sakura family

Socks for Japan

2011-03-24T14:39:00.001+09:00

Another great, easy way to contribute: Socks for Japan

Nuclear boy has a tummy-ache

2011-03-23T11:37:00.005+09:00

This is a video produced a few days ago to explain to children what's happening with the Fukushima plant. It's very Japanese - I doubt an English video would use similar imagery of poo and farts! But it's very effective for kids of Kei and Dan's age.

Earthquake

2011-03-19T20:40:00.008+09:00

I didn't expect to be posting again on this blog any time soon. But then, I didn't expect a massive earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis in northern Japan either. So many people I'd lost touch with have been contacting me, some after nearly 20 years, to offer their condolences and ask if we're all right. Yes, we are completely safe, and life here is going on almost as normal.

Osaka barely felt the quake, except for people on the top floors of tall buildings. I was in the car and didn't feel it at all. It was a huge shock to hear what was happening in the northeast of the country, and see the devastating images on TV. That first day, I think everyone in Japan who still had electricity was glued to the screen. It was unbearable to watch, but impossible to turn off. So many lives lost, so many communities demolished, so many people left with nothing but the clothes on their backs, congregating in schools and community centers without food, water, electricity, gas, or medical help. So many vulnerable people - especially the elderly, who form a disproportionately high percentage of the population in the rural areas that have been worst hit. So much to do, to try and get even the absolute basics to them amid shattered infrastructure and freezing weather.

Then came the first news the next afternoon that the Fukushima Daiichi reactor might be going into meltdown. And suddenly that became the only story for a large segment of the foreign media.

I can't write about all the sensationalized reporting that has resulted without getting angry, so all I'll do here is give a link to the Journalist Wall of Shame [UPDATE: link now fixed] project, where people who actually know the situation on the ground are posting particularly egregious examples.

Fortunately, after the initial shock Mum and Dad have been real troopers. Especially after hearing stories from other people who have to spend hours over Skype each day rejustifying their decision to stay in Japan to their frantic families, who are convinced from overseas reporting that Tokyo will soon be (or is already!) a radioactive ghost town, I'm very grateful for their support and trust.

Yes, the situation at the reactors is extremely bad. Yes, if it isn't brought under control it could result in serious radioactive contamination of the immediate area, and possibly over a wider region if the current efforts to replenish the water in the spent fuel pools fail (and as an aside, who on earth had the bright idea of storing highly dangerous radioactive fuel rods with no containment other than a flimsy roof? In an earthquake zone? Which is also vulnerable to tsunamis?). It's dramatic, and terrifying. But there's nothing whatsoever you, I, or the other hundreds of millions of people watching the TV, reading the paper, or surfing the Web can do about it at this point. There will be a time for debating nuclear energy policy, and whether a supposedly one in a million possibility of a catastrophic accident (Tokyo Electric Power's estimate before the quake) is an acceptable level of risk given the potentially horrendous consequences. But at this moment, that won't have any positive effect on the situation on the ground.

However, there are things we can do right now to help the half a million people who are eking out their existence in evacuation centers. Giving to the relief funds that are delivering basic supplies will actually save lives in the next few days. If you're reading this and you haven't already made a donation, please consider supporting one or more of the organizations actively helping get necessities to the evacuees. I am supporting Second Harvest Japan, as I know the director and several board members personally from when I worked in Tokyo, and can be confident any money or goods sent to them will have an immediate impact. Other ways of donating from different countries can be found in the link at the bottom of this post, taken from The Tokyo Post.

Kentaro is also safe and well in Shizuoka, although he felt the earthquake rather more strongly than we did. The only effect on him so far is that his hospital is having to curtail non-essential surgeries, due to a lack of some medical supplies that were being manufactured in quake-affected areas.

And the boys are thriving. At the moment Kei is off on a three-day soccer camp over the long weekend, and Dan is practicing hard for his next piano recital in May. Being older, Kei is more aware of the earthquake and its aftermath than Dan, but I'm grateful that neither seems to be badly affected by seeing the pictures on the news.

I'll try and keep posting updates for a while, now I'm back. In the meantime, here's that list of appeals.

whitebait icecream

2009-05-30T18:30:00.008+09:00

I finally realized why I have so much difficulty getting round to blogging. I'm a strong introvert - even calling close friends on the phone requires a whole lot of screwing up my energy level, while personal emails tend to get put on one side to be answered at length, only to be rediscovered with embarrassment weeks or months later. And blogging is even more revealing - I have no idea who will be reading this, or what your reaction to it will be - and so gets put off "until I have time to do it properly." Which might be this year, next year, sometime, never ...

But I know there are family members and friends who would appreciate a photo or so now and then. So I'm going to try and blog more regularly on more impersonal things to get some momentum going again, and slip in photos of the family whenever there's a particularly nice one to share.

Icecream is a bit of a personal subject, perhaps. We all have our favorites, mine being anything remotely raspberry-related. Japanese icecream includes all the regular standards - you can always find chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla - but quite a few flavors that would raise eyebrows if you saw them in Baskin Robbins in Piccadilly. Some are standard flavorings for Japanese sweets - green tea, azuki bean, sesame, sweet potato - that scarcely rate a second glance when used for icecream too. Others are a bit more unusual. Because green tea is a regular flavoring in Japan black tea gets used in the same way, and I still find it hard to adjust to Darjeeling or Earl Grey icecream. And tastes such as pickled cherry leaves or mugwort, while normal for mochi rice dumplings, somehow feel a bit strange in a cone. But occasionally you come across flavors in icecream shops that just make you go HUHHHHH?

Take this selection. The back row is relatively normal - crumbed cookie, cream cheese, milk tea, and chocolate (phew). But the front row starts getting interesting. From the left, we have shiso (perilla, an aromatic green herb), Calpis (a milk-based drink that's more appetizing than it sounds), lemonade, and finally sea salt. In the same shop I tried root ginger icecream, expecting it to be similar to the crystallized ginger version I've had so many times in London. Sadly, no - the taste was raw and pungent, and I was glad I'd tried a spoonful before buying. (I eventually settled for the lychee.)

Or this shop, in Shizuoka. The bottom three tubs are nothing unusual - grape, mango, and shincha green tea. But take a look at the top row. On the right, you might be forgiven for thinking you have pistachio, but no, it's salt ("emerald salt" this time). With wasabi (hot green horesradish), usually used for seasoning sushi, in the center. And no, your eyes don't deceive you. That is actually a shrimp on the left. Shizuoka is famous for sakura-ebi, tiny crunchy pink shrimps, and someone had the bright idea of adding them to icecream to make a local delicacy. I guess it would be perfect with a scoop of wasabi on the side.

But the one below beats all, at least for me.

In the front row, second from the left, is ... shirasu icecream. Shirasu are tiny baby fish, a type of whitebait, that are a local delicacy in the Shizuoka region where Kentaro now works. They're delicious on rice, with a sprinkling of salmon roe. But in icecream?

I bottled out and got the pumpkin, then thought I just had to try and asked for a spoonful. And what do you know, it was very very good. Not at all fishy, but with a very pure, creamy taste, punctuated by crunchy bits when you bite into a morsel of whitebait. Next time we go, I'm going to have a whole cone.

Dancing with a dolphin

2008-09-30T23:54:00.002+09:00

Kei's birthday treat at Adventure World in Shirahama, a couple of hours' drive from Osaka. (He's the smallest child in the middle.)

Make photo slide shows at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Taiwan photos

2008-08-04T19:34:00.019+09:00

Life has just been too busy to blog! Not so much because Kentaro is now living in Shizuoka - he was around so little before that in practical terms it makes almost no difference to our daily lives (although of course we miss him lots) - but because since April I've been teaching a university class in translation in addition to a tutorial group for postgraduates in scientific English, and the preparation and marking time have taken away every spare minute I had (and there weren't many of those to start with). So apologies to those faithful family members and friends who have been checking in periodically, only to find nothing new since March. We are still here and still well, and the boys are growing up apace.

Kentaro actually has two weeks' proper holiday in his new job, one week in summer and one in winter, which is a fantastic change. We used his summer vacation time to take a family trip to Taiwan, somewhere we'd never been before. Despite a typhoon that covered literally the whole island for the first three days and put paid to a planned trip to the east coast, it was a great trip. Below are a few photos to give you a taste.

We flew EVA Air, which has Hello Kitty as its logo. It felt a bit surreal to fly on a plane with a pink kitten on the side, but it was a good flight and the crew were very friendly.

The day after we arrived we went up Taipei 101, currently the tallest tower in the world. It's due to be overtaken by a skyscraper in Dubai next year, but at least we went up while it still holds the record!

The view from the top.

The boys enjoyed writing postcards at the top of the tower.

Lunch in the food court. The boys were still having a bit of a hard time adjusting, and insisted on familiar food - sushi for Kei, McDonalds for Dan. Kentaro and I were already enjoying Taiwanese chicken and rice.

Kei took this photo of us in holiday mood outside Taipei 101.

The typhoon was approaching and the wind was already pretty strong, so we headed to the National Taiwan Science Education Center, where the boys had great fun with all the hands-on exhibits, a 3D movie (Dan's favorite part of the entire trip), and an entire floor of bouncy-castle-type large inflatable structures. I wish I'd taken some photos of those, as they were so much fun.

The next day the typhoon hit. We had been due to go to Hualien, on the east coast, but all the trains were cancelled that morning. The hotel receptionist told us that services were due to be restored that afternoon, so we checked out, left our luggage at the main station, and went to see the new Pixar movie WALL-E in an almost deserted cinema. When we got back to the station, though, it turned out the afternoon trains had been cancelled too, so back we went to the hotel. The staff were highly apologetic and gave us a better room for the same price, with a huge jacuzzi in the bathroom that made a nice end to a frustrating day.

By the Tuesday the worst of the typhoon was past, but the weather was still cloudy and wet. We headed out on a day trip to Jinguashi and Jiufen, two old gold-mining towns on the north coast about an hour out of Taipei.

The landscape was green and mountainous, very similar to Japan's but with more tropical vegetation.

Jinguashi was the more interesting place of the two. The town has been turned into a "Gold Ecological Park," with the old mining buildings (dating from the Japanese colonial period) restored and one of the tunnels converted into a recreation of the mining process for tourists. Kei was especially excited to be able to touch a huge bar of gold in the Gold Museum.

We were a bit too tired to really enjoy Jiufen. It's a tourist town, with a covered arcade lined with food and souvenir shops and some steep steps that were the inspiration for the landscape in the animated film "Spirited Away." In this photo the boys are eating real crisps - a whole potato sliced thinly, stuck on a single stick, deep-fried, and dusted with curry powder.

The next morning we paid a quick visit to the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall. It's an imposing building, set in a big park that gave the boys plenty of space to run around. They enjoyed standing to attention next to the guards, and watching the marching and rifle-twirling that accompanied the changeover to a new pair.

