Chrysanthemums, persimmons and potatoes

On the way to Kei's school stands an ordinary house with a black gate. Most of the year, the gate is closed, and there's nothing to distinguish the house from its neighbours. In November, though, the owners started leaving the gate open to reveal a mass of gorgeous chrysanthemums. Most of them are bigger than Dan. I love the way you can find surprises like this even in the most ordinary-looking streets. Who knows what other secret talents my neighbours might be hiding behind their gates?




This house isn't in our neighbourhood, but my parents-in-laws, whom we visited at the weekend so they could see the boys before I take them back to England for Christmas. It's strung with persimmons, drying to be eaten at New Year. You still see this a lot in the countryside, but where Kentaro's parents live in Shiga Prefecture it's already quite unusual.

The parents-in-law have an allotment, so the boys got to dig up a row of potatoes and dig the ground over afterward. The spade was a bit big for Dan, but there was no way he was going to give up!

Chopsticks

Dan's kindergarten is very big on shitsuke. It's a word that when you use it about dogs means something like "obedience training." For children, I'm finding, it means teaching them how to be good little Japanese citizens, with all the skills nicely brought up Japanese girls and boys are supposed to absorb by example from their well-behaved Japanese parents.

Every month Dan brings home a shitsuke sheet with that month's objective, a little drawing to color in each day to show he's practised it, and a space for my comments at the bottom. Once it's filled in, it goes back to the kindergarten for his teacher to add her comments, and is then brought home again to be tied together with its fellows with a cute little ribbon. Of course I always forget about it until the day after it's due, so Dan colors in the whole lot in one fell swoop and takes it in late with my apologetic little note added to the comments. (Like most of the kindergarten mothers, I'm now highly practised at little apologetic notes.)

At the beginning the objectives were pretty easy: "Let's get dressed by ourselves!" "Let's put our shoes on the right way round!" "Let's eat up all our supper every night!" Having been in daycare, Dan has been dressing himself since he was two and eats second helpings every night, so I've been patting myself on the back on staying ahead of the game. Until this month's sheet arrived.

"Let's use chopsticks properly!"

Now, chopstick use is something I've never completely mastered myself. That's despite all the times I get told "Ah, you're so good at eating with chopsticks!" One of the first things you realize about comments like this, not to mention "Ah, you speak Japanese so well!" if you open your mouth to say "Good morning," is that they're covert expressions of surprise that as a foreigner you can manage it at all. In fact, the better you get at speaking Japanese, the less you find you're complimented on it; and when someone does exclaim how well you speak, it inevitably means you've just made a mistake and your listener is covering up their embarrassment. It's rather shaming, then, that people still tell me that I'm good with chopsticks, because what that actually means is they're wincing at the clumsiness with which I'm curling my second and third fingers at the wrong angle, which grates on their sensibilities even if I do actually get the food in my mouth 99% of the time.

I didn't even try teaching Kei how to use chopsticks, hoping that as he went to daycare the teachers would take care of it there. They were fantastic at potty training and buttoning coats, but apparently chopsticks were't part of the deal: the way Kei holds them is far from the approved Japanese grip. (And this being Japan, there is of course only one approved grip; everything else, even if it works, is Wrong with a capital W.) My mother-in-law tries to reteach him every time we visit, but it seems it's one of those things that's really hard to relearn the correct way once you've learned it wrong.

So working on correct chopstick use with Dan is a bit of a challenge. Fortunately, having learned from my experience with Kei, when Dan was two I bought him a pair of training chopsticks, with loops to put your fingers through to hold them in the right positions. They seem to have worked, as my mother-in-law regularly praises him enthusiastically for his expert grip. Unfortunately they don't make them in large enough sizes for adult.

I console myself by reminding myself that not all Japanese people are perfectly proficient with chopsticks either, and by watching this video from the comedy duo The Rahmenz. Perhaps I should just give up and go with their "International Style"...

City view

The Sunday afternoon view across Osaka from Satsukiyama, a few miles north of our house.

