—and everybody else. And that division is very, very pronounced in some areas, and not really sort of pronounced in others. So yeah, I just want to make that clear from the beginning. But Johnny, what are your thoughts on this topic?

[Johnny Rocket]: On… What was the question? Sorry…

[SMASH]: [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, it’s okay. Alright, look, I’ll make it easy. So, you know, because I’ve been in this situation. So I was in Tokyo, and I’ve been around Asia and all sorts of other places. But I was actually with a few guys and we were in Shibuya, I think, when we first got there.

[SMASH]: Shibuya!

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, and I walked up to some very, very beautiful Japanese girl and I was kind of just speaking to her, like mixed between English and Japanese, my extremely bad Japanese at the time, and yeah, I just was kind of surprised with I guess the way she communicated back to me. It wasn’t something I was used to. And you know, I’ve been in this for about 10 years or a bit longer, so I’ve kind of pretty much seen it all, and I’ve actually Japanese girls outside of Japan, but this was kind of different. So it was something that it took me a few days to get the handle on. So I’d been interested to get your perspective.

[Johnny Rocket]: What kind of a response did you get?

[Angel Donovan]: Well, first, I mean, this particular… I mean, it was pretty much just kind of like silence and just kind of looking at me. [Laughs]

[]: [Laughs] Okay.

[Johnny Rocket]: [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: And you know, she smiled a little bit, and then she kind of turned away and I talked on a bit more, and it was a bit more smooth and she turned, she smiled at me a bit more, and then she like kind of turned away, and I was just like, “Okay, what’s going on? She’s not like leaving but she’s not going,” right? [Laughs]

[SMASH]: Well, there's an interesting dichotomy between the West and over here. Everyone says, “Oh, the Japanese they’re so polite. Did you see how they handled themselves during the natural disaster? It would just be chaos over here in America,” kind of thing.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[SMASH]: It’s like, okay, yeah, they are very polite, but everything exists with a very pronounced structure, okay? And so we talk about quite a lot in the book, something called context. So if you’re in New York City or London and you walk up to a female and you say, “Hey, what’s going on?” right? She’ll probably answer. She’ll give you some kind of answer, right? In Tokyo you’re probably going to get this horrified stare, because it’s completely out of context.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[SMASH]: It does not fit in that little paradigm of Japanese social protocol. So if you have a way, and in fact I’ve written about this on my blog too, if you have a way of speaking in context something that is acceptable like, say, for example, “Oh, I’m the lost foreigner and I’m looking to go to Shibuya and I can’t find my way,” right?

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[SMASH]: All of a sudden that's completely in context. And then she’ll talk to you, and then you can move on to other things, like, “Oh, you’re so very helpful. How come Japanese people aren’t so helpful?” And you can continue on and move on from there. I think that's the biggest stumbling block, is because so many guys come over here and they expect, “Yeah, party, party weekend!” and it just doesn’t happen that way.

[Angel Donovan]: Alright, alright. Unless, well, that sounds like a very easy rule as well, like basically you just have to understand that social protocol is maybe a bit different there or not as, how we say, open as somewhere like New York or LA where people kind of do crazy stuff all the time and it’s become normal habit in social protocol.

[SMASH]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: So could you give us kind of like some outlines of appropriate social protocols like in Japan, Tokyo, and Osaka? Like I don’t know if it’s different in different cities as well.

[Johnny Rocket]: Yes, it is different in different cities. SMASH, chime in at will if you’d like to, but Osaka women are generally friendlier. They’re generally more kind of… They’re closer to the Western type. I was with a buddy of mine and we went to a restaurant, and we were just sitting there eating and some kind of very fabulous-looking food showed up at our table, and the girls next to us looked at it and immediately commented on it. And I turned to them and I said, “You’re not from Tokyo, are you?” They said, “No, we’re not. How did you know that?” And I said, “Because Tokyo girls would never, ever say something to us.” They said, “Really? Is it really that way?” And I said, “You must be from Osaka.” And they said, “Yeah, we’re up visiting.” So yeah, it’s a lot more casual down in Osaka.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. So is there a reason for that? Like if they had some kind of connection with foreign… Like is it historic or is it just they’re a warmer culture for some reason down there?

[SMASH]: The Osaka kind of Kansai region of Japan is just notorious within Japan. It’s an anomaly.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[SMASH]: It’s the old country in a way because it’s where the old capitals, Kyoto, is and everything, and Osaka is just known for it’s kind of slightly abrasive. And it also should be noted it’s geographically quite close to the southernmost part of Korea, so it has that kind of extra little spice. But I think we could go around all the cities and talk all day about these kinds of differences, but what, as a non-Japanese person, the kind of thing that you should really be thinking of, is the relative exposure to foreigners of Japanese girls in different cities, because Tokyo has by far the highest concentration of foreigners. It’s not anything strange so you’re walking in any part of Tokyo and seeing people of all shapes, colors, sizes, and cultures. Whereas the stark contrast to that, if you’re out in the country as many hapless English teachers are known to be assigned to, you’re instantly… You kind of have this paradox of getting all this attention but being treated as something that people aren’t really sure what to do with.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[SMASH]: And that's when you’re going to get… You’ll get a lot of initial interest, like, “Wow, who are you? Where are you from? Wow,” but you also hit barriers, which will suddenly kind of hit you out of nowhere, where it’s like, “Okay, this far and no further.” And I think the most important thing that the guys have to think about any interaction in the city, in the country or, like you say, approaching a girl in Shibuya, is the reaction you’re getting is as much a product of that person, of that Japanese girl’s feelings about herself and her experiences with dealing with non-Japanese people as it is about actually whether she likes you or not. I mean, you might be getting a very frosty, very muted reception or, in your case, polite smiling and then kind of turning away, and you might think, “Well, she was kind of a bit cold to me.” But in reality, what’s going through her head could be a thing about like, “Oh, I don’t really know what to say. My English is quite poor. He's a nice guy but I kind of feel a little out of my depth here.”

[Angel Donovan]: When I was reading your book, I got this importance of doing the right thing, I guess, like the girls, they put pressure on themselves…

[SMASH]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: …like socially, more pressure on themselves socially to do the right thing. And now that you’re going back to the social protocol, if it’s not something that they’re used to, so if you’re creating a social context that they’re not used to, that doesn’t happen every day, then they don’t really know what to do with it, right?

[Johnny Rocket]: Your face is out of context. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Your face is out of context.

[SMASH]: Your face is out of context by virtue of… [Laughs]

[Johnny Rocket]: [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right, because they’re like, “Oh my God, this is a white face.”

