Keeping up with the Tanakas

Today I noticed that a building I loved was torn down. I would see it almost everyday as we pulled into the station. It was very close to the tracks, on the ocean side, an old, run down two-story, painted white, obviously neglected and empty. I think the only thing that loved the building, besides me, was the ivy that grew all over, covering the outdoor staircase, enclosing it in a protective layer, almost obscuring the windows. The all-important windows. You see, the second story featured two sides of long windows, providing a 180 degree view of the world around it. It is rare to find a house with a lot of windows in Japan. These windows were the kind that have been around for a very long time, so long that they were slightly warped little squares of glass, set in checkerboard panes. When I would see the sun shining into the windows lining the sides of the second story, I would imagine myself up in that room, curled in a comfy chair, reading a book, the smell of the ocean coming in on a gentle breeze. Isamu could train watch from the comfort of his own home. Perhaps this little building wasn't even a home, I think it was owned by the train company, but I wanted to live in it.

On a train between Shinagawa and Kawasaki, an Italian Greyhound was sitting in a striped bag on the lap of a Japanese young lady. His name was Pierre. A dog with an identity crisis. She could have at least named him Giovanni. . . .or Taro.

Pulling sweet potatoes is a right of passage for Japanese children. Most preschools organize a field trip and the kids get all dirty and bring home the fruits of their labor. My children's school offers them all kinds of wonderful opportunities, but sweet potato pulling is not one of them. I noticed a sign up at our local subway station advertising the chance to pull your own sweet potatoes, right in our backyard! I roped one of Sam's friends into the plan and we met at the station bright and early to try our hand at harvesting. I was so excited, you see, it was my first time too. I imagined the children tugging and pulling, laughing and falling back on their bums as they unearthed the precious potatoes, simultaneously realizing that that food doesn't come from the supermarket and that it takes labor to get it there. Well, when we got to the field, most of the work had already been done for us. All of the entwined vines and leaves that grow above ground had been chopped off and a small power shovel had come along each row and loosened the earth around the potatoes. The kids walked up to the stubs sticking out, lifted them up and watched the dirt fall off the sweet potatoes. Voila! Satsuma imo! The kids loved it, but I was ready to complain, what the heck?!? What happened to breaking a sweat?!?! It was so much fun for the kids and so easy that they kept pulling and pulling and in about 15 minutes we had two large plastic bags full of sweet potatoes. Stop! Stop! We have to buy these you know!!!! The price was right, 300 yen for one kilo, but we ended up with 10 kilos of sweet potatoes. TEN! I maybe buy five sweet potatoes over the course of fall and winter, what on earth and I going to do with 10 kilos! I think these farmers have a scam running. They make it easy, so you pull out 20 potatoes before you know what has happened. On the way home, the kids and I delivered sweet potatoes to several friends and neighbors. We gave half of the remainder of one bag to Jiji and Baba and the other half to Aunt Yoshiko. That still left us with more sweet potatoes than I have consumed in the entire time I have lived in Japan. We made sweet potato cakes, had them steamed in all their natural glory, cooked them cubed with the rice, Mina has had sweet potatoes in her lunch box everyday this week, sweet potato tempura and sweet potato fries. I am sweet potatoed out. Then, after school the other day, Mina's friend's mom tried to had me a bag of, you guessed it, sweet potatoes. Sweet lord.

After school today, Mina was babbling randomly as she was supposed to be doing her homework and I was playing around online while I was supposed to be giving my daughter my undivided attention. Something sinks in, she needs to take something to school tomorrow. Oh lord, please don't tell me I have to go back out again after I have just changed into my comfys! She needs lots of colors. I think she has to take balloons? Huh? What? When? Why? They have to be all in a row in the book and it is going to look so pretty. I ask her, you need to take balloons to school?!?!? No! She replies, FUSEN! Isn't that balloon?!?!?! She is stumped. I am stumped. I see the wheels turning, she walks over to the bookshelves and is scanning, scanning, what she is looking for is not there. She walks back to me and says, "Like the thing that is sticking out of the blue book that has all the maps!" Oh! Post-its! You need Post-its! Good thinking, Mina! She didn't know the word for Post-it (is there a generic name?) and she couldn't remember atlas, but she got her point across and, yes, I just happened to have some she could take to school.