Children's book meme

Concerned about the extra-long silence on this blog, Laura over at Rehearsal Times Over has gone and tagged me for another meme, this time to name seven favourite children's books. It's an interesting question - my favourites when I was a child, or those I love best now? Or the ones Kei and Dan enjoy most, which would be a completely different list?

For the time being, here's an integrated list with a few of each of our top favourites, old and new.

1. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl

Or indeed anything else by Roald Dahl. One of the unexpected joys of having children has been the chance to catch up on books and films I missed out on as a child myself. I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when I was about nine and loved it, and both boys are fascinated by it too. But now we're discovering a whole world of other Roald Dahl titles - I've just finished reading James and the Giant Peach as our latest bedtime story, and it's been great to read both Matilda and The BFG for the first time.

2. The Snail and the Whale, by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler

Dan loves this rhyming story of a sea snail with a yearning for travel, who hitches a lift on the tail of a humpback whale and ends up saving its life. And I have to admit I get a kick out of reading save-the-whale stories to my kids in whale-eating Japan. (Kentaro sees nothing wrong with whaling - it's one of our major points of contention, and I'm resigned to the fact it'll never be resolved.)

3. The Indian in the Cupboard, by Lynn Reid Banks

Laura lent me this, and I can't thank her enough. I'd read The L-Shaped Room, a grown-up novel by the same author, and enjoyed it, but I wasn't prepared for either how strongly her children's writing would grasp Kei's imagination or the sheer excellence of her prose. Other books I read straight afterwards, even ones that had been old favourites, seemed dull and lumpish by comparison.

4. The Horrid Henry series, by Francesca Simon

Horrid Henry books are what Kei currently reads for himself, when he's not immersed in a Dragonball manga borrowed from his calligraphy classroom. Henry loves violent toys, junk food, and gory computer games; he loathes school, vegetables, and his oh-so-well-behaved little brother, Perfect Peter. He's every mother's nightmare, and every seven-year-old boy's secret idea of how he'd actually like to behave...

5. Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, by Richard Scarry

This is another of Dan's favourites. It and other Richard Scarry titles are nice because they work on lots of different levels - you can read them like a story, play I-Spy (to find the little yellow beetle Goldbug), or spend ages looking at all the different illustrations on each page.

6. No, David! by David Shannon

This is well loved in Japanese translation too. Not that there's much to translate - almost every page shows David doing somthing naughty, with variations on the caption "No, David!" But its ending of "Yes, David, I love you" is really reassuring for the boys if they've just spent most of the evening being told "No" for themselves...

7. Charlotte's Web, by E.B. White

One of the best children's stories EVER. Enough said!

I'm not going to tag anyone myself, as I've been out of blogging circulation for so long I have no idea who's already done this one and who hasn't. But please add your own favourites in the comments if you like.

still here....

A few people have expressed concern that I've been uncharacteristically quiet recently. We're still here, and all fine, it's just that work got really, really busy just as school and kindergarten events started coming thick and fast as well. We've had sports day at Kei's school and grandparents' day at Dan's kindergarten, along with various excursions and extra days off. I'll post a proper update when things calm down a bit!

World Athletics Championships (2)

Well, we went, and it was worth going. Seeing athletes live in the stadium is a completely different experience from watching on TV. On the screen, they look like superheroes, people from a different dimension. But in the flesh, they're humans like you and I, and the dedication it's taken them to achieve their strength and speed suddenly feels real. I'm far more in awe of their prowess now than I was before.

Getting to the Championships was quite an undertaking, though. The line for the south gate, where our tickets said we could enter, snaked for over a kilometer around the stadium. The boys and I tramped to the end, then had a call from Kentaro's mother - who turned out to be waiting for us at the north gate. I had Kentaro's parents' tickets as well as mine, so we tramped another 30 minutes around the outside of the stadium, getting a close-up view of the Emperor and Empress waving from their motorcade on the way. Though we'd left the car at 3:40, we finally got into our seats just as the opening ceremony was starting at 5:00. The boys were real troopers, and kept walking with hardly any complaining despite the heat and distance.