[Johnny Rocket]: So seriously, you know, I’ve been here… I went to school…

[SMASH]: Johnny Rocket is actually an elderly Chinese woman.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[SMASH]: If you’ve ever seen that video where the Chinese lady goes mental at the airport because she’s mystified, that was Johnny Rocket, seriously. [Laughs]

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll do that routine later. Be sure to…

[SMASH]: [Laughs]

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah. Anyway, the thing is that I’m not… I’ve been very lucky to do… My day job is a little bit, you know, it’s exciting, and there's a glamorous element to it. I’ve been lucky for that, I say with all humility.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Johnny Rocket]: And I went to university in Japan, so obviously I speak and read and write. And I can walk into… I walked into a client and it was a retail setting and there was a guy doing retail, and I said to him in perfect Japanese, “Hey, what about this over here? Why is it that way?” And he saw my face and he froze. It’s the deer in the headlights phenomenon.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Johnny Rocket]: Okay? And he couldn't… You know, they instantly go into, “Oh! I have to speak English now! Oh my God, what do I do?” you know?

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Johnny Rocket]: And so you have that to overcome as well. And so when you're walking down the street in Shibuya and you see the tall young lady that you did, [laughs] the affective barrier just like instantly goes up, and so you've got to defuse that.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right.

[Johnny Rocket]: And so doing something that's very, very much in context, that really, really fits the pattern of Japanese social behavior will help you do that.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. Could you give us a few examples of things that you think would go down well in like different environments like, I don't know, in the street or in a café or in a bar for instance?

[Johnny Rocket]: Well, the thing is, you know, this affective barrier only lasts all of five to 10 seconds anyway. As soon as they figure out that you're approachable and that you're cool and that you're going to interact in a way that is acceptable with them, then all of a sudden the guard goes down and you're kind of on to the next phase.

So, for example, something else that I have in my book—we're free for everyone to see, you know. And if you want to plug my blog you're welcome to, but I won't. If you have on your phone any kind of, you know, depending on your level of Japanese. Obviously, if you speak Japanese, you're going to have to have some kind of words that are difficult. But if you don’t speak any Japanese at all, you get a message, it's like, “Wow, I can't read this,” you just walk up and say, “Excuse me…” people generally speak English, “…can I ask you a question? What does this mean?”

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[Johnny Rocket]: Helping the poor foreigner, that's very, very much in context, and everyone, it's in the Japanese sensibility.

[SMASH]: Yeah.

[Johnny Rocket]: “Oh, we need to be of service to foreign people, because we Japanese are so obscure and, oh, we use chopsticks and we drink this really bitter green tea,” and the whole nine… You know, we all get exposed to that. So if you say something, “I need help, help me out, then boom, they’ll be right there. And then you can move that on, it's like, “Oh wow, you're very helpful. Thank you so much. What’s your name?” Obviously, if you're in a club, [laughs] that's not going to… or… [Laughs] I mean, it might. It might, but it's going to look very much like a pickup line, you know.

[Angel Donovan]: Oh yeah. So I’ll give you an example. We were in a club in Shibuya one night and we were in a lift, and there was this girl with some champagne, and I can't remember what I was talking to her about, something basic. I said, you know, “Can I have some champagne?” and she gave me the whole bottle, right?

[Johnny Rocket]: Wow. [Laughs]

[SMASH]: Sweet.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. And you know, she gave me the whole bottle and she says, “Oh,you're very welcome. You're very welcome.” And she says, “I have to go now,” and then she kind of left. And I was like, “That was funny.” I just thought Japan was great because we were constantly getting these different interactions that were interesting that we didn't really understand. So what would you say about that?

[SMASH]: About the champagne?

[Angel Donovan]: Just giving like a bottle of champagne and then like, “Very nice to meet you,” and then kind of…

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah, well, you know, you can look at it from the capitalistic standpoint and say, “Yeah,” just, you know, “I got a free bottle of champagne.” But in the social aspect it was, you know, and no offense, but it wasn’t…

[Angel Donovan]: It wasn’t good, right? That's what I thought.

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah. Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Johnny Rocket]: So, you know, you can leverage that and you say, “Hey, I want some champagne. No, I want to share it. I want to share this with you…”

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Johnny Rocket]: “Who are you? What are you about?” and all that.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's kind of what I figured, and I think what we had was we were kind of deer in the headlights because we were so, like, “Oh, what’s going on?” kind of thing, [laughs] so we didn't do anything.

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah. It's very possible that afterward she was like, “Oh my God, I just gave away my bottle of champagne. What do I do now?” [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Yes. Yeah, that was a funny experience, like I said.

[Johnny Rocket]: And the guys she just rejoined were like…

[SMASH]: “Where the hell is our champagne?” [Laughs] “I just gave it to a random guy in the lift.”

[Johnny Rocket]: “Give me more money!”

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. [Laughs]

[SMASH]: [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: So I was going to say like, as you were talking about this stuff, so you said you studied the language, obviously. You probably both speak pretty good Japanese. How important is language?

[Johnny Rocket]: It depends, okay? This is a great question. SMASH, old boy, mind if I take this one?

[SMASH]: Please do.

[Johnny Rocket]: Kind thanks. There's a book called Ugly Americans, okay? And I've been here for so long and I've kind of grown up here, and Ugly Americans captured, there was a part in the book where it really captured my experience here where the guy, one of the guys in the book—it's actually nonfiction—he says, “There's no way that I could ever move back to the US because I can't have a real relationship, and there's no way that I can recreate the life that I've gotten good at over here in the United States. I'm not mature enough to have that kind of relationship and interaction.”

And the thing is that once you get good at navigating the subtleties of Japanese culture—it's like a minefield, you know. If you know where they are, then it's great. But if you don’t, then you're just going to be stepping in steaming piles of social faux pas all the time.

Now, the language, it's a double-edged sword. The more you speak, the more they expect it of you. So, in Ugly Americans, you know, he talked about, he summed up that guy who—and we've all encountered these people where they have sets of katanas in their living rooms and they wear like kimonos to bed and that kind of thing, and they only eat with chopsticks and they pretend that they're forgetting English and that kind of thing. It's like, that's a liability, okay? You are who you are. You're foreign, and the more that you try to just fit in, the more that you're kind of just running yourself right off the tracks, okay?

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Johnny Rocket]: So, you know, the biggest and best thing that I could say to people who are coming here for the first time is just be who you are and don’t think for a minute that you have to be Japanese, and don't think for a minute that you have to speak, because you can get by without it. It does help, you know, a basic level of communication. Like if you want to get married and have a relationship, yeah, you need to speak Japanese, okay? If that's your objective. But if your objective is to come here and date around and have fun and go out and do all that, then a few basic phrases, you're going to get by.

[SMASH]: Yeah.

[Johnny Rocket]: And no one should ever feel bad that they don’t speak Japanese or that they're not bowing properly and, you know, none of that.

[Angel Donovan]: What percentage of people or like girls speak like some English there?

[SMASH]: This is really another regional thing because I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t have the basics of kind of self-introduction-style communication, being able to say, “I like cake.” But then, yeah, the further you go away from the capital cities, yeah, [laughs] you do get [laughs]… You do hit some walls.

