Tag: Living Things

Morning Glory

If you take a walk anywhere in Japan in the months of July and August, it’s possible to identify where the ichinensei in your neighborhood live. Look out at the balconies of the apāto, or the small yards of the homes. If you see a morning glory plant in a pot, then you’ve found a first grader.

First grade is an important grade in Japan. It is not about the academics, but rather it is about teaching children to live in society. After entering school they learn about themselves, and then about their families. After that they learn about their own school, and the circle continues to widen out to the world. To do this, they also have themes that cover all subjects. In the autumn, we were surprised to see the role of donguri. They counted them, sung songs about them, read about them, picked them up and helped clean the area around the school of them, and then used them for art projects. It turns out that you can get a lot of mileage out of an acorn.

By Asasa198 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40310351

We had moved to Yagumo, an area in the Meguro Ward of Tokyo, in the middle of the school year. I enrolled my daughter in first grade at the Yagumo Elementary School, wondering if she’d be the first foreign girl there. But it turned out that years ago there had been a British child, and since my daughter spoke Japanese they were amiable and welcoming. As her okāsan there was a slew of preparation I had to do. I received a stack of past class newsletters to review, and a math set that needed to have labels put on every piece, some of which were smaller than dimes. You had to write your child’s namae on tiny labels and then put them on every single item. There was no way that my clumsy Japanese script would fit on those labels, so I cheated and put her very unique first name on the tiny pieces. As for the stack of newsletters, I did give them a glance and did my best, but all of them were hand written and difficult to decipher. I was amazed that the teacher would send home this newsletter each week. It told the parents exactly what they’d studied in school that week, and what the shukudai for the next week would be. It was illustrated with seasonal pictures and also had shout-outs to children who had made some kind of achievement. I imagine it is all done via the internet today, which is sad in some ways, though more ecologically sound.

Japanese children do not have a long natsu yasumi. The school year begins in April and is divided into trimesters. The first trimester runs from April until the third week of July. Then they break until September 1. A 40 day natsu yasumi seems more effective than the American system since children have less time to forget what they have learned. And because it comes mid-school year, instead of at the end of the school year, teachers are able to give shukudai.

Yes, homework. The first graders got piles of worksheets to do to review what they’d learned in their first trimester of school. They also had projects. And even though it was summer vacation, it wasn’t like they weren’t going to school. In fact, they went to school pretty regularly for swimming lessons. Almost every Japanese elementary school comes equipped with a swimming pool. In the cities, Japan is always pressed for space, and many of these pools were found on the roof of the school. This is where the Yagumo Elementary School pool was located and my daughter, along with the rest of her class, trotted off for swimming lessons each day of the summer. It was just expected that children would be around for these classes, and they were scheduled at different times during the week. There were regulation mizugi and caps to be bought and labeled, and a whole list of instructions for what and when a child could eat before swimming class. Shana came home the first day with an attendance card and proudly showed me her sticker. The goal was to fill the card with stickers and achieve good attendance and to also get a rank in swimming. (There are ranks for everything in Japan, not just karate.)

One of the bigger homework projects involved a morning glory plant. Each first grader had nurtured their plant from seeds, starting back in April. I guessed that Shana would not be able to participate in this project because we’d moved to Yagumo in June and she didn’t have a plant. I was wrong. It turns out that the teacher had one for her. When I asked the teacher how she could possibly have known that she’d get a transfer student (very unusual in Japan) two months after school had begun, she happily informed me that she had three “extras” that she secretly was growing herself in case they were needed.

Each day the plant figured into her homework. It was used for observation. She had to draw pictures of the flowers on it at different times of day. It was used for math, as she counted the blossoms and then did math problems based on the different colors. For me, the scary part was keeping it alive over the summer. I don’t know what kind of penalty a mother would get if she and her child killed the teacher’s morning glory, but luckily these plants were pretty hardy and even the rowdy boys in her class brought them back proudly at the beginning of September fully intact. It was eye opening to see how one plant could be used for so much. Watering the plant each day and determining how much water was also the child’s job. So they learned to nurture something, with a built in guarantee that the plant was hardy and the job was doable even for a six year old.

