AFWJ Sample Journal

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!"#$%&'($)*+,# -.,$/#0#12#,$-32+10#/$4356$2"#$ %&'(5*3.-0 Š2004-2010 AFWJ Published by the AFWJ Guide Committee

AFWJ extends a warm thank you to all members who gave consent to have their articles, photos and quotes included in this guide. Without them, such a guide would not have been possible.

All photos, quotes and articles have been included with the consent of the members concerned. No full names have been used without the permission of the authors of the articles or quotes. Some authors have chosen to be credited by pen names, while others, just initials.

This publication was compiled by the AFWJ Guide Committee appointed by the AFWJ Board in January of 2003. The final product came to fruition in June 2004.

It was re-printed in 2010.

Copyright 2004-2010 by the Association of Foreign Wives of Japanese (AFWJ), except for articles with a copyright symbol. In this case, the author retains the copyright. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be utilized, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, now known or hereafter invented, including scanning, photocopying, recording, information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from AFWJ and the relevant author.

!""#$"%&$'(&)*$+,'-&$"*%.)"&*/ The AFWJ Journal is created from submissions by AFWJ members. All contributions must be accompanied by the sender’s name, and address. A pen name may be used in the Journal, or an author’s name will be withheld upon request, but no anonymous contributions will be accepted. Please send your contributions in the following way: E-mail: Send plain text (no HTML formatting) in the body of an e-mail or send a file attached to an e-mail. Attachments should be written in English and created in word processing software such as Microsoft Word and formatted/saved in MS Word Document format.

If you are unable to send a submission by e-mail, please consult with the Editor regarding possible options.

Deadlines for Journal submissions: The first day of January, March, May, July, September, and November for the following month’s issue.

Send all contributions to the Journal Editor at the following email address: journaleditor@afwj.org

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“I’m delighted to have joined AFWJ. It gives me a lot of encouragement being connected to so many other women in similar life circumstances, and knowing through the stories in the Journals that others have “survived” the experience inspires me too.”

C. Miyagawa

“When I first moved here, the only common topics that I could discuss with Japanese moms was raising babies… Everything changed soon after I was invited to the AFWJ Chiba Christmas party. Talking with so many interesting people with various backgrounds, I felt I could find myself again. So I joined AFWJ.” H.D.N.

“I am excited about meeting some people who are in similar situations to mine. I find that other English teachers I meet are not only planning to go home in a year or so, but they are also single and have no idea why I would ever marry a Japanese.”

Amanda Yoshida

“This organization really has a strong impact on my life here. I was not unhappy before I bumped into AFWJ. Actually, I had not even looked around for anything or felt that anything might be missing. But as a result of becoming a member, my life became much brighter, my horizons were widened, and to me AFWJ makes the difference.

I truly respect all of those who are working so hard to keep this organization going, and I hope I will be able to contribute something in a few years myself.”

Andrea Ota

“I joined AFWJ a little over a year ago, and even in just one year, I have met so many wonderful women who have helped me through these adjustments—the ups and downs of juggling a marriage, a career and a baby in a foreign country.”

Heather Montgomery “Watching good friends I’ve made here return to their home countries, and missing them terribly, led me to AFWJ in the hope of meeting women who are here on a more permanent basis.”

Rebekah Weddle

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599:;<5=<:>#:6#6:?@<A>#7<B@9 :6#85C5>@9@ WHO WE ARE AFWJ has over 500 members from more than forty countries in Japan and abroad and aims to provide members with friendship, support, mutual help in adapting to Japanese society, and opportunities for social, emotional, educational and professional growth.

AFWJ assists women in networking with other women who have many of the same experiences and concerns such as family relationships, children’s education, professional career development, personal growth, and cross-cultural problems and solutions.

Joining AFWJ will give you opportunities to build new friendships with other foreign wives coming from all over the world. Once a member, you can attend meetings or events held in any AFWJ district or chapter.

ACTIVITIES Members organize workshops, lectures, book discussions, luncheons, playgroups for children, coffee mornings at members’ houses and other similar activities. You can do all kinds of creative organizing and be a leader yourself. Of course there are times in your life when you can’t do as much, but AFWJers have so many talents to share.

Annually, a national three-day convention is held, and districts also sometimes hold their own mini-conventions.

AFWJ runs various e-mail groups that members are entitled to join. Some e-mail groups provide a forum for the announcement of local activities and for exchange. Others feature information on a national level, and yet others cover more specific areas such as new mothers, education of young children, dieting, speakers of languages other than English, political issues, and others. Members are welcome to create their own interest groups inside AFJW. PUBLICATIONS AFWJ members receive six English-language journals and one membership directory per year. The journals consist of articles written by the members for the members, and cover a wide area of member-related issues on life in Japan and abroad. The annual membership directory is a tool by which you can contact other members at any time, anywhere in the world.

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599:;<5=<:>#:6#6:?@<A>#7<B@9 :6#85C5>@9@ WHO CAN JOIN? The Association of Foreign Wives of Japanese (AFWJ) welcomes any woman of any national or cultural origin (other than a Japanese born and raised in Japan) who is engaged to, is or has been married to, or is, or has been in a de-facto relationship with a man of Japanese national or cultural origin.

HOW CAN YOU JOIN? For information on membership fees and on how to join please contact us at:

E-mail: membershipsecretary@afwj.org Website: www.afwj.org

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=0'#5678"%,&+D AFWJ’s publications are as old as the association itself, and content has always been by, for and about members. Since AFWJ’s establishment in 1969, members have been keeping in touch with each other through the AFWJ National Newsletter, a publication later renamed the AFWJournal.

Being in international relationships and sometimes far from their own countries may be factors that inspire many AFWJ members to share their experiences in writing.

The AFWJournal gives members a forum to express themselves. The more than two hundred issues that have been published up to now are a real treasure trove, not merely reporting on events, parties or meetings and providing information on living in Japan, but also featuring life stories, shared emotions and images both in photos and text that reflect what members are and how they live.

Journals up to now have included a wide range of topics such as living in Japan, career, legal issues, identity, marriage, family, children, education, bilingualism, housing, travel, fashion, health, cooking, housekeeping, life-long learning, advanced age and even death—you name it. Articles are submitted to the Journal Editor who edits, formats, and compiles them into a cohesive unit. The Journal Editor is one of the many AFWJ volunteers elected by the membership who make it possible for AFWJ to sustain the network that has assisted so many over the years.

The following pages show a selection of articles published in recent Journals. While the AFWJournal takes different forms as it evolves with time and with each editor, AFWJ members never run short of good stories to share.

Enjoy!

“I take it for granted that, when due, that little Journal will magically appear in my mailbox packed with great stories and loads of ideas on a whole range of issues. To all those members who have contributed over the years a very big THANK YOU—you’ve no idea how some of your contributions and personal revelations have stopped me from taking the first flight out when things get tough; it’s comforting to know that I’m not alone.”

Frances Morii

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“When I joined AFWJ we were living in a smallish city in Hiroshima-ken. For two years, the Journal was my only link with AFWJ, and it was such a help to me to realize that there were other women out there, sharing the same frustrations, problems and joys of being a foreign wife in Japan.”

Louise George Kittaka

“Writing articles for the Journal is a pleasant challenge for me, and it’s a thrill to see my work included with articles by other foreign women.”

L. Kawaguchi

“Living in Tottori means that I cannot participate in a lot of the activities offered by AFWJ, however, I can say that I am proud to be a member! I love receiving the Journals, they let me know I am not alone. It is reassuring to know there are other women out there who have similar experiences.”

S.M.C.

“As the end of the month approaches I start thinking that it will be coming soon. As the first few days of the new month go by I am eagerly awaiting and anxiously checking the mail. Finally it arrives! The AFWJ Journal.

Now that I’m living in the US, I appreciate the Journal even more. When it arrives, everything is pushed aside as I skim through its pages and then sit down to read it in greater depth. As I read I feel like a very special treasured dear old friend from Japan has come for a visit. There is much catching up to do: news of what’s been going on and current issues, news of old friends and introductions to new ones, advice and shared experiences, recipes and remedies, tips for making our lives easier and more rewarding, tears and laughter.

It’s all in there.”

Betty Ogawa

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!"#$%&'(#%)*$+,%-./%*%&#0.$1 !"#$%&%''(#)*+,( I contribute to my community by using a skill that is unique to me. No, I’m not talking about speaking English, although that is also true of me as the only gaijin for miles around. This is kind of a success story in that I managed to take one of the biggest disappointments of my life and turn it into a way to get closer to my Japanese neighbors. I think maybe I’m not alone in this. Japan can be a difficult place to live your dreams.

So how the heck did I end up in Japan??? Here’s an instance of the supreme irony of life.

When I came back from my scholarship stint in London, my boyfriend of the time convinced me not to go away to study music again, but to stay with him in Brisbane. So I enrolled in Queensland University to study my second great love, Asian language and culture. Needless to say, I ended up not marrying this boy but coming to Japan and marrying a Japanese. Talk about a twist of fate!

Introduction Please bear with me as I give you a little background. I’ll try to keep it short!

When I came to Japan as an exchange student in 1978, my horn came with me. I found the Kyoto Municipal Orchestra, and also was a member of the Kobe-based Melange woodwind ensemble who performed several concerts between 1978 and 1983.

I even played a few fundraising concerts with other AFWJ members in St. Michael’s School in Kobe. And, I played in the very first AFWJ Convention Cabaret (in Miki, in I think 1984), which at that time was more of a semi-serious talent show.

Twenty years ago, before I came to Japan, I was a professional musician. I started playing the French horn at the age of 14, and all during my high school and college years was a member of two prominent youth orchestras in Australia as well as earning money “in the pit”, that is, in a theater orchestra. I went on overseas tours to Europe, the U.S., and the Far East, including my first visit to Japan in 1974. I played in the Sydney Opera House. I won a scholarship to study with a famous horn player in London for six months. I taught at music camps and appeared on TV. I performed operas, musicals, big choral works, and solo pieces. I was at home on a big stage in front of thousands of people. I even performed the Bruckner 4th Symphony, otherwise known as the 90-minute horn concerto. I realize now that I was lucky to be a big fish in the little pond that was the Australian music scene at that time.

My entire financial, social, and emotional life revolved around music—specifically, classical music as performed by an orchestra.

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I was good! I was a reliable player with a solid reputation in my home country. My friends kept asking me (even after I got married) when I would be coming back to Australia to resume my musical career. I don’t think of this as bragging, because the person who did all those things no longer exists. But, as you shall read, someone else exists in her place.

Hiatus When I became pregnant with my first son, I started to find it hard to breathe deeply enough to play comfortably. After completing the Melange concert on the books at that time, I had to put the horn away for a while.

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I did, however, take it with me on a 2-year stint in Pittsburgh where my husband got a job in the University, and did some playing with an amateur orchestra there, including two Gilbert & Sullivan seasons. I still thought of myself as a horn player who happened to have gotten into some other things.

Returning to Japan with two small children, I was approached by a neighbor, a schoolteacher and trombone player, who wanted me to play in some brass concerts he was arranging. But here I ran up against the brick wall of my mother-in-law. As a young wife and mother, I had to do my job. I didn’t have any business with such extracurricular things (for which she would have to babysit). I don’t know why I bought this line of hers, but I did. My horn went into the closet and didn’t come out again for ten years.

At the time I thought it was worth the sacrifice to avoid daily conflicts in the home. I was scared stiff of her and couldn’t face her wrath. It’s hard to believe this now.

When I thought of all the great things I used to do, I often got depressed and blamed my husband for my isolation and lack of musical opportunities. (I tended not to blame my mother-in-law—does one blame a hurricane for wrecking one’s house? Besides, I couldn’t argue with her when she pointed out that I had chosen this lifestyle.)

I really missed the challenges, the beauty, and the adulation of a music-centered life.

My new life in a rural district of Japan just didn’t have the same glamour. Duh! I had a rude awakening in 1987, when I was invited to a gathering of alumni of my old youth orchestra in Australia. Full of hope, I went to participate, dragging my two preschoolers along. I think playing in that alumni orchestra was what exploded my dreams once and for all. I just wasn’t good enough to hold my own in a group like that any more.

I had the know-how, but not the stamina or technique. I saw that it just wasn’t realistic to keep saying “If it weren’t for—I could have AAA<'#AT<$%B

been a professional musician.” I had to develop other interests that could be pursued in my spare time, alone at home. I had to accept the life I had chosen and find personal satisfaction therein.

A Second Chance When my second son was about to enter middle school, my trombone friend approached me again. This time he wanted my help in starting up a brass band for local elementary school children. My mother-in-law disapproved of this kind of community involvement on principle (I think she was afraid I’d make a fool of myself and disgrace the family) but she was also secretly pleased that I was contributing. Anyway I became one of the coaches of the Nishioji Junior Brass. It wasn’t very much fun at first. I had always been a player, not a teacher; it was hard for me to explain method to kids who had never put a horn to their lips before. Also I felt they thought I was a somewhat useless henna gaijin. Eventually I became comfortable in my role, but I still wasn’t doing any playing, except for demonstration pieces with my fellow coaches.

After a couple of years, my trombone friend, who is a bit of a live wire (Thank God for him!!!), had another brilliant idea. Why not start a wind ensemble for grownups? Thus, three years ago, the Hino Wind Ensemble was born. The initial announcement drew many people out of the woodwork, people like me who had had to stop playing because of lack of opportunity and other commitments. We are now some 45 strong and are preparing for our third annual concert, in which the Junior Brass also participates. This is not the kind of music I’d been used to— our repertoire runs more to things like Lupin Sansei and Sousa marches than Bruckner and Verdi. The standard, too, is much lower than I’ve experienced elsewhere in my life (although there are some surprisingly good players). But once a week, I get to set up my music stand, take out my horn, and play some music with other people. That’s G34*+,-.*N/)24**XX

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the bottom line, and I accept it with gratitude.

My Contributions I’ve had to become a lot more humble myself. I’ve seen people, middle-aged housewives like myself, so excited and grateful to be playing again after so many years. I feel like one of them. Maybe my beginnings were a bit more glamorous, but now I’m right where they are. And, through humbling myself, I’ve regained my spot on the stage.