I think just the corollary to that, which Rocket has just given us there, is that, I mean, your options change. The more Japanese you come to be able to speak, some doors close and some doors open. The girls who are interested in, you know, they want to date the least Japanese thing they can find because for whatever reason they're disillusioned with their own culture or they're just wildly experimental about other things, and yeah, they want the total zero Japanese, total English or whatever country foreigner to kind of offer them a break from the norm. But, by the same token, there were certainly girls I've been involved with who I would not have been able to even get a basic kind of interaction going with if I didn't have the power of the language behind me. So like, just as Johnny says, it's a double-edged sword, and you've got to kind of pick your poison. But, I mean, the most important thing is just don’t sweat it if you don’t have the language ability…

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, it sounds like it's more of a personal decision. If you're interested in languages, if you want to learn the Japanese language, then do it, right? And I guess that would fit with the kind of girls you're going to come across if you take that path…

[SMASH]: Mm-hmm.

[Angel Donovan]: …and fit with your own mindset about your interest in the country and your interest in language and so on, right?

[Johnny Rocket]: You said come across.

[SMASH]: [Laughs]

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah, it all boils down to one thing. It's not the size of your pencil, it's how you sign your name. You work with what you got.

[Angel Donovan]: What does that even…? Okay. [Johnny Rocket]: [Laughs]

[SMASH]: Yeah, I'm lost too. Yeah, but I think, look… I mean, just to clarify, there comes a point where your ability, or you peak where you have the ability to communicate with pretty much everyone. Your Japanese isn't perfect. And then if you keep pushing beyond that point and trying to smooth it out, you actually work against yourself because it comes across as trying to be someone you're not. I mean, there are guys, you meet them all the time, they’ve been here a long time and it's a huge part of their identity that they can communicate with the locals, and if a girl starts speaking to them in English because they look non-Japanese, they refuse to reply to the girls in English. They speak Japanese. It's like, “Please accept this part of my personality that I worked on so hard.”

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[SMASH]: And that's where you start… And I say that because I've been one of those guys, and part of writing the book Japanese Girls – The Guide was part of my journey, and just screwing up so much but learning why and fixing it and just having much better experiences because of that.

[Angel Donovan]: I'm glad you said the words “screw up” because I think that that would probably be extremely helpful. If you can just kind of like… What are the top three screw-ups, you think…?

[SMASH]: Top three screw-ups. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[SMASH]: Number three…

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[SMASH]: [Laughs] Hey, Johnny, have you ever screwed up with a lady? [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: The headlights.

[Johnny Rocket]: Oh, naturally, yeah. Oh geez, seriously, screwing up is fantastic because it's the screw-ups that really, you know…

[Angel Donovan]: Educate.

[Johnny Rocket]: They bring you up. They raise you up. In fact, there was a… [Laughs] I'm trying to decide which story to tell you now, but…

[SMASH]: I know the one you should tell. [Laughs]

[Johnny Rocket]: Sorry. First of all, just speaking generally, one of the worst things that happens to guys, especially guys who come over here and they think, “Oh wow, they're so interested in me. I must be so exotic and so foreign to them,” and all of a sudden they're on this rock star high, and then pretty soon they find that they're getting summarily ignored. And it's like, “What happened? I was completely on top of this whole thing and they were so into me.”

[Angel Donovan]: Right. So you're saying like, just to make sure I understand, so you're saying like kind of you arrive there, say, arrive in a bar next to a girl, and you're getting all this attention and she's like…

[Johnny Rocket]: Mm-hmm.

[Angel Donovan]: …like really interested and excited to be talking to you, and then after five minutes it just goes dead and she's not interested and she starts talking to her friends and, you know…

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

[Angel Donovan]: She disappeared. She disappeared.

[Johnny Rocket]: And word to the wise, they really don’t care about you, okay? They're being… There's this social… Like you can be in that situation a million times, right? And you'll notice that, “Hey, wow, I'm getting asked the exact same questions over and over and over,” right? It's like a social obligation.

So the way to avoid that is buy Japanese Girls – The Guide… No, I'm kidding. You can do that. But the way to get around that is to turn it around and make it a tennis game, you know? I mean, I think this is universal. It's everywhere.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Johnny Rocket]: And she's going to be really, really interested. And play and create a dynamic. Don’t just be like, “Oh wow, she's interviewing me. All I have to do is answer questions. This is easy.”

[Angel Donovan]: Right. So you're saying they tend to interview you like, “Okay, so where are you from?”

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: You know, if you're English or whatever, “How old are you? What do you do for work?”

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: I know, I know, because it's…

[Angel Donovan]: You know, chopsticks. Right, right, right, right. So you're saying it's very standard questions that you've like heard before. And so how would you turn that into a tennis game? You know, she asks you like, “Oh, what is your job? What do you do?”

[SMASH]: One that… Oh, sorry. Go ahead.

[Johnny Rocket]: No, go ahead. Go ahead.

[SMASH]: This is really a crux, a really crucial chapter in our book, which is called The Pattern. The Pattern of course refers to the series of questions that Johnny has alluded to…

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah.

[SMASH]: …which really are identikit. I mean, we've had guys emailing us saying, “It was like we had a camera trained on them because the scripts that we provided for what these conversations look like, they're just always word-for-word the same.

[Johnny Rocket]: Mm-hmm.

[SMASH]: It's, you know, “How long have you been in Japan? What do you do? How old are you? Oh, you don’t look that old. Blah, blah, blah.”

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[SMASH]: And the problem is that she's leading. She's the interviewer, you're the interviewee. And you might occasionally interject with, “Oh, what about you?” and whatever, but that doesn’t really a conversation make.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[SMASH]: And also, the problem is that it doesn’t lead anywhere. Just because she's leading doesn’t mean she's going to take you to the next stage and say, “Hey, why don’t we go somewhere else?” because that never happens, or [laughs] very, very rarely. So the counter-chapter to that, which is Breaking the Pattern, looks at ways where if you know exactly what questions to expect, you turn it around.

For example, the age question is like, “Oh, so how old are you?” And this is, I mean I don't know what it's like in Bangkok or Thailand, but in Japan and also Korea, that's a huge thing. It's like, “How old are you?” And instead of coming up with, “Oh…” whatever age you are, you say, “Well, how old do you think I am?” or something like, “Oh sorry, that's a secret.”

And then she's going to go, “Yeah, well, I think you're…” and then she’ll give you an age. And then you say, “Hmm, no,” and then you let her guess another couple of times, and then you wave her closer to you and kind of look around as if you're telling her a big secret, and then you whisper in her ear, “Actually, I'm…” whatever. And she’ll say, “Oh, you don’t look that age,” and they always will.

And then you say, “Oh, you know, you're quite the smooth talker, aren't you?” And you know, it's every little point, you never let any point slip away as being just a boring Q&A. You turn everything into a fun little diversion. It's little stuff. It doesn’t, oh, accumulate to one grand plan or anything. It's just keeping the whole tone a bit fun and letting her know that every little thing she throws at you, you're going to give her a little bit of a runaround. But it's good-natured.

And this also has the effect of it draws out the interaction, because interview-style conversations are over very quick, and you hit that awkward kind of dead air where it's like, “So, do you like cake?” [Laughs]

[Johnny Rocket]: [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Hey, do you like movies?