Then we flew out to Penghu, a small archipelago of islands off Taiwan's west coast. We stayed in a guesthouse near the beach, one of four run by a wonderful young couple called Maco and Anna (you can see their Web site here). Our room was actually in their home, which they share with Maco's parents as well as his brother, sister-in-law and little niece. They were all unbelievably friendly and warm, offering us advice and practical help at every turn. In the photo, Maco is next to Kei; his sister-in-law and niece are next to Kentaro, and his mother and father are on the right.

The islands are low and scrubby, covered by grass, aloe, and cactus. The beaches are lovely, with fine coral sand and hardly any people.

We borrowed life-jackets for the boys, as the surf was still strong after the typhoon.

This, believe it or not, is a single banyan tree. It's 300 years old, and the roots growing down from its branches have developed into more than 100 pillars. We tried to find the original trunk, but it was impossible to tell which it was.
The stalls around the temple behind the tree sell cactus-fruit sorbet, which is surprisingly delicious with a sour-sweet taste reminiscent of blackberries.

Sunset from the seawall at Makung, the main town on the island.

The town has an old ferry that has been turned into a shop for souvenirs and marine products, with navigation equipment on the bridge that kids can pretend to operate. The boys loved being ferry captains for an evening!

Maco took us snorkeling on our last morning. The water was very clear, and we saw many small, brightly colored fish. We swam out to look at the coral reef about 30 meters offshore, but Maco said much of the coral is dying - whether because of the unseasonably cold previous winter, global warming, or some other reason, he's not sure.

Maco and Anna took us to the airport to say goodbye. They had already become such good friends that Kei cried when we left.

Funny sort of Easter

2008-03-24T21:55:00.004+09:00

For the first time in my life, Easter basically didn't happen to our family this year. We spent it moving Kentaro's stuff to his new hospital, four hours up the expressway. Easter came much earlier than usual in any case, and my usual source of Cadbury's chocolate eggs, the FBC Britshop, closed down last year because of the strong pound (sniff). Seventeen years away from the UK have finally accustomed me to Good Friday being a normal working day, but until last year I'd always been to church on Easter Sunday. This year, we were camping out in sleeping bags in Kentaro's new house on the hospital grounds, doing without a bath as the gas wasn't connected, and rushing to go shopping at the nearest big home center before returning the rented van to the rental company by lunchtime and driving back down to Osaka in our own car.

I did manage to make hot cross buns. I feel a bit proud of myself for that; sneaking a tiny taste of British Easter into the rush and stress of getting a van, a car, two kids, appliances (many kindly given us for free by friends who were leaving the country), furniture, books, futons, and miscellaneous stuff loaded up and driven to Tokai. I slipped the ingredients into the bread machine after coming back from collecting a free washing machine, shaped the dough in a couple of minutes snatched while loading up the van, and got them into the oven 20 minutes before we were due to leave. They were baked and thrown in a paper bag about two minutes before we ran out of the door to pick up Kei from Saturday school on the way to the expressway. As I drove our car with the kids behind Kentaro in the van, their aroma tantalized us for the entire journey. Early Sunday morning I dug the toaster and coffee maker out of the depths of the van, and offered my Japanese family an Easter breakfast.

Dan didn't like them, and demanded ordinary bread instead. Oh well.

There were times during the weekend when I thought we must have been crazy trying to do this with the kids in tow. It certainly would have been easier to have left them with my parents-in-law and gone up with just the two of us - shopping at the home center without the boys having ear-splitting Pokemon battles up and down the aisles would have been a lot less stressful, for one thing. But I am glad we went up there as a family. Now when Kentaro leaves next weekend at least the boys will have an image of where he's living, and we've left our sleeping bags for when we go up to visit.

I take it all back....

2008-03-10T16:41:00.005+09:00

Maybe our local city government isn't so bad after all. Even if their prose is mindnumbingly bureaucratic, at least they're sensible enough to get it properly translated.

One of my jobs today was proofreading a brochure for a different city. Up to about two thirds of the way through the English was at least comprehensible, if not all that grammatical. But then it suddenly turned into sentences like this:

They argue at the equal viewpoint as the engine of which it became independent respectively also though it's exchange of cooperating each other, city council and city chief are making an effort toward improvement of a life of city people

The person whose job it was to produce the English version must have run out of time and just thrown the last part through some translation software. I ended up sending it back to the agency with a plea for them to request the original Japanese; OK, I could have a stab at making some sense out of this, but it would be a creative reconstruction akin to trying to reproduce a portrait of someone's face using nothing but a heap of splintered skull bones.

In a sense it is reassuringly bad, though. At least computers aren't going to be putting us human translators out of a job any time soon.

Comments (please)

2008-03-07T15:05:00.003+09:00

A couple of people have told me they've tried to comment on previous posts but haven't been able to, so I've fiddled around with the settings a bit. Hopefully it should work now, so please do have another go! (I love getting comments.)

So tired

2008-03-06T01:25:00.000+09:00

I've been pretty overwhelmed with work the past few days. March is the busiest season for translators, as all our clients are trying to use up their translation budgets by the end of the financial year, so suddenly a whole raft of agencies that might have contacted me three or four times in the past year are emailing and phoning with job offers. I'm having to turn them all down, as my regular clients are keeping me quite busy enough already; tonight is the third night in a row I've been up well past midnight, attempting to turn mindnumbingly bureaucratic prose from the city government Web site into something that's hopefully vaguely readable in English. As the saying goes, though, garbage in, garbage out ... especially at this time of night. Honestly, some of the stuff I've been having to deal with lately makes Vogon poetry sound relatively appealing.

But I did go out for a rare night on the town with three fabulous friends last Saturday evening, and laughed more than I had in what seems like years. If you're reading this, girls, THANK YOU! Now I just have to find a babysitter who can persuade the boys to go to sleep (something even Kentaro can't do - the three of them eventually crashed out together on our bed at nearly midnight, apparently) so we can do it again soon.

Turning the tables

2008-02-27T22:10:00.005+09:00

It was fun to call my parents in England this evening.

"Did you feel the earthquake? Are you all right?"

Yes, according to the BBC there was a magnitude 5.2 earthquake in England in the middle of last night. England doesn't normally have earthquakes - they're one of those things that may well be regular occurrences in those funny foreign climes, but aren't quite the done thing at home. So usually it's Japan that's shaking, and my mother who's on the phone the next morning trying valiantly to sound unconcerned. The quake was apparently about level 3 intensity in my parents' town, so this time I thought it would be fun if I turned the tables for once.

It turns out they'd slept right through it. Not only that, as they hadn't watched the news yet they didn't even know there had been an earthquake at all. In fact, as soon as she heard the word "earthquake," Mum immediately assumed that there must have been one in Japan and I was calling her to reassure her.

It's actually true to form for our family. The only time Dad ever visited Japan, back in 1992, he slept through an earthquake while he was staying with me in Saitama. And I myself must have been the only person in London to have slept through the hurricane of 1989, when I couldn't understand why public transport wasn't running and there were branches and window glass all over the road as I tried to make my way to work the next morning...

I'm very glad my parents are all right. And next time there's a strongish earthquake somewhere in Japan and they call to see if I'm still alive, I'll be able to tell them not to worry as they've actually slept through one just as big themselves.

Big change coming

2008-02-23T21:34:00.005+09:00

When we bought our house, nearly two years ago, Kentaro said that at some point he'd probably have to go and work at a hospital further away than commuting distance, so he could get his specialist qualification as a pediatric surgeon.

OK, I said, that's fine. We'll do tanshin funin.

Tanshin funin is a fairly common Japanese custom. If a man gets transfered by his company to another part of Japan, frequently he'll go by himself, leaving wife and children in the place they're used to. At first I was a bit shocked by this - from a Western perspective it seemed too much like separation - but now, as a homeowner with kids in the education system, I can see why it works. The housing market works differently from the way it does in the UK and the US; houses depreciate in value like used cars, and land prices have only just stabilized after more than ten years of constant decline, so selling a house inevitably involves losing money. And moving to a new area and new schools is hard on children, particularly for biracial families who inevitably attract unwanted attention.

Louise George Kittaka, another foreign wife, has written a fun article about her own experience with tanshin funin in Tokyo Families. Like her, I've come round to the idea that it can be a positive option, so when Kentaro first mentioned the possibility of his having to move the words fairly tripped off my tongue. At that point, of course, it was all completely hypothetical, some far-off future that might or might not roll around one day.

Now that day's coming. Back last summer, Kentaro's boss and mentor suggested he might consider moving to a children's hospital in the Tokai region, about two hours away by shinkansen. In the Japanese medical world, if your boss makes a suggestion like that, it's pretty close to an order. Kentaro went up to see the hospital and meet the people, and came back impressed; they were equally impressed with him, and offered him a job. Initially he'll be on a one-year contract, which may or may not be extendable; as he needs to work for three years in an accredited institution as part of gaining specialist qualifications, he's hoping to stay there that long at least.

The hospital is in a rural area outside a provincial city. There's very little there. There won't be many other English-speaking families, and there's certainly no international Saturday school like the one Kei attends now. The kids will stand out far more than they do in relatively cosmopolitan Osaka (and they get enough comments here as it is). The boys are thoroughly settled into school and kindergarten respectively, and have made friends in the neighborhood as well as getting involved with local activities - soccer club, calligraphy class, piano lessons. The thought of uprooting them to go to a place where they'll almost certainly stick out as the only biracial children, and then to move them again after some indeterminate period, just doesn't make sense.

That's one reason - the good one - that Kentaro is moving up to Tokai while we're staying here. A more selfish reason is that I love our house too much to want to leave it. Since the age of 17 I've never lived in the same house for more than three years at a time, and that only in our last rented place - before that I'd been moving at least every two years, and often after six months or a year. Now, for the first time, I have a place that's at least partly my own (if you don't count the fact that we've sold our souls to the bank to buy it), and ever since moving in I've been determinedly putting down roots. The thought of selling it or renting it out and going back to poor-quality rented housing fills my gut with something that feels like a lead weight. (Any place we might rent would have to be poor quality, as having a cat rules us out with 99% of landlords.)

Kentaro is ten years younger than me, and as we married and had children while he was still a student he hasn't had the chances to travel and explore options that I have. Now he's ready to spread his wings, just when I'm ready to build a nest for the family. I'd never really felt the full force of our age difference until now. But I don't want to try and stop him moving on; it's important both for his career and for him as a person. So for the next one or two years, at least, we'll be living in different places, trying to work out how his next job can bring us together again.

I love Skype...

2008-02-19T20:31:00.002+09:00

... it means my mother can read the boys a bedtime story from thousands of miles away.

Photo and video editing at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Catching up (3): Kindergarten play

2008-02-15T22:40:00.005+09:00

Dan's class at kindergarten got to put on a play and give a musical performance last weekend. It was pretty impressive, especially compared with the daycare performances I've been used to. Maybe "impressive" is the wrong word. "Ultra-choreographed" might be equally accurate.