During the summer, Shana also had a few days of usagi duty. The school had a rabbit, and each day a sixth grader and a first grader would be responsible for feeding it. The school often paired sixth and first graders together since the first grader would learn the ropes from an older child, and the older child would profit from being in a teaching role. She trotted off to the school, lettuce and carrots in hand.

The last reason that she had to go to school was for a week of rajio taiso. And that’s another post I’ll make this summer!

  • ichinensei – 一年生 a first-grader. At an elementary school, but is also used for the first years of junior high, high school, and college, though usually modified to indicate which level of school.
  • apāto – アパート apartment
  • donguri – どんぐり acorn
  • okāsan – お母さん mother
  • namae – 名前 name
  • shukudai – 宿題 homework
  • mizugi – 水着 bathing suit
  • usagi – ウサギ rabbit
  • rajio taisō – ラジオ体操 radio exercise. Explanation to come….

Cute Mice

Living with cats means sometimes living with mice. I live surrounded by fields and woods so it is inevitable that my indoor cats will sometimes, somehow, find them in my basement. Usually they bring them into my bedroom at night. Alive. (One of my cats gave me a look like, “Well, if you have a pet, why can’t I?” And even took a nap with his “pet.”)

Jack and his pet

Though I never saw any nezumi in my home in Japan, we sometimes heard noises in the ceiling above us. My husband would laugh and say “nezumi no undōkai.” It’s kind of cute to imagine it that way, isn’t it?

Curiously, it seems that there is not usually a distinction drawn between rats and mice in Japan. There’s one word—nezumi—that covers both of them. This used to baffle me. But, when I asked, people would just shrug and say that a rat was an ookī nezumi. For the record, I do not think rats are cute so it does make a difference for me and I’m glad we make that distinction in English!

When I had my daughter and began to collect ehon for her I found that kawaii mice were often featured. One of my favorites was a series featuring a kazoku of 14 mice. I was instantly charmed by the asagohan story. And I’m very happy these have been translated into English. I highly recommend them if you have a child in your life! The author is Kazuo Iwamura.

  • nezumi – ねずみ mouse or rat
  • nezumi no undōkai – ネズミの運動会 literally “a field day for mice” or a sports event for mice. Undōkai are a whole other topic and they happen in the fall, most popularly at the elementary school level.
  • ookī – 大きい big, adjective
  • ehon – 絵本 picture book
  • kawaii – 可愛い If you use one word to translate it, it is “cute.” But it is simply so much more and has unique parameters which is probably why it has been exported from Japan in reference to manga, Hello Kitty goods, etc.
  • kazoku – 家族 family
  • asagohan – 朝ご飯 breakfast

It’s here

Just resign yourself to this

It feels almost trite to write about the rainy season in Japan. What could I say that 1000 other people haven’t said before me? Yet, it’s a whole freaking season so not to be ignored either. And friends in Kyoto tell me it has arrived.

Here’s what I can say. It isn’t the same every year. My first full year in Japan I got dire warnings about this season–that it would rain every single day, kabi would grow on my toothbrush, my shoes would never ever dry–and on and on and on. So, I had these expectations–and then… nothing. That is to say, my first few years in Japan the tsuyu were atypical and not bad at all. It took a few years for me to have the experience of a honkakuteki tsuyu. And then it really was rain every blasted day.

Products to fight mold during the rainy season

Mold did not grow on my toothbrush. But my kutsu were consistently damp no matter what. The biggest issues I had were sentaku and buses. I had no dryer and there was no way to hang laundry out to dry when the rain never stopped. You’d hang it inside, but even inside was damp and it could take days to dry.

The buses were torture for me because back then not all of them had air conditioning. And absolutely no nihonjin would open a window if even there was a remote possibility of a raindrop coming through the mado. It was like a steam bath and I couldn’t understand how people wearing suits weren’t sweating up a storm. Most of them looked serene.