I am still a reliable player, making a contribution to the group that only I can make.

(And would you believe, I also contribute by translating titles of works or explaining that jazz rhythm arose out of the sounds of train travel or helping kids to understand how to feel syncopation. My experience and expertise, not to mention my English ability, come in handy in lots of different situations.)

itself.” I’m sorry this article has been a bit of a downer, with none of my usual rapier wit.

Maybe I haven’t accepted my lot as perfectly as I thought. Or maybe it’s just the “Road Not Taken” syndrome. Whatever it is, this is The old saying goes, “When life hands you an example of the lessons involved in hana lemon, make lemonade.” I might change dling the ups and downs of this life with a it slightly to read, “When you’ve chosen a modicum of grace. lemon, sometimes if you are willing to accept your choice, it turns into lemonade by © 2002 Rebecca Otowa

“My favorite AFWJ events are the Kanto luncheons. They are held twice a year in different locations around Kanto. With such a large region and so many chapters, it can be hard to get to know people sometimes. However, the Kanto luncheons give me a chance to meet up to 50 other ladies, some old members, some new, at a lovely venue for a fun afternoon of dining and chit chat. Usually there is entertainment of some sort, such as a raffle, Y100 “white elephant” charity shop, or even Indonesian dancing!

I also leave the luncheons feeling energized and upbeat, ready to face another six months of life as a foreign wife in Japan.”

Wendy Jones Imura

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January 5, 1966 was a bright sunny morning with a strong cold wind blowing down from Mt. Rokko. I had just arrived in Japan and was staying in the large and largely unheated home of Tsuneo’s former English professor, Roy Smith, in Kobe. Since the most difficult and emotionally wrenching time for me had been saying goodbye to all my family and friends in Boston, I was quite relaxed about the wedding itself, and I even overslept on our wedding day. Tsuneo had to toss pebbles up at my window to wake me for the preparations. I was to wear my mother’s wedding gown which was made with central heating in mind; and although I was warmly in love, I was never so cold in my life.

But at 23, I had amazing powers of gaman, a word I didn’t yet know. In fact, I knew very few Japanese words at that time and so the ceremony itself was mostly lost on me. Except for the vows—the priest made sure to say them in English so I knew what I was promising forever. Poor Tsuneo looked like he was being read the death sentence, and couldn’t bring himself to smile for most of the day. Needless to say, there were to be no hugs or handholding either, as he tried to maintain a suitably grave bearing in front of his family and friends.

I had no one there on my side to impress, and so I just kept smiling at everyone and looking happy. Which apparently was not a good idea, because when we got to the reception, he told me to stop smiling and try to look dignified. That this gathering was not to be in any way a jolly event was quickly brought home to me by all the dour male faces spouting dour-sounding speeches.

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red with exertion, his whole body trembled, and a strange gurgling sound came up from his insides, which seemed to strangulate in his throat before trailing off in a series of mournful wails. Afterward, when everyone applauded, I realized it must have been some kind of performance. (Of course, it was Noh chanting which I’ve since come to appreciate thanks to my father-in-law.

But at the time I had never heard it and had no idea what it was.) “Wow,” I thought, “is this fun or what?” Maybe we had walked in on someone’s memorial service by mistake.

Then I started thinking that the Japanese might need party lessons even more than English lessons. And Tsuneo could definitely do with some hugging lessons. Well, 36 years and a million hugs later, he is definitely still THE ONE, but I sure would have done our HIROEN differently. For our 40th anniversary, we’re going to do it up right with a band and dancing and good jazz singing (by our daughter, if we’re lucky) and enough smiles and hugs for everyone.

As to what has sustained us over these many years, I believe it was the sense of destiny we felt about our marriage… that God had ordained it and we had to carry it through. We knew that we were entrusted to one another and that God’s guidance would keep us firm in our commitment. It is just so hard for people to live together day after day after day, ego clashing, pride bashing, tripping over each other’s faults and mostly fed up to the teeth with our own poor failings. There are times when we are very incompatible, and there are certain irreconcilable differences that we’ll take to our grave; but that’s no reason not to keep on loving each other. I even think there has to be a sense of desperation, of being stuck with each other and having nowhere else to go that keeps us humble G34*+,-.*N/)24***X[

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and hard working, and even laughing at our poor helpless predicament. Isn’t it a wonderful relief to know that we’ll never REALLY understand each other and yet we’ll never run out of reasons to love each other again and again and again, even through our tears.

So, maybe our wedding reception was a good opening number after all. It was very different from what I had imagined; and it also helped me to know what I truly valued and that I would have to learn how to incorporate these values into my life here.

Four years ago, I became a mother-in-law when our son, Markio, got married. Things got off to a rocky start, and we were quite upset about their relationship. But when I thought back to my own rough beginnings and that Tsuneo’s parents did not reject me, who was I to reject anyone? So I just made up my mind to love Yuka-chan unconditionally. It’s amazing how once we decide to love the heart follows through beautifully. And I also decided that whomever our daughters marry, I already love them.

It’s so much easier and so much happier that way. As it turns out, both of our girls have very ‘significant others’ and are starting to make plans. I am very excited for them and very glad to be having more family to love.

My advice to them? Love is wonderful, marriage is damn hard work; and the game is definitely worth the candle.

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Below a reassuring flow of pleasant talk our hearts are locked in conference of a different sort, “you always do that” “you didn’t hear me out” “the same old story” “you don’t have to shout” beneath the stalwart smiles the ego chafes.

But we have found the road back time and times before knowing how to meet each other more than half-way; actually we cut a pretty good figure in our fancy-dress words, while underneath the heart is humming “he loves me” “she loves me still.” © 2002 Winnie Anne Inui

© 2002 Winnie Anne Inui

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75%!#++'$8 !"#34#5674 After spending an entire day trying to write objectively about my wedding, I realized that not enough time has passed for me to be able to do so. I don’t know if enough time will ever pass.

The day itself I remember mostly for two things, my feet hurt and I sweated. A lot. I had to borrow a pair of white pumps from the Bridal Hall and they were much higher than I ever wear. I had to climb stairs, go outside, and come back inside, everything in those darn high-heeled shoes. At the end of the day, in the receiving line, I took my shoes off. I left them under my dress so no one else knew about it. Thankfully, no one noticed I was suddenly three inches shorter!

The temperature that day was a very sunny 26 degrees Celsius. I was wearing a heavy silk dress, plus a thick bustier underneath. I had two hairpieces in my hair and a veil. I started to sweat when the people from the Bridal Hall took us outside for the first set of pictures, and I never stopped. I know that “sweat” isn’t a ladylike word, but that’s what I did. In the chapel during the ceremony big beads of sweat started to drip off my nose. The staff passed me handkerchiefs for the rest of the day. It was embarrassing, but I couldn’t help it.

We had chosen to honour our respective cultures. I wore a white wedding dress, and Fumihiko wore hakuma and montsuki. I refused to change my dress; although halfway through the reception I took off my veil and changed my hairstyle.

Our wedding was a time of happiness and sadness. Happiness because we were able to share it with many of our friends and Fumihiko’s family. Sadness for me because none of my family came and only two of my friends from “back home” were there. Our wedding was soon after the terrorist attacks in the United States, and part of me wondered if it was right to celebrate when so many people were unhappy.

The question that was asked by the Journal was “Would I do it again?” Right now I would have to say no. I don’t regret getting married, but I do regret not getting to do more things my way. I was on another island when we planned our wedding and I had to leave most things to my fiance, which actually meant leaving it to the Bridal Hall people.

It wasn’t a perfect day, but it was a special day.

“My favorite AFWJ event is the convention because I can meet so many members, visit a new place and not have to worry about rushing to catch the last train home.”

Non-Tokyo member in Kanto

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My brother and sister-in-law nearly divorced over two words: ‘shut up’. He had been taught by my mother that saying this was akin to sticking a knife in someone’s heart and he obeyed this taboo. We all did. Do. My sister-in-law’s parents hadn’t seen anything wrong with it and so Rose used it as liberally as the ketchup she poured over everything. The ketchup fetish was weird, we thought, but harmless. Those two lethal words were not.

The ‘shut up’ story has become part of family folklore, made powerful now as a teaching tool. My brother and his wife just celebrated their 25th anniversary. She hasn’t used those two little words in a long time, but I’ve never forgotten the pain in my brother’s face when she did. The lesson was sharp and surprising to me as a teenager. “Every family has its own culture,” my mother explained. I nodded, not pointing out how clearly I understood it: how my siblings and I were the walking wounded in my parents’ civil war. You are marrying into another country when you marry and need, as much as any traveler, to learn a new language, to avoid strange, unfamiliar taboos. To treat gingerly unmapped territory and seek out alternative paths.

All this was interesting to me, in the abstract.

Then I fell in love and married a Japanese, and now live near Tokyo. People ask me about the cultural differences (waiting to hear horror stories, I suppose). I say there are some, but that the differences in the number of siblings (he has one, I have seven) or in temperament (I want things planned and mapped out, careful traveler that I am; he wants no reins and is fiercely addicted to impulses)—are far greater.

When I visited my favorite English professor from college a few years ago, he asked me with a gentle, 18th-century delicacy, what came down to, “How could you marry someone whose first language is not English?” He was asking this, knowing how much words meant to me: he’d critiqued my poems; in the journal we kept for his class he’d patiently, wittily carried on a written conversation about Irish history, red wines, Sidney’s sonnets versus Shakespeare’s. He knew my mind in ways my family doesn’t.

with when I first realized I was in love. Takeshi was saying, in one of our many marathon phone calls, how he became interested in English through jazz. He’d wanted to understand the lyrics. This led to my questions about jazz and he began to explain. I sat in the dark listening, in shock, in dread, in exhilaration. In a flow of gorgeous, ‘simple’ as a Zen garden sentences, I remember one: “When you listen to jazz you have to carefully step from stone to stone to get across the stream, catching your balance before each jump.” That was it. Guess I wasn’t leaving. Who cared that his grammar was sometimes awkward and he didn’t have the elaborate vocabulary of an English major? This man thinks in metaphors, experiments with words like a musician trying out notes. This is a mind whose rhythms match my own.

The second reason has to do with living in a non-English speaking country. The startled delight that can come when one world speaks to another: there was the time a student mispronounced ‘skyscraper’ as ‘sky-crapper’. Indeed.

Or there is the way a language learner will turn a word or an idea upside down with a question: “You mean English does not have five or six separate words for all the different kinds of ghosts there are?” There are the words we don’t have precise equivalents for, and the ones that change from positive to negative or even from feminine to masculine, as they are translated. In answer to language questions, pondering the changes incurred through translation, I see my native language in colors of a different landscape and all is made even more compelling. This is what marriage to a non-native speaker makes possible. This, and the chance to test the power of something by its absence.

To weigh the strength of words as they fade from lack of use, or as they are manipulated and transformed into the newest, trendy catch phrase in Japanese. It is learning, with the glee of a foreigner, new idioms, phrases, slang, when I go back to the U.S. for a visit. And it’s feeling to the core the devastating power words have when misunderstood.

Words. Where does their value reside? It is not, I think now, in their weight but in their weighing.

I gave him two answers. The first one has to do XS***G34*+,-.*N/)24

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In defense of mothers-in-law, and in praise of mine—that was the motivation that gave life to this contribution. One hears so much about the dreaded, feared, jealous, etc. mother-in-law. Mothers-in-law are the largely undeserving subjects of endless jokes in countries around the world; the frequent friction between them and their daughters-in-law is legendary. And in Japan, for some mothersin-law, the worst-case scenario imaginable for their only son would be a gaijin wife, a Management and Accounting major who even struggles with the organization of a closet, occasionally loses things (read as: “temporarily mis-locates items”), and who speaks terrible Japanese!

Whoops!

After meeting a wonderful Japanese man, we married in a small chapel ceremony with family (and were delighted that our five grown children could attend and get to know each other).

I moved to Japan in late spring of 2002. Pulling up stakes and relocating to another country was somewhat unsettling, although I was excited about seeing my husband’s country and the challenge of settling in. Serious concern about how I would get on with my mother-in-law, Okasan—or, as she is called affectionately by everyone, Oba-Chan—was near the top of the list of my many preoccupations and worries. We had met once before the wedding when I came for a week-long visit in Japan. We got on very well in spite of no common language; I was delighted. As a matter of fact, when I left for the airport to return to the US, we were both in tears. But it also occurred to me that maybe we got along well because we both love the same guy and, naturally, since he was anxious that we be friends, we wanted to make him happy.

When I returned about 10 months later as a wife, my mother-in-law’s first welcome gift to me made me realize that she was, indeed, an AAA<'#AT<$%B

extraordinarily perceptive lady, a lady very advanced for her generation and time. Her gift, the English language “Japan Times,” was my only link with the rest of the world since radio, TV and newspapers in Japanese were incomprehensible for me. As time went on, I realized what a truly thoughtful and intelligent lady she is.

“Mom” spent the first 22 years of her life in Korea; she also traveled to China, around Korea, etc. When she married and returned to Japan, she became the instant mother to the seven young orphaned siblings of her new husband. Then, the later birth of a son, my husband, completed a family of 10. This resourceful and multi-talented lady mothered and raised 8 children; ran the house, cooked, shopped, etc.; helped her husband teach students at home in the evening; and pitched in to add to the family finances by preparing and selling konnyaku.

Now at 83, this formidable, tiny dynamo of a lady, ambulatory difficulties notwithstanding, tackles any task that she sets her mind on. My “Mom” is like my late Mom, with the philosophy that everything has a place, and everything is always in its place. Since I lived alone for many years before marrying in 2001, if I were in the middle of something such as sewing, cooking, etc. and had to leave for work, I would simply leave everything where it was, knowing that when I got back, I could pick up where I left off and there was no one whom it would bother in the meantime. Similar in personality and sense of humor, if we have one quiet but sensitive point of major difference, it is that “Mom” is the epitome of organization and order, and I am the antithesis, although I am trying to reform gradually. “Mom,” one of the most tactful and diplomatic ladies I have ever met, also has a very savvy and astute head for business. When she laments that this hurts or that hurts with age, I tease her that her head and her heart are very young and those are the

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most important elements of an ageless person, regardless of how many years we have under our belt. Another common bond is music, and she has taught me some Japanese songs in impromptu lessons in the kitchen! She often sang with her pianist husband and still at 83 happily warbles as she works.

