Despite what I’m sure many of you may think, Beth doesn’t enjoy being groped by strangers. I know, it once surprised me too, but I now completely understand.

Let’s rewind all the way back to yesterday, as Beth and I wandered around Akihabara, to begin this journey of understanding. Beth was looking for the new Kakitori-kun kanji game while I was searching for the ever-so-elusive DS browser. Seriously, no one sells it.

As we’re walking back to the station, Beth with her new game in hand and me with nothing, the whole mood changed quite quickly. Completely out of the blue some guy snuck up behind Beth and started violently shaking her head and rubbing her hands all through her hair.

I immediately went into wtf boyfriend mode and stopped him in his tracks. Once he realized that this girl actually had a very pissed off boyfriend standing right next to her he immediately backed off. It didn’t last long, as he quickly regained his composure, started to stick out his hand to Beth’s head again and asked me if it was OK.

Fuck no, it’s not OK by any sense of the word to violently shake my girlfriend’s head, doubly so if you’re a random grungy guy off of the street. While this was going on, I was able to stand back and see who we were dealing with.

He was in his mid-40s and around the same weight as me, though he was obviously quite shorter. His clothes were all grungy, so he either had very little to no hygiene to speak of or was one of the not-so-ditry-looking homeless guys. He straddled the line ambiguously enough that I wasn’t quite sure which camp he belonged to. I then looked him in the eyes, preparing to give this sonofabitch the best verbal beating I could give him in Japanese, but he beat me to it.

Beat me to what, you ask? Well, he made the quick decision to switch to the other foot and transform from some dirty, grungy, molester of foreign women into a curious Japanese man eager to practice his English. Once he saw that look in my eyes he immediately became a different man.

Now he was a bumbling fool. I’m positive he was crazy to Japanese people, and once he began spouting off what he thought was English to me I tacked on blunderingly stupid jackass to my mental description of him. So yes, before I could spout of any of my angry Japanese he started spouting out a bunch of jibberish. He apparently thought it was English, but I understood not a single word of his rant.

I gave him my best ‘leave me the hell alone’ look and started to walk away, but he followed us. Sensing that it might be difficult to get rid of him, I told Beth to leave and meet up in a few minutes so I could separate her from him, lest he try to rub her up again. By this time Beth was too freaked out and distrustful of everyone to want to leave me, so she stayed.

While I was thinking of the best way to handle this, the guy stopped his barely audible rumblings and asked me how his English was. I couldn’t believe he still seemed to honestly think that I was going to give him a free impromptu English lesson. I responded to his question with simply, “incoherent,” then took Beth’s hand and walked away.

He followed for a few steps but eventually stopped and went off to surely harass some other poor soul.

Beth was shaken for the rest of the day.

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