AmyB Halfway Around the World

I love hanami. And if you’ve ever been to one in Japan, you’ll understand. Otherwise, I don’t really think my explaining it can do it justice. Some people we know here plan to go to Ueno or even Kyoto (we did!) for hanami (which means flower-viewing and is literally just that) but I don’t think you can enjoy it nearly as much unless you have friends around you.

Yesterday morning, I packed up some snacks (I made onigiri that actually worked this time!) and took the train into Utsunomiya. Before we’d even scoped out a place to light, we were flagged down by some friends so we camped out beside them. Eventually, we were surrounded by friends. The middle of the park is on a little incline, ringed by cloudy-pink cherry trees. I could have crouched there all day, sipping sakura cocktails and getting sunburnt but as it turned out, our picnic mat made for a perfect slide. Some slid down it quite by accident and others made a game of it. By the end of the night, we’d lined up two of the mats together (to make a longer slide) and one dad was pretty much flinging his tiny son down the hill as he laughed manically. So did we.

The first thing I ate was fried cheese, a relative rarity at Japanese festivals. Then I tried some yakisoba and potato mochi. That mochi was just like a dense hashbrown, drenched in grease and served with a side of butter. Or was it mayonnaise? Anyway, yum. Will mowed on an ear of grilled corn and many cups of kara age or fried chicken. Todd tried the yakitori or really, chicken parts. Good-tasting but not something you want to think about while you eat it. All of this was complemented by several sakura cocktails in a can and eventually some wine. I’ve learned I can only drink so many of those cocktails…Of course, there were obanyaki to finish off the night.

Mine were the last of the children to leave (the parents with the babies left first, right after lunch and then others right after the lights were lit) but they held up just fine. Japanese people seem to have no qualms about including their children in their drunken revelries, chasing them and flinging them down hills. I’m glad we stayed a little longer because our group decided to have an impromptu sumo match which is really quite funny when half of them were stick-thin Japanese and the others tall, if slightly more thick, Americans and Canadians. Great moments of very large, very drunk Matt being taken down by Dan…

I gave Yuka-san the last of my bottle of wine, some friends loaned Sophie a blanket as she’d dressed for summer and the night had gotten cool and we called sayonara and headed up the hill out of the park, the lights of the Utsunomiya tower pink behind us and the lanterns bobbing among the ephemeral trees. Even though the train ride is only 10 minutes, Sophie fell asleep and Will zoned out with his Ultra-man mask on his lap and half-eaten obanyaki in his grubby fist. It felt good to get home and climb into bed to dream of another hanami…

Spring break in Japan also means the end of the school year so there are graduations left and right. This week is 6th grade graduation at Sophie’s school and the excitement is in the air. Yesterday was the last day the 6th graders led their walking groups to school and Leonard, the 6th grader down on the corner, came up with a paper bag on his head and proceeded to lead the underclassmen in a little game of “follow the leader” up the middle of the street on their way to school. They wound around in circles, skipping and laughing.

After school, a 6th grader named Yuka-chan stopped by. She had given Sophie a letter at school earlier telling her she loved her and remarking how much Sophie’s Japanese had progressed since the start of school last year. Yuka-chan ended up walking to the park with us where we played with another of Sophie’s classmates and got some pictures.

Today, Yuka-chan and Leonard and the rest of the 6th graders graduated, leaving behind the school where they’ve studied for 6 years to move on, as we all do, to junior high (chogakko) and beyond. All the students had practiced for today for weeks, making sure they knew what to wear, how to bow and the songs to sing. Sophie came home famished and tired and said that she’d cried during the ceremony as did most of the other children there, boys and girls, 1st and 6th graders. The importance of learning and making friends and ritual are highly stressed in all aspects of Japanese life.

I didn’t once get the feeling that Yuka-chan thought of Sophie and Colleen as babies or charges but instead only as friends. The innocence that would make a 12 year old want to play with a 6 year old or a little boy cry openly in front of his peers at a school ceremony is never looked down upon but instead taken as the norm. These rites of passage are so momentous that what else could one do but cry? I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to understand fully the Japanese emotional ups and downs, the rights and wrongs of when it is ok to show joy or vulnerability but I don’t care because I love it all. It has always been in my personal nature to cry at life’s greatest moments and the changes inherent therein and so this seems natural to me. What other emotion do such things bring up but joy and sadness so great that the only thing one can do is cry?