Until last April, both Kei and Dan attended daycare in central Osaka, where we lived before moving here. Daycare and kindergarten are two different worlds in Japan. Daycares (hoikuen) are run for working parents and comes under the auspices of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, whereas kindergartens (youchien) are officially educational establishments supervised by the Ministry of Education.When Kei started elementary school I tried to move Dan into a daycare in our present city, but waiting lists for good places are long, and he didn't get into any of the ones I would have liked him to go to. So we made the decision to switch him to kindergarten, and were lucky enough to persuade the principal at a highly regarded local kindergarten to allow him to enter at very short notice.

The daycare in Osaka was run by a Christian organization, and they put on a show each Christmas that included both a nativity play by the five- and six-year-olds and a performance of some sort by each class, including the younger children. The plays by the younger classes tended to be rather chaotic affairs, with lots of running around and singing songs at the tops of their voices. Only the oldest class got to say individual lines, and those just in the nativity play. I'd always thought that was fine - the kids enjoyed themselves, there wasn't much pressure, and it was all nicely age-appropriate. I had no idea that more could even be expected from four-year-olds, until the kindergarten play last weekend.

I think I've mentioned before that Dan's kindergarten is very big on "training." You could see it immediately in the way the kids filed in in their identical uniforms to begin the event with musical numbers, standing carefully in their prescribed places and looking straight ahead. A few gave quick waves to their parents, but among the three pages of information that we'd been given in advance were strict instructions not to wave back, as this would distract the children from their performance. Dan found us with his eyes - you could tell from his smile he'd seen where we were - but quickly returned to his concentrated pose.

They played percussion instruments in perfect time to the song "Bibbety Bobbety Boo" and sang a couple of songs before bowing in unison and filing offstage to change for their play, "The Giant Turnip." The turnip itself had been a class craft project the previous term, and was quite impressive in its own right.

I was amazed by how much the kids achieved in the play. Not only did each of them have at least one line of their own to say, there were also several songs and dances by small groups. Dan was one of three children playing the sun. He did really well, concentrating intently and obviously making a huge effort to get his lines and the little group's song and dance right.

The kindergarten had adapted the story so that not only the people and animals but also the butterflies, the sun, and finally the class teacher had to join the line before the turnip finally came out. Then of course they had to end with a final song.

The whole thing left me slightly dazed. Part of me was really impressed that the children had been able to concentrate so well and remember everything they had to do - out of a class of 23, only three or four were too shy or forgetful to get their lines right. Another part, though, was slightly nostalgic for the vitality and semi-chaos of the daycare performances. Should we really be expecting that degree of achievement from three- and four-year-olds? It all felt a little over the top. But it seems that by putting Dan in a "good" kindergarten, this is the choice we've made.

Catching up (2): Kachoen

2008-02-13T16:13:00.003+09:00

These are some of my favorite recent photographs of the boys, taken on a day out a couple of weeks ago to Kachoen on Port Island in Kobe. "Kachoen" means "flower and bird park," and that's literally what it is - a huge, warm greenhouse filled with colorful flowers and with several areas where you can watch, feed, and even touch exotic birds. It was a great antidote to the winter blues on a cold, wet Sunday afternoon. (Even the penguins were shivering - they're a South African variety, and they liked the Kansai sleet as little as we did!)

Catching up (1): Skating

2008-02-11T22:00:00.000+09:00

I'm going to try and post every day or two this week, to catch up on what's been happening with us this year so far. To start with, here's a clip of the boys and Kentaro on the ice, taken in January when we visited Kentaro's parents after coming back from England. Though there's no rink within easy distance of where we live, there's one very close to their house, and skating has become one of our regular activities whenever we visit in winter. The boys' different personalities are really apparent here: Dan toddles quietly around like a little penguin as he concentrates on staying upright, while Kei swoops,cavorts, twirls, and frequently falls flat on his bottom. Solid achievement versus thrills and spills - if this carries on into adulthood, it's easy to imagine who's more likely to have the conventional career, and who is going to have an unpredictable, rollercoaster ride in life. (Note to self: MUST stop pigeonholing these boys according to my own narrative of who they are, before they start to believe it themselves...)

Photo and video editing at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Better late than never

2008-02-09T22:32:00.001+09:00

The mood for blogging comes and goes, but with the coming of winter it's seemed to disappear into hibernation. I love browsing what other people are writing, but never seem to pull the energy together to put anything on myself. And the longer I leave it, the more guilty I feel, so the less I want to think about it. Then things happen that I do want to blog about, but I can't because there's other stuff that needs putting up first, so the list gets longer and longer, and the guilt grows exponentially ... ah, the joys of being an inveterate procrastinator.

So here's some pictures from Christmas in England that will at least start to clear the backlog. OK, we've already been back for six weeks, and a lot has happened since, but hopefully I'll get around to that a bit more quickly once these are up.

I took the kids out of school and kindergarten for the final week of term, and flew back with them to spend Christmas and New Year with my parents. The British Christmas experience is un-recreatable in Japan, and it was something I really wanted the boys to have as part of their childhood memories. The last time we were in England for Christmas was when Dan was a small baby and Kei was three, so neither of them really remembered it. This time they were both old enough to appreciate the tree and the turkey, mince pies and Christmas cake, a party in the municipal hall and the pantomime at the theatre. We managed to fit in seeing my brother and his family several times, as well as making a couple of visits to old friends.

Kentaro used his New Year's holiday to join us just for the last four days. The poor guy didn't even have time to get over jetlag before we had to leave again - but at least he did get to see my parents for the first time in a couple of years.

The Christmas tree.

Making the Christmas cake.

The finished result.

My father carving the Christmas turkey.

What's in the cracker?

A keyring!

Chrysanthemums, persimmons and potatoes

2007-12-10T11:10:00.000+09:00

On the way to Kei's school stands an ordinary house with a black gate. Most of the year, the gate is closed, and there's nothing to distinguish the house from its neighbours. In November, though, the owners started leaving the gate open to reveal a mass of gorgeous chrysanthemums. Most of them are bigger than Dan. I love the way you can find surprises like this even in the most ordinary-looking streets. Who knows what other secret talents my neighbours might be hiding behind their gates?

This house isn't in our neighbourhood, but my parents-in-laws, whom we visited at the weekend so they could see the boys before I take them back to England for Christmas. It's strung with persimmons, drying to be eaten at New Year. You still see this a lot in the countryside, but where Kentaro's parents live in Shiga Prefecture it's already quite unusual.

The parents-in-law have an allotment, so the boys got to dig up a row of potatoes and dig the ground over afterward. The spade was a bit big for Dan, but there was no way he was going to give up!

Chopsticks

2007-11-30T22:42:00.000+09:00

Dan's kindergarten is very big on shitsuke. It's a word that when you use it about dogs means something like "obedience training." For children, I'm finding, it means teaching them how to be good little Japanese citizens, with all the skills nicely brought up Japanese girls and boys are supposed to absorb by example from their well-behaved Japanese parents.

Every month Dan brings home a shitsuke sheet with that month's objective, a little drawing to color in each day to show he's practised it, and a space for my comments at the bottom. Once it's filled in, it goes back to the kindergarten for his teacher to add her comments, and is then brought home again to be tied together with its fellows with a cute little ribbon. Of course I always forget about it until the day after it's due, so Dan colors in the whole lot in one fell swoop and takes it in late with my apologetic little note added to the comments. (Like most of the kindergarten mothers, I'm now highly practised at little apologetic notes.)

At the beginning the objectives were pretty easy: "Let's get dressed by ourselves!" "Let's put our shoes on the right way round!" "Let's eat up all our supper every night!" Having been in daycare, Dan has been dressing himself since he was two and eats second helpings every night, so I've been patting myself on the back on staying ahead of the game. Until this month's sheet arrived.

"Let's use chopsticks properly!"

Now, chopstick use is something I've never completely mastered myself. That's despite all the times I get told "Ah, you're so good at eating with chopsticks!" One of the first things you realize about comments like this, not to mention "Ah, you speak Japanese so well!" if you open your mouth to say "Good morning," is that they're covert expressions of surprise that as a foreigner you can manage it at all. In fact, the better you get at speaking Japanese, the less you find you're complimented on it; and when someone does exclaim how well you speak, it inevitably means you've just made a mistake and your listener is covering up their embarrassment. It's rather shaming, then, that people still tell me that I'm good with chopsticks, because what that actually means is they're wincing at the clumsiness with which I'm curling my second and third fingers at the wrong angle, which grates on their sensibilities even if I do actually get the food in my mouth 99% of the time.

I didn't even try teaching Kei how to use chopsticks, hoping that as he went to daycare the teachers would take care of it there. They were fantastic at potty training and buttoning coats, but apparently chopsticks were't part of the deal: the way Kei holds them is far from the approved Japanese grip. (And this being Japan, there is of course only one approved grip; everything else, even if it works, is Wrong with a capital W.) My mother-in-law tries to reteach him every time we visit, but it seems it's one of those things that's really hard to relearn the correct way once you've learned it wrong.

So working on correct chopstick use with Dan is a bit of a challenge. Fortunately, having learned from my experience with Kei, when Dan was two I bought him a pair of training chopsticks, with loops to put your fingers through to hold them in the right positions. They seem to have worked, as my mother-in-law regularly praises him enthusiastically for his expert grip. Unfortunately they don't make them in large enough sizes for adult.

I console myself by reminding myself that not all Japanese people are perfectly proficient with chopsticks either, and by watching this video from the comedy duo The Rahmenz. Perhaps I should just give up and go with their "International Style"...

City view

2007-11-24T18:17:00.001+09:00

The Sunday afternoon view across Osaka from Satsukiyama, a few miles north of our house.

Children's book meme

2007-11-20T13:21:00.000+09:00

Concerned about the extra-long silence on this blog, Laura over at Rehearsal Times Over has gone and tagged me for another meme, this time to name seven favourite children's books. It's an interesting question - my favourites when I was a child, or those I love best now? Or the ones Kei and Dan enjoy most, which would be a completely different list?

For the time being, here's an integrated list with a few of each of our top favourites, old and new.

1. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl

Or indeed anything else by Roald Dahl. One of the unexpected joys of having children has been the chance to catch up on books and films I missed out on as a child myself. I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when I was about nine and loved it, and both boys are fascinated by it too. But now we're discovering a whole world of other Roald Dahl titles - I've just finished reading James and the Giant Peach as our latest bedtime story, and it's been great to read both Matilda and The BFG for the first time.

2. The Snail and the Whale, by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler

Dan loves this rhyming story of a sea snail with a yearning for travel, who hitches a lift on the tail of a humpback whale and ends up saving its life. And I have to admit I get a kick out of reading save-the-whale stories to my kids in whale-eating Japan. (Kentaro sees nothing wrong with whaling - it's one of our major points of contention, and I'm resigned to the fact it'll never be resolved.)

3. The Indian in the Cupboard, by Lynn Reid Banks

Laura lent me this, and I can't thank her enough. I'd read The L-Shaped Room, a grown-up novel by the same author, and enjoyed it, but I wasn't prepared for either how strongly her children's writing would grasp Kei's imagination or the sheer excellence of her prose. Other books I read straight afterwards, even ones that had been old favourites, seemed dull and lumpish by comparison.

