I was with my father, and we exited a subway train in a heavily residential area of Tokyo. Unlike the images of endless skyscrapers that people usually imagine when they think of Tokyo, this was an area of quiet residences and low-key convenience stores and restaurants. The streets were narrow and their layout more convoluted than those in the suburban sprawl I was used to in the Chicago suburbs. It was mid-October, the sun was shining, and the there were puddles on the sides of the roads. We walked past a few small storefronts and saw a sight that was strangely familiar: Denny’s.

For the uninitiated, Denny’s is a chain restaurant that has many locations (probably hundreds or thousands) throughout America. I had no idea that it existed in Japan, but there it was. Denny’s had gained a bad reputation in the 1980s for having a lot of racist incidents that seemed endemic to the chain, but to be fair they had done a lot to rehabilitate this image, whatever that may mean. Here I was in Japan, however, looking at the familiar yellow sign with red lettering.

In America, there was a common joke that Denny’s was where one went when one was too drunk or high to eat anywhere else, as the items on the menu came with big color pictures that one could point at to the server without saying anything. We entered the Denny’s and were ushered to a table. I spoke very little Japanese, only enough to order the most basic things. This made the pictures on the menu very useful. I pointed to one thing on the menu to the waitress, and there was some confusion. I tried to ask in Japanese what was wrong but there was no chance of communicating. She smiled and covered the item on the menu with her hand. I realized she was saying “We don’t have this item right now”. I nodded in understanding and quickly pointed at something else, what turned out to be a curry soup. There was understanding; the curry was ordered.

When it arrived, I successfully ate it, but managed to get it all over my dress shirt, which looked very conspicuous. As we walked through this quiet neighborhood in Tokyo, I felt like a total mess with the sun beating down on my dress shirt covered with curry stains, but we continued on our journey to reach our destination, a monastery which was famous for its sales of maneki-neko, which were statues of a cute cat in a distinctive posture believed to bring good luck to their owners. I had promised my mother I would buy her one in Japan, and when we reached the entrance to the monastery, we passed through its gate and wondered where we were to go, and my Japanese being as bad as it is, how we would find out without embarrassing ourselves.

There was nothing to worry about, however, as there was a sign with a picture of a maneki-neko with an arrow pointing to a building. We followed the sign and walked into the store, and I was feeling a bit self-conscious about my little bit of cultural appropriation I was committing and the fact that I had curry all over my shirt. I attempted to ask for and successfully picked out the largest maneki-neko they had and paid several thousand yen for it in cash. I had succeeded in my mission, and we retraced our steps out of the monastery, through the streets of Tokyo, back through several subways, and made our way to Ningyocho, a place in a much busier area of Tokyo.

Did I believe in the power of the maneki-neko? Actually, at that point in my life I did believe in things such as good luck, so it was not mere cultural appropriation, or at least not only that, but a desire to give my mother something that would aid her fortune. I do not really believe in this now, however, having aged a bit. When we retired to the hotel in Ningyocho where my father and I shared the same bed (hotels with multiple beds being too expensive for us to afford), I felt a sense of having fulfilled a mission, the one promise that I made my mother when we went to Japan. I had gotten her a maneki-neko, and as of this writing it sits on her dresser to this day.