How Do You Translate 'Wa'?

I remember talking with Billy, a guy from Vancouver who married a Japanese girl and was living in Fukushima. His son was a few years older than mine, and had so far survived what concerned me now about my two-year-old speaking much more Japanese, at a higher level, than English. Yes, he was only two, but this was the kind of thing I’d rather tackle sooner than later.

‘Kids pick up on these things,’ he assured me. ‘The pronunciation, the details.’ But what he said next gave me pause. ‘They say a kid will keep developing that language base until he’s ten or twelve years old.’ Which made me wonder: first, what if all of a sudden I turn around and my son is a teenager and doesn’t have that solid English foundation? And second, are we still going to be living in Japan ten years down the road?

This was in October. In December I brought my family to the States for Christmas, and after four weeks my son returned to Japan speaking better English than Japanese. It didn’t take long for his Japanese to catch up again, and I redoubled my efforts to not only keep him speaking English but to constantly add new words and expressions to his repertoire. (After years of teaching English as a foreign language it is too easy to fall into the habit of slowing down, and dumbing down, one’s own speech.)

This Spring we spent three months in the US, and in September we moved here for good (for now). Naturally, ironically, my concerns have shifted from my son’s English capacity to his ability not just to hang on to his Japanese but to continue advancing it.

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Stint at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen

I have a rather bizarre series of creative non-fiction which will be going up in installments at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen.  This will serve as one of two bookends to my adventure in Japan, forever closing this chapter of my life and ushering in a new one.  Check it out at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen or below the fold:

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Leaving Fukushima

Kevin has written a lot about how his family got out of Fukushima, Japan following the Daiichi meltdown.  Parts I through VIII can be found on this site plus Kevin's own travel blog: Travel. Write. Drink Plenty of Fluids.  As some readers know, I've been working on a book about the whole event to be loosely framed as a creative narrative but altogether more a work of science journalism.  My plan calls for a long and ambitious schedule and party explains why I haven't been writing many articles here recently.  (There are a few other reasons as well, but hopefully I can get some more time for articles soon.)  Anyways, my first thoughts on the disaster have appeared as a functional article on the website Expat Arrivals titled In the Case of Emergency: What's an Expat to Do?  Here is an excerpt: 

In the case of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown, the Japanese government was hopelessly inept at pressuring the plant operator to disclose necessary information. When numbers finally came out, they were conspicuously low, and then they got conspicuously slightly less low, and now they’re conspicuously slightly less low than that.

Crowdsourcing and social media surfing is a much better way to stay informed. Basically, we had a dude in Canada who had nothing better to do, so he assembled information from people on the ground and posted it all on his Facebook page. By checking his Facebook page with our Smartphones, we knew which roads were closed, where quarantine lines were, which cities had gas and other supplies and which cities didn’t, the best routes to escape, which way radioactivity was blowing, and what the levels were. We and others challenged the assembled information by commenting and demanding links to credible sources.

The next steps in our constantly evolving plan were decided by piecing together such credible press releases, crowd sources, and scientific articles to get a clear picture of exactly what was happening. The mainstream media was useless for getting accurate information: typically a major news outlet would report what we already knew and had acted on two or three days later, usually riddled with inaccuracies and the trappings of news theatre.

The article is of fairly moderate length (just over 1000 words) and not always relevant to the purposes of the Inductive, but it provides a good glimpse into what it was like getting my family out of Japan for anyone who is interested.  

Goodbye, For Now - tohoku earthquake part eight

On Tuesday morning all I cared about was getting my family out of Fukushima, far away from the radioactive mess that was percolating down along the coast. We didn’t know where we might end up when we jumped into Jun’s car. Maybe we’d go to Akita, I thought, or Yamagata – put some more miles and mountains between us and the reactors. If we really thought it necessary we could probably get to Osaka, or even Kyushu, where people had gas in their cars and the supermarket shelves were stocked and kids could play in the park without their parents worrying about what might be falling out of the sky. No place could be too far, really. We just needed to find a corner of Japan, a place we could go to be safe, where we could breathe the air and let our kids run around outside, and wait until things settled down. Then we could return home and get on with living our lives.