To celebrate my first snowstorm in Hokkaido, I eagerly went outside to shovel the front walk.

The swirling, icy winds emptied the powder snow from my shovel before I could empty the scoopful on the side of the front walk, gradually covering me from head to foot with a white dusting in the process. I glanced at the window and saw “Mom” inside, bent over with laughter—actually an identical reaction to the time three months ago when I was standing on a 6-foot snow drift on the back deck, trying to clear away snow partly obscuring the first story windows! Being designed and constructed by my Maker in little sumo lady proportions, I crunched through the top crusty surface of the snow and sank like the proverbial stone several feet into the snow, managed to scramble out and stand up—almost—and then landed on my butt and slid down to the bottom of the drift. “Mom” had been observing my progress through the window, and was doubled over with laughter! Fortunately, I love snow from my Connecticut childhood days and, therefore, Hokkaido winters and was mercifully endowed by my Creator with an indestructible sense of humor!

She taught me to make miso soup, about tofu types, Japanese fruits and vegetables, consult the garbage pick-up schedule, rinse out the cans, bottles and plastics before discarding, etc. And with Japanese language, “Mom” has a wonderfully clear pronunciation and the patience to look up words, and pronounce them.

My mother-in-law is the managing director of the house and the president of the rice cooker; we could not survive without her as I have much to learn about being a housewife and homemaker in Japan.

ready smile. And somehow we communicate even though, many times, I suspect that half of what I say to her and half of what she says to me—despite a flurry of dictionaries in the kitchen—is incomprehensible to the other because of spoken language limitations. We have become adept at mime, gestures, sign language and acting things out when spoken language fails. In the meantime, Anni—the Fuji tiny Pomeranian—responds to food-oriented language in Japanese or English when it comes to the dessert dog biscuit! We have mutual respect for each other’s Buddhist and Catholic religious beliefs. Our home blends East and West, a Christmas tree and a tatami room with Buddhist altars to family ancestors. “Mom” keeps up with the news on TV, devours two newspapers every day, heatedly discusses politics (over the dinner table with Takashi in Japanese with me in the spectator role, trying to pick up words now and then to ask about), avidly watches baseball and soccer games and sumo bashos (me, too!). She also works in her flower garden and enjoys watching her beautiful roses bud and bloom, has a love for nature, and eagerly greets spring with watching bulbs and seeds sprout into colors. We also share another passion: we are ice cream lovers—she, azuki bean and me, anything else!

All that said, I just wanted to stand up and cheer for mothers-in-law like my “Mom”! May she live a thousand years! We are blessed to enjoy a warm and loving friendship, and have merged the hugs of my Connecticut family and the traditional bow of her Japanese family; our blended family does both.

Thanks, “Mom,” for becoming my Mom and increasing your family by yet one more child, this one “orphaned” by distance from the American part of the family. In keeping with international tradition of occasionally lifting a glass of sake or wine to those we wish to honor, here is “Kampai” to Hisayo Fuji, my wonderful Japanese mother-in-law, my friend, and my “Mom.”

But the reason I most love and admire her is for her constant upbeat attitude. In spite of physical problems with vision and strength, she is unfailingly cheerful with a brilliant, XV***G34*+,-.*N/)24

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&#DE,%4*3#%FD%(2.0%4"#%4.G !"#!+//.%#?2@.*( Aside from that bothersome period of time shortly after birth, when most of us watch huge coils of our precious mane snaking down the drain, and our hairbrushes are so full of loose strands that they resemble beavers with plastic tails, the quantity and quality of a mother’s hair is not really the problem.

No, it’s style, color, and maintenance that often gets a little neglected once we assume the mantel of motherhood. Finding the time, not to mention the discretionary cash, for a real haircut can be overlooked for months on end. A good sharp pair of cuticle scissors attacking the hairs that surround our face is often the closest we get to a professional grooming. Whatever is going on in the back of our skulls is of little or no interest. How old do the kids have to be before we have the time or interest to blow-dry the backs of our heads? As the mother of kids between the ages of six and ten, I confess, I still only groom the parts of my head that I can see in my car’s rearview mirror.

No matter how much trouble and effort I’m willing to take with styling my hair, by the end of the morning I’m feeling messy and claustrophobic by all the sweaty hair on my face and neck. It’s my personal observation that we moms function at a rate slightly above the land speed record, and perspiration and wilt are the natural result.

Pregnancy and motherhood, not to mention the passing of time, conspire to take some of the poop out of our hair follicles. I’ve dyed my hair for years and I don’t clearly recall my natural hue, but I think it’s pretty much like the dark brown found on two of my three kids. I have so many white hairs, that if I don’t dye my hair, everyone would think I was my youngest child’s grandmother. So, I am quick to cover the evidence with my little squirt bottle. I think it’s safe to assume that I don’t have the coppery highlights that my AAA<'#AT<$%B

little girl has when the sun glances down at her or the warm chestnut undertones that my son has both in his hair and in his eyes.

Mud. That’s probably the most accurate description of the color of my hair.

Not only has my hair dulled, but my complexion has lost some of its former oomph. I used to be pretty much the same color from my forehead to my chest, but now my freshly washed face has all the shadings of a paper-maché contour map of Japan. Some of the changes can be attributed to ordinary wear and tear, but you’ll never be able to convince me that the dark circles under my eyes and the broken capillaries on my cheeks aren’t part of my sacrificial gift to maternity. The lunar eclipse under my eyes are like a barometer of my sleeplessness, my premenstrualness, and my haphazardness in remembering to pick up another tube of concealer at the drug store. As for the capillaries, I can still remember feeling them explode during all those hours of pushing to get each baby out of my uterus and into my arms.

The great news about coloring is that it can restore the luster we delude ourselves into believing is our birthright, it can create a softer or more exciting frame for our drained faces, and, best of all, it doesn’t require any physical exertion on our part. Who cares if you weren’t born a blond? You can damn well be one now, even if you were born with green hair. You’re a woman, a MOM, and you deserve that tiny indulgence of crowning yourself with whatever color mane you ever wanted. And if you don’t like it or get bored with it, you can change it as frequently as Madonna.

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sprouting up like weeds in a rose bed. I find that my roots have to be dealt with every three or four weeks. Hair color can also be an expensive endeavor, so it might be a good idea to find a friend who’s willing to be your peroxide partner. The home coloring kits at your local drug store are pretty manageable and not too expensive. Start out with the rinses that come out after five or six washings until you’ve found your best color and mastered the technique, then you can move on to the permanent colors. And speaking of permanent, do us all a favor and avoid perming your hair once you’ve colored it, or leave it to the professionals, because there are only so many chemicals a strand of hair can take.

It’s never a good idea to think of your hair as just another “craft” project. You can always hide the découpaged kitchen chairs, but you’ll have to wear the frizzy orange tumbleweed cap on your head for months.

H#,D%I..D%I.29*2+ !"#A+2.:%#5%+<B%#;.**(9( One thing that has always amazed me about Japan is the narrow range of shoe sizes. Practically all of the adult female population here takes between a 22.5 and a 24.5 cm size shoe. Even tall Japanese women seem to have rather tiny feet. Although I am above average height in New Zealand, I have a perfectly average size foot. This makes me a size 7 1/2 in US sizing or a size 5 in British sizing—we use both in NZ. However, here in Japan I am a 24.5, which puts me at the ‘bigfoot’ end of the range. Fortunately for me, 24.5 is still a standard size, and it is fairly easy to get shoes in my size. It must be tough for anyone over 25 cm. On a positive note, I have found that shoe sizes are very standardized. I am 24.5 in any brand, and I can order shoes through direct mail with confidence, virtually assured they will fit. This is not the case overseas, where the size often varies from company to company.

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I love Japanese shoes. During my visit home last summer, I couldn’t find a single pair I liked (at a price I liked). Here in Japan I can get a nice pair of shoes for 2-3,000 yen at any one of several shoe stores around town.

Kids shoes, with their generous boxy toes, Velcro fastenings and bright colours, also get a thumbs up from me. They are attractive, practical and comfortable. When we were in NZ, my 7-year-old noticed that all the boys his age had lace-up sneakers, and he begged for a pair. Well, after seeing how long it takes him to put them on and take them off, I understand why Japanese kids tend to wear Velcro shoes well into the upper grades of primary school! Incidentally, at 23.5 cm my son’s feet are already bigger than some of my adult friends’!

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4.%J'K#%.2%L.D%D.%J'K# !"#>%=./C(#D:2'8."( I try to stick to business at the supermarket. Keep my eyes on my list, or down in the deep freeze searching for a lucky prize like Canadian salmon. Although surrounded by fellow shoppers and loiterers, I look through the other people to the boxes of cereal or cans of tuna fish. I try to avoid getting trapped into a chat session by an acquaintance (one of the hazards of small town life.)

These days my supermarket is the clean, well-stocked Mbabane Spar, open seven days a week, 364 days a year. Anyone after groceries heads to “the Spar”. I meet Swaziland’s Chief Justice there regularly, I meet other expatriates, but mostly I meet Swazis from every walk of life.

Yesterday was a typical weekday afternoon— I had to pick up something at the Spar— but I had a new experience. A young fellow planted himself in front of me and caught my eyes before I even made it down the first aisle. With his dress pants, shirt and tie and leather jacket he blended in well with the hoard of lunchtime shoppers. But he wasn’t there on his lunch hour to buy a piece of roast chicken from the deli corner or bread and emasi (sour milk, the favorite drink of Swazis). He was there to beg. Limping along (apparently afflicted by polio), one hand gripped his walking stick while the other was cupped and extended. There was no doubt what he was up to. I tossed him a dirty look in response to his well-rehearsed pitiful look of appeal, then carried on to the dog-bone corner of the butchery before cruising the condiment aisle. Although I’ve shopped at that store almost every day for the past year and a half, it was my first time to encounter a beggar inside.

tick (even an unexpired jar). All Gold tomato sauce—tick. I rounded the corner, passed by the aisles of junk food and cleansers, and there he was again at the end of the cracker and biscuit aisle. He tilted his head and gave me the same “woe is me” look. This time I was really irked. I certainly wasn’t impressed with his begging skills since he couldn’t remember or didn’t care that he’d approached me one minute before. For his second offense, he got a glare and a firm shake of the head. I glanced around for a security guard to have him removed from the store, surprising myself at how strongly I was reacting to his presence. But I didn’t see a guard and didn’t bother searching. The store is in a shambles due to renovations. I just wanted to get the necessities and get out. I didn’t want to have to steer my red plastic basket around an opportunistic beggar, limp or no limp.

Although I’ve been around the world, I lack experience with beggars. I remember a lot of buskers around Seattle’s Pike Place Market, but no beggars. My first roommate in New York City, an 18-year old from New Jersey, took to begging in Soho after she drank up her small inheritance. I was a graduate student living hand to mouth at the time, but never joined in on her exploits despite the opportunity for social science research. I was impressed with the cash she could earn in just a few hours. In the South Pacific, young children in the outer islands would flock to any papalagi (“white burst from the sky”) hold out their hand and say, “give me money,” but it always seemed they were practicing their English more than begging. Adult beggars were not to be found. Neither did I meet any beggars in Tokyo where I spent The guy was still on my mind as I contin- five years. In Lusaka, Zambia, colorful billued my rounds. Hellmann’s mayonnaise— boards along the airport road touted the AAA<'#AT<$%B

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message not to give to beggars, so begging was an after-dark activity. The few times I gave I felt like a lawbreaker. After reading Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (set in India) I’ll forever look at beggars differently, not that there is organized begging or intentional maiming here in Swaziland. Anyway, as I said, my exposure is still limited, and I’ve yet to develop a firm stance on giving.

I’m confronted with just one beggar a week on average here, despite all the time I spend in and around town. My generosity is whimsical, depending on my mood (which is largely dependent on the weather), accessibility of my pocketbook and a host of other things. Last week in the industrial district I bought a small bunch of bananas from a young girl carrying a cardboard box of fruit on her head simply because I wanted to support her efforts at petty employment. No one in my family eats bananas. (Ten years in the South Pacific was enough to cure us for life.) Then, at my next stop a few doors down, a man approached and asked for bread. Now this guy looked like a beggar with his bare feet and rags, and he was on the street where beggars belong.

I passed him the bag of bananas, which he accepted by cupping his hands and lowering himself in the very deferential Swazi way of saying “thank-you”. His timing was so perfect, it crossed my mind that he and the fruit peddler might have a thing going, but I don’t think so. I was happy to be relieved of the ripe bananas and proud of my quick thinking.

zi men I’ve seen. I often imagine how spectacular he’d look freshened up and wearing decent clothes. In my book, a guy that good looking should be a success. He doesn’t appear to be sick or crazy.

Now that my son’s karate venue has moved from town to a residential neighborhood, I rarely enter the territory of the small band of streetkids that are prone to pester. Another karate mom once caught me giving and scolded me. She said that I shouldn’t give money on the street because the boys could get free meals at the Lighthouse, a town shelter for the homeless. She recommended making a periodic donation to the organization, as she does. Someone else said the boys weren’t homeless at all, but simply naughty and after pocket money for liquor or snacks.

I don’t know where these boys eat and sleep each night, but I think it’d be difficult to make yourself look so shabby and destitute no matter how hard you tried.

Like most issues, I can see both sides. Giving to beggars encourages more begging, no doubt about that. And who wants more beggars? But there are a lot of hungry people here, and if I am able to relieve someone’s hunger for the night, shouldn’t I? © 2002 Melinda Tsuchiya

Mbabane’s most prominent beggar can usually be found daylight hours at one of the two busiest intersections. I have given him notes over the months, but lately roll up my car window and turn down his requests. I don’t know why. He’s very polite—never persists or casts any guilt-inducing looks.