4. The Horrid Henry series, by Francesca Simon

Horrid Henry books are what Kei currently reads for himself, when he's not immersed in a Dragonball manga borrowed from his calligraphy classroom. Henry loves violent toys, junk food, and gory computer games; he loathes school, vegetables, and his oh-so-well-behaved little brother, Perfect Peter. He's every mother's nightmare, and every seven-year-old boy's secret idea of how he'd actually like to behave...

5. Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, by Richard Scarry

This is another of Dan's favourites. It and other Richard Scarry titles are nice because they work on lots of different levels - you can read them like a story, play I-Spy (to find the little yellow beetle Goldbug), or spend ages looking at all the different illustrations on each page.

6. No, David! by David Shannon

This is well loved in Japanese translation too. Not that there's much to translate - almost every page shows David doing somthing naughty, with variations on the caption "No, David!" But its ending of "Yes, David, I love you" is really reassuring for the boys if they've just spent most of the evening being told "No" for themselves...

7. Charlotte's Web, by E.B. White

One of the best children's stories EVER. Enough said!

I'm not going to tag anyone myself, as I've been out of blogging circulation for so long I have no idea who's already done this one and who hasn't. But please add your own favourites in the comments if you like.

still here....

2007-09-26T12:52:00.000+09:00

A few people have expressed concern that I've been uncharacteristically quiet recently. We're still here, and all fine, it's just that work got really, really busy just as school and kindergarten events started coming thick and fast as well. We've had sports day at Kei's school and grandparents' day at Dan's kindergarten, along with various excursions and extra days off. I'll post a proper update when things calm down a bit!

World Athletics Championships (2)

2007-08-27T11:43:00.000+09:00

Well, we went, and it was worth going. Seeing athletes live in the stadium is a completely different experience from watching on TV. On the screen, they look like superheroes, people from a different dimension. But in the flesh, they're humans like you and I, and the dedication it's taken them to achieve their strength and speed suddenly feels real. I'm far more in awe of their prowess now than I was before.

Getting to the Championships was quite an undertaking, though. The line for the south gate, where our tickets said we could enter, snaked for over a kilometer around the stadium. The boys and I tramped to the end, then had a call from Kentaro's mother - who turned out to be waiting for us at the north gate. I had Kentaro's parents' tickets as well as mine, so we tramped another 30 minutes around the outside of the stadium, getting a close-up view of the Emperor and Empress waving from their motorcade on the way. Though we'd left the car at 3:40, we finally got into our seats just as the opening ceremony was starting at 5:00. The boys were real troopers, and kept walking with hardly any complaining despite the heat and distance.

The opening ceremony itself was fun. Kentaro described it as "typical Osaka, all mixed up." It started with acrobats dressed in the kuidaore doll costume, and proceeded through a taiko performance with dancers spelling out words and characters such as "throw" and "run" in both Japanese and English; cheerleaders; singers and dancers from the all-female Takarazuka Review; Sarah Brightman singing impossibly high notes, accompanied by a gaggle of schoolchildren waving green branches; a song by a pop star called Yuji Oda; and finally a famous kabuki actor leading a clapping ritual that no-one was able to keep time to because the images on the screens were about half a second behind the actual performance.

I'd taken toys and books for the boys in case they got bored, but they didn't need them - the ceremony and then the actual competition kept them spellbound right up to the end, late into the night. They cheered for both Japanese and British athletes, but it was the Japanese who attracted their most fervent support. One moment early on made me laugh. Kei started chanting "Ganbare Nihon!" ("Come on, Japan!"), and Dan shouted indignantly "It's not Nihon, it's Japan!" Kentaro's mother explained that "Nihon" is "Japan" in Japanese, at which Dan's eyes and mouth formed perfect little O shapes of surprise and comprehension. I hadn't realized he didn't even know how to say the name of his own country in its own language ... sometimes bilingualism has unexpected pitfalls ...

At least when we go back tonight for the hammer final, both boys will be able to cheer for Koji Murofushi in the correct language.

World Athletics Championships

2007-08-24T19:27:00.000+09:00

We're going to the opening ceremony of the World Athletics Championships tomorrow night (Saturday), and again on Monday night for the final of the hammer competition. The hammer is the only discipline in which Japan has a remote chance of a medal, except perhaps the women's marathon, and Koji Murofushi, the Olympic champion, is biracial like my kids, son of a Japanese father and Romanian mother. (Though in his case both were Olympic athletes, father in the hammer and mother in the javelin.) It'll be good for the boys to see a biracial role model who isn't a TV talent, not to mention a once-in-a-lifetime chance - how often is a World Championships of any description held in Osaka?

Keep an eye out for us if you watch the ceremony!

Holiday snaps

2007-08-22T16:47:00.000+09:00

There's nothing more boring than having to look through someone else's holiday snaps. We had such a good time, though, that I can't resist posting a few. Please forgive the self-indulgence....

Kentaro had three days of summer holiday this year. In Japan, for a doctor of his seniority, that's a reasonable amount. His first year after qualification, he asked his superior in the hospital where he was working at the time about holidays, only to be greeted with scornful laughter. "What does someone like you want with a holiday? Who do you think you are?" he was asked, rhetorically. OK, that was the hospital from hell, and where he is now is far better in every way - but holidays are still like gold dust. We treasure every tiny break from work: his unexpected return home before the boys are asleep, the rare Sunday when he doesn't go into the hospital at all, the one day a year it closes to commemorate its foundation.

Those three days, added to the weekend, were enough for us to embark on a 1,200-km road trip down to Yamaguchi Prefecture, at the southernmost tip of Japan's main island of Honshu, and back. On the way we took in caves, uplands, beaches, hills, rivers, and an old samurai town. The high spot for the boys was seeing so many stars - in Osaka they're all but obliterated from the night sky by the city lights, but in rural Yamaguchi the Milky Way spread out across the sky each night. On our final evening we visited an observatory with a 75-cm telescope, through which we gazed enrapt at the craters on the Moon, Jupiter surrounded by its moons, a star cluster, and a binary star. Those we couldn't photograph, but they're the part of the holiday that has engraved itself most deeply on our family's collective memory.

The entrance to the Akiyoshi-do cave system. I took lots of photographs inside, but it was too dark for them to come out properly. The caves themselves are spectacular, but the lighting and signs are desperately drab - they look as if they've been put in by some overworked bureaucrat with neither imagination nor business sense. The nicest thing about the caves was the temperature: 17 degrees, as opposed to the sweltering 35 degrees outside.

Akiyoshi-dai, Japan's largest limestone upland. This grassy landscape may look ordinary to Westerners, but to Japanese eyes it's rather exotic in comparison with the usual steep slopes wooded with cypress and bamboo.

Pony rides.

Kentaro on a sightseeing boat going round Omijima, on the northern coast of Yamaguchi.

The Omijima coastline.

Omijima was traditionally a whaling center, and the town still holds a yearly whaling festival. Kei is looking at a harpoon outside the Whale Museum (really a museum of whaling, exhibiting fearsome harpoons and whale skeletons), with the model whale used during the festival in the background. The shop behind sells whale meat, and will deliver nationwide, but doesn't seem to be doing very good business - a sign on the door announced 40% off all whale products.

Morning over a small harbor up the coast, from the balcony of our hotel.

Dan on the beach.

Kei discovered snorkeling this year. He could hardly bear to be parted from his mask and snorkel, even out of the water.

You can just see him swimming in the foreground. The water was wonderfully clear, with colorful small fish darting around the rocks.

Tsuwano, an old samurai town just across the border in Shimane Prefecture.

A path lined with torii gates climbs up to a shrine.

The ruins of Tsuwano Castle, perched on a hill overlooking the town.

Little samurai coming down from the castle.

Birthday boy

2007-08-20T11:47:00.000+09:00

Dan turned four earlier this month. He's always trying to catch up with his older brother, so for his birthday presents he got a scooter (like Kei's, but a different color) from my parents and a remote-controlled racing car (like Kei's, but a different color) from us. He's so proud to be an oniichan, or big boy.

Cool water on a hot day

2007-08-13T21:33:00.000+09:00

We came back from camp on Saturday night. Two leisurely days and nights on the shores of Lake Biwa with good friends, followed by an impromptu stay with Kentaro's parents, who came out to join us at the lake on the second afternoon and invited us to come by on the way home, have left both the boys and me brown and relaxed, ready again for all the city can throw at us.

Spending time with other bicultural families is really important to me. Partly it's for the boys' sake - if they are to grow up confident in their double Japanese/English identities they need to be around people who look and think like them, other children who see understanding two languages as neither strange nor particularly cool and who don't see their round eyes and brown hair as a cue to yell Eigo de hanashite! ("say something in English!"). Although Japanese society is becoming more open, marriage between Japanese and Westerners is still relatively rare, and our children (known as haafu, meaning "half") do stand out. When they are little, strangers exclaim how cute they are; but as they grow older, they become aware that they are different from their friends, in an environment where for the most part conformity equals correctness. So I take every opportunity to find multicultural friends and role models for Kei and Dan, in an attempt to counteract the ambivalence of the mainstream message that they are exotically attractive the one hand, and potential outsiders on the other.

It's also a treat for me, though. Being in an intercultural marriage is one situation that carries particular stresses and issues which are hard for people who haven't experienced them to understand, and being a foreigner in Japan is another. So to spend time with other people, particularly women, who are in the same circumstances and who empathise without the need for everything to be spelled out, is like taking a dip in a cool lake on a long, hot day. Groups such as the Association of Foreign Wives of Japanese (AFWJ) and the Married in Japan mailing list, which has to be one of the most supportive Internet groups ever, are real sanity savers. Any worry is lightened when you share it with people who not only understand, but have been through exactly the same thing and can offer a variety of solutions you'd never have thought of for yourself. Not to mention laughing wryly with you, hugging you, rejoicing with you, and on occasion crying with you, rekindling the spark of your own humanity so you can start to laugh again in turn.

I've officially been the Kansai AFWJ camp coordinator for the past couple of years, and previous camps have had up to eight or nine families with over a dozen kids participating. This summer, though, many people seem to have either gone back to their home countries, moved away, or had new babies, and this time we were camping with Margarite from Holland, her sons Kai and Dylan, who are slightly older than my two, and Reina, an American whose elementary-school daughter was away visiting relatives in the US. Sandra from Hong Kong joined us for a barbecue on the first night, and my in-laws came swimming the second afternoon and brought fireworks with them. Having fewer people than usual actually meant a lot less stress, and after swimming most of the day we sang and chatted the evenings away with a small amount of wine and a good deal of laughter.

The last night, another multicultural family came and camped on the same beach: a German mother with her two half-Japanese daughters (one married to a Chilean guy and with her own Japanese/German/Chilean daughter) and her young German/American son. They'd been touring Japan in the van for two weeks, camping here and there and enjoying the country as they found it. It was refreshing to meet them, and to feel even more strongly the openness some international families possess simply because of who they are.