The opening ceremony itself was fun. Kentaro described it as "typical Osaka, all mixed up." It started with acrobats dressed in the kuidaore doll costume, and proceeded through a taiko performance with dancers spelling out words and characters such as "throw" and "run" in both Japanese and English; cheerleaders; singers and dancers from the all-female Takarazuka Review; Sarah Brightman singing impossibly high notes, accompanied by a gaggle of schoolchildren waving green branches; a song by a pop star called Yuji Oda; and finally a famous kabuki actor leading a clapping ritual that no-one was able to keep time to because the images on the screens were about half a second behind the actual performance.

I'd taken toys and books for the boys in case they got bored, but they didn't need them - the ceremony and then the actual competition kept them spellbound right up to the end, late into the night. They cheered for both Japanese and British athletes, but it was the Japanese who attracted their most fervent support. One moment early on made me laugh. Kei started chanting "Ganbare Nihon!" ("Come on, Japan!"), and Dan shouted indignantly "It's not Nihon, it's Japan!" Kentaro's mother explained that "Nihon" is "Japan" in Japanese, at which Dan's eyes and mouth formed perfect little O shapes of surprise and comprehension. I hadn't realized he didn't even know how to say the name of his own country in its own language ... sometimes bilingualism has unexpected pitfalls ...

At least when we go back tonight for the hammer final, both boys will be able to cheer for Koji Murofushi in the correct language.

World Athletics Championships

We're going to the opening ceremony of the World Athletics Championships tomorrow night (Saturday), and again on Monday night for the final of the hammer competition. The hammer is the only discipline in which Japan has a remote chance of a medal, except perhaps the women's marathon, and Koji Murofushi, the Olympic champion, is biracial like my kids, son of a Japanese father and Romanian mother. (Though in his case both were Olympic athletes, father in the hammer and mother in the javelin.) It'll be good for the boys to see a biracial role model who isn't a TV talent, not to mention a once-in-a-lifetime chance - how often is a World Championships of any description held in Osaka?

Keep an eye out for us if you watch the ceremony!

Holiday snaps

There's nothing more boring than having to look through someone else's holiday snaps. We had such a good time, though, that I can't resist posting a few. Please forgive the self-indulgence....

Kentaro had three days of summer holiday this year. In Japan, for a doctor of his seniority, that's a reasonable amount. His first year after qualification, he asked his superior in the hospital where he was working at the time about holidays, only to be greeted with scornful laughter. "What does someone like you want with a holiday? Who do you think you are?" he was asked, rhetorically. OK, that was the hospital from hell, and where he is now is far better in every way - but holidays are still like gold dust. We treasure every tiny break from work: his unexpected return home before the boys are asleep, the rare Sunday when he doesn't go into the hospital at all, the one day a year it closes to commemorate its foundation.

Those three days, added to the weekend, were enough for us to embark on a 1,200-km road trip down to Yamaguchi Prefecture, at the southernmost tip of Japan's main island of Honshu, and back. On the way we took in caves, uplands, beaches, hills, rivers, and an old samurai town. The high spot for the boys was seeing so many stars - in Osaka they're all but obliterated from the night sky by the city lights, but in rural Yamaguchi the Milky Way spread out across the sky each night. On our final evening we visited an observatory with a 75-cm telescope, through which we gazed enrapt at the craters on the Moon, Jupiter surrounded by its moons, a star cluster, and a binary star. Those we couldn't photograph, but they're the part of the holiday that has engraved itself most deeply on our family's collective memory.



The entrance to the Akiyoshi-do cave system. I took lots of photographs inside, but it was too dark for them to come out properly. The caves themselves are spectacular, but the lighting and signs are desperately drab - they look as if they've been put in by some overworked bureaucrat with neither imagination nor business sense. The nicest thing about the caves was the temperature: 17 degrees, as opposed to the sweltering 35 degrees outside.



Akiyoshi-dai, Japan's largest limestone upland. This grassy landscape may look ordinary to Westerners, but to Japanese eyes it's rather exotic in comparison with the usual steep slopes wooded with cypress and bamboo.