The rice-bag vest, dirty body and unkempt hair can’t hide this guy’s good looks. In fact he’s probably one of the most attractive SwaZZ***G34*+,-.*N/)24

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7.D"#2E,%I/$#2*M !"#D(E(8#F(9(E2<( September 2, 2002, Monday den center accompanied by meditation music under the glow of our garden lights. YoDear Friends, shihiro and I will have some umeshu (plum Three days ago, I heard that my mother had wine) and we will give some to mother in a died. This is the way I have processed her small sake cup in front of the flower. We will death and how I have come out on the other burn incense in the garden and we will both side full of energy to live my life in a positive say something to her. I will read my letter. I way. I am proactive and creative, and this is will take the copy of the letter to the United States next fall and read it to her at her grave one good example of how I live my life. there. It is a celebration of my gratitude to Taking time to process my mother’s death her, not a grieving for things not realized. It was an excellent way to get the energy to re- is a celebration of gratitude. I am not feeling surface. My reaction to this news was total- heavy loss or major grief and I think I unly different from what I had ever expected it derstand why. My mother was 84 and it was would be. I have entered another sphere of time for her to die. understanding how to ‘be’.

I have spent years using various approaches Since Friday morning, I have been process- of processing ‘the family’s’ dysfunctional way ing the news that my mother died last Tues- of interacting perpetrated by Mother. One day. I found out in a round-about way on approach is that of valuing myself. One day Friday morning through an e-mail from Lin- several years ago, I drew a geneogram of my da, a good friend from junior high school, family from memory, filling in as many dewho still lives in the Amish area of Penna. tails as I could think of. After years of blamLinda had heard the news from her moth- ing my parents and feeling sorry for myself, er who had seen it in the newspaper. Linda I was amazed to discover how much my parthought I might not know about my moth- ents had been able to do for their family, giver’s passing, and she was right. Because of en their own limited capacities. What they Linda’s thoughtfulness, I was able to send gave was not sufficient from within my own two bouquets of flowers to the funeral on definition of giving, but then my situation time, one from Yoshihiro and me, and one has been much more privileged than either on behalf of his family. My sister and broth- of theirs had been. From that time on, I beer contacted neither me nor my half-sister in gan to see my parents differently and deal New York to tell us. They also closed the fu- with them as people, not just my parents. It neral so that no one could attend, therefore was a revelation to know that all the ‘missno one who knew her could go and grieve ing’ stuff that I had expected from my family for her. No cousins, and not even her grand- had already been created in my life through son, our half-sister’s son. I have never un- the lack of it in the family. I was not wantderstood my sister and brother, and I think ing. After all, unknown to my mother, the they are totally insane. Tonight in my gar- way she has encouraged the dysfunctionden, Yoshihiro and I are having a Celebra- al interaction in our family has been the tion through Gratitude ceremony. catalyst for me to find a way to THRIVE I wrote a letter of gratitude. I will bury it un- through RESILIENCE and CREATIVITY. der the flowering plant I bought at the gar- That is a huge gift, so in remembrance of my AAA<'#AT<$%B

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mother’s passing, I am focusing on the positive things I remember in her spirit and I am letting the other things go. What would be the use of dwelling on them now? This is my chance to heal.

There were many dysfunctional ways my mother lived her life, but she also had a creative side. She had a file of poems she wrote in the past ten years since my father died which I would love to edit and publish as a present for her, even if I have to pay for the publishing myself. It is the only thing I want out of my mom’s entire estate. But knowing my sister and brother’s values, I fear that they will throw all those kinds of things away and burn them. If I let them know that I want them, that will make them throw those things away even faster. It would be wonderful to share my mother’s thoughts and feelings that she could only express through poetry. I would like to share that part of my mother’s way of being. I will probably never be able to have those poems and this is what I regret the most. She always wanted to publish her poetry, and that is something I could do for her now. When I visited her she asked me to read her poems but when I suggested that I needed more time with them, her dysfunctional mistrust surfaced and she would not let me take even copies home to Japan.

I truly regret this expression being lost but there seems to be no way to get the poems without physically going there and ‘stealing’ them. I will have to release this regret since I am not going to the United States for another year. The resilient, creative way is to write poetry myself through my memory of my mother.

time, and a symbol. I now have a place to go to ‘remember’ my mother when I want to cry or talk to her. I spent Friday, the day I heard the news, and Saturday and Sunday talking to lots of friends by telephone.

The idea for the celebration ceremony came together bit by bit. Those three days of reflection through writing, and talking with friends brought wonderful insights. I realized two huge things as we were talking and thinking in the quiet space of the lighted candles, incense, music, and the sake.

1. It is all finally finished. I have been waiting for this to happen, to come to a close. I am free. It was such an immense, full realization. It was a ‘felt sense’ opening out from the core of my body through a widening of my chest.

2. Mother is at rest. All the manipulating and orchestration of people to function against each other have been released from her body, freeing her from that stress. She, too, is free.

3. I am opposite of everything she taught me. I realized it is because the manipulation and petty scapegoating hurt me so badly as I was growing up that I did not want to act that way towards others. I developed great empathy for how people are feeling. I have wondered why I was different and the garden reflection has brought this understanding as I thought back over how I felt when I was in those unhealthy interactions and how I acted differently to change my feelings.

4. I am some of what she was. She was strong, friendly, fun and vivacious. She was creative. That is clearly a part of me. So I am There are a multitude of ways to respond using her legacy to me in a very different and to the death of immediate family members, wonderful way from the way she used her many ways to meet our needs of ritual and own similar qualities. May it forever be true. altars, many ways to process our feelings.

The following is the result of our ritual celebration in the garden.

Our celebration brought closure to the situation, centered the grieving in a location, Z\***G34*+,-.*N/)24

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&'DDM#%)./,#%'$%N"'D*0*:"'%% !"#7*('%"#D(<G./#1:+E2<( Housing—a topic close to my heart; it will be a year since we bought a tiny little house in Jujo, Kita-ku, Tokyo. Our place is one of eight little homes built in a circle; I am sure you have seen ads for similar new urban developments in your newspaper every Friday and Saturday morning. All of the houses look a bit alike and I can touch my neighbor’s wall through the window. We all own the land under our individual homes and share the land in the middle of the circle, but no one can use the common land for personal use.

back and forth into each others homes, borrowing things, and helping take care of pets and kids. No one asks me to teach them English or treats me like novelty which is very different from other places I have lived.

Last July, my daughter Erin and I were leaving for the States for a month. The night before we left, the neighbors had a huge barbeque party in the circle, complete with grills, music, and a kiddy pool. They had another welcome back party when we returned, but I was really shocked at Halloween. I was feeling a bit We looked at the house because it was afford- homesick and wanted Erin to trick or treat, so able and near the station. I now know why, Jujo the neighbor kids all dressed up and the paris not trendy and it is shitamachi (old down- ents passed out candy to the trick or treaters. town), a bit dirty and full of winding one way One of the mothers dressed up and she and streets that lead to nowhere. Moreover, Jujo is my husband led a parade down Jujo Shotenthe home to the Tokyo North Korean junior gai. It was a riot. Another neighbor told me high and high school, the immigration office she wanted to participate because I have to for overstayers complete with a detention cen- adapt to Japan all year, so she wanted to “adapt ter similar to a jail, and a Self Defense Forces to me” for at least one day. When it snowed, training ground. “All kinds of dubious char- we built a kamakura and ate oshiruko and acters swarming about,” many Japanese (the drank amazake outside (I still can’t figure out doomers and gloomers) were quick to warn us. how they are always prepared for these kinds My husband was excited since he thought the of things). area would have many yakinuku and “ethnic” restaurants (it does and they are good and in- Some friends, both Japanese and non-, have expensive). The doomers and gloomers really asked me if I feel a lack of privacy. No, acgot excited when they heard a single man was tually I don’t and I feel much better than in moving in next door. We had better be careful, our old mansion where no one spoke to anyyou never know...(in reality he is one of the one. Sure, I hear when my husband takes Erin shopping in her pajamas, but I also know that most trustworthy people around). if she wandered away, someone would know We ignored the doomsayers and are now shar- her and look for me. In this respect, I am pering driveway space with seven other families in fectly happy. a very untrendy area. I was a bit leery before moving in, but our move has been the best de- There are two downsides to our place. Due cision we have made. I love my neighborhood. to the sunlight laws, the ceilings on the third Most of the eight are either from the area or floor slope making the rooms smaller than the have a connection to Jujo, but we all moved actual floor space and preventing full use of in the same month which is the great equal- all four walls. The other downside is the locaizer, so we are all new in a way. One of the tion of the toilet. It is in the LDK! Not near eight families keeps to themselves (in fact with the LDK, but right in the middle of the kitchthe exception of a son, they never go outside), en, so a busy person could use the facilities, but they don’t bother anyone and no one both- eat breakfast, watch TV, and even wave to the ers them. The other seven are constantly going people across the circle. What kind of builder AAA<'#AT<$%B

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puts a toilet in the kitchen? Sure, it has a door and an electric seat, but still. I saw the location on the blueprints, but it never dawned on me until we moved the kitchen table in, but we are surviving. I think it may even make toilet training easier.

My advice to anyone looking for a house is to move into a new complex if possible, look at areas you may not be originally considering, walk around the area and eat at an izakaya to get a feel for the neighborhood, and keep the toilet out of the kitchen.

“While I can say that family events such as parties for Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter are definite highlights because they are wonderful for the kids, who are learning about their mothers’ cultures and traditions, and they are also a great chance for the foreign wives to get together, I really must give serious credit to the basic “Potluck Lunch” and make clear how much I relish the languishing afternoons that are a result. Each has had a memorable moment (or topic!), but I would like to mention a few noteworthy stories.

Just after moving from Bangkok to Chiba in 1992, I was welcomed by the friendly Chiba leader over the phone. We had a lovely chat and I immediately volunteered to host a potluck. I intentionally chose a weekday that my darling husband would have off from work so he could help with the baby number 2 and anything else that cropped up. It ended up being a very successful day (the first of many), but the funniest thing that happened was that most everyone brought desserts! They were certainly all very yummy, but not entirely filling, nor good for the little ones. My sweetheart quickly went to the nearest supermarket and came back laden with fried chicken and some salads. Thanks to Daiei, we muddled through. After that episode I have been more careful about saying “bring anything!”

Another potluck began as your average lunch time gig. We all brought food to share, enjoyed good conversation, followed by tea and coffee. No one wanted to leave or maybe that was our destiny for that evening anyway! Later, one member had a telephone call from her husband advising us to stay put because of the bad traffic conditions.

So we hung around. Luckily for us, our hostess’s husband, although a business during the week, becomes a talented chef on the weekends. He quickly made miracles in the kitchen and we had dinner on the table (plus some wine). I don’t think she got rid of us until nearly 11:00 p.m. that night!”

Catherine ZS***G34*+,-.*N/)24

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Simpler Living is my lifetime theme. I am training myself to value the basics of what living is to me: eating, sleeping and doing what I like the most; reading and writing.

I’d like to explain to you what simpler living means to me, and what I do to simplify my life.

For me, simpler living is eating well. For me, eating well is to prepare each family meal with gusto and eat it calmly. I care about making sure that two-thirds of our menu is composed of vegetables and fruits with the rest of the pleasure coming from proteins and carbohydrates. Proteins need not to be the most expensive item of the meal. One pork chop, or half of a sardine, or three slices of salmon cover the daily dietary need for protein. To balance the monthly food budget and increase health it helps to know the wonder of grains. A whole pack of tofu or three handfuls of edamame covers the dietary proteins need, makes you slimmer and yet the fiber helps your body rid itself of undesirable elements. Creativity is helpful to me as I look for ways to serve chickpeas, pinto beans, black beans, or other legumes.

What takes the most time while cooking is preparing the vegetables. Luckily, most vegetables can be eaten raw, sautéed or boiled. I basically sauté most leafy vegetables with olive oil, garlic flavoring, salt and ground pepper. For a change in flavor, I might use soy sauce with sesame oil or oyster sauce. When I boil vegetables, I usually flavor with vinegar and soy sauce or I pour my original dressing over them. Our family is learning to like the bitterness, the sweetness, and the crunchiness of the vegetables. I am grateful that for most days of the year, the three of us are able to have dinner without needing to turn on the lights! We begin dining at or before 5:30 p.m.

the most. Only eight hours of sleep wakes me up smiling. Some days, I even need nine to ten hours of peaceful, quiet sleeping. To make this happen, my ideal is to turn off the TV at 8 p.m. and get ready for bed. From 8 to 9 p.m., I take shower/bath, and clean up the rooms and the kitchen. I pick up a book and lie down. “Gokuraku!” (It is paradise!) By this time, hubby is usually reading to our 7 year-old daughter. We live in a 36 square meter, 53 year-old apartment owned by the Prefecture of Tokyo. If the TV is on, it can be heard from any corner of the “apato”. I am grateful that it has become a habit that by 10 p.m. everyone here is already fast asleep!

To describe simpler living, I’d like to tell you about a typical day. I have chosen October 23rd. For breakfast I had one slice of bread with butter, coffee and mini-tomatoes. For lunch, I ate spaghetti allo e olio with a salad made of lettuce, finely sliced red onion, wakame, tomatoes and tofu. I dressed it with my original recipe. (1/2 cup vinegar, 1/4 cup shoyu, 1/4 cup olive oil, 1Tbsp salt, some ground black pepper and 1 clove of slightly crushed garlic). At 2.30 p.m. I made some popcorn with olive oil and had a bowl of it with milk tea. We dined at 5.30 p.m. on pumpkin soup with bread and sautéed broccoli with garlic, salt and black pepper.

I discovered that adding two small potatoes to pumpkin soup makes it tastier.