The morning after we arrived, I was awakened before dawn by a group of three (Japanese) teenagers cavorting noisily about the beach. Though I crawled out of the tent to shush them so they wouldn't wake the children (who were actually so tired after the previous day's swimming that they probably wouldn't have opened their eyes for anything less than a major earthquake), I couldn't be angry. The sunrise was quiet and certain, pine trees painted black against the rosy gold of the clouds. It was the perfect way to start another day of both being foreign and belonging here, bringing up children whose bicultural experience of the world will be totally different from my own but who are linked to me by both heritage and love. I'm sure that as they grow they will find their own ways of coping, their own cool water to refresh their spirits. But for now, a lakeside camp with friends will do all of us just fine.

Jinxed?

2007-08-07T22:12:00.000+09:00

I'm starting to worry about the rate at which my electrical devices are biting the dust. After the washing machine fiasco, I managed to kill my mobile phone on Sunday night with a flask of tea, which leaked inside my bag on the way to yet another local summer festival. No sooner had I invested in a new phone than my webcam started playing up, turning itself off within three seconds every time I connected it. Our internet connection suddenly went on the blink on Sunday too, necessitating some frantic rooting among the detritus of empty computer peripheral boxes for a manual with the NTT technical support number on the back.

It's a good job the boys and I are off camping tomorrow with another international family for a couple of days, to give the jinx or whatever it is time to lift before something really vital packs up. Though I think Kentaro would forgive me anything except the dishwasher. Clearing up after meals is his job on those evenings when he's home in time to eat, so if I did anything to that particular machine we'd be in big trouble.

A dog's breakfast

2007-07-31T21:40:00.000+09:00

No, the title doesn't refer to Abe's ridiculous response to the election results, though I'm amazed that he's still hanging on by his toenails despite leading the LDP to their second worst defeat ever. Three out of five of the major national Japanese dailies are now calling for his resignation, and it's hard to see how on earth he can keep going given the almost universal public rejection he now faces. But this is about something altogether sweeter than politics.

Fancy one of those delicious-looking desserts? Sorry, they aren't for you - unless you happen to have brought your pet. This photo was taken in an upscale pet shop in Osaka that makes cakes specially for dogs. Your pampered pooch can select from a range of cheesecakes, banana cake, and other treats, some shaped cutely like little bones, and they can even be decorated with a birthday message to show just how much you care.

I rarely experience "Only in Japan!" moments these days, but coming across this shop was definitely one.

Now, if they sold cakes for cats, that I could understand. I might even have brought one home for Ume-chan. Though it has to be said she's quite plump enough already.

Election night

2007-07-29T23:05:00.002+09:00

I'm watching the results of the Upper House election as they come in on NHK this evening, and Abe's Liberal Democratic Party is losing badly. Abe is swearing he'll stay in office to "fulfill his mission to create a new country," but even the usually obsequious NHK commentators are asking him pointed questions about his unpopularity with the electorate and hinting less than subtly that he ought to resign. His eyes look hunted, and he's on the ropes.

I really hope he does go. He's a ideologue who cares more about his pet right-wing policies (teaching patriotism in schools, revising the Constitution to get rid of the pacifist Article 9, pushing North Korea over the abduction issue) than basic issues like the economy and Japan's greying society. And he's proved surprisingly inept in his Cabinet appointments - after one farm minister committed suicide rather than face corruption allegations, he appointed another who was immediately exposed as engaged in precisely the same kind of corruption, for example.

The problem is that the leader of the Democratic Party, Ichiro Ozawa, is himself a former Liberal Democrat politician who was heavily involved in that party's money politics before jumping ship when the faction to which he belonged became discredited by multiple corruption scandals. Ozawa is a very clever politician, but it's unlikely any opposition led by him will be motivated to clean up the corruption that's endemic to Japanese politics. Seeing Abe losing by such a landslide is exhilarating, but the lack of a decent alternative is thoroughly depressing.

But then I don't have a vote in Japan, so my opinion isn't worth the pixels it's appearing on your screen in anyway....

Forest escape

2007-07-28T09:09:00.001+09:00

Now the rains have lifted, we open the curtains each morning to deep blue skies and the incessant metallic shrilling of cicadas. By eleven you could fry an egg on the balcony, and to open the front door in the afternoon is to step into the hot blast from a sauna. Most days the boys and I stay inside until early evening, but with the windows shut tight to keep the air conditioning in we all find ourselves getting a little frayed by the end of the day. So on Wednesday I drove them up to Mino Park, in the hills that bound Osaka to the north, for some forest therapy.

Mino is the closest summer getaway to Osaka, and one of the nicest for a day trip. A path winds up through deep woods along a swift-flowing river, with deep pools teeming with stippled brown fish, past an insect museum and onward to a high waterfall. Getting the boys out of the car and started up the path was hard - the first few hundred meters were punctuated by continual complaints that they were tired, their thermoses were too heavy, their fishing nets were too hard to carry, the monkeys who live in the forest were sure to attack us - but once we were a little way into the woods, their negativity fell away and the peace of the river carried us laughing and playing up the hill.

First stop was the insect museum. Though the boys enjoyed the tanks of beetles and scary-looking centipedes, their real aim was to get to the butterfly house, where hundreds of butterflies fly freely and the boys tried again and again to lift them gently up from flowers onto their outstretched fingers.

Then we trekked on up the hill to the waterfall. On the way up we'd passed a monkey, sitting high on a rock wall overlooking the path. The forest monkeys can sometimes be quite aggressive in trying to steal food, but if you're not openly holding something edible they generally leave people alone. This one followed us up the path a little way, before it decided that we weren't all that interesting and settled down at a corner to wait for the next group to come along.

After the steep walk, we ate lunch sitting in the cool spray from the waterfall before deciding we deserved ices. The shop where we bought Dan's chocolate icecream and Kei's strawberry kakigori (ice shavings topped with syrup) had something I've never seen before: a mineral-water foot spa below one of the tables, where you could sip your drink while cooling off your feet from the mountain climb. We ate our ices outside for fear of spilling, and then spent a happy ten minutes splashing our feet in the cool spring water.

By the time the boys had played for an hour in the river, made friends with a half-Japanese, half-Russian boy they met there, and run with him all the way down the path to the bottom of the mountain again, they were both exhausted and deeply content. This is what summer holidays are meant to be like; the perfect antidote to the confinement of the city.

Money down the drain

2007-07-23T17:13:00.001+09:00

A very pleasant repair guy came out from the manufacturers today and got the washing machine working again. Turns out it wasn't mainly the paper blocking it, but coins to the value of 210 yen, against which the paper had wadded up. Kentaro has been muttering that we've been wasting money recently, and I guess this proves his point - in our household it's literally going down the drain.

The 5,400 yen (a bit over 21 pounds, or 45 dollars) it cost to clean out the washing machine definitely falls into the "down the drain" category, too. Still, it's times like this I'm glad to live in Japan. I can't imagine a British plumber coming out the next working day and doing that sort of job for the same sort of price.

"Look, Mummy, Pokemon writing!"

2007-07-20T20:12:00.000+09:00

What NOT to do at the start of the summer holidays...

2007-07-20T19:24:00.000+09:00

.... decide your child's book bag looks a bit grubby and throw it in the washing machine while he's eating lunch, without checking first to see if there's anything inside.

(BIG mistake number 1.)

Kei finished school this morning for the summer holidays, and was invited to a friend's house for the afternoon. After lunch he came skipping up: "Where's my book bag, Mummy?"

I assumed he wanted it to carry his Nintendo and snacks to his friend's house.

"It's in the washing machine. You'll have to take your rucksack."

His face crumpled in shock.

"But my summer homework's in it! We're all going to Shinya's to get started on our homework together. Shinya told me specially to bring it."

He'd taken his satchel to school this morning as well as his book bag, and until today had always brought his homework home in that. In my hurry to get everything washed, I hadn't realized the book bag was heavier than it should be. I rushed frantically to the washing machine. Maybe I could somehow separate the pages and dry them out?

But the finished load at the bottom of the machine was smothered in small flakes of pink and grey paper. I fished out his book bag and opened it. Empty. I'd turned Kei's summer homework into papier mache, and the holidays hadn't even started yet.

Ooops. And I thought I'd been doing so well at this kindergarten/school mother thing lately.

I pacified Kei's floods of angry tears with abject apologies and the promise to go straight round to his school that afternoon to pick up another set, and took him over to his friend's house. Shinya's mother collapsed into uncontrollable giggles when I told her why Kei didn't have his homework with him. I left him playing Nintendo with five other first-graders, and went over to the school to tell them what had happened.

Kei's teacher had to try very hard to stifle her laughter too. Fortunately she had a spare set of homework prints, but then came the really embarrassing part.

"What else was in there? Is anything missing?"

"I have no idea," I confessed miserably. "The pieces are far too small to tell what they were. But there must have been a colored sheet in there, because a lot of them are pink ...."

"Ah, the health record. That's very important. You need to stamp your seal on it, and bring it back at the beginning of next term. I'll have to make out another one for you, and it'll take a little time."

Bowing repeatedly in shame, I promised to come back later and pick it up. The teacher saw me out, hand over mouth, her eyes dancing with mirth as she sympathetically assured me that everyone makes mistakes sometimes. I bet she can't wait to add this story to her "idiot parents" repertoire.

But my idiocy wasn't over yet. When I got home with Dan, I looked at the disgusting pile at the bottom of the machine, thought about how much work it would take to pick all the pieces off by hand, and decided to do what I usually do if I leave a tissue in the wash - run the washer repeatedly on the rinse cycle until all the paper is washed away.

(BIG mistake number 2.)

Half an hour later, as I was hard at work at an already overdue translation, the washing machine started beeping. I opened the lid with a feeling of foreboding. It was full of water heavily clouded with paper flakes. I stopped the cycle, set it to Drain, and pressed Start. Nothing happened.

Oooooooops.

So although Kei has another set of homework to keep him happy (and I even went back to pick up his reissued health record too), we now have a totally clogged-up washing machine. So far this evening I've fished out all the paper-covered clothes and rinsed them in the bath, bailed the water out of the washer with a bowl and poured it down the sink (through a fishing net to avoid blocking the drains as well!), and unscrewed the beater part at the bottom of the drum to see if I could clear the place where the water drains out. No luck at this point. Once the boys have gone to bed, I'll turn it on its side and unscrew the drain pipe from the bottom, to see if I can clear it out from that end. Watch this space and wish me luck....

Thank goodness, Kentaro is on night duty tonight, so with a bit of luck I can get it sorted out before he comes home tomorrow. He'll add it to his catalogue of proofs of my lack of common sense, and my inability to think about what I'm doing until it's too late. Days like this, I really think he might be right.

Update: We'll have to call out someone to repair the wretched thing. I did manage to unscrew the drain section from the bottom and remove a five-yen coin that had got stuck there, which I was hopeful would do the trick - but no, the water still isn't draining out. Rats.

A single strawberry

2007-07-13T16:45:00.000+09:00

Finally, I made it to a kindergarten mothers' craft session this morning. It started at 9:30 a.m., but as the text message from the class representative said "Just coming for part of the time is fine," I finished off a translation before getting there at 11. All the others were already there, heads bent intently over their sewing.