Pony rides.



Kentaro on a sightseeing boat going round Omijima, on the northern coast of Yamaguchi.



The Omijima coastline.



Omijima was traditionally a whaling center, and the town still holds a yearly whaling festival. Kei is looking at a harpoon outside the Whale Museum (really a museum of whaling, exhibiting fearsome harpoons and whale skeletons), with the model whale used during the festival in the background. The shop behind sells whale meat, and will deliver nationwide, but doesn't seem to be doing very good business - a sign on the door announced 40% off all whale products.



Morning over a small harbor up the coast, from the balcony of our hotel.



Dan on the beach.



Kei discovered snorkeling this year. He could hardly bear to be parted from his mask and snorkel, even out of the water.



You can just see him swimming in the foreground. The water was wonderfully clear, with colorful small fish darting around the rocks.



Tsuwano, an old samurai town just across the border in Shimane Prefecture.




A path lined with torii gates climbs up to a shrine.



The ruins of Tsuwano Castle, perched on a hill overlooking the town.



Little samurai coming down from the castle.

Birthday boy

Dan turned four earlier this month. He's always trying to catch up with his older brother, so for his birthday presents he got a scooter (like Kei's, but a different color) from my parents and a remote-controlled racing car (like Kei's, but a different color) from us. He's so proud to be an oniichan, or big boy.

Cool water on a hot day

We came back from camp on Saturday night. Two leisurely days and nights on the shores of Lake Biwa with good friends, followed by an impromptu stay with Kentaro's parents, who came out to join us at the lake on the second afternoon and invited us to come by on the way home, have left both the boys and me brown and relaxed, ready again for all the city can throw at us.

Spending time with other bicultural families is really important to me. Partly it's for the boys' sake - if they are to grow up confident in their double Japanese/English identities they need to be around people who look and think like them, other children who see understanding two languages as neither strange nor particularly cool and who don't see their round eyes and brown hair as a cue to yell Eigo de hanashite! ("say something in English!"). Although Japanese society is becoming more open, marriage between Japanese and Westerners is still relatively rare, and our children (known as haafu, meaning "half") do stand out. When they are little, strangers exclaim how cute they are; but as they grow older, they become aware that they are different from their friends, in an environment where for the most part conformity equals correctness. So I take every opportunity to find multicultural friends and role models for Kei and Dan, in an attempt to counteract the ambivalence of the mainstream message that they are exotically attractive the one hand, and potential outsiders on the other.

It's also a treat for me, though. Being in an intercultural marriage is one situation that carries particular stresses and issues which are hard for people who haven't experienced them to understand, and being a foreigner in Japan is another. So to spend time with other people, particularly women, who are in the same circumstances and who empathise without the need for everything to be spelled out, is like taking a dip in a cool lake on a long, hot day. Groups such as the Association of Foreign Wives of Japanese (AFWJ) and the Married in Japan mailing list, which has to be one of the most supportive Internet groups ever, are real sanity savers. Any worry is lightened when you share it with people who not only understand, but have been through exactly the same thing and can offer a variety of solutions you'd never have thought of for yourself. Not to mention laughing wryly with you, hugging you, rejoicing with you, and on occasion crying with you, rekindling the spark of your own humanity so you can start to laugh again in turn.

I've officially been the Kansai AFWJ camp coordinator for the past couple of years, and previous camps have had up to eight or nine families with over a dozen kids participating. This summer, though, many people seem to have either gone back to their home countries, moved away, or had new babies, and this time we were camping with Margarite from Holland, her sons Kai and Dylan, who are slightly older than my two, and Reina, an American whose elementary-school daughter was away visiting relatives in the US. Sandra from Hong Kong joined us for a barbecue on the first night, and my in-laws came swimming the second afternoon and brought fireworks with them. Having fewer people than usual actually meant a lot less stress, and after swimming most of the day we sang and chatted the evenings away with a small amount of wine and a good deal of laughter.