I know what my homestay father would have said. He would have blustered out one of his “wareware nihonjin wa” statements where he’d explain the national character of the entire Japanese population. He’d often tell me what the otenki would be like for a given day and say smugly that only the Japanese could understand Japanese weather. (Personally, I thought it was more like he could understand the weather forecast and I could not.)

So, after experiencing a few of the more typical rainy seasons, I too began to steel myself for a month of rain. These days people have dryers or laundromats for their clothes, but I bet shoes still stay damp. I think that I do not miss tsuyu at all.

  • kabi – かび mold. You really do need to watch out for this during the rainy season. There used to be stories about how young mothers would find mold growing on their babies’ backs. I had trouble believing that ever really happened….
  • tsuyu – 梅雨 rainy season. The characters literally say “plum rain.” It sounds so poetic, doesn’t it. Ha!
  • honkakuteki – 本格的 genuine, the real thing
  • kutsu – 靴 shoes
  • sentaku – 洗濯 laundry
  • nihonjin – 日本人 Japanese person or people
  • mado – 窓 window
  • “wareware nihonjin wa” – 我々日本人は “We Japanese.” It’s a pompous or slightly academic way to start a sentence when you are going to describe some national trait of the Japanese people.
  • otenki – お天気 the weather

Nakayoshi – Part 1

Japanese honyakusha often talk about the untranslatable words and phrases. We all have our own thoughts on this and there are many that are commonly discussed. We struggle with giving a literal translation (sometimes misleading), a footnote (can get long-winded and cumbersome)—or an explanation when we first use the word in a given text. Because Nihongo has so many ways to write a given word it is very nuanced. And sometimes a word just gets adopted into English. Kawaii is one example. It means cute, but it evokes so much more than that in Japanese modern bunka.

A sign in a store in Kyoto that I photographed for just this reason

I have two new neko. They get along great and because one of them is a koneko there is a lot of mock fighting going on. He’s a strong kitten and sometimes the older one gets knocked around, perhaps a bit too much. This morning I found myself watching the roughhousing and saying to them “Nakayoshi, nakayoshi.” Since I learned my mothering skills in Japan, this phrase came out of my mouth naturally. It literally means “good friends.” But it also works as an admonishment to “stop fighting” to small children who are quarreling.

Sophie bopping Sammy on the head

I thought more about it and sent a text to my busy family therapist musume. I wanted to ask her opinion about this way of stopping a quarrel. It seems to me that it would be therapeutically better to stop a fight by reminding the kodomo that they are “good friends” rather than saying to stop doing something. Or am I going too deep here?

There is a lot about childrearing in Japan that I like. In my mind I’ve combined the best of American and Japanese practices. Not sure my kids would agree, but this is certainly one of the advantages of being bicultural. In Part II I will let you know what my daughter thinks. It is benri that she also understands Japanese and the nuances!

  • honyakusha – 翻訳者 translator. Honyaku usually refers to written translation and sha is a suffix for person. There is another word for interpreters.
  • Nihongo – 日本語 Japanese language. If you’ve been reading my blog religiously, you should already have this one down!
  • Kawaii – 可愛い If you use one word to translate it, it is “cute.” But it is simply so much more and has unique parameters which is probably why it has been exported from Japan as is in many cases.
  • bunka – 文化 culture
  • neko – 猫 cat(s)
  • koneko – 子猫 kitten. Note that this is a combination of cat and the prefix for child. Now then, if you know that inu means dog, you can guess how to say puppy!
  • Nakayoshi, nakayoshi – 仲良し、仲良し Used like this toward children, it is meant as a reminder that you are good friends and to thus, stop quarreling. A nice way to admonish, I think!
  • musume – 娘 daughter or young woman
  • kodomo – 子供 child
  • benri – 便利 convenient

Ikigai

Excuse me while I just go wildly off topic for a day.

The last month has been a particularly hard one for me. I lost my dear dear kitty and having lost my oldest cat last summer, this left me cat-less. Neko ga ippiki mo imasen. It’s not my natural state. Not for many many years. But, what to do? Both of my children have (wonderful) allergic partners, though neither live nearby (closest is 1.5 hours, other is a different coast). But… still. My Japanese self has been telling me to restrain from having any more cats because it would not be fair to my beloved J and M.

