When I lived in Japan, the doorways of my apartment were around six feet in height. I am six foot four inches tall. You can guess where this is going as, from my experience, the doors of my apartment were pretty standard for Japan. I have always been aware of my height because even if I didn’t notice, people tend to point it out, but my height didn’t stick out more than it did when I was in Japan.
I normally got reminded about my height going to the bathroom. More specifically, going to the bathroom in the middle of the night when I was half asleep. Drowsily stumbling from my bedroom, I would head to the bathroom. In my more or less sleepwalking stage, I often forgot about the height until my head met the doorframe. It was never pleasant. More than once I thought I may have given myself a concussion. What I gave myself was some permanent dents in my skull.
There are two major times I hit my head because of my height in Japan.
The first was because I wasn’t paying attention while walking under the outside staircase of the apartment complex I lived in. The stairs had steel support beams that ran under each landing. I was walking towards the stairs and ducked down to walk under the stairs. After going past the first support beam, I stood up forgetting that there was also a beam in the middle. I bounced my head off that beam so hard that the world went white and I fell to my knees. My head hurts thinking about it.
The other time I find to be amusing. I was watching some metal bands perform in a bar in Shinjuku and I had a few drinks prior. Enough to dull my sense of pain which was a very good thing. I needed to go to the bathroom and as I have mentioned before bathroom doorways are not my friend. I hit the doorframe hard with my head but just ignored it, entered the bathroom, and closed the door behind me.
When I exited the bathroom, I was being stared at. Great. The intoxicated American must have done something wrong. Turns out that they wanted to make sure I was ok. A couple of things happened when I ran into the doorframe. One was that it was loud. Loud enough that the band playing heard it. Two was that I cracked the frame. I hit it with enough force and cracked the wood. Thank the gods for the numbing effects of vodka.
My height wasn’t always a bad thing in Japan. I could easily look over crowds to see where I was and where I needed to go. One particular time it helped was at the Ueno Zoo in Tokyo. They had pandas on loan from China that you could see. You had to snake your way to the enclosure on along this winding, back-and-forth path to get your chance to see them. For most people that meant not being able to see them until you were right in from of the glass. Not me though. I could see over everyone else. Most got a minute or two to see the pandas and I got a good half hour as I watched and took pictures the whole time I was in line. One of those times being tall helped me out.
But yeah. Many times, I was just too tall for Tokyo.
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