Weird behavior in a bar

A while ago I had a day full of surprises. A magician colleague of mine called and said that a guy from Australia who does not know Japanese was coming to the magic bar, so if I had time he wanted me to show up so someone could speak English. I got there towards the end of the time for these guests and did some magic in English for them. The guy turned out to be Danish, but he now lives and works in Australia. Meeting people from Denmark is very rare in Sapporo.

Then a Japanese man in his late forties (probably, it is hard for me to tell with Japanese people) entered. He was alone, which for non-regulars usually means that it is someone who does magic. This man was no exception, though he was a beginner in magic.He turned out to speak excellent English (quite rare in Japan) and he talked to me about all kinds of things after I had shown him some magic. When I went up to him and said that I too would do some magic (after one of the other magicians had finished), he also said: "Ah! I saw you in the newspaper. That is why I came here!". Since I was in the magic bar where I usually do not perform (we have two bars), and it was a weeknight (when I don't generally perform), it was a lucky coincidence for him, I guess. Meeting a Japanese man who speaks fluent English is perhaps even more surprising than meeting a Danish guy from Australia.

Since I had gone straight from my university job to the magic bar, I was starting to feel hungry at around midnight, so I decided to go have some fried chicken in another place in the same building. There I ended up sitting between a guy from Osaka and a woman from Sapporo, who I have said hello to once or twice but not really talked to.

When I was talking to the guy from Osaka, suddenly the woman on my other side pulled at my arm and started pressing her fingers quite strongly into strange places on my arm and hand. I was a bit surprised, and looked at her for a while, trying to figure out what she was up to. She said she works as a masseuse. The points she were pressing did seem to be spots that when I was doing martial arts were recommended as: "if you press here, it really hurts"-points. She kept pressing at various points and looked at me with a slightly disappointed face. I think she may have been trying to get me to feel pain (which succeeded, haha) and was disappointed that I did not seem to be in pain (after all the martial arts training, I got used to people doing painful things to me, so as long as it seems to be only pain, no real damage, I do not care so much).

She said something along the lines that usually this thing hurts and did something more. I said that yes, especially here between the thumb and the index finger, it hurts a lot and showed her where it hurts on me. I said that it also hurts a lot if you press fingers in between the skull and the jaw where they connect beneath/behind the ear, but she said she did not think so. I said that indeed it does and she said she did not believe me. In the end she asked me to show her where, so I pressed gently behind her ears, which seemed to hurt. She said she was disappointed, because now she had "lost" to me. She tried pressing on some lymph nodes again, but then finally my chicken arrived, and I could get a reprieve from the pain, haha.

So I started eating my fried chicken with the provided chopsticks. While I was still eating, she pulled at my arm and bent it into a strange angle again. Not the arm I use chopsticks with, but still it made eating a bit difficult. I said that maybe she could wait until I had finished eating, and nodded towards the chicken I held with the chopsticks. She then proceeded to bite into my chicken that I held in the air with the chopsticks, and she eat about half of it. This surprised me quite a lot, haha. I asked if she was hungry, and perhaps wanted some more. This seemed to be the case, since she bit off the rest of the chicken I held with the chopsticks too...

I am not sure what she wanted to achieve, but perhaps she was worried about me getting fat and was trying to save me from unnecessary Calories late at night. Anyway, that was a very surprising finish to a somewhat surprising evening. When the masseuse was busy talking to her friends and I had finished my chicken, I took my leave and went home.