"Do you do embroidery?" asked Haruhito's mother brightly.

"Uh ... no, not really, but I'll try ...."

Another woman handed me a small semicircle of red felt.

"Start out by sewing white seeds on, like this."

She showed me a sheet of paper covered in complicated patterns for what looked like different varieties of fruit.

Meekly I took a needle and some embroidery thread from the basket on the low table, and set to work. I didn't have a clue what I was supposed to be making.

"It's a strawberry, look."

Hideaki's mother, quietly kneeling next to me, passed me a piece of delectable-looking sponge cake covered in whipped cream, strawberries, and pink flowers, made of felt and painstakingly sewn together with tiny embroidery stitches. I gulped and nodded.

"Are you all right? You're staring into space ..." giggled Haruhito's mother.

An hour later, after a few false starts and a lot of surreptitious glances at how the others were doing it, I'd managed to put together a passable strawberry. Next to me on one side, Hideaki's mother was finishing a luscious melon. Haruhito's mother was putting the final touches to a bunch of perfect tiny grapes on the other. The others had already finished their tasks and were endulging in some rather bawdy speculation about a woman whose twins had turned out to have different fathers.

My strawberry, the melon, and the grapes were added to the fruit basket, and our class bazar craft-making was finished for this year. The results were amazing. As if the cake and fruits weren't enough, there was also a hamburger with at least eight layers, and two different lunchboxes. My favorite is the tiny octopus. (In real life, mothers cut sausages so they look like octopuses to make their children's lunchboxes fun - it's a knack I've yet to master. The felt one is even cuter than the sausages!)

Lavender bags definitely wouldn't have made the grade. I'm so glad that's over for this year, but am wondering how on earth we can top this next time. When I'll definitely have to do better than a single measly strawberry.

To be honest, though, I enjoyed myself. No-one was annoyed that work and inexperience meant I couldn't manage more of a contribution, and now we've all got past our initial politeness with each other, the class mothers are turning into a friendly, lively group with a surprisingly down-to-earth sense of humor. Crafts and bazars notwithstanding, I think this year is going to be all right.

Tanabata

2007-07-06T22:13:00.000+09:00

July 7 is when Japan celebrates the Tanabata festival. Branches of bamboo grass are festooned with paper decorations, and children write their wishes for the year on long strips of paper that they hang from the branches. This is the Tanabata branch at our local public library, which has been up for the past couple of weeks (a bit like Christmas trees going up early in the UK).

The festival itself dates from medieval times, when it was a ritual of the stately Heian court, but the story it celebrates is actually an old Chinese folk tale. There are many versions, of which this is one.

The Heavenly Emperor had a beautiful daughter, the Weaver Princess (Orihime, the star Vega). She wove such lovely clothes that her father was very proud of her. Because she worked so hard, however, she had never had the time to fall in love, and she became sad and lonely. When the Emperor became aware of her sadness he arranged her marriage with a cowherd (Hikoboshi, the star Altair). The two of them fell deeply in love and were blissfully happy - so happy that the Weaver Princess neglected her work, and the Emperor no longer had any beautiful clothes to wear. Angry with the lovers, he ordered them to be separated, and they were forced to live on either side of the River of Heaven (the Milky Way). But he agreed to allow them to meet just once a year, and on the seventh day of the seventh month the heavenly boatman of the moon)comes to ferry the Weaver Princess across the Milky Way to meet her beloved cowherd.

If the Weaver Princess neglects her work during the year, the Emperor may cause it to rain to prevent their meeting. If this happens, however, magpies may fly into the heavens and make a bridge for the Princess to cross for her assignation with her husband.

Clearly the Japanese work ethic hasn't changed much since medieval times! Career women working too hard to have time for romance is commonplace these days, and husband and wife being separated because of work sounds a lot like tanshin funin, though that generally involves the husband moving away to follow his job while wife and children stay put to ensure the stability of the children's education. I wonder how much work (and love as a once-yearly reward for work) was emphasized in the original Chinese legend, and how much is Japanese adaptation?

Dan's kindergarten festival last week was actually a Tanabata celebration. The kindergarten yard was bright with lanterns and decorations, and the children dressed up in yukata summer kimono to perform songs and dances in front of their watching families.

Kei got into the mood and wore his yukata too. This is the two boys looking rather bored, waiting for things to start. Dan has noticed someone else with a camera and is reflexively starting to make the peace sign.

The festival started with all the children singing the kindergarten song.

Then came the class performances. Boys and girls in Dan's year danced separately, with the girls doing a fetching flower dance to Okinawan music while the boys were fighting ninjas. Gender stereotyping? In a Japanese kindergarten? Whatever gave you that idea?

Next everyone danced the Soran Bushi bon odori dance together, with its memorable lyrics: "Yaren soran soran soran soran soran hai hai!", after which there were fireworks. Fireworks displays are another traditional Japanese summer event, and the large ones are spectacular, but as this was a kindergarten we just had a few Roman candles.

Then all the kindergarteners got a lantern to take home, and we trailed our way back to the car with the boys arguing the whole way about whose turn it was to hold it. (They were pretty tired by that stage.)

We now have our own little bamboo branch up at home, with decorations hand-made by Dan at kindergarten. His wish says "I want to be Geki Blue!" (one of the Gekiranger superheros on TV - we don't even watch it at home, but playing rangers is one ofthe most popular games for three-year-old boys). Kei's says "I want to be a soccer player."

My wish this year is for good health and no major upheavals. I think Ume-chan the cat's is to be left in peace to sleep! What's yours?

Various updates

2007-07-03T09:37:00.000+09:00

It's a busy week translation-wise, so just time for a few quick updates on previous posts.

All our suzumushi this year have turned out to be females. That's probably because you're supposed to spray the earth holding the eggs with water once a month or so throughout the winter, but as I put the tank in the back of the cupboard and completely forgot about it the soil dried out completely. Usually we've had forty or fifty little crickets hatching - this year there's only six. And, as I said, they're all females. Those girls must be strong to have survived such neglect! Fortunately the pet shop near Kei's school sells suzumushi, so when they're old enough I'll buy a few males and arrange a matchmaking session, to be sure we have some eggs again in the autumn. This winter I'll put a note on the cupboard door to remind me to keep spraying...

The beetle larvae are still showing no signs of pupating, though they grow monstrously fatter by the day.

Two of the tadpoles have turned into frogs, though one died before we could get it to a pond. The last one is still stubbornly refusing to grow its front legs yet, lurking at the bottom of its tank like a teenager who's reluctant to grow up and leave home.

And I finally have an idea about what crafts I'm supposed to be making for the kindergarten bazar! Work deadlines meant I missed the last two class meetings, but at the boys' swimming lesson last week I ran into another mother who told me they'd spent several hours cutting out tiny cakes and lunchbox items out of felt. (Japanese lunchboxes are pieces of art in themselves, in case you're wondering just why anyone would bother making toy ones.) There's another craft-making session next week, and to try to redeem myself I'm going to really make an effort to get there. Not that I think I'm capable of cutting out beautiful little felt food items, but perhaps I can glue them into boxes or something.

Dan's kindergarten has some photographs up here of his summer festival, held last Thursday. This is one of the best ones of him, doing a ninja dance with the other boys in his class. I'll try and get some of my own photos up in the next few days.

Goal!

2007-06-29T08:34:00.000+09:00

I have to confess, I'd never been a soccer fan. Watching it on TV always seemed marginally less interesting than watching laundry go round in the washing machine. In fact, I once said as much to a then-boyfriend who came out to ask why I was sitting by myself in the kitchen, rather than joining him and his flatmates watching Cameroon playing in the World Cup. (An incident that probably had a lot to do with the collapse of our relationship soon after.)

But being in Japan has converted me to the "beautiful game." It started with Japan's qualification for the World Cup finals. In 1994 Japan had lost out on a place in the finals when Iraq scored against them in the final minute of the last qualifying match, so when the winning goal went in in extra time in the final qualifier for 1998 the entire nation was on its feet. Watching the match on TV late at night with Kentaro (which for me at the time was genuine proof of love) it was impossible not to catch something of his joy and enthusiasm. And that of the other residents of his shaky old apartment building with its paper-thin walls - the cheering from the other apartments practically took the roof off.

Then in 2002 the World Cup was actually held in Japan. England held their training camp on Awaji Island, close to Osaka, and I was one of scores of translators dragooned into registering as temporary police interpreters because the prefectural police were terrified that the English would descend on the city and trash it. I remember being in an "international exchange" session that suumer with a group of high school students, who on being asked what their image was of England as a country chorused in unison "Hooligans!" In the event, there were almost no arrests at all, England supporters partied peacefully with Japanese in the streets, Japan made the second round (we always try to forget about arch-rival South Korea getting to the quarterfinals), and the future of soccer in this country was assured.

Kei and Dan both think of themselves as budding Beckhams or Nakamuras, and in April Kei started soccer school two weekends a month. Through the soccer school, we were given free tickets to see our local team, Gamba Osaka, playing FC Tokyo last weekend. It wasn't something I'd have thought of myself - but since we had the tickets, and Kei would have sulked for at least a year if we hadn't gone....

It was great!! I'd had no idea the atmosphere would be so good-natured. Families with two-year-olds dressed in Gamba jerseys that hung below their knees, young couples on dates, elderly women with orange-dyed hair chatting loudly in broad Osaka dialect, high school girls giggling and taking pictures of each other with their cellphones, men in their forties and fifties sitting quietly but erupting with the rest when Gamba had a chance at goal ... the crowd couldn't have been further removed from my 1980s British image of drunken yobs out for a fight. We were too late to find anywhere to sit, but even standing for the whole match didn't feel like a hardship.

Gamba Osaka is currently top of the J-League, and they went all out to show the home crowd a good time. FC Tokyo scored two early goals, but Gamba clawed one back just before half-time, and then came out again for a second-half goalfest that left the FC Tokyo defence looking as if they wanted to crawl off the pitch and hide. The final score was 6-2, and it would have been seven if another goal hadn't been disallowed for a dodgy offside call. The crowd was ecstatic, and so were we.

So I'm sure this won't be our last soccer match. Kei is already asking to go to a Gamba game as his birthday treat in September, and will be off to soccer school on Sunday with even more enthusiasm than before (if that's possible). Now the boys just have to choose whether they want to play for Japan or England when they grow up.

Wheeeeeeeeee

2007-06-25T22:10:00.001+09:00

Now this beats the Wii hands down.

You know you've been in Japan too long when...

2007-06-25T17:24:00.000+09:00

... you find it hard to take time off work for personal reasons like going to visit your parents or having babies.

... it seems strange to see a dog with no clothes on.

... you start to analyze everyone's personality according to blood type.

... your favorite beer snack has tentacles.

... you’re not surprised to have to sit in the bank for the whole of your lunch break just to pay one bill.

... you automatically make a peace sign when anyone points a camera at you.

... you bow at passing traffic when you want to thank them for letting you cut in front of them.