By 7 a.m. of the same day, I had already walked for 40 minutes, and I had joined the “rajio taiso” at Shakujii Koen. Rain or snow, there are always people there for the 6 and 6:30 a.m. ten-minute session of “rajio-taiso”. I remembered to keep the yasashii kao (gentle face) throughout the walking. I noticed that the oshidori (mandarin duck) that lives hidden on the island of the Sanpojii ike, an extension of the Shakujii Koen, Another part of simpler living is sleeping. had come out. This made me look around This is the activity of the day that I treasure and discover that the trees are turning yelAAA<'#AT<$%B

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low, red, brown...

brarians here in Shakujii have been gathering books from around Tokyo for me! I am That afternoon my daughter and I went to still in the beginning of this simpler living the public library, to the post office and to journey but thankfully, my main work now Chokoji Bashi Koen where we played tag. is to enjoy it.

The whole afternoon I walked behind my daughter while she rode her new bicycle. The results and actions taken toward my She bumped in the gutter of the streets and goal of simpler living may seem simple and there were uncountable times my heart al- organized, but this road was not straight and most popped out wondering if she would be was paved with pain, struggle, and conflict. I able to pull the brakes to stop before crossing had supporting friends and some how-to-do the streets. That afternoon, for the first time, books like: Living the Simple Life, by Elaine she speeded down the slope that leads to the St. James. Simple Abundance: A Daybook of river sidewalk behind our toei-jutaku. I am Comfort and Joy, and The Simple Abundance glad that both of us are alive and complete. Companion, by Sarah Ban Breathnach. How (October of 2001 will forever be with me. I Children Learn, by John Holt. The Artist’s have written down every step of how daugh- Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, ter learned to ride and experiment with her by Julia Cameron. A Writer’s Book of Days: bicycle and my struggles to keep my mouth A Spirited Companion and Lively Muse for shut to let her enjoy every step of the adven- the Writing Life, by Judy Reeves. The readture.) ing was fun. The real struggle was to not to preach but to do.

My days have been much like this since the sun decided to show up more frequently My day to day guide has been to live: here in Kanto. So, when my much treasured activity of the day was to begin I have been the 3 S’s (Simple, Slim, Smart,) screaming “gokuraku!!!” the 3 R’s (Refuse, Reuse, Recycle) We unschool our daughter, thanks to her re- and the Simple Abundance principles fusal to go to school and our doubts about collective schooling. The decision to take the 1. Gratitude responsibility of her education into our own 2. Simplicity hands was much easier than the decision to give away, for a while, my economic inde- 3. Order pendence. My toughest decision of the year 4. Harmony was deciding not to look for a good, satisfying job.

5. Beauty Looking back now on how far I’ve come, I 6. Joy am grateful to my daughter for staying out of school and for my husband, who has supported home schooling from the beginning. I wish you a serene day.

Our choice led me to being able to take daily morning walks, daily writing practice, daily reading, to do laundry every sunny day, shrink my wardrobe, trim the number of personal and household gadgets, take leisurely walks on sunny days, try economical dishes, bake cakes and cookies and take them to friends’ places for tea, talks and play.

I’ve been going to some new place in Kanto at least four times a month (outings for home schoolers and family hiking). The liZV***G34*+,-.*N/)24

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IM5'$8%9'D"%IM5M*+5 !"#H.(/%#F(B(*+E+ I was surfing the Internet one day when I should have been doing something more constructive and stopped at one of the websites that focus on housewives and housecleaning. A number of women there mentioned “Flylady” and how she helped them get their act together when it came to organizing their homes and lifestyles. I’m a sucker when it comes to yet another method that will allow me to live a more organized life, so I linked myself over to Flylady to see what she could do for me. It sounded interesting and it was free so I signed myself up. Flylady (who used used to be a fly fishing teacher) discovered a method that helped her keep her house under control. She started emailing her ideas to friends. Well, now those friends have expanded to over 50,000 people who find her advice (sent several times a day in email ‘reminders’) so useful that these people introduce their friends to the group, and their friends do likewise.

4. Where is your laundry?

This is how the Flylady system works. Once you sign up you will be sent a number of email reminders every day, plus testimonial letters from Flylady fans (who call themselves Flybabies) thanking Flylady for helping them get their houses and their lives under control. The emails, though sometimes annoying with their nagginess, are actually quite useful because the philosophy begins to sink in and you find yourself automatically wiping down your sink after each time you use it. (Flylady insists that if you do nothing else in a day, keep your sink clean and shiny. If you do that, other things follow automatically). Flylady also insists that you get washed and dressed the minute you get up in the morning (all the way down to the shoes—which isn’t great advice for living in Japan) and to have morning, afternoon and evening routines that you follow faithfully.

Evening reminders are sent to remind you to start your evening routines early enough so that you can go to bed at a reasonable time.

Evening routines are usually cleaning up the sink, laying out your clothes for the next day, relaxing in the bath, etc. In addition to the regular email, there are some which remind you to do things that generally get put off: clean your purse, return books to the library, organize your makeup drawers, etc. Hearing regularly from Flylady is almost like getting nagging email from mother—but without the emotional drama that’s usually involved. The good thing about Flylady is you can ignore her advice or just do bits and pieces of it. Mostly it’s a matter of common sense.

The morning reminders are usually: 1. Are you dressed to shoes, hair and face?

2. Have you checked your Hot Spots and put out any fires? (Hot Spots are places where clutter tends to gather.)

3. What’s for supper?

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5. Have you taken a break this morning or had any water?

6. Did you have any breakfast?

Afternoon reminders are usually: 1. Did you have any lunch?

2. Have you exercised any today?

3. Go do a 5 minute Room Rescue! (A room rescue is a quick ‘pick up’ of a room) 4. Have you taken a break this afternoon to just sit and be good to yourself?

5. Empty your trash 6. Where is your laundry?

7. Start supper if you haven’t put it in our secret weapon crockpot!

I’ve always been a pretty clean and organized person, but when my schedule gets too hectic I tend to do major cleanings once a week and just try to keep things fairly tidy in the meanwhile. With these short little routines of my own that I’ve established, I’ve been able to cut out the massive weekly cleaning I’m able to have more time to myself on my days off. If you are interested in Flylady, take a look at the website at www.FlyLady.net. I’m sure you’ll be glad that you did.

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4.'M#D%)/0./2 !"#I.'*+<.(#J+:8.E2<( It doesn’t take long for when it comes to amusing any group of foreigners anecdotes. First off, how in Japan to get round to do they decide the length the discussion of toilets. of the basin in the squat Toilets from hell, toilets toilets? Medical research from outer space, a myrihas proved that the Japaad of toilets with gadgets nese femur is much stronand gizmos to boggle the ger than a Western persons brain and pamper your femur, strengthened by all behind. In fact, the toilet that squatting and heavis the only place my mothing. However, that same er is truly happy when she femur tends to be a lot comes to Japan. She shuts SHORTER than a Westherself away for a good ern femur so I have often half an hour of electronic been left with a tidy debuzzing, blowing and squirting and comes posit on the Japanese style toilet floor havout slightly flushed in the face and proclaim- ing totally missed getting it into the basin! ing she hasn’t had that much fun in years.

(Come on, surely it is not just me??!!!) Or holding on for dear life onto the pipe runI, however, am generally doomed when it ning from cistern to the squat hole and havcomes to toilets wherever I am in the world. ing the whole thing rip off the wall. Or rushA first visit to a boyfriends house in Eng- ing into a Japanese toilet with toilet clogs on land, flush the toilet and have the water and and having them fly off and drop into the the assorted floating gubbins continue to rise toilet itself. I have lost lipsticks and sunglassand rise and rise, coming precariously close es from my pockets in Japanese toilets; they to spewing all over the rim, nothing to do are very dangerous places! for it but to just put the lid down and never to return again. Or the first day of a home- I am continuously exposed to the perstay in a log cabin in the wilds of a Finnish ils of Japanese toilets due to the nature of forest. A visit to the outhouse, with its plank my work. A priest has to go to house-towith a hole over an open, MOVING cesspit house amongst their congregation, chanting in the heat of August, and the door locking and drinking innumerable cups of tea. Tea closed, from the OUTSIDE. I had to scream drinking combined with the extreme cold for 35 minutes before I was rescued from and lack of any type of heating in people’s that stinking hell. I have had cisterns drop altar rooms leads to an increased propensity off the wall when I pulled the chain, I have “to spend a penny”. So, there I am, halfway peed on my shoes in French, shower-cubicle up mountains, going house-to-house in an style squat toilets and have developed nasty extremely isolated rural community. Most of rashes from wiping with dodgey leaves when these people have never even met a foreigngoing “au natural”. er before let alone have a female one dressed in order-made silk robes from Kyoto asking But Japanese toilets really take the biscuit to use their toilet facilities. The whole situ[Y***G34*+,-.*N/)24

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ation can become acutely embarrassing for everyone involved. It is extremely rare to people in this area to have running hot water and nine times out of ten the toilet and the bath are outside, alongside the cow and chicken sheds. (The bath heated by burning firewood). I tend to choose my toilet places with discretion, I find a house with a young family stands a better chance at having a reasonable toilet, but as most houses are occupied by a single elderly person over the age of 70, those type of houses are few and far between. However, I want to tell you about my visit to the toilet in the hamlet of Kuwanouchi, a gathering of 7 houses, on the edge of a mountain range with a full view of Mt. Nekodake in Aso. First it takes 45 minutes driving along single-track windy road through forests to get there. And to think my husband’s Grandfather used to WALK there! There are no signs of habitation for at least 30 minutes, then around a particularly hair-raising bend and a close encounter with a wild boar I arrive at my destination. I have a map but it is difficult to distinguish between what is marked as a house or a shed, as far as I can tell it’s all cow-sheds, though some have washing hung up outside. I park my car and start to walk slowly up the cow-dung-spattered path to he nearest house. I have to keep my wits about me because it is hard work trying to walk up a slope in zori without getting manure on my white tabi. Before long, I am on to my sixth house and my sixth cup of tea and I have in mind to go to the loo in the final house where all the neighbours and I will gather for a meal when the lady in house six says to me “Are you sure you don’t want to use the toilet?” Hmm, interesting, normally people are not so forthcoming, I get the hint that I should take her up on her offer, maybe house seven’s toilet is really hideous, so I follow her through the dark corridors to the extremes of her very old farmhouse. And then I am left alone. In front of me is a door, not any old door but AAA<'#AT<$%B

a bronze-coloured door with pretty scrolling on it, I open it and my breath is taken away.

In front of me are the most divine “his and hers” wash basins, set with gold taps in marble from floor to ceiling. The floor is made with stepping stones set in silver gravel making a path lined with silk flowers, leading to another bronze-scrolled door, I open it and to my left I see a urinal, set as if in the garden of the finest tea-rooms in Kyoto, with more raked gravel and silk flowers but I am still inside this woman’s house, and then the final door, more floor to ceiling marble and I walk into a throne room. The toilet lid flicks open to greet me and I collapse into helpless fits of the giggles, stunned by the incongruous surroundings. I could have stayed in there for hours, but when I found my way back to where the couple were waiting for me, their faces shined with happiness when I praised their facilities. It turns out that the toilet is her husband’s hobby and he has spent many hours creating this paradise all by hand. Honestly, the best hotels in Tokyo have nothing on that toilet in the wilds of Kyushu.

Now, they say you should never judge a book by its cover, but you can certainly get a good insight into someone’s psyche by going to their toilet. Japan’s toilets, like the nation and the people itself are full of contradictions, they shock you, they surprise you, and there is always room for the unexpected.

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&.K#O%7*22'*8#O%*$+%&'(#%'$% P*G*$Q%6%N#D%B./2,# !"#34>4 Living in Japan has shaped my life in ways that never would have been possible inside the comfy state lines of New England. A golden opportunity in University opened the doors to my first adventure here, a place I only knew then from Fodor’s book of travel as the exotic land of the rising sun. It was all that too, and more. My host families took me to some of the most beautiful places in the country. I’ll never forget the nighttime sail along a river in Shikoku, eating fresh fish called ayu that had just been purged from the throats of the most beautiful, noble looking black birds. The two-month trip was in fact filled with one exotic adventure after the next.

One human services degree, an unfulfilling job, and four years later I returned on my own, as an English teacher; if not only in Japan, then surely one of the few places that zero teaching experience and as much interest qualified me for the position. A year and a half after that I found myself explaining over and again that I did not meet my husband at NOVA. The eating and drinking establishment where I did meet him might not be any more dignified, but it did seem hopelessly romantic, in a Casablanca kind of way.

A three-year-old son and another on the way has cleared the smoke from our eyes, but we do continue to grow in ways that only our cultural differences make possible. My husband is not of the typical Japanese mindset, so simply functioning to meet expectations in this society is stressful in and out of the workplace. I can feel the pressure lift after a couple of days of relaxation. When he explains the enormous pressure of conforming to Japanese standards, I try to be sympathetic, though I can’t really understand what [Z***G34*+,-.*N/)24

it must be like. Leaving his office at 7:30 is considered skipping out early. Declining non-essential business trips abroad (mainly because it causes stress at home), refraining from entertaining and drinking late with clients, taking days off for things like renewing my visa are all things that apparently make him the black sheep in his company. He’s always got to be incredibly polite, overly apologetic, infinitely flexible, non-opinionated and non-defensive to whatever criticism flies his way for having a character that reeks of independence. Coming from a culture where individualism is encouraged, it’s hard to imagine being shunned for being distinctive. Working for an American company in Japan makes the situation all the more complicated. In addition to the usual staunch hierarchy, nobody wants to sneeze without checking with American headquarters. Having an American wife puts him at an even further disadvantage. Not only is he undeniably different, he’s assumed to be arrogant.

Speaking with me on the phone in English causes anxiety, lest someone on “pompous patrol” be lurking within earshot. The discrimination is both blatant and subtle. There are always some trivial obstacles interfering with his hard-earned incentive bonus. Even his travel re-imbursement is hampered all the time by measly problems that don’t affect the conventional.

The petty things in Japan can also pose an exercise of endurance for both of us. I want to know why none of those pretty elevator girls in department stores re-route the escalator-abled people instead of instructing people with baby carts to wait (and wait and wait). I refuse to sit at a non-smoking table six inches from the smoking section. I want to know why having my sandwich on un-

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toasted bread requires a round table conference, and in what book of unspoken etiquette I can find the reason for not sending back a half filled glass of flat gingerale, or a steak that still has a pulse. Things I don’t give a second thought to by nature make me a rebel without a cause here. God forbid if it’s not in the “set course”. That’s what I feel like my life has become at times, a set course. No need to think about what you want, it’s right there in A, B or C, just drool a little and point and all will be decided for you.