[SMASH]: [Laughs] Yes. Oh, by the way, Rocket, that was a good dodge. You didn't even end up answering the question about failing with a girl.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[SMASH]: [Laughs]

[Johnny Rocket]: Okay. Yeah, actually this will shed a lot of light, okay? So before what I call my rebirth—see, I stand on the shoulder of giants, you know, like in anything else—I was out with an early mentor of mine when I had first come over to Tokyo. And we went to a bar, and my mentor was immediately on these two girls, but this guy just kept asking me questions, and like an idiot I was answering this guy’s questions because we were in the same industry. And so time wore on, and then pretty soon the second girl disappeared with a French guy and I was like, “Oh no.”

And so my mentor says, “Hey, David, can you stand with my girl while I go to the bathroom?” I said, “Yeah, sure.” So I walked over, and the conversation was just an absolute disaster, just horrifically bad, so bad that I don’t even really want to repeat it, but I will.

And I said, “Hey, so, what do you do?” right? “What’s your job?” It's like, you don’t ask a girl that, you know what I mean? Maybe if it's like a meet and greet or a networking party or something like that, but not at two o'clock in the morning at a bar in Roppongi, you know?

And she just looked at me. She didn't say anything, and I was like, okay, I just did something wrong. And I said, “Oh, let me guess. You're a doctor.” Lame. So lame. And she just continued to stare at me like she was going to vomit. [Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Johnny Rocket]: And I said, “Oh okay, no, you're not a doctor. You're a lawyer.” And I just kept on going. I was digging myself deeper and deeper. And I said, “Wait, an engineer?” And about that time my mentor came back, right? And he goes, “Hey!” And she goes, “Hey!” And he goes, “So, do you like movies?” And she goes, “Yeah! I like!” right?

[Angel Donovan]: Uh-huh.

[Johnny Rocket]: He goes, “Do you want to watch one?” She goes, “Okay.” It's like two o'clock, 2:30 in the morning.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Johnny Rocket]: “Oh, want to go watch a movie?” Like they're going to watch movies, right? And then he looks at me, he goes, “Hey, sorry dude. You understand, right?” I'm like, “Yeah, sure.” And they just immediately turned on their heels and they left. Now, I was a complete dork. I know it's hard to imagine, right?

[SMASH]: [Laughs]

[Johnny Rocket]: I had on new Birkenstocks and I was wearing these goofy shorts, and these big old shorts, right? And I reach in my pocket, I had a thousand yen, and it's at least 3000 yen back to my house in a taxi, and at that time of night there are no subways, no buses. And so it was pretty much my fate, my punishment, to walk home in new Birkenstocks. My feet were bleeding and the sun was rising by the time I got home. But I had that time to contemplate my existence, and I thought, “I suck, and I don’t want to continue this existence.”

And so it was at that point that I decided to pull myself out and to become a socially viable, socially skilled individual, and I ended up talking to that mentor and he said something really, really profound. He said, “Dude, there's something you have to realize.” And I said, “What’s that?” He goes, “Not every chick wants a boyfriend.” And that, coming from having lived under the Western Christian halo of morality for so long, just it was a complete paradigm shift for me.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, I'm glad you kind of brought that up because the first Japanese girl I ever dated, which is like, I think it was eight years ago in London, the first night I went out with her, she said, “Do you think Japanese girls are yellow cabs?” And I had no idea what she was talking about, right?

[SMASH]: So you were like, “Yeah…” [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: It was my first exposure to Asians. It was just I was like, “What’s going on?” So I kind of ignored it and spoke about other stuff, and I got away with it, right? But now I understand what that means. So that's kind of connecting with your topic there, and I think it's important because some guys kind of arrive in Asia and they think the Asian girls are easy, and I've heard like rumors that like Japanese girls are very easy. Could you shed some light on that?

[SMASH]: Yeah, they're not easy.

[Johnny Rocket]: No.

[SMASH]: I mean, I personally don’t like the phrase “yellow cab,” so I wouldn't really refer to anyone like that.

[Angel Donovan]: Where does that come from, like for guys who don't know, like might not have heard of that?

[SMASH]: Well, there's the slightly derogatory reference to Asian people as being yellow and cabs as being ready to go, I think.

[Angel Donovan]: Ready to go, everybody’s been in one, right? Everybody’s been…

[SMASH]: Oh, you got it, you got it, you got it.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah.

[SMASH]: Yeah. And, but sorry, Rocket, do you want to…?

[Johnny Rocket]: They also say—this is really bad—they also say “koshu benjo,” which is public toilet.

[Angel Donovan]: Oh, that is bad.

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah. Okay. If they refer to somebody as koshu benjo, that's really, really rude.

[SMASH]: Like a sperm dumpster.

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah, exactly. The mattress back. [Laughs]

[Johnny Rocket]: ah.. yeah..

[Johnny Rocket]: One interesting note concerning the public toilet is that, you know, in the West, in the States, you can talk about, you can do sex jokes, dick jokes, all day long, and everybody’s like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” You know, you see it on TV all the time, it's like, “Hey, go kick some ass fo,” you know, whatever.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Johnny Rocket]: But here, dick jokes are kind of taboo.

[SMASH]: Yeah.

[Johnny Rocket]: Pretty much taboo, but you can talk about toilet humor all you want. And so you'll be sitting around one afternoon with some girls, guys, whatever, and one’ll be like, “I'm so constipated,” and it's like, “Oh yeah, me too,” and then they go on and on. And you know, to the uninitiated, it's like, “uuuuuuugggh, what…?” [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Johnny Rocket]: It's like one of those advertisements for Fiverr. “Oh, I work like…” you know. It's like, “Hey…” and they do the little motion, it's like, “Oh, I've just cleaned myself up,” you know. What kind of imagery are you having? It's like I just took a big dump. Terrible, you know. But anyway, that's another one of those cultural things.

[SMASH]: What that question was about…

[Johnny Rocket]: Hmm?

[SMASH]: So, about Japanese girls being easy.

[Johnny Rocket]: Oh, yellow cabs. Did you digress, SMASH? Jesus.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[SMASH]: No. Me? [Laughs]

[Johnny Rocket]: Come on, get on with the question.

[SMASH]: Okay, the problem is that you hear the word easy, which is an adjective, and you take it to this extreme where some guys think that you're going to get off the plane at Narita Airport and suddenly you have your pick of the litter, and obviously it doesn’t work like that.

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah, kind of thing. Sorry about that.

[SMASH]: [Laughs] Yeah. Yeah, you don’t need to bring that up. It was only one time.

[Johnny Rocket]: [Laughs]

[SMASH]: So, but then there are certain contexts, again, like the context where you would say, “Oh, this is easier than I'm accustomed to or that I would have thought,” or something.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[SMASH]: And then, there are also contexts where you're coming up against something, “What? This is way hard,” or like, “This is not easy at all.” So I think anybody who says, “Oh, you should go to x country because it's easy,” is completely oversimplifying everything, for one. And it's like, what does that even mean? If you go with incredibly broad preconceptions, you're going to screw yourself up, and that goes for Japan or anywhere.