... you are no longer annoyed by people praising your chopsticks skills.

... you visit an aquarium and catch yourself thinking how good everything would taste as sashimi.

... you sniffle rather than blowing your nose.

... you can feel the cool breeze of autumn in early August.

... you think, "Those plastic drawers look nice!”

... potato salad in a sandwich doesn't seem odd anymore.

... long-grain rice tastes weird.

... green doughnuts and purple bread are normal.

... you buy an otohime for your own house because you can't physically use the toilet without one.

... you realize that in recent movies from your home country you have no idea what some of the slang means.

... if someone asks you to do something you don't want to do, you suck your teeth and say "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh, soooooooooooo nanda," and then you say it again.

... you no longer feel like grabbing an air rifle every time the election trucks drive through the neighborhood.

... you’re disappointed if the ENT doesn't suck all the snot out of your nose with a suction wand.

... you’re rushed off to the hospital and overhear the paramedic inside the ambulance on the phone to the hospital saying “Nationality? I think she's a Japanese, but her face looks foreign....!”

(With grateful thanks to Kathy, Cath, Laura, NT, Jo, Janina, Jennifer, Linda, Christine, Bo, Mel, and all the other members of the wonderful MIJ community, who came up with the much longer list from which these are taken.)

Play dates

2007-06-22T22:03:00.001+09:00

When I was a kid (starts the rant), we always seemed to be playing outside. Our street was a cul-de-sac of solid semidetacheds where the neighbors could always be relied to look out for our pack of kids as we bombed up and down on our bikes, pretending to be circus riders or racing drivers or whatever happened to catch the fancy of the group that day. Or climbing apple trees in the back garden, making show-jumping courses out of flower pots and bean poles, and swinging the rickety swing so hard we yanked the foot-long pegs that anchored it in the lawn clear out of the ground.

Life looks a bit different for city kids in Japan these days.

Kentaro and I wouldn't buy Kei a Nintendo DS, despite his pleas. We both instinctively dislike children spending all their time playing with them. But we did compromise by letting him save to buy one himself, and as he'd saved up all his pocket money for over a year and even earned extra by cleaning shoes and weeding, it didn't feel fair to tell him he couldn't use it to buy something he so desperately wanted.

In fact, in the end I even helped him mortgage a wobbly tooth to the Tooth Fairy for 500 yen so he would have enough money to buy Super Mario Cart software for his newly purchased DS, to play with on the 12-hour plane journey to England. (The tooth fell out the night we arrived, and he punctiliously paid me back the money from under his pillow the next day.) So when yet another little friend arrives after school and makes a beeline for the DS, or more frequently pulls out their own, I do realize it's not entirely Kei's own responsibility that so many of his play dates are spent on the sofa immersed in Pokemon or Super Mario Brothers over other children's shoulders.

It's not always like that. We do go to parks, and play baseball or soccer (occasionally both at once) in the street with neighborhood children. But as the rainy season drags on and the stifling heat of summer looms uncomfortably close, it seems likely Nintendo DS will be the play date occupation of choice at least until the autumn. Unless, of course, the boys can save up enough between them for a Wii.

Meme

2007-06-21T22:30:00.001+09:00

Laura at Rehearsal Times Over (check it out!) has tagged me for this meme that's been going round lately. I have to start, she says, by posting the rules, so here they are:

1. I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.

2. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.

3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.

4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.

5. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog.

OK, that's done, now what on earth can I tell you that (a) family and old friends don't already know, and (b) won't bore new visitors to tears and send them clicking straight back to Mad Priest or wherever else they've come from?

1. My first name is really Alison. My parents were cajoled into calling me that by my great-grandmother, whose own name was Alice and who reportedly had, let's say, quite a personality. They themselves really wanted to call me Claire, but to avoid my initials making me a "cad" they christened me Alison Claire instead. I'm always doing a double-take in places like driving-license centers and doctors' offices when people call me by a name that doesn't feel like mine.

2. When I was little I desperately wanted a pony. I was one of those horse-mad girls who read books by the Pullein-Thompson sisters endlessly under the bedclothes with a torch, and nagged my parents to paint my bedroom grass-green so I could plaster it with paper horses cut out of pony magazines. Even today I feel a faint stab of longing whenever I see a horse.

3. The Queen Mother once shook hands with me - by mistake. She'd come to open a new classroom block at our school, and was making her way down the line of prefects, saying distractedly "Isn't it exciting?" to about every third person without looking them in the eyes. I happened to be standing just past the final prefect, and she sailed right along and grasped my hand too before the headmaster hastily hustled her away.

4. My favorite chocolates are made by Leonidas. Godiva comes a close second, followed by Thorntons, followed by ... well, pretty much any company that makes sweets consisting of cocoa butter, milk, and sugar, basically.

5. I once traveled from the UK to Japan by train, bus, minivan, and ferry. It took a leisurely month in all and was one of the best times I've ever spent travelling, though nearly falling off a crumbling bit of the Great Wall of China on the way was a bit unnerving.

6. I'm feminist enough to hate it when men try to hold doors open for me or carry my bags in the UK, but Western enough to resent it when Japanese men don't even offer.

7. I don't like mayonnaise. Can't stand anything with it in, which is a bit of a problem when you're trying to buy a sandwich in a Japanese convenience store as it seems to be an ingredient in absolutely everything. This sometimes freaks out Japanese friends, who assume that because mayonnaise is a "western" food I should automatically love it. I get round that one by asking them "Do you like natto*?"

8. I don't like natto either. But then everyone thinks that's normal.

*Sticky, stinky, fermented soybeans. Foreigners are generally believed not to be able to stomach natto, and in fact many Japanese people (especially in Osaka) hate it too. Kentaro and the boys just love it, though.

Now the big problem: as I've only been blogging for a couple of months I don't know many people well enough to tag, and all of the ones I do know have already done this meme. So I'm going to go out on a limb and tag a couple of people on the Married in Japan list who I know have blogs: Kathy at Mikan Days and Jojoebi at A Bit of This & A Bit of That. Girls, I hope you don't mind....

Four Stories

2007-06-18T11:09:00.000+09:00

Last night I went to the regular Four Stories literary event in Osaka, organized by the dynamic Tracy Slater. Four authors read excerpts from their work for 15 minutes each, while the listeners enjoyed good Portuguese wine and food and the chance for relaxed, grown-up conversation with interesting people. That's a rare opportunity for a translator working from home whose main everyday human contact comes through two young boys and the Internet, and it was exhilarating to have the brief chance to enjoy an atmosphere Tracy describes as "like a 19th-Century salon, only 150 years later―same socializing, same witty banter, but no corsets."

One of the readers was Jessica Goodfellow, an amazing Kobe-based poet who is also a friend. Her work interweaves imagery from mathematics, the Bible, and nature in fresh and thought-provoking ways. Two of her poems were read by Garrison Keillor on The Writers Almanac earlier this year, including this one, The Invention of Fractions.

The Invention of Fractions
by Jessica Goodfellow

God himself made the whole numbers: everything else
is the work of man.
—Leopold Kronnecker

God created the whole numbers:
the first born, the seventh seal,
Ten Commandments etched in stone,
the Twelve Tribes of Israel —
Ten we’ve already lost —
forty days and forty nights,
Saul’s ten thousand and David’s ten thousand.
‘Be of one heart and one mind’ —
the whole numbers, the counting numbers.

It took humankind to need less than this;
to invent fractions, percentages, decimals.
Only humankind could need the concepts
of splintering and dividing,
of things lost or broken,
of settling for the part instead of the whole.

Only humankind could find the whole numbers,
infinite as they are, to be wanting;
though given a limitless supply,
we still had no way
to measure what we keep
in our many-chambered hearts.

(Copyright © 2006 Jessica Goodfellow. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the author.)

You can find more of Jessica's poetry at Verse Daily here and here, or buy her chapbook A Pilgrim's Guide to Chaos in the Heartland from Amazon.

I'd been half expecting that the boys would still be up when I got home late in the evening, but they were actually asleep - on our bed. I was able to carry Dan back to his own room, but had to lean over Kei and growl gently "Who's been sleeping in MY bed?" to rouse him so he could climb into his top bunk.

Metamorphosis

2007-06-14T21:09:00.000+09:00

Both Kei and Dan, like virtually all Japanese boys their age, are into bugs. All types of bugs, but particularly beetles. Keeping beetles and other insects has a long tradition in Japan, and recently the Mushi King animated game fad has transformed interest into addiction on the part of all males aged between two and six. (At six they graduate to Pokemon, according to Kei, who passed over all his jealously guarded Mushi King cards to Dan his first week after starting school.)

So, we keep beetles. Beetle larvae, to be precise. Two white, squirming things the length and diameter of my index finger, with uncountable legs and great chomping jaws. They were a present from the boy next door, who to his mother's consternation now has about 40. At some point during June they are supposed to pupate, after which we should hopefully have two Giant Atlas Rhinoceros Beetles nosing around in their tankful of earth. They are going to stay there, too - I'm trying hard to see the charms of giant rhinoceros beetles as opposed to, say, cockroaches, and one of them is definitely that I know where they are at all times...

We also have a tank of suzumushi, Japanese bell crickets. When they're fully grown they look a bit like little black grasshoppers, but in the nymph stage they resemble nothing so much as silverfish. They chirp appealingly in late summer evenings, which is traditionally supposed to make you feel cooler. I rather like them, and they're easy to look after - spray with water once a day and stick in a bit of cucumber or aubergine for them to munch on, and they're happy.

Next to them are the tadpoles. They only arrived a couple of days ago, when I managed to get to the wonderful iris gardens at Shirakita Park and noticed them wriggling in the muddy water around the roots of the flowers. Kei has seen it all before, but Dan is fascinated by the idea that they'll turn into frogs and is looking for their legs to appear at least six times a day. We also have a large tank of goldfish and a black-and-white cat whose name translates as Plum Blossom, but they provide much less excitement.

Today's real thrill, though, has been the butterfly. Citrus trees are a magnet for swallowtail butterfly caterpillars, and I'm constantly brushing the tiny brown ones off our little lemon tree before they chomp their way through it wholesale. A couple of weeks ago we found one I'd missed, which had grown green and huge - a dead ringer for Eric Carle's hungry caterpillar. We brought it inside and fed it (sparingly) with lemon sprigs, and it duly spun itself into a chrysalis attached to the top of the tank. Then this morning Kei came rushing upstairs to tell us the butterfly had emerged. Fortunately it was still unfolding and drying its wings when we woke up, and hadn't had time to damage itself against the sides of the tank. We took it outside as the boys left for school and kindergarten, and left it on the porch to find its way out into the world.

We've kept caterpillars before, and daycares and kindergartens have them in virtually every classroom. But no matter how many times I see it happen, metamorphosis is a miracle every time.

