There's an outlet mall near the airport in Osaka. I went out there one day to pick up a new pair of shoes. As you can imagine, buying shoes in Japan is damn near impossible for me. I wear somewhere around a size 13 US, which translates into 30~32 centimeters Japanese. I used to go into a shoe store, browse around, find a shoe I liked, only to ask about the sizes and find that they only had up to 28. Eventually, I wised up, and before even looking at one pair of shoes, I'd go directly to the store clerk and ask if they had my size.
Me: Um, excuse me, but do you have a size 32?Clerk: ....EH?!?! 32?!?!?! I'm terribly sorry, but...Me: Okay, well, thanks anyway.Clerk: (as I'm walking away!) Holy FUCK, 32? Was that a human that just came into our store, or a Big-Footed alien?!
Most times, when my shoes are getting worn, I have mom send me a new pair from America. She's got decent taste in shoes, and I've found that it's MUCH easier to ask Mom to send shoes than to send condoms. ...Though I have to wonder, what does poor Mom think?
Friend: Hey, what's your son doing in Japan?Mom: Judging by the care packages I send him, going on massive walking treks, and having lots of sex apparently.
This time though, I didn't have time to put in the Mom request, so I headed out to the outlet. As they import straight from America, and considering the proximity to the airport, they actually do have a decent range of sizes. I bought myself a nice size 32 pair of Timberland's, at a pretty good price.
Interestingly enough though, none of this is actually relevant to the point of this article.
I went with my girlfriend. We went by a train line called Nankai. And that's how we expected to come back, but as we arrived in central Osaka, we found ourselves at a JR station. How, exactly, this happened, we have no bloody idea. I can only say that its Japan, and apparently, trains will just up and change lines for no apparent reason. I think this is why Japanese people have that "wake up at my stop" super power, because if they didn't, they might find that their train has stopped in Russia.
This might have been fine if we were using normal tickets, but of course we weren't. I had my magical sensor card, and my girlfriend was using a pass card. As far as train lines go, JR is retarded, and they don't accept our specific type of magical sensor card and merely ordinary pass card. What this meant was that we were going to have to have to pay out of pocket the JR price, and then get a note from the JR station that the unsettled balance on our rail cards was, in fact, settled, for the next time we wanted to use the cards at the 1.37 billion other train lines in Japan that aren't as retarded as JR.
My girlfriend and I lined up at the gate. She explained our situation, and the JR station guy began to fill out a note for her while she paid the ticket price. While standing there, a light bulb went off in my head - you don't have to pay the ticket price. Just Gaijin Smash this dude. I'm not sure why I came to this conclusion - perhaps it was the way he refused to look directly at me? And while you might argue that he was just focusing his energies on the current patron, the guy did manage to look everywhere else. The look in his eyes too resembled that of prey, hoping that if it didn't make eye contact with the circling predator, maybe, just maybe, it would turn invisible.
So after my girlfriend paid for her ticket...I simply smiled at the guy, and walked through the gate. The guy returns my smile, and says nothing as I pass through. My girlfriend is shocked. "What the hell?! You didn't pay! And he didn't even care! What in the...?!"
I realized then that, in all our time together, while she's been witness to a lot of the other Gaijin Super-Powers, this was her first time seeing a Gaijin Smash.
I repeated the Gaijin Smash at the next train station. Since I hadn't paid at JR, I didn't have the little note saying I'd settled the balance on my card. My girlfriend is freaking out - "You can't do that, they're going to arrest you!" She worries. Maybe, if I was Japanese. But not with the Gaijin Smash on my side! I handed the card to the guy, and in the clearest, most perfect English I could muster, said "Oh, I made a mistake on this card, can you erase it?" Of course, I could have said "I like pleasure spiked with pain and you can be my aeroplane" and it would have been all the same to this guy. He looks at me, blinks a few times, takes the card, and promptly erases the old charge.
The girlfriend is amazed. "Wow, you just rode all the way to the airport and back, totally for free! And just because you're a Gaijin?! Man, I wish I was a Gaijin..."
Though the powers of the Gaijin are great, the burden and responsibility are also much to bear. It is our blessing, it is our curse.

~From GaijinSmash.com