[Angel Donovan]: Yup.

[SMASH]: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[Angel Donovan]: Because I think probably this goes for a lot of guys, they’ve got their perspectives skewed either one or the other. I think it's pretty typical that you get these guys who meet Japanese girls, and because Japanese girls are more polite and so on, they’ll treat them, how do you say, a lot more sensitively?

[SMASH]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: And maybe they won't escalate for a very long time, so they won't like get physical or they won't kiss or like touch them for… Because they’ll feel like, “Oh, Japanese girls are a lot more polite, so I've got to treat her differently to the girls in the West.” Or you get these other guys who have got the other extreme, right? And then they're thinking yellow cab and they go the other way.

So I think what you're saying is that it's more balanced but maybe it depends on the context and stuff, and it's maybe some things you have to kind of understand about where each girl is coming from.

[SMASH]: Well, the irony is that both of those extremes of guys kind of have it half right, but if they put it together they might get a whole. I mean, yeah, the thing about Japanese girls being kind of polite and very restrained and kind of sugar-sweet is huge because it catches you completely off-guard. There is a tendency for us in the West to, if we're not having a bit of kind of banter or kind of a little bit of push and pull with girls we're trying to move things along with, we kind of feel, “Wait a second, something’s not right here.” If you're not getting any resistance to kind of what you're doing verbally or physically, you start getting a little suspicious, especially if the girl herself isn't being proactive.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[SMASH]: And…

[Johnny Rocket]: Which is pretty much every time, right?

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, let's talk about proactiveness a bit, like…

[SMASH]: Well, this is huge because this is what basically was the dearth of my sex life in the first I’d say six months of my time in Japan, was that I would see girls who were, now I look back, into me, but there was just, it was also very nice and also very harmless that you always don’t want to be the one to spoil the picture. And I was thinking, well, you know, once she give me the right cue, then we'll move things along. And of course, it never came, because it's not that she's not giving the cues, it's just they're completely different to what I expect.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Johnny Rocket]: These days the cue is usually her eyes rolling back in her head and her head like doing 360-degree spins.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Johnny Rocket]: He has a penchant for attracting really nutcase… Sorry, I interrupted you. Sorry, man.

[SMASH]: That may be true, but it does not undermine the validity of my point. [Laughs] So, did you want to add anything more to that? I've completely forgotten where I was in that.

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah. I fully intended to derail what you were saying. No, I… Okay. But the one point I will add to this is that in my travels, and everybody, you know, as I said, SMASH attracts a certain kind of woman, of course I do as well, but generally speaking, in Japan, it is the man’s responsibility to push as far as you can go without being severely offensive and committing a crime. It's the woman’s prerogative to say no when she wants to say no.

Now, this is the one thing that befuddles Western guys most, because they want to do this push and pull, play the little game, I give you a signal, you volley it back to me and let me know that what I'm doing is okay. If that's the case, you're going to be disappointed. It's going to be a long night for you.

And so many times my friends have been like, “God, she's such a bitch, man. I was being so cool to her. All I did was ask her to have tea. All I did was ask her to go to Starbucks.” I'm like, “You know what? You didn't ask right. You didn't follow the progression. It wasn’t time to do something like that. Japanese girls aren't just going to go bail on their friends. This is not New York City. This is not LA.”

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Johnny Rocket]: Okay. So you play the game, if she's blowing you off, like you're walking down the street in Shibuya, the tall girl that you were talking about before, “Hey, what’s going on?” right? And she's blowing you off, okay?

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Johnny Rocket]: Now, if you just give up, then all of a sudden you just proved that you're unworthy, okay? You keep talking until she like physically turns around and walks away. “No, sorry, just this one question I had, can we talk about this? Can we do this?” whatever. “Can you answer this for me? Blah, blah, blah?” If you really want to see this in action, go down to Shibuya and watch those recruiters right in front of the station. Some of them are real chumps, but others are just absolute masters.

[Angel Donovan]: You're talking about the Japanese guys who…

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah, the long-haired Japanese dudes.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. The hosts, right?

[Johnny Rocket]: The hosts, yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Johnny Rocket]: And when you see one that has stopped a girl and is actually conversing with a girl, you just saddle up, it's all in Japanese but you can kind of, you know, you get the nuance. You can kind of guess what's being said. Those guys are really, really smooth.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay. Well, cool.

[Johnny Rocket]: And the thing is that they don’t give up.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Quick interlude for people who haven't been to Japan or whatever. So they have these host bars in Japan where basically they're the guys who will entertain the women, and the women will pay for that entertainment, right?

[Johnny Rocket]: Mm-hmm. Yup.

[Angel Donovan]: So, you know, they’ll just make jokes and sing songs or whatever. It's kind of like karaoke TV kind of like environment. So, basically, the way the guys find their clients is that they’ll kind of stalk them on the streets. I mean, you see…

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Is it in Shibuya or was it the other place you see hundreds…?

[SMASH]: In a lot of places.

[Johnny Rocket]: A lot of places, yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, you see hundreds of them, and at first I had no idea what was going on. I was wondering if they were all trying to pick up girls, you know? They were just random guys trying to pick up girls, because I'd heard of nanpa…

[SMASH]: Yeah.

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: …which is the Japanese version of pickup. So they’ve kind of had that culture there for a while. But no, it was actually their job.

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah, yeah. And it's not always a host club. It could be…

[SMASH]: It's not always host, no.

[Johnny Rocket]: …yeah, right? Sometimes they do it for haircuts as well.

[Angel Donovan]: What does that mean?

[Johnny Rocket]: Haircuts?

[Angel Donovan]: Oh, so they're trying to get girls to…

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah, come in and let me cut your hair and pay me a bunch of money to do it.

[Angel Donovan]: Wow.

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: It's very interesting.

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah.

[SMASH]: It's just general sales. I mean, so you've got the nanpa guys who are just trying to pick up, you've got the hosts who are trying to bring girls to their clubs, you've got the sales guys who are trying to get girls involved in modeling – I say that with inverted commas because it's, you know, usually soft porn.

[Johnny Rocket]: [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[SMASH]: But, I mean, the one consistent thread with all of this if you watch any of them is that whenever I've seen… They get blown a lot, they get a lot of failure, but when they do hook it's usually after about a minute at least of walking by the side of a girl who’s flat out completely ignoring them.

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah. Yes, yes.

[Angel Donovan]: So it's persistence.

[Johnny Rocket]: Persistence. Persistence pays.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Johnny Rocket]: But you have to know when to quit, that's the thing.

[Angel Donovan]: Alright, so if you could give like a simple… What’s a continue sign and what is a quit sign?

[Johnny Rocket]: I mean, if they completely turn away and walk away from you…

[SMASH]: Yeah, that's a quit sign.