Every time I go to California, of course, I think a lot about all the things I want to do, people I want to see and foods I want to eat; you might be surprised however by how much energy I put into buying souvenirs. Not just for friends and family, but for Toshi's coworkers, the neighbors, Mina's piano teacher and on and on. It is very tricky. First of all, ideally the gift should be something actually produced or from the locale you visited. Do you know how difficult it is to find things made in the USA, let alone California? Secondly, you have to consider the value of the gift. You can't give something thought be too extravagant or you will make your neighbors feel obligated. If you give something too chintzy, it reflects badly on you. Chocolate melts. Oranges don't clear customs. Throw your budget into the mix and it all adds up to nightmares and headaches. Then there is this peculiar quirk of mine where I don't like to buy things just for the sake of buying them. I like to pick something out that I actually think the person I am giving it to might enjoy. This year it was Knott's Berry Farm Shortbread Cookies for the neighbors. Bath and Body Works hand soap for friends. And Lil' Kinz for the kids' friends (I know, I know, not made in the USA, but a very popular US trend that has not yet hit big in Japan). Throw some American snacks and candy into the goody bag and there you have it! Now, I think I have written about all of this before, so this time around I am going to share with you the items we received as omiyage. Sweet potato cookies. Special Hello Kitty furikake (rice seasoning sprinkles) only available from the northern region of Honshu. Kona coffee. A painting of Isamu's name. A flower pin for Mina's hair. Apple flavored Hi-Chew candy available only in a certain part of Japan. Mickey Mouse cookies. An Ariel key chain. It is fun to receive those little bags, handed to you in stealth, with a disparaging word of how uninteresting the contents are, but I wonder, does everyone else stress out about it as much as I do?

Labels: omiyage, souvenirs

Yah, neither did I. I suppose that is because after I dropped Sam off, I killed 30 minutes in Starbucks before the grocery store opened, did some shopping, returned home to be sucked into the computer, shared lunch with Toshi and then it was time to head back out again. Behavior like this is not going to cause the ground to shake.

People have been asking me what I am going to do with all my time now that both kids are in school, but really, I am not sure where this idea that I'm going to have my hands full of empty hours is coming from. The bottom line is a maximum of nine unscheduled hours a week, subtract from that all the different meetings Japanese schools seem to be so fond of and I don't have much to work with here.

Please, don't think me ungrateful. I am going to make the most of these hours and to prove it I will list for you the things I would like to do with my time.

Read the newspaper. I mean really read it. Think about it. Question it. Know what is going on in the world again and maybe even form the occasional opinion of my own about those happenings.

Tame the jungle. I am not a gardener, but I have begun to envy the spring blossoms in my neighbors' yards and I would love to do something with our little patch of green.

Write letters. Because real mail is one of the great pleasures in life and my grandmothers are not online.

Make the house presentable. I have always been a slob, however since I am supposed to be a responsible adult now, I figure it is time to make more of an effort in the cleaning department. Japanese people do not often entertain in their homes. This is a big mistake, because how else are you supposed to get motivated to clean?

Read more books. I have read an average of 50 books a year for the last few years. This year I set a goal for myself of 75 books. Selfish? Yep.

Write the next great American novel. That isn't going to happen, but Toshi has more than once asked me to write the next Harry Potter. . . not as in fantastical children's literature . . . as in a book that becomes an international phenomenon making the author obscenely rich. Okay, honey. I'll get right on that and while I am at it, you discover an inexpensive, renewable source of clean energy!

At the very least, I figure I should be able to keep up this blog.

