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By Root 709 0

got my very first taste of Buddhism from an episode of the show. It was episode 35, in fact, known in Japan as “Kaiju Hakaba”—“The Graveyard of Monsters.” The main cast of the Ultraman TV show was the Science Patrol, a five-person super-scientific fighting force who seemed to be the only people able to do anything when Tokyo was getting trampled by a rampant iguana with a glandular condition. In this episode, the Science Patrol decides they feel pretty bad about having slaughtered so many gigantic creatures whose only crime was that they were too big to walk down Tokyo’s boulevards without wrecking everything (not unlike most American tourists actually). So the Science Patrol holds a traditional Japanese Buddhist funeral service for all the monsters they’d killed. A group of monks pound a traditional wooden drum shaped like a fish, burn incense, and chant in front of photos of the dead beasts adorned with the traditional black ribbons. It was cool.

I loved Japanese monster movies and I knew deep in my heart that Japan was where I wanted to be. I fantasized about how these movies were made. I used to imagine a room full of rubber monster costumes hanging from hooks on the ceiling. I’d pray that someday magic would happen and I’d come home to find that room when I opened the door to the attic above our garage. (The room I fantasized about, by the way, was exactly like the Monster Warehouse at Tsuburaya Productions, a place I never even suspected really existed back then. It’s even in an attic that looks a whole lot like the one at the house I lived in then—but I’m getting ahead of the story here.)

In those days I devoured everything I could get my hot little hands on about Japan and its monsters. Mind you, in Wadsworth, Ohio, in the ’70s, that wasn’t much. I had a few copies of Famous Monsters of Filmland and Monster Times magazines with Godzilla in them. As a teenager I even made my own Japanese-style (i.e., really bad and low-budget) monster movies. I borrowed my dad’s old Super-8 camera and drafted my friends into service as actors and special-effects assistants. Each cartridge held about ten minutes’ worth of silent film, so we’d go out and spend an afternoon making a ten-minute monster movie. It never occurred to us that maybe real moviemakers actually wrote scripts before shooting their movies; we’d just make it up as we went along.

When the film was about three-quarters used up and nothing significant had happened, we’d try to think of a climax. Then, when the film was almost completely gone, we’d have to come up with an ending. Whenever we came to a special effects sequence, the “actors” would take five while I and the “special effects crew”—which invariably included some, if not all, of the “actors”—went over and animated my collection of Aurora dinosaur models. Editing? We don’t need no steenking editing! Thus came into being such cinematic masterpieces as Buck Laserbreath and Rocky Cosmic Disorders on the Planet of Dinosaurs and Voyage to the Outer Space Trek. Mad magazine would have been proud.

When I finally got out of Wadsworth and into Kent State University I took Japanese to fulfill my language requirement. I got C-minuses, but only because the teacher was too nice to fail me. I thought I’d never realize my dream of actually setting foot in the Promised Land.

Then around 1990, my sister heard about a thing called the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) program run by the Japanese government’s ministry of education. They were actually paying young Americans good money to come to Japan and teach Japanese kids real live English.

By this time Dimentia 13 had released its fifth album, Flat Earth Society, to a thunderous roar of critical and public indifference. I was sharing a place nicknamed The Club-house in Akron’s seedy North Hill district with Steve, the current drummer for Dimentia 13, and Logan, lead singer of the Zen Luv Assassins (who had no Zen influences at all, mind you, save for Logan’s penchant for black clothes), and Logan’s girlfriend Laura. Sitting on the john in our small bathroom, you could