Okay, here’s something I don’t get: In this corner, we have the Western guys who gretz that the 外専 Japanese guys in 2-chome are all users just out to amuse themselves with the nearest hunk of white boy (or black boy). They’re wondering where–where–the guys are who are interested in relationships. And in that corner, we have the Japanese guys who gretz that the foreign guys in 2-chome are all users just out for the nearest perky Asian smoothie. They wonder why English teachers and guys in the armed forces are all So Treacherous.

My question is, How is it that you can all manage to run into me to bitch about this stuff, but you can’t find each other? I mean, I think I have a decent understanding of how probability works. There’s only one of me, and there are a lot of you guys, so if we’re all making the rounds of the same places, you guys ought to be crashing into one other like billiard balls.

Of course, complaining about how shallow the bar scene is is a staple of gay conversation worldwide. It’s our version of “How about this crazy weather lately, huh?” and if you banned it, 70% percent of interfag chit-chat would disappear. The cultural dynamics also do really matter. The Western men are mostly here short-term–either teaching English for a few post-college years or transferred to Tokyo temporarily by their employers–an arrangement more conducive to playtime than to settling down. The Japanese guys, for their part, have been reared in a culture in which behavior is enforced through social pressure. That makes it tough to rely on their convictions about right and wrong to make their way through a relationship that isn’t recognized by society. Finally, sheer scarcity value means that we foreigners have more 外専 Japanese men competing for us than vice-versa. [Insert the usual bemused speech about how many Western losers are running around with gorgeous, capable, talented, articulate Japanese boyfriends or girlfriends.]

So the intercultural factor is important, but I remain unconvinced that it’s an adequate explanation for the issues the men I meet have. After all, players and guys who fall too fast are hazards everywhere. What I think is going on, conveniently cosmopolitanized, is the old half-a-loaf problem. Exchanging phone numbers with a cute guy is risky. He may not call you. If you call him, he may decide that you’re not all that interesting when he’s sober. Or you may get together for what turns out to be a few weeks of awkward conversations over coffee or dinner during which you realize you’re not interested in each other, which will leave you either bored or humiliated. On the other hand, flatly asking Cute Guy back to your place is offering an unambiguous, known quantity. At least you won’t be watching him get snagged by someone else and then going home alone yourself. If he rejects you, it’ll be quick, and you can just go back and talk to your friends on the opposite side of the club again.

Anyone who believes that this scenario is specific to Tokyo gay life is a dunderhead. Investing youself, as a person, in someone, as a person, is hard. Period. You have to be patient, you can’t flee at the first miscommunication, and you have to stop thinking only about your own wish list all the damned time. I’m flattered to be asked for advice or happy just to be a sounding board every so often, but I find it hard to sympathize with people whose fundamental complaint is that forming a relationship takes more work than hooking up.

Of course, the opposite extreme (just to make sure no one I’ve met in my entire life goes uncriticized by the time this screed is finished) is annoying, too. A while back, I was talking to a casual friend who decided to unload (not for the first time) about how unfair it is that he never gets boys. He’s honest and sweet and attentive and smart and nice to the pigeons in the park, but guys he’s interested in always wander away from him toward other, cockier foreign men.

All I had to do was nod sympathetically; my friend wasn’t seeking advice. And a good thing, too, because if he’d asked me what I thought, I just might have told him. He has this idea that he should just be able to sit there and Be Sincere, and that any man who doesn’t respond to that isn’t worth pursuing. What my friend doesn’t realize is that he comes off as a drip–an effect compounded by the fact that, after Japanese Guy is screwed over by Cockier Foreign Man, he’s always hovering close by to be confided in, unburdened on, and wept at.

He’s also practicing his own kind of cockiness–in assuming that other guys should be coming up to him to strike up conversations while he waits for it to happen, in assuming that they should keep talking to him even if he’s sending non-committal signals, and in assuming that those of us who steeled ourselves to risk rejection and learned how to reel ’em in will be sympathetic. If guys put exactly as much effort into you as you put into them, you can’t blame acculturation. Well, you can, but you’re being an un-self-critical idiot.