The long ride to Morioka – the stretches of quiet thinking time along a road through a country that seemed much more dead than alive – those four hours in Jun’s car changed all that.

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Hope & Reliance - tohoku earthquake part seven

The ramen shop was flooded with light and familiar smells. My wife and I, our boys between us, sat across the low table from Jun, his brother Yu and his friend (girlfriend?) Miki. We ate as we would on any night, though the cooks couldn’t make a couple of dishes for lack of certain ingredients. We talked as we would over any meal – hometowns and high school memories, jobs and friends and the soft-boiled eggs Yu had this thing about. Yamato slurped his noodles, splattering his soup. Seiji fussed and laughed and ate and refused in turns. The radiation we had run from seemed far, far away.

Yet the reason we were there wouldn’t fade from my head. Not completely. Not for a moment.

Back at Yu’s apartment we would share snack food and drink a random assortment of beer in cans. Yamato was given his first taste of video games and Harry Potter. Seiji entertained before he started tiring; my wife would skip his bath tonight and try to get him down. We talked more, about all manner of things, though somehow – as it seems to happen in Japan – we never scratched too deep below the surface. This because maybe the Japanese are inclined on all levels to remain one of the group; tipping the conversational scales in any one person’s direction, particularly their own, is not the overriding inclination.

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Kamikaze of the Sea: Otsushima Kaiten Memorial Museum

<Alexis Bonari is currently a resident blogger at College Scholarships, where recently she’s been researching both the Ford scholarship as well as football scholarships of all kinds. Whenever she gets some free time, she enjoys watching a funny movie or curling up with a good book.>

The first time anyone in the United States asked me where I was originally from, I was buying a pair of socks in rural North Carolina and surrounded by at least three other customers.  When I responded, “Hiroshima,” everyone grew hushed, and the inquirer preferred the awkward silence to following through the conversation.

The first time anyone outside of family asked me what kind of novel I was writing (or trying to), I was at a friend’s dinner party.  When I replied, “About World War II kamikaze pilots,” everyone fell so quiet that I heard someone’s belly complaining over the shrimp appetizers.

Admittedly, both topics can make some Americans a little uncomfortable.  They might have made me feel uncomfortable, too, at least until halfway through my college career when my father—an American former Marine working in Japan—offered to introduce me to one of his friends, a former kamikaze pilot. 

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North - tohoku earthquake part six

I recognized the woman at the door immediately, despite the mask that covered her nose and mouth. I knew her daughter too, as one of my son’s many pre-school friends. ‘Konnichi-wa,’ I said, trying in vain to recall either of their names. The woman offered a slight bow, awkward enough with her daughter on her hip, forget about the underlying circumstances. ‘Kevin-san, domo.’ She handed me a small, heavy plastic bag.

My wife had said she’d be dropping by, with milk formula for our little boy. In the intervening moments I’d forgotten her name, but I remembered very clearly one thing my wife said: she was going to be driving to Sendai.

‘I’m leaving tomorrow,’ she said in response to my casual query. I glanced over at her boxy car, already half-stuffed with blankets and bags. ‘Are there any buses running out of Sendai, do you know?’ I asked. She shook her head. ‘Maybe, but I don’t know.’ With this we both understood: I was looking for a way out of town, and while she really would like to help…

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Things, We Didn't Know - tohoku earthquake part five

The subject of the text message was simple: 'Run!'

With this one word all the thoughts I'd fallen asleep to came crashing back into my head. My friend had spent the night thirty miles up the road in Yonezawa. 'We'll go further today, if we can,' he said.

If we can?...

In my head it sounded right out of a movie, too dramatic to be real. And he wasn't the only person I knew who was already heading west, away from the nuclear reactors leaking God-knows-what-if-anything into the air. A co-worker of mine, one of the sharpest and most level-headed guys I've ever met, had also hit the road. He too was with his family, making his way toward the Sea of Japan, unsure of their destination, living out of their car.