My behavior easily causes my husband stress. I ask the doctor a million questions, and what’s worse, disagree with recommendations I find preposterous. I’m involved in endless battles at the post office and the bank with their itty-bitty enforcement committees. I yell back at the taxi guy who scolds our 3 year-old for rubbing his foot against the sacred lace. Our phone is shut off almost every month because I forget the deadline, and they do mean dead line. I put my husband to the humiliating task of getting extra packets of ketchup, ordering a third refill under a nomihodai the three-year-old is sucking down, ask him to find out why the hot carpet takes five weeks to clean, why my son can’t go into the fun ball pit two minutes into the 20 (no matter how much we pay), and on and on. It’s not that he doesn’t get infuriated with profusely apologetic society abiders for blindly denying the most simple, logical requests or their empty explanations, it’s just that my husband knows these inquiries are akin to asking a Coke machine why it doesn’t have Pepsi. Also, he can sense my disgust. I think he struggles with the urge to just conform to the “rules” and the shame of it on the same hand. He’s not a cow in the herd by nature, but he was born into the herd. Nonetheless he asks questions, demands explanations. He wants to make changes, and wants to get results. Something so deeply engrained, something that is unspoken among other Japanese that is unavoidable when confronted with the foreign wife, in this country. I think it’s espeAAA<'#AT<$%B

cially difficult to swallow after living abroad.

Having to speak your mind to survive. “You want a steak? Well how do you want it, exactly? And what do you want it with? What kind of potato, mashed baked or fries?

Which vegetable? How much bread? Butter or margarine, tea or coffee? Geeze that gingerale looks flat, let me take it back.” Cows in the herd need not apply, leadership abilities required, decision making on all levels.

Whether you’re a waitress or a president, nobody wants to have to tell you what to do unless you’re wearing diapers. More importantly, nobody wants to be told what to do, how to do it, what to eat, how to eat it, what to say or how to say it, whether they’re in diapers or not.

I can’t pinpoint it but there seems to be a sense of dependence on a higher authority figure, or rather unanimous consent. An “I can’t possibly make the ultimate decision by myself” mentality that emits a sense of powerlessness, which if not observed evokes hatred toward the free mind that dared to emerge. It stinks of oppression to me, yet behind all the superficial politeness lies quite an enigmatic thought process.

My husband agrees with my idea that one of the most integral customs here is knowing how to not be straightforward. There couldn’t be a more unfortunate rule for me.

Even before all the years spent in role-plays beginning with “what I hear you saying is....”, saying what I mean has always been second to breathing. All the beating around the bush and great lengths people go to avoid saying things directly must consume a lot of energy. Probably not even as much as constantly reading between the lines and trying to decode all the euphemisms. My depth of understanding of this crystal ball mentality extends about as far as trying to anticipate when my husband wants to eat something I don’t care much for. Even then I fall for the decoy counter-offer of eating my favorite meal instead. Consequently I continuously find myself in the doghouse for not being G34*+,-.*N/)24**[[

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sensitive enough to interpret such a simple “request”. Likewise, just when I think I’m getting the hang of this fortune telling, I go and take up a neighbor’s offer to “stop by anytime” or ask a favor of a Japanese “friend” that insisted I call for anything. Hence my lack of Japanese friends. What a clever excuse not to improve my Japanese, I’d never be able to communicate anyway!

The examples seem petty, but the conformist lifestyle is a stressful one, whether we heed it or not. Contending day in and day out with the Japanese rat race and coming home to Miss American Pie, who doesn’t even understand the language must not always be easy.

Nor is spending a day cleaning up sticky places and crying faces, and keeping a 3 yearold from being plowed down by a bicycle.

Since we’ve been married I think we’ve both developed a lot of patience, partly through tolerance acquired from functioning in this society. I know I still drive my husband nuts in some ways. He thinks I am too confrontational, inflexible, not apologetic enough, and too defensive; all the things he can’t be in this society. It must wear on even the healthiest self-esteem. Trying to keep that in mind however, when we are warring over the way one of us said or did something, is not easy. Then again, neither is marriage. At the risk of being incredibly corny and stealing a line from a not-sogood movie called The Two of Us, if I have to put up with someone’s flaws it may as well be his.

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Reviewing this rant of mine, I must say I sound pretty negative. However this was originally a response I wrote to an AFWJ email list about why a husband’s personality might spiral downward in this society after living abroad. I could write an equally positive critique about this society, as there are lots of things I love about living here. We’ve never lived abroad together, but we plan to relocate to the States before the re-entry permit on his green-card expires this November. I don’t expect any complete transformation in personality, but I do hope working life will be less stressful for him. Other things will surely be more stressful, and then I’ll probably be writing about how much I miss Japan.

Living in a society that I will never feel I fit into has taught me a lot about myself, and about what I want out of life. Security used to be very important to me. I liked the idea of settling down with the next several years of the future planned. Stability is much more important to me now. Whether we end up here another year or ten, or if we move to another country tomorrow, we are building a foundation for our family wherever we are. It was our love that set us on this path together. It’s the compromise, commitment and loyalty to our family that has to hold us together, in Japan, Jamaica, or on Jupiter.

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R.M/$D##2'$8 !"#H4-474 With two kids and three moves, I have experience in three elementary schools, all in different parts of Tokyo. My son is now in university in Tokyo and my daughter in high school in Singapore.

I was always surprised that I couldn’t get out of volunteering for various activities just by being foreign! I always felt like I should be exempted, duty-free, or something like that, but the choose-the-volunteer process is so horrible that any warm body that might fill the position is accepted and no one is going to let you off scot-free if they can help it.

Having a full time job only gives you a “grace” obligation to do the things that can be done on weekends/evenings/etc. The only excuses which ever seemed to work were young babies at home or elderly parents who required intensive care. I was fortunate enough to have a fairly flexible work schedule, but as any working mom will tell you, the big meeting with the important client that you can’t miss will always coincide with the school event that your child begs you to attend. It’s the Murphy’s Law of Working Mothers.

ability to stonewall. If you are good at avoiding eye contact and can endure the endless silence, then you might make it to the end of the meeting.

I can laugh about all this now, but the experience is truly horrific. Forty women are kept prisoner in the classroom until all positions are filled. The teacher leaves the room and doesn’t come back until the air clears at the end. I can’t tell you how many ridiculous positions I have volunteered for, just so that I could go home! I’ve even been on the newsletter committee. I mean, of all the ridiculous committees to put a non-native speaker of the language!

On a side note, this situation seems to be prevalent in other areas of Japanese society and Japanese are not immune to the urge to raise their hands just to go home. My husband became the head of the Neighborhood Association under the same circumstances.

Again, your ability to actually do the work doesn’t seem to matter at all in the selection process—he is a workaholic salaryman in the retail industry so he doesn’t even get Saturdays or Sundays off. There was no way he would be able to attend the annual gateball tournament, but they named him kaiBeing absent from the meeting on the day cho-san anyway! that they chose the class mom/etc. does not mean you will not be chosen! I tried that Despite this, volunteering is a treat as a paronce and got shifted onto toilet cleaning ent, if time permits. You get to know the duty (true yochien experience). Everyone teachers, the other parents, the school and (start asking your neighbors now) will tell the community in a way that you can’t othyou that it is best to go and volunteer ear- erwise. Even if, or maybe especially if, your ly for the “easy” jobs. And since the jobs are Japanese is not very good, this is an excelthe same year after year, and were probably lent way to show your child’s teacher that the same when the mothers attended school you want to be actively involved in your themselves, they know a whole lot more child’s education. You care, and you are conthan we do! Be sure to tap into this valuable cerned enough about what is going on, to resource! After that, it all depends on your participate. There are plenty of silly jobs that AAA<'#AT<$%B

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don’t require much language ability, such as watching the playground for a few hours during summer holidays so that the school can keep the gates open for the kids.

booth worded, “you can do this, or this, or that job OR you can donate $20” (in lieu of volunteering!) It made me so mad I immediately threw it in the rubbish! I never got another letter. I wish it had been as easy in ToYou will learn a lot from observing the kids’ kyo! behavior as they play together or in the classroom. And you will learn about your own I find that there is much more volunteer child’s behavior in a group situation, too. work done “voluntarily” here in Singapore Personally, I was always happy to know than there ever was in Japan at the secondary that my children were “proud” to see me at school levels. In Japan, it is really an elemenschool; they never avoided acknowledging tary school phenomenon and once the kids the strange foreign woman as their mom. are in upper grades, you only go to school I’ve made some of my best friends through for the infamous parent-teacher-child conbeing on the same committee, and boy, ference once a year (when the teachers show those proper PTA women sure know how to you the test scores). Here, parents are very let loose and party once you make it to the actively involved in the extracurricular activnijikai (the real party after the official bor- ities (sports and others). ing one!).

Maybe it is a unique situation in Singapore I drew the line on volunteering when my with international school, since many of the son wanted to continue to play baseball in mothers left full time jobs behind to folhigh school. Sports team volunteering is in a low their husbands overseas and have time completely different category, and the com- on their hands without the friends and fammitment on the part of the moms is major. I ily commitments they would have had back told him that I honestly didn’t think I could home. The school really becomes the comdo it. He changed to basketball, and loves it. munity, and an outlet for skills/talents put on hold by the move.

Singapore My daughter is now a high school junior at an international school in Singapore. Volunteering is completely at the discretion of the parent. There is nothing mandatory about it, but the Japanese mothers sent out a letter “asking” for volunteers for the Japanese food

“I enjoy so many aspects of AFWJ from the quiet lunches with friends to the raucous parties at Convention. Those are always great times spent but one of the most rewarding benefits of AFWJ, in my opinion, is the opportunity to exchange knowledge on the different e-mail groups. This is the ‘nitty-gritty’ of networking... people helping people to live a meaningful life in a foreign culture.”

Erin Sakakibara [S***G34*+,-.*N/)24

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)*M(% >B.$(#,,'.$,%.$%HSFLJC%*$+%D"# ?D"#2%N'+#%.(%D"#%B.'$ !"#K%//.L%<#F.**( My mother is Japanese. She was born in Kyushu, raised in Tokyo, and became a naturalized citizen of the US after she married my father some 30 odd years ago. My father is Caucasian—of German descent from the middle of soybean and cornfield land in central Illinois where he is still known as “Ernie’s (my grandfather) boy who got married to that oriental gal.” I lived in the United States my entire life (barring the year I spent as a very small child in Japan with my mother when my father was stationed in Greenland). I never spoke Japanese at home. In fact I never really spoke Japanese at all, until I started studying in college, where that one year in Japan as a child and my mother shouting “urusai” and “yamenasai” at me and my brothers probably gave me a slight advantage for about the first two semesters.

After that, I was as clueless as everyone else!

I never heard of the word “half ” being used as a noun and applied to a person (as in “I’m half”) until I came to Japan at age 22. (So what rock did I climb out from under?!...)

In fact, I was telling another AFWJ member a while ago that if I had known that it was such a big deal to be “half,” in Japan, I would’ve dropped out of high school and headed straight for Shibuya!

look Caucasian). I was at a loss the entire time I was in college and I think I checked a different box for “race” every semester. I even checked two boxes once and my registration forms apparently got stuck somewhere in the automation whereupon I learned that from the university’s point of view, the correct box for me to check was 3. Other. And if I chose not to check any box, the administrative secretary will check one at her discretion based upon my appearance. Whatever...

I heard the word “double” being used back then too. And frankly, I find it completely ridiculous. I know now that I don’t have to justify my background to anyone. If I feel like explaining that my mother is Japanese, I will, if not, I won’t. Regardless of what I say, it will probably not change the way the other person thinks.

So—you can call me Half. Or you can call me Other. Or Mixed, or Bi-racial, or Multiracial, or Whatever. (Just don’t call me Double—it makes me feel like Doublemint Gum.) It’s easy to get bogged down playing the name game, but in the end, the label means nothing.

Until I got to college, I really had no “word” to describe myself. Then when I became a number (how many of you who went to large universities in the US can still recite your social security number?!), everyone wanted to know my “race.” I could pick: 1. Caucasian 2. Asian, Pacific-islander or 3. Other. It was not until then that I realized I wasn’t exactly the white chick I thought I was (I don’t even AAA<'#AT<$%B

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Dr. Nakagawa (Dr. “In the River,” you translate in your head) is the man who’s supposed to keep your children alive. When you first see him, the word that pops into your head is “young.” He has brush-cut hair and dimples. His ample belly strains against the pink smock. From the back, you can see that he’s wearing a T-shirt underneath—casual clothes when professionalism would seem to dictate button-downs and neckties. Get my babies out of here, you think. You’ll take them to the Citizen’s Hospital on the other side of the city, to gray-templed physicians and decades of experience. But then you see that your newborn twins are trussed up with wires and tubes. There’s a long thin tube going into each tiny mouth conveying oxygen to their lungs; minuscule I.V. needles are threaded into their veins; there are wires linking heartbeats to monitors. Those babies aren’t going anywhere. You’ll have to trust this man.

Japan, the country you have lived in for ten years, has never felt so foreign as it did on the day when you were forced to check into one of its hospitals. “Threatened premature labor,” the doctor told you, and you gasped because you were only six months pregnant.

You had been planning on starting a program of Mozart and poetry in the seventh month, had already picked out a layette in the Land’s End catalogue. You had just started wearing maternity clothes and ordered a gray cotton dress, which hadn’t even arrived yet. You had an appointment the next week with a doula recommended by your hippie friend who lives in the mountains. According to your pregnancy diary, the lungs had not yet fully developed. Your babies’ eyes were still closed. One of your unborn babies is less than a pound, the other barely over two.

the early weeks of motherhood in the rooms where they first dreamed of bouquet-bearing suitors and careers in film. Their husbands go to work and make phone calls at night.