Tomorrow Sam will have his first ever lunch box at school. He is very excited about this, so I thought I would give him some choice in the matter. I asked if he would like norimaki or onigiri in his obento. He answered, "mmmmm . . . . senbei." This is roughly the equivalent of asking someone if they would like mashed potatoes or baked potatoes with dinner and they respond "potato chips!" Norimaki is rice rolled around various fillings, covered in seaweed paper and cut into bite size cylinders. Onigiri are often called "riceballs" in English, but really, what image does that conjure? Rice is pressed into the shape of a triangle around some type of filling, such as salmon or a pickled plum and covered in nori (seaweed paper) to make an onigiri. Senbei are baked (or sometimes fried, naturally I prefer the fried ones) rice crackers. Somehow, I don't think the teacher would approve of a box full of rice crackers and yes, they do check. I have heard of mother's being called out for not providing enough variety, enough color, enough balance, enough cutesy inserts to make the lunchbox appealing . . . okay, I am kidding on that last one, but still. With Sam's first school lunch comes Mom's first morning at home on her own. Watch out! The Earth is going to shake!

Toshi often asks me to proofread his English business correspondence. Before he sends out any letters, he e-mails them to me. I clean them up and send them back to him. Sometimes I wonder how diligently I should perform this task. Today a letter came through with one of those charming translation quirks often found in letters written in a person's second language and I really had to think about whether or not to change it. You see, I used to work in an office where these quirks were a huge source of entertainment, brightening our days with a break from business as usual. Today Toshi wrote a letter requesting a company to send him a "drawing of the guts of the T-4042 for making the parts list in Japanese." The guts?!?!! Isn't that fantastic? I am not making fun of him, the image puts a big smile on my face. Sometimes it is refreshing to encounter these language hiccups. Is it my job to deprive the recipient of the letter the same simple pleasure? It was a tough call. Now, I ask those of you taking the time to read this to weigh in, leave a comment and let me know, would you have left it or changed it and if you would have changed it, what would you have changed it to?

I love the Japanese Postal Service! It is not just the fact that our letter carrier looks like something out of anime, racing around on her little red scooter, all of four feet tall, her bangs hanging down in front of her coke bottle glasses, though I do get a cheap thrill each time I see her and she smiles, showing off her slightly buck teeth that are too big for her mouth, but seriously the service is excellent. If you aren't home when a package is delivered, they leave a slip in your mailbox. Okay, pretty standard so far, right? But wait! If you return home by 6 PM, and you call, they will make their way back to your house and deliver your package that very same day! Here in the big city, we have an automated service to call, but back in the good ol' Omihachiman days, I used to call the post office and tell them my name (which was pretty much all I could do in Japanese at that time) and they would know exactly who I was and why I was calling and send someone out to my little apartment posthaste to put the care package from home into my eager hands as soon as humanly possible. For someone as big on instant gratification as myself, this alone would rate them five stars in my book. But there is more! On rainy days, they have been known to put my letters and catalogs into plastic bags to keep them from getting damp. One particular Auntie at our local post office adores Mina and Sam and always gives them some treasure or another whenever we visit, from tissue to old fashioned children's toys. My favorite employee in another post office I frequent always checks for the least expensive, most efficient way for me to send my books overseas without me even having to ask. We went to a new post office the other day to buy additional postage for letters we were sending out and the kind woman who helped us got the stamps, handed the envelopes back, gave Mina and Sam each a stamp, showed them the damp sponge on which to wet the stamp, instructed them where to place the stamps, and then praised them for being such wonderful children. I almost wanted to ask her to adopt all three of us, she was so sweet. Awhile ago the Japanese Postal System was privatized and I was worried that it would bring unpleasant changes, but no, I still love Japan Post!

Labels: Japan Post

Today was Mina's first day in the elementary age group classes at the pool. She has been feeling apprehensive about starting elementary school, swimming with the big kids, riding the trains, making new friends and facing all the changes coming her way this week. I have been dealing with lots of this: "I don't want to go to the pool. I don't want to go to school. I want to stay with you forever, Mommy." Today, hurdle one, the pool. Her class is now during a different time slot than Sam's, so she doesn't have her little brother's hand to hold anymore. To make matters worse, we switched our lesson day, so she didn't have any friends at the pool today either. She went without complaint, but the insecure body language was on full display. She couldn't keep her fingers out of her mouth to save her life. Once class started, she was fine and things kept getting better from there. When I went to meet her in the locker room, she quickly noticed that there were no mommies in the changing area with the big girls and said to me, "I am okay by myself!" I know you are sweet pea, and I am so glad you finally figured that out for yourself.