The day before I left for Texas, I had my annual physical at work. As mandated by Japanese law, the health checks here are much more thorough than anything you would get from an employer in the US, unless you were suspected of stealing something. This year I was 35 or over for the first time, so a new test was added to my already-comprehensive battery of proddings, this one the most invasive and ridiculous of them all; the stomach inspection.

I was made to strip down and then swallow some barium sulphate, together with some bicarbonate powder. This powder gets all frothy and expands your stomach when it gets down there, and the barium coats the lining of your stomach and esophagus so it shows up easily on an X-ray. So you drink that down with a bunch of yogurt, and then have to hold your belches down until the test is over. If you burp at all, you have to drink a new dose. Fortunately I have trained myself in the fine control of my sphincters from an early age, so it was no problem for me. But some people had to do it five or six times.

It's harder than you think, because once you've swallowed the barium, they make you lay on this sarcophagus-like table and flop around a lot. You have to raise your arms above your head and then roll onto your stomach and your right side and so on. While you do that, the coffin is rotating into different angles so that sometimes you are upside down or diagonal or vertical or horizontal or just mixed up. The speaker that the guy's voice was coming out of sounded like a drive through, so it was really difficult to even understand his Japanese instructions while doing a handstand naked and holding back a massive powdery white belch. Of course he was in a different room speaking to me through a speaker, because the whole time this was going on, he was flying a little robot X-ray camera all around me and looking at the details of my esophageal lining. It was over in about 5 minutes, but the whole time it was going on, I felt sure that my coworkers were going to jump out from behind a secret door and tell me what game show I was on.

But, the test ended uneventfully, unless you count my belch of relief. Apparently, the Barium makes you constipated too, so they gave me some laxative to take. I kept burping for about the next three hours, and then I laid some nice like café au lait easter eggs.