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Home, Neighbors, Cake & What's Coming - tohoku earthquake part four

After faking his own death Huckleberry Finn hides in a tree outside a church window, looking in on all the townfolk crying at his funeral. 'I never had any idea so many people cared about old Huck Finn,' he says as the tears well in his own eyes.

Of all the scenes of all the movies, all the passages in all the books I've ever read, this was the one that came to mind as I stared at the screen of my laptop soon after returning home on Sunday.

The population of the shelter was about half what it had been the first night. In the morning air I felt a mix of restlessness and lethargy; the aftershocks had all but ceased, and though they'd probably keep the gym open for anyone wanting to stay, I knew it was time for us to go home - utilities or no.

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The Morning After - tohoku earthquake part three

Morning arrived in the form of the generator's low hum; a murmur of voices; the footsteps, discernible somehow, of people at task. I crawled out of my futon (everyone I'd offered it to - elderly women, infant-coddling mothers, even the girl who literally fell asleep on her knees on the bare hardwood - had declined in favor of their own measly blankets) and looked around at a gymnasium filled with sunlight. People were up and about, moving not so much with purpose as with a desire for purpose. A few still reclined where they had slept, or not slept. Many stood in a line that stretched halfway around the room and ran right past the edges of my comforter. In shorts and a t-shirt I folded everything into a less obtrusive pile. The people at whose feet I'd just been sleeping pretended not to notice or care.

At the long tables against the far wall men and women handed out rice balls and tea. My wife was already on line, both our boys hanging onto her. I caught her eye and she motioned for me to join her; food was being carefully rationed out and they might not have given her any extra rice for a husband she'd claim was still asleep in that oversized lump of bedding over there. Although with our own leftover rice from home, along with some crackers and bread and peanut butter and juice, we weren't living on the edge of survival. Not yet.

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Calm Amid Calamity - tohoku earthquake part two

I walked into the dark front hall of the Shimizu Learning Center. A man in a blue windbreaker approached, moving with an efficiency that told me he was at work though in what capacity I had no idea. What was the situation here, or anywhere else? What had really happened, and what needed to be done? I hadn't seen any damage. A distant siren bled through the hum of a single generator; outside the glass doors a circle of men dressed in shadows watched over a huge pot of water, slowly warming over a propane flame.

I suppose I expected to be received in some way, for someone in a dark blue windbreaker to ask me my name, if I was all right and did I come with any family. I waited for direction but the man kept walking, by my shoulder and out into the wind and the returning snow. More figures appeared, out of the black corridors ahead and the blustery darkness behind. A couple of them held flashlights. They traded scant words as they passed each other. No one spoke to me. No lines, no people with clipboards. Barely a sound besides that generator. The siren in the distance faded and died. Something was going on here - but what? I wondered if we had come to the wrong place.

Yet the parking lot outside was full; my wife was waiting out there with our two boys, along with enough food and blankets, we hoped, to get us through the night. There had to be others. I walked down the left corridor, drawn to a softly-illuminated doorway and a murmur of voices. At the bottom of a single step a dozen pairs of shoes lie in semi-disarray. I kicked off my battered sneakers and stepped inside.

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Where Fear Lies - tohoku earthquake part one

With a cheap driver I worked the tiny screw on the back of my son's toy microwave oven. He likes to play restaurant every now and then, making me fish pizza and croissant soup or whatever strikes his blossoming imagination. Then he tells me to 'sit here and eat'. I couldn't remember those words coming from him lately though so maybe the batteries in there still had some juice.

The sky outside was growing dim.

I am so not prepared for this.

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Quarter to three in the afternoon; my son is sitting at a kid-sized table with his friends at the Shinryo pre-school, chomping on cookies and drinking cold tea. The other kids are there with their moms. Both teachers in the room are women. I'm the only adult male, and though they all say it's great that my son could be there today with his 'O-to-san' I'm feeling a bit out of place. I stir my paper cup of coffee and watch my son interact with the other kids in effortless Japanese.