[Johnny Rocket]: …that's a pretty good sign that you're done, okay?

[Angel Donovan]: Right. In any place probably, yeah.

[Johnny Rocket]: But if they're giving that half-assed kind of, oh, well, I'm walking but I'm still looking at you, and I'm not really sure, what should I do, right? To a Westerner in a Western context, that's going to be kind of rude, “Oh my God, she's not paying attention to me.” But in a Japanese context, that's like, “Okay, I'm walking but you're kind of intruding in my walking, my Japanese condition of walking down the street,” okay? And so if she is acknowledging you even a little bit, then yeah, you're in. Keep going.

[Angel Donovan]: So as long as she's acknowledging you, then keep on going.

[SMASH]: Well, remember, she's having an internal dialogue at this point.

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah.

[SMASH]: All this stuff is kicking in, like, “Is this sales? Is this cool? What is being expected of me? How should I reply?” All this sort of thing. “Am I going to have to speak English? How is my English?”

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[SMASH]: And so all this stuff that you talked about, “Oh, she's such a bitch, she's totally ignoring me,” it completely ignores this entire dimension that you're not offering yourself up to be judged, but you're creating this scenario where if you both follow that thread of attraction, you will meet in the middle. And sometimes she's not going to. Either she's not interested flat out or she just doesn’t have the confidence. And that happens. She might think you're a cool guy, but it's like, “Ah…”

I mean, we've all done it. I was in Shinjuku a couple of months ago and this old guy sidled up beside me and started talking to me in English. And obviously, my reaction, having been born and brought up in London, is just ignore people who just talk to me out of the blue.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[SMASH]: But he stayed at my side and it became apparent he just wanted to practice English. He was just a nice guy. He was going to an English class or something, and he saw me as an opportunity to just have a quick chat. So eventually, it must have been after about 30, 40 seconds, I stopped and had a really nice chat with him. And I actually felt a bit disappointed in myself that I’d ignored him at first, and I realized this is very similar to the kind of dialogue that Japanese girls are kind of having with themselves. They’ve just got to reach that point where they think, “Actually, yeah, this is okay. I can talk to this guy, and I don’t get a bad vibe from him.” So, boom, and then you've already kind of made that first contact.

[Angel Donovan]: Excellent, yeah. Yeah, that's straightforward. So like I don’t want to miss this, but you spoke about like a few things you messed up with the first girls you liked in your first year.

[SMASH]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: And you said you missed the signs that they were giving and you were just, you know, you put it as being polite and nice. What were the signs that they were saying, “Right, let's move this along,” and you were missing them?

[SMASH]: Well, here's the interesting thing, that Japanese girls, they're remarkably direct in some ways and remarkably vague and fuzzy in others, and if a Japanese girl is interested in you just as a friend or something… Well, let me rephrase that. If a Japanese girl is not interested in you as a romantic prospect, unless you have a seriously solid friendship built underneath that, she's just going to disappear. It's not so much like the culture I'm accustomed to where you have girls for friends and you might kind of fancy them and you keep hanging out, and you know, then they're not going to break off all contact with you even if they don’t fancy you back because you've got this platonic thing going on. That doesn’t really happen so much in Japan. I mean, the culture hasn’t evolved that way.

I don’t want to say this doesn’t happen at all, but if a girl continues to meet you one-on-one, you're going out to the park, to the cinema, to dinner or whatever, which is kind of the sort of stuff I was doing, referencing my first kind of year in Japan, it's not really the sort of thing I do anymore, but if she's continuing to meet you and trying and make plans with you, then she's in the game. The problem is, she's not going to get herself drunk and fall all over you in most cases, which is up to that point kind of what I relied on in my dating life. I'm quite happy to talk very candidly about my first failures. I've written a 250-page book in very painful detail.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs] Yeah.

[SMASH]: So there was this—Shinkansen is the bullet train—attendant girl who’s very pretty. They always hire very pretty girls to serve the snacks on the bullet train. And she and I, it must have been for about six weeks we were meeting quite regularly, and I was just like, “Oh…” you know, I was totally into this girl, and she was really beautiful. And at the time she had to speak English because I just wasn’t up to it in Japanese. And so I came to dropping subtle hints like, “Oh, so what are you doing after this?” and “Do you have work tomorrow?” and the answers I got were really kind of vague. It's like, “Oh, I think I might go home,” or that sort of thing. And it's because I wasn’t leading. I was throwing out this little kind of fishhook and saying, “Are you going to bite? Are you going to bite?”

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[SMASH]: Total failure. Total failure. Eventually, she lost interest. I didn't want to break that beautiful little harmonious thing we had. Of course, it just went rotten. And what you really need to do, if you're serious about it is not say, “So, what are your thoughts on this?” but you assume the light is green until it goes red. And that's a really dangerous thing to say to some people, [laughs] but I assume we're going to be responsible with that knowledge.

So you don’t ask. You lead. You tell. So after dinner, I’m thinking, “We’ll go here.” Or, even better, you don’t say anything. You finish up your date and you say, “Alright.” You take her hand and you walk to wherever you're going, be it the notorious Japanese love hotel or your own place or something. If you're ready to go to that step, you lead. You don’t ask for permission.

If she's not into it, completely, if she's completely flat out no, she's going to stop you. So you're not going to… It's not as if you're playing a trick or anything.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, there's nothing really to worry about because she will stop you…

[SMASH]: No, exactly.

[Angel Donovan]: …if it's no good. Yeah.

[SMASH]: Mm-hmm. Exactly.

[Johnny Rocket]: Just a footnote, not condoning date rape.

[SMASH]: Jesus Christ, no. I mean, there comes a point where if you're like, “Oh, I don't know if the light’s red,” and then you get arrested. It's like, please don’t blame me for that because I think we all have a reasonable degree of common sense.

But the amazing thing I found is that even when you don’t verbally kind of confirm what you're doing, is how much you will be followed without question. And that is really something for the Western mind to wrap itself around because we're very used to this kind of implicit permission thing. “I suggest you give your permission.” “Okay, we're good to go.” In Japan you've got to go to this other mindset that, “Alright, I'm going to assume I have permission until you tell me that I don’t.”

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[SMASH]: And then you have to be bold. You can't be a pussy about it. You can't be like, “Oh, I'm so tired. Let's go and have a lie-down,” something like that, because it just…

[Johnny Rocket]: [Laughs]

[SMASH]: [Laughs]

[Johnny Rocket]: So it sounds like you used that line before.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[SMASH]: I probably did. I probably did. I don't know. Whoa. [Laughs] Look at the time.

[Johnny Rocket]: [Laughs]

[SMASH]: But yeah, so no questions, just moves. And this is scarier than it sounds. It sounds really easy when I talk about it, but when you're there with this happy, cutesy Japanese girl who’s having such a lovely time, you're thinking, “Right, I'm now going to be like, alright, this is what we're doing now,” there is a little kind of hurdle you have to get over for that.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right.

