"OK, I'll try to start at the beginning. I guess that makes sense," Zerzinski said.
Once again, he looked toward the corner of the room. Where he kept his memories, apparently.
He was finally seeming to be more or less at ease with telling me stories that include intimate details. I would certainly understand if he never got used to it. But it sure flows better when he can relax, as with anybody else.
"I probably said this before. But it was like coming up for air.
"Going from being largely responsible for running a clinic, and deciding how everything worked there. As well as being the person they were coming to see.
"From that, to just hanging out in this wonderful place. With absolutely everything taken care of by someone else. And so much better, as well as more outrageous, than I ever could have done or even imagined."
"What were your initial impressions?" I asked.
"Well, I knew I was fascinated with Japanese culture and history, But I realized once I got here that I knew nothing about the Japanese climate."
"It's hot in the summers," I chimed in helpfully.
"Yes. Way too hot. But that's the only real downside, so I can live with it. And the rest of the year it's gorgeous. Although the locals think the winters are cold. They associate snow with cold."
"When it's snowing, that means it's not all that cold, actually," I noted. "That means it's not all that far below freezing."
"Yes, exactly," said the fellow northeasterner. "But you can't tell that to someone who's not from a colder climate.
"Anyway, the summers are hot. And it was still close to summer when I first got here. Otherwise, initial impressions were a veritable flood.
"It's so green, so beautiful, in Yamaguchi. The women running this place were so cordial, so respectful, and so fun from the beginning.
"And everybody else in society above the age of two also really gives you space to breathe.
"It feels like in the US people are going around hitting each other with emotional baggage all the time, in comparison.
"And then I come here, to paradise. To the mountains where I can breathe. Where I'm being treated like a king, where people are always cooking for me and looking after all of those things. If it were 'just' that, it would be amazing."
"But then of course it's not just that," I pointed out. "They have a purpose for you."
"Yes. Not just that. From the time I got here, I had to begin to fulfill my obligations.
"Which involved a 'date' with a beautiful Japanese school girl every weekday evening, that usually culminated in some of the most memorable sex ever. Once I got over my guilt complex."
"Was there a new guilt complex going on once you got here?" I asked.
"Well, partly the same one. That feeling like I should be able to deliver this thing that people want in a less invasive, less intimate way.
"It shouldn't be so much about me getting my rocks off, you know? That kind of guilt.
"But the new guilt here was about the age thing. In Oregon, all my clients were at least 18. Often quite a bit older, like well into their thirties.
"Here, with the Purification Temple girls, eighteen or nineteen is old. They're usually more like seventeen. Sometimes younger."
"How young?"
"Well, the age of consent here is thirteen. As long as she has permission from her parents. But the girls here are all high school seniors. So whatever age they are when they enter their senior year. Which varies, but is usually seventeen."
He wasn't directly answering my question, I noted, but I didn't ask it again.
"You know," he continued, "here in Japan there's a major, widespread, longstanding, almost totally accepted fetish throughout society aimed at high school students. Who mostly wear easily identifiable uniforms, like they do in England. Little skirts.
"The Purification Temple's aim, as I understand it, was to basically incorporate this school girl fetish into a sort of coming-of-age ritual.
"The appropriate time for this ritual, they thought, was the last year of high school.
"They rightly projected that demand for this would be so big that they would have to limit it to the prefecture of Fukushima. As it is, it's only a small percentage of eligible girls who are able to join the Purification Temple. Even with that limitation."
"And that's where the Choto Temple comes in," I noted.
"Yeah, it was a process," he said. "They knew I could potentially serve more clients. But they didn't want to just double up with Fukushima school girls."
I must have been smiling at that phrase, because Zerzinski momentarily put his hands over his face and chuckled.
"I know this is nuts," he commented before continuing.
"So then I was here, happily going along, living the life. Seeing to the school girls during the week. And having time on my own or with visiting friends on the weekends. Occasionally going to visit other places in Japan just to see the sights, and so on.
"Then the board of directors, which is basically three somewhat stern but wonderful older women who live over that way" - he pointed toward the other end of the property - "one day announced to me that they were considering starting a second, but different, temple. And they wanted to know if I was OK with that."
"What did they tell you about it initially?" I asked.
"Just that it would be open to women from other parts of Japan as well as Fukushima. And that they might be older than school girls. And even more dedicated to being my particular version of the feminine ideal."
"Nothing more specific than that?" I wondered.
"That was it," he said. "So then I had two appointments every weekday from the time they started that temple, only a few weeks later. The school girls every evening, and in the afternoons, the Choto girls.
"It was immediately obvious," he said emphatically, "how different they were."
"How so?"
"Well," he said, breathing deeply and taking a sip of his cappuccino, "they were clearly, consciously submissives. In the BDSM sense."
"How do you know they're for real, and not just playing a more involved role in order to get their inoculations?" I asked.
"First of all," he said, once again with great emphasis on every word, "some of them stay."
I pretended to look like I wasn't sure I understood his point. And he continued, as I'd hoped he would.
"They stay beyond getting their inoculation. And for those who don't, well, it's hard to know for sure. But they wouldn't have been picked in the first place if they didn't fit the bill."
He was holding out his fingers like a child trying to count something.
"First of all," he explained, "they have to answer questions in such a way that the board is convinced they are truly submissives.
"In the sense that submission is something that turns them on. Not just something they do out of a Japanese sense of obligation. Of course in some cases they may have just answered the questions right. That's OK, too."
"Can you explain that?" I asked.
