Relatives Pay a Visit

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The other day, the barbarian horde wielding gleaming swords and powerful clubs descended on my tranquil village. The villagers did what they could to mitigate the onslaught, but despite their best efforts a horrific bloodbath ensured and the casualties, still being discovered, numbered in the hundreds. The survivors set upon themselves the grim task of collecting the body parts, intermingled among the rice plants, which the unfortunate victims had lovingly cared for, as had their ancestors for decades without number. The houses and stores will be rebuilt in time, but the shattered sense of security wrought by thousands of invaders will take far longer to repair…
You will have to excuse my overactive imagination. In truth, the barbarian horde was but three in number, and usually referred to more lovingly as my uncle and semi-cousins (daughters of his fiancée). They neither pillaged the land nor murdered the populace, and when they left my peaceful village was much the same as it had always been. Still, during the time they were living here, if not quite rumblings of discontent, there were clashes with the status quo, conflicts with the unwritten rules on how people are supposed to live their lives. Small things ruptured time honored customs and traditions: whistling across the partition that separates men from women in the town spa, trying to wrest discounts from anybody and everybody, including the local liquor shopkeeper, and playing loud music far into the night were but some of the more discernable violations of the norms.
Still, their encounters with the people of Japan were by and large positive ones. My cousins, especially, were amazed at the kindness of strangers, a neighbor who gifted us with cherries for no particular reason, the friendly smiles that greeted us whenever we said hello even in the largest cities, the shopkeeper who unconcernedly piled heaps of presents into bags of goods already purchased to say thank you. At the end the ultimate display of generosity: After a bit of sweet-talking on my part, my relatives received an invitation to spend a night at the police station. Instead of paying for a hotel room, they were treated to hot bowls of noodles and couches by policemen who were considerate and generous when they had no need to be that way.
Over the course of the two weeks that my relatives were here, we covered hundreds of miles by car, bullet train and bus trying to take in as many aspects of Japan as possible during that brief time. We shopped for kimono, taught English together at one of my junior high schools and my adult English conversation class, got feted by the members of the Board of Education and various teachers interested in introducing them to authentic Japanese food and of course drink, climbing a mountain and talking a boat ride around an island through various rock formations, as well as touring a castle and various temples particularly well known in Japan. Still, my cousins are young and their interest in things Japanese is slight. A renowned puppet show in which a narrator sitting on the side speaks while puppeteers in full view carry their marionettes around with them inspired only groans as did a rock garden which remained to them a random assortment of rocks thrown upon the sand.
Desperate for familiarity, they turned to American style entertainment: Universal Studios Japan quickly became the highlight of their trip. Extremely picky about food, we “dined” at KFC and Mickey D’s, in my opinion, missing out on one of the greatest assets of the Japanese people, their varied and always surprising cuisine. We managed to avoid Japanese restaurants for two weeks solid, usually dining at home on rice with chicken consommé, pizza, pasta, and wontons, quite popular in Japan. My uncle who lives to eat and was hesitant at all about trying new foods, partook of sashimi, or raw fish, tempura, or vegetable and shrimp fried in deep fat, as well as ample servings of sake and wine to wash down all the exotic foods. My cousins were content with steak and wontons.
Frankly, my uncle admitted, he would never have taken the girls to Japan if I didn’t live here. The costs are exorbitant (mostly living in my house, he still paid about $6,000 for the vacation for the three of them), Japan’s culture is quite foreigner to the average America, and to be in Japan without knowledge of Japanese is to suffer a huge disadvantage because of the paucity of English speakers. Once you depart from Tokyo, the frequency with which he run into decent English speakers dramatically diminishes in spirit of the fact that all Japanese people learn English in school. The reasons for that are complex, but basically schools highlight grammar over basic communication.
My Japanese is far from ideal, but being infinitely better than my relatives, I was anointed official translator/interpreter for the duration of the trip. I was responsible for everything from telling them the wisdom emanating from ET as we waited in line for his great adventure to conveying the essential theme of the puppet show (actually I had to ask someone first) to serving as an interlocutor when my uncle decided it was storytelling time, and he related to my coworkers a tale of a murder and a con that he experienced during his work as detective. My Japanese received quite a workout, but it was a good feeling to convey at least a little piece of my ongoing project of figuring out exactly what Japan is all about.
The last day I dropped my relatives off at Hiroshima Airport at midnight and arrived at home about 3:00 in the morning, utterly exhausted. I have since recovered physically, but the emotions from being around Americans again for an extended period of time linger. Fortunately, I head home soon, only for two weeks, but still a chance to still my parents, siblings, grandparents and hopefully some friends who are in the New York area. A trip to Boston remains a distinct possibility, but no definite decision yet. I come home July 20th and depart Aug 4 for a second year in Japan. It is short due to lack of summer vacation, but I am looking forward to it. There will be more details in the next and final newsletter of my first year in Japan.

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