[SMASH]: But I’ll end off by saying that I have never, in all the cases that I've taken that very direct, proactive action… I've certainly been refused, I've certainly come up against that wall, and I will say it's probably a minority of cases, but it has happened, but I've never had a girl like lose respect for me or think that I'm a schmuck or something like that. There was respect for me making the move, and then a polite refusal.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right.

[SMASH]: I've never had anyone saying, “Oh, what the hell are you doing?” kind of thing.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[SMASH]: It was always like, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[SMASH]: “It's okay.”

[Angel Donovan]: Well, I’d say like, interestingly, something I've seen quite a lot, because a lot of the Japanese girls I've met and dated and whatever have been while I've been traveling, and there's normally some kind of time constraint involved, you know.

[SMASH]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: And so I’d be there for one day or two days. So normally I've met them, and then I’ll meet with them again in the night or something, and things will progress quite fast. And sometimes they’ll be back at your house, and maybe in total they’ve spent like an hour with you or even less. And when you go for the kiss, like you start kissing, sometimes there'll be like, “No, let's watch a video or whatever,” like we'll be watching YouTube or whatever we're doing.

[SMASH]: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[Angel Donovan]: So I found that, “Oh yeah, cool,” and then you just carry on like playing and having fun, right? And then five minutes later she'll jump you and she'll kiss you.

[SMASH]: Exactly.

[Angel Donovan]: Right? And she just wants to feel comfortable, you know, and you just have to feel that comfort.

[SMASH]: She needs time to process, and this is so important that you don’t give up on the first refusal, especially if it's something like you've described of just like, “Oh, let's just watch the video or something.” Just give her a few minutes to process what is going on. You've already made your intentions abundantly clear.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[SMASH]: If you give up at that point, you lose because she's not going to… I mean, there are times that she might jump on you, but you're probably going to have to be expected to make a second move.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right.

[SMASH]: And maybe even a third.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right, right. And she just needs to kind of process these ideas, like you're saying, right?

[SMASH]: Yeah, exactly.

[Angel Donovan]: I like the way you say that, yeah. And so you need to give her that little bit of time once it's become clear.

[SMASH]: Absolutely, yeah. But in Japan, I mean, speaking from my experience, and I'm sure Johnny will back me up on this, girls will not lose respect for you for making that move. If you do it in the channel of good context, good social kind of context, and there are all kind of caveats to that, but the fact that you are crossing that line between acquaintances, friends or whatever and something more is never something you'll be made to feel ashamed about.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. What would you say about holding hands? If you're holding a girl’s hand in Japan, does it mean a lot?

[Johnny Rocket]: Absolutely. Yes. Yes, it does. It depends on what kind of context you want to set for your relationship, but generally, if you're out having fun dating a number of different people, holding hands may not be the best idea, because that pretty much says, “Yeah, we're in a relationship or we're on the way to being in a relationship.”

[Angel Donovan]: Is it… I mean, because you know, the public angle, like the public display of affection…

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: You know, like my first Japanese girlfriend in London, we’d been dating for something like six months, and we're walking down Regent Street in the middle of London and for some reason I went to kiss her, on the cheek or I can't remember what it was, and she literally pushed me off and she got all frozen up, and she's like, “Oh, no, no, no, not here,” right?

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Which was a very surprising thing for me. So I guess that's like the social context of that is like, you know, not in public.

[Johnny Rocket]: Yeah, definitely. The younger crowd is a little more open to that.

[Angel Donovan]: Repeat?

[Johnny Rocket]: The younger crowd, they're a little more open to the PDA, the public display.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. Mm-hmm.

[Johnny Rocket]: But if she's, you know, over 30, then there's a good chance that that's a big no-no.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[SMASH]: Yeah.

[Johnny Rocket]: Because it used to be just really taboo.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. But now you're saying it's kind of, you know…

[Johnny Rocket]: I mean, it was a really different place. It's loosening up a little bit.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So you're seeing a change over time, I guess.

[Johnny Rocket]: Yup, definitely. Definitely. For sure.

[Angel Donovan]: For sure.

[Johnny Rocket]: Sorry, if I can just get back to the whole…

[Angel Donovan]: Excellent.

[Johnny Rocket]: If you go into kiss somebody and you get rejected, sometimes that's a power play, at least in my travel, it's that. You know, I'm doing what the peanut gallery is telling me to do. This is the right thing to do in this situation. “No. No kissing will be done here,” right?

[Angel Donovan]: So you said peanut gallery? What does peanut…?

[Johnny Rocket]: The peanut gallery is the socialization that they get. So in everybody’s head it's like, “Oh well, what would mom think? What would dad think? What would my teachers think? What would my friends and my brothers and sisters and everyone in my life, what would they think about what I'm about to do?

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[Johnny Rocket]: Okay? And so there's this constant… because Japan is a…

[Angel Donovan]: It's a community. It's a lot more than… We're all individuals in the West these days.

[Johnny Rocket]: Right, exactly. Here, not so much. And so if all of a sudden you get refused, that could very well be to appease the peanut gallery. And so if you, you know… [Laughs] My final essay in the book is The Little Red Ball, and so my crew over here, we refer to that, if you had the little red ball, the little red ball refers to, you know, when you're like 4 years old, your parents take you in to get pictures taken and you've got the attention span of an insect and you're all over the place, and so the photographer has that—okay, maybe 2 years old. The photographer has that little red ball in his hand. He's like, “Look at the ball! Look at the ball!” And you're like, “Huh, huh, huh, huh? What?” right?

[SMASH]: [Laughs]

[Johnny Rocket]: And so that little red ball, if you can distract the peanut gallery and say, “Hey, look over here, look at the red ball,” and the peanut gallery, when they're not looking, then you go in and you have more of a physical conversation, okay? I'm not going to say any more than that, so that if that piques your interest, you know, we go into detail about that.

[Angel Donovan]: Great. Well, you know, guys, it's great to have you on this call today. Do you have anything else you want to add before like we close it down?

[SMASH]: We did want to, I think, just when we were prepping for this…

[Johnny Rocket]: Yup, yup.

[SMASH]: You did mention a few words about encountering Japanese girls abroad…

[Angel Donovan]: Oh, yeah.

[SMASH]: …overseas. Because I imagine a lot of your listeners probably aren't going to be in Japan, so…

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[SMASH]: But we've covered a lot about kind of the home base, where all this thinking comes from and the way it is there. But, obviously, our book is not just about how to operate in Japan, but really the Japanese female wherever you encounter her. I thought it would be good to… because I was actually in London just about a month ago for my sister’s wedding, and I dropped back in on my old Japanese language school, which was where I first started to learn the language before even heading out to Japan. And obviously it's been about over five years, so I didn't really recognize many faces. And there was this new teacher there, young, perky, young female teacher. And obviously my Japanese wasn't good usually since I was originally at school, so I was just chatting away to everyone.

And this teacher and I kind of crossed paths at the water cooler or something, and I said hello and everything. And she was quite new at being… only there a few months, and I could see she had just finished a class. She’d just been making kind of the small talk with students, “Oh yes, I’d like to go to Japan one day. Oh yes, blah, blah, blah,” all this thing.

