A Few Minutes of My Time

"Mary, come over here and interpret for me, would you?" my friend Linda called anxiously. I looked over my shoulder and saw that she was being interviewed by several youths with a video camera. She was obviously struggling to explain herself in Japanese.

We had taken our toddlers to play in the park earlier. As the camera-carrying lads were casually dressed in jeans and tee shirts, I figured they must be students who were interviewing people as some sort of classroom assignment. I waddled over to see what was going on, though I was more than a little leery of the cameras: I had good reason to be.

Five months pregnant, I looked awful. My hair was a bushy mess, I hadn't managed to wash my face that morning, and I was wearing my husband's old denim jacket from which my sumo-esque pregnant belly protruded like a watermelon. Some pregnant women manage to look all glowing and fashionable when they are growing their babies. I just looked sloppy and tired.

"What do you want to know?" I wheezed, and they slowly trained the camera on me. "We'd just like a few minutes of your time," one of the men said, holding up a microphone. "We're interested in people's painful experiences," he explained. "Tell us about your most painful experience." I turned to Linda and duly translated this for her benefit.

"Physical pain?" she wanted to know, and when I asked them they nodded. "Yes, physical pain. We're not interested in heartbreak."

"That's easy," Linda exclaimed fervently. "Having a baby!" I provided the Japanese for this, and the man with the camera followed our every move. "How about you?" one of the men asked me, and the camera and microphone swiveled my way.

"Yep -- childbirth would be my answer too," I burbled, eyeing them curiously. They looked impossibly young with their jeans, tee shirts and fashionable haircuts, and I had half a mind to ask what year they were in at university. But instead, I waxed lyrical on the subject of childbirth. It's not every day people ask you about this, after all. I didn't get into the real nitty-gritty; I will always be grateful for that. But I said enough. The main interviewer asked me point-blank if I hadn't learned my lesson, given my obvious pregnancy, and I burst out laughing. "Obviously I haven't!" I crowed, and the camera dipped down to cover my enormous pregnant belly. Not that there was any way you could miss it.

They spent about five minutes filming and recording us. Once I got past my initial embarrassment, I really enjoyed that camera, the thrill of being the center of attention. Why not go along with it, I reasoned. Only a handful of people were ever going to see me in all my pregnant glory, after all, and being asked my opinion and given a chance to express myself ad nauseam was like a dream come true. Linda rather enjoyed it too. She and I never managed to ask the boys what college they attended or what class they were making the film for. Then we forgot all about it.

Some six weeks later, I got on the train to go to work one morning in June and noticed that people were staring at me. I discretely checked my face for traces of jam or butter, but no, it was perfectly clean. When I got off at my stop in Tokyo, more people stared at me. I put it down to being hugely pregnant, but it still felt strange.

At the YWCA, where I went for my pre-work swim, one of the ladies approached me in the pool. "You were on television last night, weren't you?" she asked. "No," I said, smiling. "But you were!" she said. "It looked just like you!" In Japan, I was often confused with other Caucasian women who were younger, older, shorter, darker, fatter, thinner. So the penny didn't drop until one of the women said, "But you were talking about pain. You and your friend. You were talking about heartburn and childbirth and how awful they were." Suddenly I stopped smiling. Oh God. Oh please, no.

"I had heartburn when I was pregnant too," one of the women told me. "So did I," said another woman. "And my feet were swollen. Plus, I screamed my head off and I didn't care who heard me, so you shouldn't feel ashamed about that!" I turned to look at her. "Did I say that?" I asked faintly. "Yes," she said, "and it was all so funny! My husband and I laughed and laughed. I'm going to tell him that I met you today! I told him I thought you were a YWCA member, and he was very impressed!"

The boys with the camera equipment, it turned out, had worked for NHK, the Japanese national broadcasting corporation.

The people at work had seen it too. So had half of the people on the train coming home. Months later, Japanese friends in Wales and the U.S. were calling us: they'd seen me on satellite. "We were sure surprised to see you on national television!" they all said. "Were you really only five months along? You looked huge!"

My brief moment of fame and I hadn't even brushed my hair.