I’m the shy one. I finally came out to eat.

To my shame, my American “let’s have self-care” self has won. I cannot easily be cat-less. So, moshi wake gozaimasen to J and M. There are 1.5 new cats in my house and my heart is singing with joy.

I’m a three month old kitten and I am already causing chaos.

It turns out that having something or someone to nurture is really my ikigai. I did not know that. But, yatto wakarimashita. Just call me That Crazy Cat Lady.

  • Neko ga ippiki mo imasen – 猫が一匹もいません I don’t have a single cat. Not even one… 🙁 Neko=cat
  • moshi wake gozaimasen – 申し訳ございません “my deepest apologies” There are many ways to apologize in Japanese and many levels of politeness. This particular phrase is for when you are deeply sorry and it is pretty polite.
  • ikigai – 生き甲斐 reason for living, or that thing that makes you wake up in the morning with a smile. Try googling it.
  • yatto wakarimashita – やっと分かりました “I finally understand.”

Scaredy Cat

Japan has quite an insect life. That isn’t a fact that is widely known. Someone once told me Japan has more varieties of insects than Africa. I’m not sure if that is true, but I have had some memorable insect encounters.

There was the semi that I nearly sat on in the summer of 1978 when I was at a realtor’s office in Kyoto in late August. The squawk it let out made me jump up from the chair in fright. The realtor laughed and carefully took the cicada in his palm and let it out the door, which stood open in a way that I was no longer seeing as welcoming.

The huge hairy spider on the wall of my mountainside apartment in northern Kyoto was so extreme that I had no idea how to manage. You couldn’t crush it with a shoe because it would have left an unacceptable stain on the wall. (I honestly do not remember how I dealt with that one.)

In desperation, I started to ask my students how they dealt with the giant flying cockroaches in Kyoto. That was fun and I got lots of answers. I learned about gokiburi hoi hoi, or cockroach hotels. My favorite solution was the vacuum cleaner and the worst thing that I learned was that they tended to fly into one’s hair.

Some insects were cute. There were, what I called, the “hoppy spiders.” These kumo were very little and would literally hop across my tatami apartment in Tokyo.

One day in Tokyo, there was a huge kamakiri in my genkan area. Simply huge and bright green. I just could not. Not at all. I don’t care if they are praying, they are super creepy. I knocked on my neighbor’s door pleading for help. She curiously came back with me and gently lifted it up and put it outside. So brave!!

And a couple weeks later it was her turn to need help. Oh horrors! One of the stray cats had climbed through the window and was in her bath room. She was terrified of a cat. Yes. Terrified of a cat?! That was an easy one for me and she was very grateful. Those stray cats yowled like nobody’s business, but nope, not scary. Each to their own!

I have more insect stories, but that is enough for now, I am sure.

  • semi – セミ cicada. I feel like the ones in Japan are super noisy. The Japanese describe their call as “min, min.”
  • gokiburi – ゴキブリ cockroach. There are both brown and black ones. Some of them fly. They are huge.
  • gokiburi hoi hoi – ゴキブリホイホイ what we in the West call cockroach hotels. Hoi hoi is something like “come hither.”
  • kamakiri – カマキリ praying mantis
  • kumo – くも it means spider, but it also means cloud. Some say you can distinguish which is which by the intonation. But that varies by region. So you’d usually go with the context. It is conceivable that even two Japanese speaking together could need clarification. In that case it might be explained as sora no kumo or “I mean the kumo in the sky.” Gotta love this language!
  • tatami – 畳み bamboo mats that used to cover almost all floors in houses and apartments. Sadly, they are disappearing in new construction. There is nothing like the smell of fresh tatami.
  • genkan – 玄関 the entrance of a home. It’s where you put your shoes before you enter the home and traditionally it is a step up from there to enter the home, proper. I was pretty sure that my kamakiri could manage that step, which was a chill-inducing thought for me that day.