You wanted to stay near your husband, and besides, your insurance wouldn’t cover childbirth in another country. You’d picked out a small ladies clinic locally famous for its good food (ice cream bars every afternoon, celebratory red snapper right after the baby is born). The rooms have floral curtains and you can almost pretend you’re staying at a cozy B & B instead of a hospital. You settle in with a stack of novels and silk bed jackets.

Your Japanese mother-in-law shows up every day with cream puffs and freshly laundered pajamas. She sits by your bed for hours, long after you have run out of things to say to one another. You read, you eat, you have exams.

And then the doctor tells you that you must leave. The bleeding has not abated. You’d be better off in the ward of a bigger hospital— one with incubators and a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. “I like it here,” you protest.

“And I like you.” The doctor shakes his head.

“No. You should go.” So you are transferred by ambulance, siren singing you along the highway. Because you are horizontal, you can not see the other cars making way.

Your mother has never seemed as far away as she does on the day you are rushed into the operating theater. A few weeks of bed rest have suddenly turned into blood running down your legs and an emergency Caesarean, and you are desperate for the safe and familiar. Fortunately, your husband is only a phone call away. He arrives shortly after the obstetrician, called in on a Saturday, still in his day-off clothes—a striped polo shirt and khakis. You see your husband long enough to tell him that you are sorry about the failure of your body to keep the babies inside.

You tell him about the pain that is about Most Japanese women go back to their to crack you apart. You press your wedding childhood homes to give birth. They spend ring into his palm and then you are wheeled [V***G34*+,-.*N/)24

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away. The nurses in white run with the gurney down one corridor and the next, into a darker part of the hospital that is unfamiliar to you. There, you are handed off to another set of nurses and they take you the rest of the way. On the operating table, you are surrounded by strangers wearing blue gauze masks and matching smocks. You look at the clock: 5:30 a.m. The nurse tells you to curl into a ball and you do and the needle slides into your spine. You wonder if you’ll be able to speak Japanese under anaesthesia. You’d expected childbirth to be something else entirely—Enya on the stereo, champagne chilling in the hospital mini-fridge, your husband’s fingers kneading the small of your back. Instead, he is in another room and the obstetrician is swabbing and slicing your abdomen. There is a screen between you and the action so you can’t see a thing. You feel liquid ooze and gush, and the hands of the doctor reaching into your womb. There is movement, like a fish flopping against your belly, and then a tiny mewling cry. “Kawaii,” the doctor says. “Cute.” But you can only imagine because your son is immediately whisked off to an incubator before you can catch a glimpse of him. “Now we’re going in for the other one,” the doctor says, and he reaches for the girl who has lived beneath your heart for the past few months. And then she is taken away, too, and the worst part is over. Or so you think.

The first time you see your babies, see the swell of their eyeballs under sealed eyelids, you think “baby bird.” And then you look at their thin, bowed legs and think, “bull frog.”

Their heads, so narrow, so large in proportion to their bodies: aliens. They have little beards, but no eyelashes. When your daughter’s diaper is changed, you see that she has no labia. You can’t make out the shape of their mouths, which are taped to the breathing tubes. Your husband was right. They do not look like the babies on the covers of your magazines, but you are wrenched with a violent kind of love. If you could will them back into your body, you would. You are sorry you dreaded the pain of childbirth. Let them tear you apart if they could be born again, healthy.

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The nurse in charge of your boy goes about her work with the enthusiasm of a kindergarten teacher. She dances with the giant baby to the tune of “Brahm’s Lullaby” and takes him for “walks.” She reaches into your son’s incubator and waves his hand around as if he were an action figure. “Genki da yo!” she says in a baby boy’s voice. “Don’t worry!

I’m fine!” All the people must wear a pink smock over their clothes (pink being a color found to be soothing to babies), a white cap over their hair. The parents wear masks. You have to wash your hands three times before you can touch your babies.

Every three hours, you and the other new mothers go to the Nipple Room. Okay, so it’s not really called that; it has some Japanese name that you can never remember, but the Nipple Room seems apt. All five or six of you (the number varies) sit on cushioned benches with your pajamas unbuttoned and your pink/brown nipples bared.

There is none of the modesty that you’ve experienced in women’s locker rooms in Japan. You compare and admire each other’s breasts. “Mine are so hard,” one woman moans. “Feel them.” At her urging, you press the pads of your fingers against her swollen breast and indeed, it is solid. When the nurse hands over her giant baby boy, she tickles his parted lips with her nipple, but he won’t suck. “Don’t sleep,” she says. “Give me some relief.” You are jealous that she has a baby to suckle even if he is reluctant. You sit there beside her eking colostrum from your own breasts. It slides into the sterilized bottle, thick and yellow, drop by precious drop.

Your fingers ache. Your lily-white breasts are stained with bruises. You’ve heard that thoughts of babies activate the ducts, make the milk flow faster, so you think about your son and daughter. Your boy has a slender tube through his nose going directly to his stomach. Every two hours, he is fed two milliliters of your milk. Two cubic centimeters—that’s maybe a teardrop or as much dew as falls on one leaf of clover. This morning when you sat before your daughter’s incubator listening to the hum of the respirator, Dr. Nakagawa told you that she could not digest the milk. Although she, too, was fed through a tube from nose to stomach, G34*+,-.*N/)24***[W

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the colostrum remains in her stomach, un- room. When your husband arrives that eveprocessed. The feeding will be stopped. If ning to spell her, your mother-in-law’s face she can’t eat, how will she stay alive? is heavy and sad. All of the bags that she has brought remain in a corner of the room.

“I’ve heard that physical contact can make all the difference with preemies,” your col- A couple of days later—an unlucky day aclege roommate e-mails from New York. cording to your mother-in-law’s calendar— You’ve heard that too, but you’re afraid to your hippie friend comes to visit. The nurse, touch your babies. You open the Plexiglass with her finger to your pulse, studies him doors to your daughter’s incubator and out of the corner of her eye. What must she stroke her foot with one finger. She jerks think of this pony-tailed man in a poet’s away. “I’m your mother,” you whisper sadly. blouse? Does she think that this is an assig“I’m giving you affection.” Her eyes are still nation, a tryst? He has arrived with a tattered sealed shut. She can not look at you. You ca- paperback of Anne Waldman under one arm ress her arms, ever so lightly, and then her and a bowl of salad in the other. The nurse head, and then brush your finger tips over finishes her business and leaves and you lay her torso. The monitor alarm goes off. You against the white sheets while he feeds you look up quickly and then snatch your hand freshly picked parsley, spinach and sprouts away when you see that her heart rate has on a fork. You tell him about the treatment suddenly dropped from 112 beats per min- that your children are getting. Your hippie ute to sixty. A nurse comes running toward friend who self-medicates with herbal teas you, rubber soles squeaking on the floor, and says, “All those chemicals can’t be good for then Dr. Nakagawa. “You’d better let her rest them.” But you know that without them, for awhile,” he says. Then he smiles sadly, as your babies would die. if to assure you that it wasn’t entirely your There is one other woman who expressfault. es milk by hand. Her newborn son (1318 Your mother-in-law arrives with bags of sou- grams and growing) is in the NICU, too. venirs. She has spent the previous evening His incubator is next to your baby girl’s. preparing packages of little bean-filled cakes, One day you start talking about mothersoranges, and iron-supplemented soft drinks in-law. “My mother-in-law,” you say, “sits by for the visitors sure to stream into your room. my bed all day. I just want to read my book, “It’s the seventh day,” she says knowingly. but I feel as if I should entertain her. She’s “And an auspicious day on the calendar.” always hovering and fussing. If I so much as There is still so much that you don’t know cough, she jumps up to throw a blanket over about local tradition, but you are quite sure me even though I’m sweating. It drives me that no well wishers will come. Later, you nuts.” “Mine never visits,” the other woman will learn that the people in the office where says. “Why not?” “Because she blames me you worked are wondering if your babies are for this.” And you know that she is referring even alive. It is hard to decide if this is a cele- to her own bum womb and the tiny boy bebratory occasion or not. Your parents send a hind Plexiglass. On another day, you hear a bouquet of flowers and a card saying “Thank nurse tell a story of a woman who was diyou for our new grandchildren.” Your aunt vorced for giving birth to a stillborn child. calls from Michigan and her first words are The husband and mother-in-law discussed “I’m so sorry.” Your mother-in-law, who has it while the wife was still convalescing, still not yet seen the babies, knows only that you grappling with her grief, no doubt. They have provided an heir. She sits by your bed gave her the news the day after she was reall day and puts on her social smile every leased from the hospital. You realize that the time the door opens, but it is only the clean- woman who annoys you so much is not so ing lady come to scrub the toilet, the hand- bad after all. some young intern to change your I.V. fluid, the nurse to take your temperature, a mis- You walk into the NICU in your mask and chievous child who barged into the wrong smock and paper hat and the young doctor motions you to his desk. “Your son in fine,” \Y***G34*+,-.*N/)24

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he says. “No problem.” And then he takes out a photo done by ultrasound, shows you the blue spots that indicate blood in your daughter’s lungs. He draws a picture of the heart’s chambers and scratches a word above it: “ductus arteriosis.” It seems that a duct in your daughter’s heart has failed to close, as it should have after birth. Her body has not adapted to life outside the womb; her lungs don’t understand that they must now fill with oxygen. The doctor tells you that there is medication and, if that doesn’t work, they can try surgery. He gives you a form to sign your consent. You sit by her incubator longer than usual. “My little sweet pea,” you say. “My darling girl.” She weighs no more than a small animal—a squirrel, perhaps, or a chipmunk. You can not imagine such a delicate being surviving cuts and sutures. When you go back to your room, your mother-in-law is there, plumping pillows and changing the water in the vases of flowers—flowers for “congratulations” and “get well soon.” You try to smile, but your spirits are flagging. You show her the form explaining the problem and the procedure for dealing with your baby girl’s heart. It is all in Japanese. You explain as well as you can that there is a duct that needs to be closed. You try to be brave and confident because you know how much your mother-in-law will worry if you aren’t. The next day when you visit your children, Dr. Nakagawa is listening to opera in his office. You can hear Italians warbling through the partition and you try to identify the music. A tragedy? A comedy? Is this one of those stories where the heroine dies consumptive at the end? The other four babies in the NICU have been released from their Plexiglass prisons. They are given suck at intervals by cheerful moms, taken on promenades by the nurses, bathed in the stainless steel sink. If Dr. Nakagawa is worried, it’s because of your children. It’s because of the baby girl balanced between heaven and life on earth. But then the young doctor emerges from his haven and smiles.

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So now your daughter is getting better. She is being fed breast milk. She is growing stronger. But then the doctor tells you that although the duct in your son’s heart closed on its own, it has now reopened. “That can happen?” you ask. “Yes, sometimes. But rarely.” You feel helpless, much like you do when an earthquake rocks your house. Everything is unpredictable, subject to chance.

You are given another form to sign. On this day you sit next to your son’s incubator longer than usual.

On the day that you come home from the hospital, your next-door neighbor is weeding her flower bed. She sees you get out of the car with your little brown suitcase. She looks from your face to your diminished stomach, wipes her hands on her pants, and ambles over. “Congratulations,” she says. “A boy and a girl at once. You’re so lucky.” Your neighbor had a baby just this side of forty after years of trying. She has a five-yearold girl and from what she’s implied, there’ll be no more children. There is an aura of envy around her. “They’re still in the hospital,” you say. “They’re on life support.” She waves away your concern. “They’ll be fine.

These days incubators are just like the mother’s womb.” You reflect upon this. Inside, the body is warm and dark. The incubator is in brightly-lit space. Sometimes the nurses wrap gauze around your babies’ feet and hands because their extremities chill easily. Inside the body, babies are lulled by the mother’s heartbeat and the sound of her voice. The NICU is a cacophony of alarms and beeps and buzzes and infants screaming in pain.

After you leave the hospital, everyone you run into asks “Why?” Why did you go into premature labor? Why were your babies born fourteen weeks early? Your older woman friend thinks it’s because you let your legs get cold. She saw you at a musical in February in a knee-length dress and nothing but nylons when you should have been wearing insulated pants. Your boss believes it’s because you walked to work each day—a five-minute saunter, if that—carrying a softsided briefcase containing notebooks and a G34*+,-.*N/)24***\X

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magazine or two. He doesn’t consider that the cigarette smoke perpetually fogging the office might have had something to do with it. You have a flashback of a cup of coffee downed at your desk in the third month and you wonder if that might be it. Your husband thinks it’s because you went to an African dance party the week before you started to bleed. You knew when you walked to the bus stop and later when you boarded the train, that your husband wouldn’t approve. But he was in Hokkaido on business, and you would have been alone. Better to be among caring friends, you’d thought.

Maybe you shouldn’t have moved the furniture when your husband called and said, “The new recliner will be delivered in ten minutes. Clear out a space.” But then you think about your sister-in-law who travelled to Bolivia on business in her seventh month of pregnancy, who rested her wine glass on the shelf of her stomach in between sips of Chardonnay, who actually went jogging till a few days before giving birth. Her son, your nephew, was born after two hours of labor.

Who is the freak of nature? You or your sister-in-law? And how can something so ordinary, so natural, go so wrong?

The doctor takes the tube out of your daughter’s lungs. Without it, you can see that her mouth is shaped like Clara Bow’s—beautiful. Until now, she has sucked on the tube for solace, but now she gapes like a fish out of water. “Her mouth is lonely,” the nurse says. You wish you could slide your pinkie between her lips. For the first few hours, she takes regular breaths on her own. But in the days that follow, she sometimes forgets to inhale. When she stops breathing, the monitor beeps. You step aside quickly to allow the nurse to reach in and jiggle her. After a moment, her chest rises and falls, and you start breathing again, too. It takes awhile to get used to it, but you do. Soon, you are the one to reach in and remind her to breathe.

You are singing to your daughter, making up the words as you go along: “My darling child, my little peanut, my ballerina girl.”