And for me it's quite natural to… She was cute and looked pretty nice in her little work suit, and for me it's quite natural to just to talk and not create that boring pattern of conversation, like I said, and just kind of tease her a bit and kind of launch into this thing of, you know, “Oh, so you're all the way out here in London. You're a Japanese teacher. So you're just not even going to bother to learn English?” And she's like, “Huh? No, no, no, I'm learning English, just blah, blah, blah, and just my focus is on this, blah, blah, blah.” And then you'd be a little bit self-effacing, it's like, “Yeah, I'm looking to start Japanese lessons because I suck and everything.” She's like, “No, no, your Japanese is really good, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And just keep throwing kind of weird curveballs.

And for me, I had to backwards analyze this conversation after the fact because it was very, very natural. But by the time I was ready to go and sling my hook and head home, she was like, “Oh, when are you coming back in? When are you coming back in?” And I said, “Well, I'm not actually a student here, so never.” And she's like, “Oh, well, you know, if you have time, maybe we could…” She wasn't even that full of it. It was kind of very much that feeling, you know, “Oh, well, if you have time, it would be nice to meet again.” I said, “Sure, I can.” I gave her my business card.

And I think the takeaway from this is that if… kind of go to understand from the other person’s point of view, what are the very normal, dull interactions they're having on a day-to-day basis? Now, if you're a Japanese girl in a different country, what are the ways that guys are going to approach you? And you can kind of extrapolate and just imagine it quite easily. There are the guys who think, “Oh, I'm going to say, ‘Konichiwa!’ and she’ll think I'm so down with her culture and everything,” but obviously we would not recommend doing that because it's lame.

And if you think about the sorts of questions that she'll be answering, you know, “Do you love sushi?” or stuff about ninjas, samurai, anime, manga… I actually have been involved with a girl whose family name was Suzuki, and obviously you imagine that every conversation she starts outside of and is going to be like, “Oh, your family in the automotive industry?” And it's like, “No.”

So, I mean, the fundamental principle for all of this stuff, not just our but for the whole series of learnings which came to be known as pickup, is three words. It's “do something different.” It's just figure out what everyone else is doing and do something completely different, because then you will stand out.

And if you imagine a conversation with a Japanese person the way we described it with the pattern and the kind of interview-style questions, always very positive, “Oh, that's amazing,” “Oh, you don’t look that age,” “Oh, your job sounds great,” if you kind of imagine this ocean with very gently lapping waves that just go up and then up and then up, and then just kind of very, very monotonous, and then you're kind of pulling the plug out at the bottom and starting this massive cyclone stuff, and then you suddenly put the plug back in – so you're not actually trashing it but you're upsetting this flow. So now the waves are back again and they're a bit bigger and they have bigger crests and bigger troughs, and you're kind of taken on this ride where it's like you're not just bobbing on this ocean anymore, you're kind of having a little bit of an adventure.

So my advice to anyone who encounters Japanese girls in their own country is consider things from their point of view and the sort of stuff they have to deal with every day. Consider what their anxieties are and things that they might be dealing with in their everyday life, whether they're tourists here in your country or studying or working or something, and make your interaction memorable. And I think, you know, if you're really interested in kind of developing your skills in that area, then we've got a book for that and…

[Johnny Rocket]: Shameless book plug!

[SMASH]: It was coming though.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah.

[SMASH]: You know, we've been relatively good about this for the whole interview.

[Angel Donovan]: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on, hold on, because before you finish like this thread of conversation…

[SMASH]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: So, I mean, one of the things I really picked up, because most of the Japanese girls I've met have been in all sorts of places outside of Japan, and someone who taught me something a very long time ago, a guy called Maniac High, was a very, very simple, is to talk slowly. And you would be amazed at the difference it makes because you know, we’ve been talking about the nervousness of language, and also the fact that if a Japanese… It's very hard to English. Their language is very different. So even if they’ve sometimes been living in New York or wherever for a few year, sometimes they're still kind of like struggling with hearing the subtleties, and especially if you're talking fast.

So, you know, for me, back in the day, it made a world of difference just to talk slowly, and it could really make the difference between night and day. So I think that's really a key thing. And like everything you've said, like about Japanese girls in Japan, I think, you know, it often applies to a large extent, to the girls outside, but you know, as they spend a longer time outside, of course, they get more Western influences and they get a bit more open and maybe less… You know, they feel easier with their social interactions and so on. But certainly, the frameworks and the ideas that you have are still relevant to most of them.

[SMASH]: I like to think so. Well, we're certainly very appreciative of the good interview… the good review, rather, that you gave our book when you did review it. So, hopefully, that kind of value we can continue to offer to people who are interested in this.

[Angel Donovan]: Yup. Well, great, guys. So…

[Johnny Rocket]: We like to think of ourselves as philanthropists. [Laughs]

[SMASH]: [Laughs]

[Johnny Rocket]: I think, you know, love really does make the world go round, and you know, somebody wise once said that no matter how much you change the factors on the left, what is to the right of the equal sign in the equation of a man’s life is always the same.

[SMASH]: Yeah, it's always a big dong. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Johnny Rocket]: Maybe in your case.

[SMASH]: I'm sorry.

[Angel Donovan]: Guys, so back on your book…

[SMASH]: Yeah…

[Angel Donovan]: You know, what I found about your book is like, it is certainly connecting with that, was that it’s very mature advice, really, right?

[SMASH]: And this is why you're surprised that we are so immature.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, exactly. What happened there?

[SMASH]: [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, so you know, I really, really appreciated that. And I think, like guys on the call, like check out the review of the book. I talked a lot about detail, but it's really the best thing I ever read so far on Asian women in general.

[SMASH]: Totally, thanks. Come visit us in Japan1

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs] We’ll see next year, but I hope you guys are going to continue to work and develop your stuff because, you know, I really enjoy it, and I think it is useful for people, and it will help more love go around in the world by eliminating a lot of the bad mistakes that happen and the kind of the sabotages of perfectly good potential relationships that go on every day. So thanks for that.

On the page for this podcast you'll find the profiles and everything for SMASH and Johnny, so more information on them and links to their products and so on, so you can check all that stuff out. You guys got anything to say before you go?

[Johnny Rocket]: Hallelujah.

[SMASH]: [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[SMASH]: Just keep on trucking and let's spread the love across cultural and national boundaries. I'm doing my part. [Laughs]

[Johnny Rocket]: Moving in to 2012,you know, and the age of whatever the age is, we’re going to call it the age of love. And that's all we want out of this book, is to facilitate good love connections. That's it.

[SMASH]: I think so.

[Angel Donovan]: That's great, and I think it goes as a good way to doing that. Well, thanks, guys. Great to have you…

[SMASH]: Sweet.

[Johnny Rocket]: It's been great.

[SMASH]: Yeah, love the work you do. Thanks a lot.

[Johnny Rocket]: Yup.

[SMASH]: Thanks for having us.