I can’t really talk about this with the other American/Canadian moms here. They would simply roll their eyes and doubt and question it loudly and vocally. Sometimes, I think maybe I’m the weird one but that’s the way I like it…

I remember a trip to Columbus, when I was probably around Sophie’s age, to see a play…a version of “Rumpelstilstskin” maybe? After the show the actors lined up in the lobby and signed autographs. I had brought my autograph book especially for the occasion. Perhaps I should go back and find that, there may be a now-famous actor’s name in there. But what I remember is the absolute need to get those autographs despite my intense shyness at that age. Yesterday, I loved seeing Sophie doing the same thing.

We returned, with the neighbors, for a final event with the Tochigi Brex basketball game and again won the chance to get autographs. This time, I gave mine to Sophie and she waited in line with Todd, the book that we had bought for just such a chance clutched in her hand. She was so excited. In fact, she’d been crying seconds earlier because she actually hadn’t won the chance… I had given her mine instead. But now she was jumping around, one foot to the other, as she waited. One player (an American) asked her her name and then she quickly ran the book over to Will and me as we waited in line, too.

Afterward, she approached the cheerleaders, who were also signing autographs, and they remembered her again, asking if she was Hitomi-chan’s friend. One of them signed her book and she suddenly threw her arms around her. I had heard her mumbling something about giving them a hug but it was just so unlike her to be so openly demonstrative with strangers. Then they called us back over and gave her a gift, a “presento” they call it: a large card with their picture and all their names and little notes signed on it. She was beyond excited. I could not get over how she was so immediately friendly with that cheerleader. It made me think that maybe, if we were here longer, she might have gone into the cheerleading classes with Hitomi-chan. Even as we walked away, the cheerleaders called out, “See you next season!” and we all waved.

I wish, I thought…

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It’s been a rough week. Talk about two different emotions crashing in midair. And the hormones. Last Monday, Todd came home from work and informed me that his boss had asked if he’d like to go home early. By this, I don’t mean if Todd would like to cut out from work early that day but if we would like to pack up our house and life and stuff and move back to Ohio early.

I was completely taken aback. We talked about it and at that point, we decided that, Heck no, we weren’t returning early. We wanted to stay because we like it here. We wanted to stay because we’ve built a little life here. We have friends here and the tiniest of little root holds. Sophie and Will love their schools, they have friends, both Japanese and English-speaking. What’s more, we’d made the plans to stay for 2.5 years. We’d sold our house and cars and many of our possessions. The plans we’d made included financial and social ones in addition to the internal, unspoken ones: we were in this for 2.5 years and everything about our lives spoke that. We were in a sort of limbo but it’s what we’re supposed to be doing now. We like it. And frankly, I’d just been home to Ohio and I didn’t really like it all that much!

That night, I felt fine about it. Todd would tell his boss that we’d like to stay through next March, 2010. That would be 4 months earlier than originally planned, than they’d originally asked Todd to commit to. We felt in control of the situation because they wanted us to leave early and we were willing to compromise. On our terms.
Or so we thought.
Why did we think we’d be in control of some corporate bigwig’s decision?

Todd came home Tuesday, the next night, and blurted right out, “The decision was made before D. even said anything to me.” They’d already made the plans, financially and office-wise, for Todd’s return to America before even approaching him with the idea decision.

We were devastated. Pissed. I managed not to cry in front of Sophie but I did cry. All night. I went to sleep empty and crying and woke up in the night with the hugest headache that lasted all the next day. And every time I saw something or heard something or smelled something that reminded me of my scant year here in a place I’ve come to love, I would feel the tears burning my eyes yet again. Every time I thought of Sophie and how utterly difficult it must be to leave your school and family and start new, learning a new language the whole time, but yet how much she has thrived and grown and how happy she is, I would cry. Every time I thought of all our friends here, friends we’ll likely never see again, I would cry. When I heard the 5 o’clock song, I cried. The 6am song. We drove into Utsunomiya Wednesday afternoon and the sight of the mountains, so close in the clear winter air that it felt like I could walk right over there, made me turn away before my friends could see my tears. When I smelled the laundry drying on the line, the meat-on-a-stick burning in front of the grocery (the smell wafts over to our front door), I cried. Even the smell of the kerosene from the space heater makes me cry! The smells remind me of our first winter months here, struggling, learning, becoming something new. In those months, I cried, too, wandering around looking at photographs of my family, my dad, that I’d put around. Now I cried for the opposite reasons, gazing at photos of the friends and places we know here. Who would have known.