Suddenly, the doors whoosh open. In comes the young doctor, a flock of nurses and a pair of incubators. Another set of twins has been \Z***G34*+,-.*N/)24

born, alas, too early. You stop singing and sit frozen like a deer in headlights. The doctor calls out for things and the nurses hand them over. Each baby is weighed. Within five minutes, both red-skinned newborns are intubated and set up with IV’s. You admire the staff’s brisk competence. This must be what it was like on the day of your babies’ birth. The new twins, you notice, two boys, are slightly larger than your son was at birth. Your daughter remains the smallest patient in the NICU. You want to seek out the parents and tell them that you know how they feel. “But look!” you’d say. “Our boy was smaller still and now he thrives!”

His mouth twitches in a smile. His hand curls around your finger. The mother is wheeled in on a gurney, up close to the incubators. You watch her reach inside to touch each one and think, “How lucky! I had to wait till I was able to walk by myself to see my children.” But then the heart specialist is called in. He and the other doctors confer behind screens. They speak in hushed tones to the twins’ parents. When you visit two days later, one of the new twins is missing.

In its place is an incubator covered with vinyl. You know that it is none of your business, but you gesture and ask, “What happened to the other one?” The nurse frowns at you with your bad manners. She makes a stalling sound—“mmmm”—and you lower your eyes. “Oh,” you say. “Pardon me.” In that same week, another baby dies and your daughter’s kidneys stop functioning.

Your daughter’s face is puffy with water; her diapers remain dry. Two days ago she was delicate and slender. Now, the nurses joke that she looks like a sumo wrestler. “We’ve never seen anything like this before,” Dr. Nakagawa tells you. “In most cases, kidney failure occurs immediately after birth, not two months later.” “What’s causing it?” you ask.

He answers with the most chilling words yet: “We don’t know.” This is a country where doctors pretend to be gods, a condition that makes his frankness all the more alarming.

For once in your life, you would have preferred a lie, some fake confidence. When milk time comes around, your daughter gets nothing. She is being fed intravenously until her condition improves.

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The doctor tells you that your son is almost ready to go home. You have nearly forgotten that these days will end, that you are the true guardian of the baby boy and girl in the incubators. The thought of taking care of them by yourself—the responsibility—terrifies you. Your son begins breathing room air, unassisted. He is taken out of the incubator and installed in a Plexiglass bed. He starts drinking breast milk from a bottle and then, little by little, from the source. He cries loudly whenever he is hungry and you worry that he might be disturbing the other babies who are weaker and sicker. Dr. Nakagawa tells you that when your baby boy reaches 2,500 grams, he can go home. He now tips the scale at 2,300. You haven’t finished preparing the nursery yet, but this news brings a bloom to your cheeks. It’s been almost three months since he departed your body and you long to have him close again. Dr. Nakagawa asks you if you’d like to schedule his release for an auspicious day on the Japanese calendar. You are not superstitious like your mother-in-law, but you know that she would be horrified if your son left the NICU on an unlucky day. You are not superstitious, but you are willing to take all the help you can get.

The medicine that the doctors prescribed for your daughter has worked. Her kidneys are functioning properly once again and her second chin has melted. Her milk intake is increased. She is getting better, but you take nothing for granted. There have been too many surprises along the way. Every day your husband chants Buddhist sutras and you pray to another deity while on your knees. A couple weeks later, your daughter begins to acquire the suggestion of meat around her thighs. At last, she develops labia and grows eyelashes.

By the day that your son is ready to check out of the hospital, your tiny baby girl is out of the incubator as well, engulfed in a gauze kimono and swaddled in a white bath towel. After two and a half months, she is no longer the smallest baby in the NICU. She has been breathing room air unassisted, non-stop for three days now. You dress your son in baby clothes for the first time.

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The little sailor outfit is intended for a preemie, but it is roomy on your boy. You and your husband give the NICU staff a box of cream puffs and a case of soft drinks as an infinitesimal token of your appreciation. Insurance has pretty much picked up the tab for your children’s care, but you want to pay back something. Everyone gathers round as you prepare to take your boy out. You can’t speak because your throat is jammed shut by emotion. Instead, you bow and let the doctors and nurses see the tears in your eyes.

You hold your daughter a little longer than usual on this day. She looks up at you with clear grey eyes. You wonder if she will notice that her brother, her womb-mate, is no longer in the next bed, and if she will cry out in the night. Twins belong together, you think, but for now, they must separate. When she has closed her eyes and drifted into sleep, you force yourself to put her down until tomorrow morning. You tuck your son into a wicker basket with a comforter printed with a teddy bear motif. Then you carry him out the whooshing door. When you step onto the elevator with your baby-boy-in-a-basket, it feels like you are doing something illegal.

You can now hold, feed, and bathe your son whenever you want to. The nurses no longer have any say. Dr. Nakagawa’s work is done.

Now it’s up to you to keep him alive. It’s late summer and the sun is shining on your child for the first time. Cars and trucks drive past.

The grass is green. Swallows fly overhead and the sound of giggles floats over from a nearby kindergarten. Out in the parking lot, you realize that freedom can be as scary as it is exhilarating. You feel a dozen things at once, and hope is one of them. You are beginning to think that you might be lucky after all.

“I like helping new Members, and getting together with the older members who have known me for 25 years. AFWJ means making foreign friends, whom one can help and socialize with.”

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T*:"#ME,%T*K#$./,% T#:'G#%B.2$#2 !"#$('8%=#;(/.% Welcome to the new Food Column!

My name is Rachel Kanie and I belong to the Chiba chapter of AFWJ. I joined in September and then got my first Journal in October, thinking what a nice thing it would be to find some new and favorite recipes from all over the World. (Especially since I got my new oven and can’t wait to try anything that sounds tasty). In every Journal I will write about a different kind of food—Italian, Chinese, Brazilian and so on, so I would be happy if you send me your favorite recipes so we can all enjoy them.

This time I will start with a few of my own country’s recipes. I am from Israel and Israel is a country with people from more than eighty nations. The Israeli cuisine is also influenced by the neighboring nations such as Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon, as well as from Greece and Turkey. I was going to start with things like falafel humus or tahini, but then decided to go for new and different recipes. I hope that you will enjoy these recipes.

In Hebrew, leshakshek means, “to shake.” Shaksuka is a very popular and very tasty dish.

Great for breakfast, lunch or dinner, best served hot with crusty bread.

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1. Fry the onion, add the red and green peppers and fry for 2-3 mins, stirring constantly.

2. Add the tomatoes and sugar and cook for 1 min. Add the hot peppers and cook for 1 more minute then add the garlic and stir well.

3. Add 1/2 cup of water, spices and lemon juice, bring to a boil and add the eggplant. Lower the heat to medium and let the eggplant soak slowly into the sauce, then add another 1/2 cup of water and cook for 10 mins, stirring constantly.

4. It should be thick but not dry; if needed, gently add some water. Turn the heat to high and add the eggs—break the eggs over the sauce, making sure that they stay whole. After adding all the eggs, lower the heat and cook for a further 10-15 mins.

Another popular dish can be made with different kinds of stuffing. This is one version.

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6 peppers (red, green or yellow) For the sauce: 1 cup washed rice 1/2-cup olive oil 300 grams minced beef 4 medium tomatoes, chopped 1 slice of bread, soaked in water and then 1 red hot pepper, halved* squeezed 1 big onion, chopped 1 big onion, chopped 3 medium potatoes, chopped 2 eggs 1 Tablespoon tomato paste Parsley, finely chopped 2 mint leaves 1 big tomato, chopped 2 cups water 1 red hot pepper, chopped* 1/4 teaspoon paprika Cinnamon Salt, pepper 1/4 teaspoon black pepper *Omit hot peppers if you prefer less 1/4 teaspoon salt spicy foods 1. Cut the tops off the peppers, remove the seeds, and keep the tops for later use.

2. In a deep bowl mix together the onion, tomato and hot pepper; then add the bread, meat, rice and parsley and mix.

3. Add black pepper, cinnamon, salt and eggs and stir till mixed well. Stuff the peppers with the mixture and then cap each pepper with the tops from 1.

4. Make the sauce: Heat the oil in a wide and shallow pan, add the onion and cook for a few mins. Add all the vegetables, tomato paste and spices, stir and add the liquid, cover and bring to a boil.

5. Arrange the stuffed peppers close together in the pan in the sauce, then cook on a medium heat for about 30 minutes till the peppers are soft. Serve hot.

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1. For the kebab: Mix the meat with the egg yolk, 1 garlic clove and a little bit of the parsley and make long patties.

2. For the tahini: Mix together well the tahini, lemon juice, the rest of the garlic, vinegar and the rest of the parsley. Continue to stir and add water slowly till you get the desired consistency.

3. Heat the oil in the pan and fry (or grill) the kebab for about 3 mins. on each side. Serve hot with the tahini sauce.

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U#D:"'%U.2$#2 !"#H%(//%#N%/+#(/C#A+2.:%#5%+<B%#;.**(9( Hi everyone! I hope you had a lovely summer. Here is installment number two of water-saving tips. I guess it is not very pertinent now that summer is pretty much over (and we had that great typhoon dumping so much rain all over Japan), but if you start incorporating these tips they will be second nature to you come next year (and of course, everyone in the Southern Hemisphere can utilise these tips straight away!).

Deanne’s Tips: Economic Dish Washing Buy one of those large stainless steel tubs (called tarai in Japanese), just big enough to fit in your sink. Fill it half-full with cold water (don’t fill it right up, or the water will overflow, and that’s a waste!), and put your dirty dishes in it. By the time you start washing, the water will have softened the dirt a little, making the washing a little easier to do. Also, you can wash them at that stage without extra water, and just run some water for rinsing. (This is my husband’s handy hint! He went out and bought the tarai! And yes, he does help with the washing up... sometimes!)

The Lawn and Garden Water your plants and lawn in the evening. I have heard that watering at night is not good because it causes the roots to rot.

Well, in Australia we are always told by the water board to put the sprinklers on in the evening, because less water is evaporated that way. I always water in the evening over here. I DID water in the morning once, as a kind of experiment. The grass was completely dry within the hour. However, when I water in the evening, the lawn will still be damp when I go out and get the paper in the morning. So the lawn and plants benefit as well as you, because they are able to take their time to soak up the moisture.

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Louise’s Tips: Recycle Baby Bath Water When I have finished bathing baby Marin, I collect the water in a watering can and use it on my pottted plants. (Bonus tip not really related to the topic: No need to buy a baby bath—use the kitchen sink! I just wipe it out thoroughly before and after I put her in.)

Combine Showering and Bath Cleaning Like most people, I give the bath a quick daily clean by swishing around some of that generic yellow cleaner. But I like to try and give the whole furoba area a really thorough clean every week or so, especially in the rainy season when mould can grow so quickly. I like to wash my hair in the morning in the shower, so I combine cleaning and showering. I wash and shampoo my hair as normal, then while I am waiting for the conditioner to work, I get some bath cleaner on a sponge and go over the whole bath, ceilings, walls, mirror, down in between the tiles with a brush, etc. Then I rinse everything off with the handheld shower, rinsing my hair at the same time. (Since I am going to get wet anyway, I figured this was as a good a time as any to clean the bath!) (Dee’s note: I’ve started doing this too, and it saves time as well as water and money!).

Our next Ketchi Korner will be featuring an article about supermarkets and their tricks to get our money!

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Does anyone know the difference between the old beer and Japan’s post bubble economy happou-shu or “low-malt” beer? The Japanese beer sales section at your local liquor store probably boasts a large variety of beer, at an average cost of 180 yen. If you look at cost, a 350ml can is about 70 yen cheaper for the low-malt beer. Hmm… a hundred yen for a can of beer? That’s my kind of price, but how about the taste?

to the next main point of this article. In order to supplement for the loss of malt and flavor, manufacturers have developed a variety of new production methods. For example, one maker’s malt ingredients use B grade whole wheat in order to get the fullbodied flavors. As well as the malt, the other main raw material beer makers are particular about is their hops. Using lots of fine aroma hops, and also devising various systems to successfully develop the necessary fullbodied taste assists in retaining the flavor.

Based on these methods, low-malt beer now tastes hardly any different from traditional beer, or so most people tend to think. Beer sales remain steady, but low-malt beer sales have suddenly increased so much that the majority of beer makers are now also selling low-malt beer. If it’s delicious and cheap, of course it will gain popularity. It appears that the low-malt beer boom will continue for a long time.

I’ve never really liked beer. It tastes better without all that malt. The majority of these low cost beers are called happou-shu, or lowmalt beer, if you haven’t already figured it out. The difference in the percentage of raw malt ingredients is what makes the difference between these two types of beer. Japanese Liquor Tax Regulations state that a “beer” label must be affixed to products containing more than 66.7% raw malt ingredients, and anything less is considered “low-malt beer”.

Furthermore, low-malt beer containing no more than 25% malt is given a lower tax Happy Beer Drinking... maybe I’ll even rate. The lower tax rate combined with use have one. of alternative ingredients such as rice and cornstarch, allow a decrease in the production cost, and is reflected in the cheaper sale price to the end consumer, which means you and me. This said and done, no matter how cheap the product is, if the product tastes bad, consumers, especially Japanese ones, keep their respectful distance. Foreign consumers probably run for the hills, singing... see you later, arigatou...r.

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Mentor: a wise advisor; a teacher or coach Mentors are warm, living, breathing human beings for which there is no replacement but there are times when we need advice or guidance and there is no mentoring person at hand.

Books, magazines, television, radio, and even the internet can help fill the gap. There are sites out there on the web for all of our ages and stages and passages through life. This issue I have selected a few sites with relevance to us as married women as we pass from young (?) newlywed to mother-to-be, to parent, and then on into our middle and senior years.

Hitched: the webzine for Young Marrieds www.hitchedmagazine.com Redbook: magazine for the 30 somethings all about balancing family, work, love, and private time www.rbclick.com Parenting.com: for information about pregnancy, babies, parenting, and family life www.parenting.com Middle Age: essays and insights by Bob Adams www.middleage.org Midlife Passages: for the health of midlife men and women www.midlife-passages.com Thirdage: a full range of topics for the 50+ group www.thirdage.com Senior-site: unique, informative, interesting, and entertaining site for seniors (over age 50), their children, grandchildren and caregivers www.seniors-site.com Happy Surfing!

Nancy

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