(2) Yellow fever
Stefhen Bryan talks about his book
Dear readers, as promised, I’m posting an abridged transcript of Stefhen Bryan’s interview with Jeff Krueger about his book, Black Passenger, Yellow Cabs, and what happened in his life after the book was published. Please file this entry under “Don’t shoot the messenger.” Both the guy and his book are highly controversial, and the conversation is peppered with foul language, but I think it’s an interesting look into some of the things going on in Japan.
The first part focuses on Bryan’s relationship with women, his growing up in Jamaica and his love and sex life.
Jeff Krueger: Please introduce yourself.
Stefhen Bryan: I'm the author of the infamous book Black Passenger, Yellow Cabs that is going to be rereleased under the new title Yellow Fever. 16 years later, I’m writing its follow-up, From Deadbeat to Heartbeat: A Sociopath Journey to Becoming a Good Father.
Jeff: You say infamous. Have you received quite a bit of pushback on this?
Stef: Oh man, in the beginning, when it first came out, it was greatly opposed. But it was good. It means that I touched a nerve, you know?
Jeff: I love the book. I recommend the book. I think it's really well written, really insightful. It tells a story that very few people have the balls to tell. I was amazed by your frankness. I've never met anybody quite so honest.
Stef: Well, that comes from therapy. It comes from 16 years of cognitive behavioral therapy. And so, you know, therapy allows you to be vulnerable and be open. Also, I was in Hollywood, I was doing the acting thing and I had a really good acting coach. He taught me that if you wanna perform and not look like you're acting, you have to get in there and feel the pain. Literally. So I think therapy plus my acting coaching helped me to just be open and say look, this is my shit.
Jeff: First off, let's talk about the composition of the book. It's 86 chapters. 46 chapters of those are titled after names of specific women that you had sex with, while the other 40 chapters cover a range of topics that tend to cluster around women's issues, including a chapter outlining the history of prostitution in Japan, which was very interesting. I would say that the book was kind of a blur of sexual debauchery, peppered with statistical information and social commentary on political and economic conditions of women in Japan, which is a weird juxtaposition. So here's the question. Tell me, based on your own observations, how have women responded to the book? Especially regarding your statement that you're a feminist.
Stef: There were women who agreed; they were like Stefhen, thank you, this is very good. You are 100% right. And then there are other women who wanted to lynch me. But at the end of the day, I think that the women who were angry about it, they knew that there were some truths in the book. Because of the fact that I was having sex with these women, I understood the psychology behind these women. So I was able to have sex with them easily because... First of all, let me tell you this. I grew up in a church commune with all women. I was socialized by women. There were 50 women and I was the only male child. I was one of two males (the other one was the pastor) and there were three children, 2 girls and me. So I grew up actually wanting to be a woman. Not literally, like I wanted to have a sex change. But you know, when I was a kid, I would put my penis between my legs and pretend I had a vagina. So I grew up being very uncomfortable around men. That's how I learned about women. And of course, as I wrote in the book, I was sexualized already when I was 7 years old.
Jeff: Your story is crazy because you wrote about being depressed and suicidal at the age of four! What was the reason for that?
Stef: I was a different kind of child. My mom came from a poor family, a family of nine. They had two rooms to live in. And so my mom had to go to live with some people in a really nice part of Jamaica, Belmont Heights in Stony Hill. My earliest memories are of course very vague and foggy, but I do remember it was a very nature-filled environment. I remember there being a river. I was around two, I think. And then the family that she lived with wanted to be closer to their church, which is the same church that my mother got baptized in, and they moved from that really beautiful environment to the fucking shanties of East Kingston. I think I was about three at the time and I remember that transition just played havoc on me. In fact, just recently, a few years ago, I spoke to the sisters - they had three daughters - and they said that they literally wanted to kill their parents for that move. Everything was dilapidated and terrible. So we lived in this one room, me and my mom, and I think when I was 4 years old expressing to my mom that I wanted to roll off the bed and die. I made my first attempt at nine and if I hadn't left Jamaica at 15, I would have died. Then I made several attempts in my teenage years.
But let's go back to the feminist thing. The fact that I grew up with women and was socialized by women. That's how I became concerned about women’s issues. I mean, I grew up seeing women getting the shit beat out of them by men. I grew up seeing men causing most of the problems in relationships. They were fucking drunk.
Jeff: You yourself don't drink, right?
Stef: No, I don't drink at all. I hate that smell. So if a woman is drinking, we're not gonna have sex. Anyway, I had sex with all these women. But the thing is that it's mutual. It's not taking advantage of them. It's making sure that they have multiple orgasms first. You know, it's not like ‘Wham bam, thank you, ma'am.’ And I keep in contact or at least I did at the time. I'm not into one-night stands. So the answer to your question is yes, some women were appalled. Some were repulsed. But some have embraced my ideas.
Jeff: Well, feminism is a complex movement, obviously there's a large spectrum there. There are radical thinkers like Andrea Dworkin who view all penetration as rape. (To be fair to Dworkin, her position is actually a little more subtle than this.) And given that 46 of the chapters in your book are describing penetration, that's a lot of rape from her point of view. I imagine that extreme feminists like Dworkin would definitely view you as a misogynistic.
Stef: I do have some misogynistic tendencies. No, let me rephrase that. I don't consciously go out of my way to be misogynistic, you know, because I'm always concerned about what they might have encountered in their lives. I know that 80% of women have experienced some kind of inappropriate sexual act. I mean, so many of the women I've had sex with have been molested as children. A couple even by their fathers.