Honda says it’s for financial reasons. And of course it is. Everyone’s struggling (and so why the hell do we want to go home to a country where the economy is in the tank?!) but the truth of the matter is, someone, somewhere in the huge Honda brain (ha!) didn’t plan well and we, our family, has to pay the price. Todd’s boss asked him why he was so emotional about it and Todd replied that now they were messing with his family, how would he feel?

In the end, we have regained some control. They wanted us to leave in June this year and it’s pretty official that we’ll be going in August. The Japanese school year ends in March so Sophie and Will will have a few more months in the next school year and Sophie can and WILL go into 3rd grade when we return to America, Will hopefully kindergarten. We’ll have the whole spring and summer here to enjoy our friends and travel and see and do the things we’ve enjoyed. Now, the doing of those things will be tinged with sadness, as they would have been in a year, too. It just sucks that the sadness will also come with a little bit of bitterness.
I hate to be negative about it. When I actually left to come to Japan a year ago, I was ready for it but still nervous and frightened and already experiencing homesickness before I’d even left home. I don’t want to spend the next 7 months being angry at Honda and not enjoying my time here. But it does feel like we’ve been tricked or cheated somehow. It feels like a big joke and that makes me angriest of all.

Friday was rice-pounding day at Will’s school and I was scheduled to help out. I have to admit that initially, last spring at the sign-up meeting, I was a little leery of the whole deal as, while other moms were doing janken (Japanese for rock-paper-scissors), vying for the task they wanted during the year, there was no competition for a spot on the mochitsuki team. Nobody wanted the job and I seriously wondered what I’d gotten myself into. But I stuck by my decision since the other jobs were things like picture-sorting or planning and organizing festivals and they seemed like things I could do in any country or culture. Where else could I see a mochitsuki?

Mochitsuki is a Japanese ceremony usually performed around this time of year as mochi is traditionally eaten on New Year’s Day. The night before, the teachers soaked the rice (grown by one of the men who helped out that day) and early the next morning, the gym teacher and bus drivers started fires to cook the rice. After the rice cooked, it was poured into giant wooden bowls called usu that looked like mortars. Dads had also been recruited to help and they set in pounding the rice with giant mallets called kine. Between each pound someone, preferably another man, would reach into the usu and knead the rice, quickly returning his hands to a bowl of water. The rice-becoming-mochi was by now a glutinous mass like stiff cookie or bread dough, still scalding hot from the fire so water was necessary to keep the hands cool and the rice from sticking. Yeah, and it helped to be pretty strong to be able to actually flip that glob of rice in the split second between each whack of the hammer.
I took my ceremonial turn at the kine and usu and also tried the mochi-flipping. Will, too, lined up with his class to whack at the rice with the hammer. Pictures were taken and the class filed by the fires to get a mini-lesson on mochitsuki. The few minutes I actually worked at the pounding and kneading were quite a little workout as one has to think and move like lightning to stay ahead of the hammer and get the job done.

When the pounding was finished the big blob was brought into the hall where we women waited to pull off palm-sized chunks of it and roll it in either kinako (soybean powder and sugar that tastes somewhat like peanut butter) or corn starch (they said; I highly doubt that’s what it was). Then we put one of each kind on a tray and transported them to the students for lunch. The pace was quick as it was best to work while the mochi was hot, but I picked it up with the help of the always helpful and accommodating Japanese women. I didn’t worry a bit about the language barrier because Sato-san, a woman I just met this week, took me under her wing. With my broken Japanese and her better English, we managed to get through the morning!

During one lull, the last bit of mochi was a piece no bigger than my thumb. I rolled it in kinako and Sato-san told me to eat it. I was glad. I don’t think mochi is my thing, I won’t seek it out again but something about working hard and helping produce that with my own hands made me very hungry for it and it was good.

The last round of rice wasn’t pounded but instead brought into the hall where 4 of the women rapidly formed it into triangular rice balls or onigiri and then we ate them. I can honestly say I have never tasted better rice in my life. It was grown here in Tochigi, cooked before my eyes over open flame and then deftly shaped into a handy little lunch, salted to perfection. We all chipped in to help wash up the dishes at the outdoor sinks and then bowed and arigatooed and headed home. You know me…I fought back tears as I walked home, my souvenir mochi on a styrofoam tray, thanking my lucky stars that I’d stuck with my decision to help out at the mochitsuki!