Driving license ... yawn

2007-06-14T12:39:00.000+09:00

I had to renew my driving license a couple of weeks ago. In Japan that involves first a trip to the police station to fill out forms, followed a week or so later by attendance at a driving safety lecture. "Gold drivers" with no points on their license get out after 30 minutes, "regular drivers" with a single violation have to stay an hour, and "violators" with multiple or serious violations have to sit through a two-hour talk. Unfortunately, thanks to a parking ticket and a failure to come to a complete halt at a stop sign (I was too distracted by wondering what the police were pulling people over for to notice the wretched sign until I was halfway across it), I currently fall into the latter category.

The elderly volunteer teacher spent ages wittering on about how the points violation system works, traffic accident statistics in Osaka, and recent revisions to the Road Traffic Law. The last time I renewed my license I had the first-time version for "novice drivers," which told us about how to approach crossroads safely, how to tell if you're going too fast at night, and other information that was actually useful in becoming a safer driver. But this guy seemed to actually want to bore the pants off us.

It wasn't an entire waste of time. I discovered that seatbelt and drink-driving laws have been tightened up since my last license renewal - you're now liable for prosecution if you sit in the passenger seat beside a drunk driver, regardless of whether or not you've been drinking yourself, or if you lend a car to someone who then drives it drunk. But as everyone seems to ignore the laws anyway - e.g. no Japanese families I know use child seats, although they're legally required - it all seemed rather academic. I'm pretty sure the people in the back row alongside me thought the same, as by 30 minutes into the lecture they were all fast asleep.

I'm utterly determined that next time I renew my license I won't have any new violations on it, so I can be classed as a gold driver and never have to sit through something like this again. Hmm, so maybe the system does work after all...

A welcome guest

2007-05-28T15:16:00.000+09:00

My friend Isabelle has been staying with us since Thursday. We've known each other since 1991, when we met briefly as trainee mission partners at the Selly Oak colleges in Birmingham. I was impressed by her observations in class, which were always interesting and to the point, but we had very little actual contact during the few weeks we were both there before I went off to Japan and she later to Kenya.

It was only several years afterward that I joined an email list discussing women's ordination and noticed a number of interesting, to-the-point posts from an "Isabelle in Nairobi." On the offchance, I emailed her privately - and yes, it was the same person, and she was happy to hear from me!

Since then we've stayed in close touch by email, telephone, and face-to-face. I've left the mission society altogether, and she is no longer a missionary full-time - she has a challenging job with the European Commission in Brussels - but amazingly our friendship is deep-rooted enough to have outlasted all the changes in both our lives. She visits us yearly in Japan, and is now a well-loved godmother to Dan and an honorary member of our family. We've visited her in Brussels too, and hope to go back there again in future. She's one of the few people from life before marriage and children for whom our friendship has not only been maintained but actually deepened, and that's something very precious.

On Saturday she and I took the boys to the prefectural farm in the hills to the north of Osaka. They had a ball - feeding cows and sheep (almost getting trampled by some rather aggressive ewes at times!), seeing pigs and goats, lambs and rabbits, ducks and peacocks, and even trying their hands at milking. There were bumper cars, a little train ride, and a bouncy castle. We came across frogs and beetles, irises and violets, swallows and sparrows, in what was a perfect outing for early summer.

Isabelle is leaving tomorrow. We'll miss her, and are looking forward to the next time we meet. Whether it's in Japan, Brussels, or England, it's sure to be special.

Reprieve

2007-05-25T11:58:00.000+09:00

Dan got me out of the bazar meeting by coughing at breakfast-time on Wednesday. I'd usually have met Kentaro's suggestion of taking him to the pediatrician with a breezy "It's nothing, he'll be fine by tomorrow," but faced with the alternative of a four-hour-plus meeting I immediately called him in sick to the kindergarten and took a lazy trip to the doctor's. So I have no idea what crafts the other mothers decided on, or when we'll be expected to hold our group manufacturing session; but sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof...

When life (hopefully) gives you lemons...

2007-05-22T13:12:00.000+09:00

After a barren year last year, our little lemon tree has been flowering like mad this spring. Sadly only a few flowers have set to fruit, but there are now three tiny lemons growing against the south wall of the house. I'm watching them tenderly, watering and feeding the tree with love, in hopes that one day in summer we'll be able to go out and pick the warm fruit straight from the branch. (Yes, I'm definitely planning to make lemonade!)

Here are a couple of other flower photos, too. We don't have a garden, but like every home in the neighborhood we grow flowers and shrubs in planters around the house.

Bazar bizarre

2007-05-20T20:04:00.000+09:00

Having a child at kindergarten in Japan is proving an eye-opening experience. Both boys have attended daycare from the age of one, so you'd think I'd be used to it by now. But daycare is officially a welfare service, set up to assist working parents, so with the exception of having to send in the occasional spare set of clothes, lunchbox, or Halloween costume it was generally a pretty laid-back affair.

Not so kindergarten. While daycare offers support to harrassed working mothers, kindergarten gives them a whole new set of hoops to jump through. Dan's first two weeks were a maelstrom of rush-ordering custom-made bags to the kindergarten's exact size specifications, naming about 80 different items in exactly the correct spot and format, apologizing for missed buses and forgotten nametags, and frantically checking and double-checking each morning that I'd filled in all the right forms, sent the right money in the right envelope, and remembered to put both a hankerchief *and* a miniature pack of tissues in his uniform pocket. But however hard I tried, every day something else was wrong. Friday it was forgetting to stamp our name seal on the receipt for his custom-made rush slippers for the summer dance. I'd correctly named and dated the form, signed it, and sent it back on the right day - but sure enough back it came in his bag that evening, with a little note from his teacher regretting that it hadn't been properly completed. (His teacher has also offered to correct the Japanese in the notes I write her ... I think she believes I need taking thoroughly in hand if I'm to become an acceptable kindergarten mother!)

But the bazar preparations beat everything so far. Thursday I went to my first class mothers' meeting. After a swift run-through of the gate-duty rota, we were told that for the bazar in October each class has to provide a certain number of hand-made items for sale. No problem, you might think - if you're good at handicrafts, make lots; if you're not, cheat by buying hand-made things somewhere else and passing them off as your own. (Shades of the heroine of I Don't Know How She Does It distressing mince pies the night before the Christmas bake sale...) But you can't get away with that at Dan's kindergarten. At our meeting next week, we were informed, each of the 24 mothers has to come up with one proposed craft, providing either a sample or detailed pictures and instructions. We then have to choose seven of these proposals, which will be submitted to the Bazar Committee for their consideration. The Committee will select three of them, which must then be made by hand BY THE ENTIRE CLASS OF MOTHERS TOGETHER. No pleading that I can't sew or crochet, that I haven't knitted anything for years, that I can't draw or paint for nuts and that I'm utterly challenged when it comes to beautifully crafted pictures in seventeen shades of kimono silk. No, whatever the group decides is what everyone HAS to do. Together.

There are two or three other working mothers in our class, and none of them was at the class meeting. I wonder how they manage this stuff? I was able to go last week because my translation workload was fairly low, and should really be able to attend the next meeting too (though it's due to last the entire kindergarten day, from 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., I guess becuase they expect it to take that long for us to make a decision!). But now I'm in a quandary. Do I show willing and attend, suggest a craft that I can actually make (I'm thinking lavender bags, in which case I could do something simple like stuffing in the lavender while others do the actual sewing), and then actually have to direct the other mothers should it make the final selection? Or plead work, and let the keener mothers select crafts that are completely beyond my meagre abilities?

A friend told me that at one kindergarten she knows, mothers are allowed to buy their way out of contributing handicrafts by making a donation instead. Corruption has never sounded so good.

Golden Week (2): Children's Festival

2007-05-16T09:23:00.000+09:00

The day after our camp, we went over to Kentaro's parents' house so the boys could take part in a Children's Day festival at the local shrine.

It's a common ritual in Shinto to carry portable shrines (mikoshi) around the streets. The deities enshrined in the main sanctuary are temporarily transferred to the mikoshi for the duration of the parade. In this particular festival, they were carried down the hill to the large Buddhist temple at the bottom, then up the steps to the Buddha hall so the deities could pay their respects to the Buddha enshrined there (Japanese religion is nothing if not syncretistic!). At that point everyone takes a well-earned break and chugs down a beer or two (fruit juice for the kids) before heading back up the hill to the shrine again.

Because it was Children's Day, two small mikoshi were brought out, one for girls and one for boys. Normally adults carry them on their shoulders, but the children's ones are carried by adults at hip height while the kids pull on two long ropes. When they reached the steps up to the temple, fathers stepped in to hoist them up. Even though they're relatively small, they're pretty heavy, and Kentaro had a bruise on his shoulder by the time the boys' one was finally at the top.

The adult mikoshi is much larger, and the guys carrying it were all pretty drunk by the time the festival rolled around, so there was a fair amount of both merriment and unease as it went up the steps. Mothers kept their children well away ... it has been dropped before now...

It was our first ever festival. Previously I'd managed to avoid taking part in Shinto events, out of a residual sense of unease at participating in non-Christian religious rituals. As faith has slipped imperceptibly away, I've finally let go of that inhibition too. It'll be fun for the boys to take part in our local shrine festival with their friends this autumn.

Golden Week (1): Camping

2007-05-16T09:01:00.000+09:00

At the end of April and the beginning of May there's a period when five Japanese public holidays fall in the space of seven days, and the entire nation goes on holiday. Well, almost the entire nation - in previous years Kentaro has always been on duty at least part of the time (being a junior doctor, he gets the short straw when it comes to holiday cover). This year, though, his seniority has started to kick in and he only had to cover one night, so we were able to go away for a couple of days.

Everywhere books up early during Golden Week, and because Kentaro was only told his schedule the week before we hadn't been able to make reservations anywhere. So we just put the tent in the back of the car and headed over to camp by Lake Biwa for a night, where Kentaro's parents joined us for an evening barbecue on the beach.

Dan had great fun bashing in tent pegs with gusto, but Kei was more interested in catching frogs.

Getting started

2007-04-20T14:19:00.000+09:00

In the West we make New Year's resolutions, but in Japan everything new starts in April. It's when the school year begins, when new recruits join companies, and older personnel are shuffled and reshuffled. So this seemed like a good moment to take a tentative step out into the blogosphere, and try to create a space where friends and family can keep up with what's happening in our lives. Goodness knows we need one - both Kentaro and I are dreadful at the social niceties, and it's been years since either of us sent out a Christmas card or nengajo (the Japanese New Year's cards that are supposed to be a mandatory social obligation).

So what' s new? Kei has started elementary school, and trots off at 8 a.m. every morning with his huge black satchel on his back. He comes home in the mornings too, as the first-graders don't start staying for lunch until May. Dan is going to a nearby nursery three days a week until a place opens up at kindergarten, which we're hoping will be next month. Kentaro is still working at the Red Cross hospital in Osaka. And I'm enjoying not having to spend three hours a day going back and forth from daycare in Osaka, though with the boys home much more at the moment work time is considerably shorter than ideal. I'm looking forward to their both being in school and kindergarten for the greater part of the day! It's been some years now since my brain has been able to function effectively enough to translate at 2 a.m.

Spring in the park

2007-04-16T10:43:00.001+09:00