Jeff: Obviously that's not just in Jamaica.
Stef: That's Japan. That's America. That's worldwide. But especially in Japan because it's a male dominated society and men collectively don't really give a shit about women in this country, and they don't care about their feelings and if their needs are being met.
Jeff: I get the feeling that they don't care about people in general, like individuals, right? It's all about the collective, it's all about the company, the nation, the society.
Stef: Yes, you're right. But especially about women, because they're further down the totem pole, I guess. They're not even on the totem pole.
Jeff: The question that my wife had when I've talked to her about this book was, what did your wife think of the book? Has she read it?
Stef: My wife, unfortunately, has not read it. She refuses to read it.
Jeff: Ah, that makes sense, considering all the women you had sex with. She wants to be the only one. She doesn't want to think about competition or the past.
Stef: I don't think that's the case. She's not like that. You know, she's a lawyer. She's a very logical minded person. When she used to come to my house before we were married, when I was whoring, she would just say, look, let's get rid of the panties and all the toothbrushes, you know. So she knew. She just didn't want to see it.
Jeff: You finished the book by getting married and stating that you had achieved a state of self-actualization, right? 16 years have passed. So my question is, at the time when you wrote the book, what did you view as self-actualization? And now that 16 years have passed, is it any different?
Stef: I thought I was already self-actualized before I wrote that book. That's why I started writing the book, because it was self-actualization that drove me to write it. And self-actualization just means that you have a complete understanding of yourself, your psychological dynamic. The people around you, the society around you and the world around you, nothing is a mystery anymore. There is no mystery about how people operate, about how societies operate. And you are comfortable with that. I understand, you know, as much as I've been to therapy for so many years, I still have asshole tendencies. I just told my wife: you married an asshole. I mean, there's some good qualities about me, but there's some really shitty qualities about me too, and I think I'm probably not gonna try to change that because I just can't.
Now I'm 59 years old and the knowledge of myself that I have now I'm using it to raise by child, it allows me to be a better parent. I've been working on myself for a long long time. So when I sat down to write the book, I realized that I know who I am. I know what I am. I know what my problems are. I know what my potentials are. I know why I didn't achieve the kind of success that I wanted to achieve. I know these things and so I can actually become a really good parent now because I know myself well.
Jeff: Your daughter is 3 and a half years old, but you also have a daughter from a previous relationship, right?
Stef: Yes, she's 35 now. In fact, I have a granddaughter who's the same age as my second daughter. But the little one is the first daughter that I’ve been actually raising. It’s the first time I’m doing the dad thing.
Jeff: Your partners have also had 15 abortions.
Stef: Yes, and people can judge me all they want. I know people are on different sides of the fence with that one, but it's probably better than having illegitimate children that are raised by single mothers and you're not taking care of.
Jeff: Right. You kind of learned that lesson with the first child, I'm guessing. But how do you feel in terms of your relationship with your current child? Is there an emotional bond?
Stef: I'm writing about this in the follow up, but I was in the process of getting a divorce from Shoko (Stef's wife) because we were physically separated. I mean, I left America and moved back to Japan in 2014. Shoko stayed because she continued to pursue the bar in California. But she didn't want to get a divorce. So she still continued to visit me in Japan.
I was like, I’m done with Shoko. I was hitting some girls. But I couldn't divorce her. It was just so difficult to divorce her because she was so loyal and so giving and so caring. Anyway, I decided finally I was gonna go back to America and divorce Shoko once and for all, come back to Japan, marry my new girlfriend. But I went back to America and impregnated Shoko instead. That was in 2018.
But I know what people need and I know what children need. I know what it takes to raise a good human being. And I thought, Jesus, I have to jump on the therapy again. So I started going to therapy specifically to accept the situation and more importantly, to be able to create a bond with this child. Because I realized that in order for this to work, my bond with this child is going to have to supersede the bond that her mum's oxytocin would create. And so I've gone overboard. I’ve reached a point where I miss my daughter at nighttime when she goes to sleep. It's fucking crazy, yeah.
Jeff: I think that's what people mean when they say that having a kid changed them. You access feelings that you might not ever had before or thought that you could have.
Stef: Right. You have to be open to these changes. And so because I was committed to the idea, I was committed to not having my child being in a single parent environment, I was committed to my child growing up in a civil, functional, loving environment, I had to be committed to my marriage.
Jeff: That's fascinating, but potentially problematic because it sounds like you are 100% in this relationship for the child, and not necessarily because you're committed to the wife, right?
Stef: in my case, I'm still intimate with my wife and we're still normally civil. We're not trying to force it, you know. One of the things I learned in therapy was PSO or Positive Sentiment Override and apply that every freaking day. So every time I feel like I want a divorce, I think about something positive about her. I've been employing that since the birth of the child. Anytime something happens, you know, I look at the child and I think, OK, let's just forget about it.
It's getting easier now. I'm getting the feeling that children-centered marriages, marriages where people are more concerned about their children than about themselves, are more beneficial to the children. Because you know, in our case, right now, we can never divorce. There is nothing that could make me divorce my wife. Because I have a child and I have to think about the emotional state of this child. My life is really not mine anymore. That's what it boils down to. I mean, that's just for me. I'm not saying that that's how everybody should act, mind you.
That’s all for today. The second part of the interview will focus on Bryan’s life in and his relationship with Japan.