All along the coast, from Fukushima up through Miyagi and into Iwate, fishermen in slickers and rubber boots and weathered skin tie off their nets and head to bed. Their wives sit on the floor on straw mats pouring tea, alone or with friends, glancing outside at the slowly warming March weather. Young children play and shriek and eat cookies at schools just like Shinryo. All along the coast.

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Bathrobes & Beer: A Night at a Japanese Ryokan

Japan boasts a considerable array of accommodation options – to put it in cheesy tourist pamphlet terms. Capsule hotels, business hotels, love hotels; the Hilton and the Hyatt and the Japanese versions of such; you have your youth hostels (thirty dollars with membership) and your campgrounds (thirty dollars without); and on the traditional side, you’ve got your minshuku, with tatami floors, futons and green tea to make yourself comfy as you watch your coin-operated 13-inch television, and then you have your more upscale ryokan, with tatami floors, futons and green tea to make yourself extra comfy as you relax and watch your wide screen high-definition plasma television.

In the course of my travels around Japan, when not camping (illegally) or sleeping on a beach or a gazebo in a park (maybe legally), I’ve rucked up to many a minshuku. They give you those robes to hang out in, and dinner and breakfast are included so why not? I’m not much of a TV guy however so I never sprang for the more expensive ryokan. And if my wife hadn’t finagled a sweet deal at Azuma-So up the road in Iizaka last weekend I might very well have ended up leaving Japan – or dying – without ever experiencing a wide plasma screen while hanging out on the floor drinking tea in someone else’s bath robe.

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Twelve Facts about Mt. Shinobu

Fukushima City from Mt. Shinobu

1.  Mt. Shinobu is a large hill (about 275 meters tall) in the north-central area of Fukushima City.  It is surrounded by homes and office buildings.

2.  It is slightly smaller than Uluru/Ayers Rock in Australia and no less interesting.

3.  Mt. Shinobu has four peaks, stretching from west-southwest to east-northeast: on the first peak is a round, concrete platform usually covered with cigarette butts and high school kids/DQNs necking; on the second peak is a Buddhist temple with a bell dedicated to world peace which anyone is free to ring, so long as they wait until the reverberations can no longer be heard before leaving; on the third peak is a Shinto shrine featuring a giant sandal made for the giant feet of the Gods which is paraded through the center of the city on people's shoulders every year at Fukushima's biggest summer festival, Waraji; on the fourth and highest peak is an ordinary tree.

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Love Rules in Japan

I managed to get this post written on Monday despite the tidewaters of passion rising all around me. But as the afternoon gave way to evening I was subsumed by the tsunami of emotion that is Valentine’s Day in Japan and I am only now recovered enough to put forth (as a warning for anyone wrapped up in the throes of this love-loving land come next February 14^th) this thesis on the many layers of Japan’s amorous neo-traditions. 

It's the start of another English class; I'm pretending to jot something in my notebook when I toss the question out. ‘What day is it, guys?...’

My students enjoy the easy back-and-forth, to get their minds and mouths into English mode. For me, it’s nice they play along since I usually don’t know what day it is. As far as I’m concerned, that we’ve shown up on the same day at the same time at all is cause enough to celebrate, by cancelling class and going out for ramen and beer I always say - to no avail as I’ve yet to be blessed with a student who doesn’t see this as a breach of some vague rule system.

This morning too I asked, then found myself squinting at the calendar across the room trying to figure it out before my student did. ‘Oh!’ she says, in an authentic show of surprise; this starts me thinking that maybe she forgot about a hair appointment and is going to cancel class on the spot, or at least step out into the hall for ten minutes to apologize profusely into her cell phone, which will allow me to hang out and down an extra cup of coffee while I figure out what day it is.

But instead she turned to me, wide-eyed. And then it hit me too. And a wave of guilt washed through me, knowing what was going through my now equally guilt-ridden student's head.

In Japan, where passion ranks on the common social agenda just below understanding football, there is only one possible explanation for why Valentine’s Day is met with such enthusiasm: it is because a thorough set of guidelines has been established so everyone knows exactly how they are supposed to express their unbridled love.

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