The last night, another multicultural family came and camped on the same beach: a German mother with her two half-Japanese daughters (one married to a Chilean guy and with her own Japanese/German/Chilean daughter) and her young German/American son. They'd been touring Japan in the van for two weeks, camping here and there and enjoying the country as they found it. It was refreshing to meet them, and to feel even more strongly the openness some international families possess simply because of who they are.



The morning after we arrived, I was awakened before dawn by a group of three (Japanese) teenagers cavorting noisily about the beach. Though I crawled out of the tent to shush them so they wouldn't wake the children (who were actually so tired after the previous day's swimming that they probably wouldn't have opened their eyes for anything less than a major earthquake), I couldn't be angry. The sunrise was quiet and certain, pine trees painted black against the rosy gold of the clouds. It was the perfect way to start another day of both being foreign and belonging here, bringing up children whose bicultural experience of the world will be totally different from my own but who are linked to me by both heritage and love. I'm sure that as they grow they will find their own ways of coping, their own cool water to refresh their spirits. But for now, a lakeside camp with friends will do all of us just fine.

Jinxed?

I'm starting to worry about the rate at which my electrical devices are biting the dust. After the washing machine fiasco, I managed to kill my mobile phone on Sunday night with a flask of tea, which leaked inside my bag on the way to yet another local summer festival. No sooner had I invested in a new phone than my webcam started playing up, turning itself off within three seconds every time I connected it. Our internet connection suddenly went on the blink on Sunday too, necessitating some frantic rooting among the detritus of empty computer peripheral boxes for a manual with the NTT technical support number on the back.

It's a good job the boys and I are off camping tomorrow with another international family for a couple of days, to give the jinx or whatever it is time to lift before something really vital packs up. Though I think Kentaro would forgive me anything except the dishwasher. Clearing up after meals is his job on those evenings when he's home in time to eat, so if I did anything to that particular machine we'd be in big trouble.

A dog's breakfast

No, the title doesn't refer to Abe's ridiculous response to the election results, though I'm amazed that he's still hanging on by his toenails despite leading the LDP to their second worst defeat ever. Three out of five of the major national Japanese dailies are now calling for his resignation, and it's hard to see how on earth he can keep going given the almost universal public rejection he now faces. But this is about something altogether sweeter than politics.




Fancy one of those delicious-looking desserts? Sorry, they aren't for you - unless you happen to have brought your pet. This photo was taken in an upscale pet shop in Osaka that makes cakes specially for dogs. Your pampered pooch can select from a range of cheesecakes, banana cake, and other treats, some shaped cutely like little bones, and they can even be decorated with a birthday message to show just how much you care.

I rarely experience "Only in Japan!" moments these days, but coming across this shop was definitely one.

Now, if they sold cakes for cats, that I could understand. I might even have brought one home for Ume-chan. Though it has to be said she's quite plump enough already.

Election night

I'm watching the results of the Upper House election as they come in on NHK this evening, and Abe's Liberal Democratic Party is losing badly. Abe is swearing he'll stay in office to "fulfill his mission to create a new country," but even the usually obsequious NHK commentators are asking him pointed questions about his unpopularity with the electorate and hinting less than subtly that he ought to resign. His eyes look hunted, and he's on the ropes.

I really hope he does go. He's a ideologue who cares more about his pet right-wing policies (teaching patriotism in schools, revising the Constitution to get rid of the pacifist Article 9, pushing North Korea over the abduction issue) than basic issues like the economy and Japan's greying society. And he's proved surprisingly inept in his Cabinet appointments - after one farm minister committed suicide rather than face corruption allegations, he appointed another who was immediately exposed as engaged in precisely the same kind of corruption, for example.

The problem is that the leader of the Democratic Party, Ichiro Ozawa, is himself a former Liberal Democrat politician who was heavily involved in that party's money politics before jumping ship when the faction to which he belonged became discredited by multiple corruption scandals. Ozawa is a very clever politician, but it's unlikely any opposition led by him will be motivated to clean up the corruption that's endemic to Japanese politics. Seeing Abe losing by such a landslide is exhilarating, but the lack of a decent alternative is thoroughly depressing.

But then I don't have a vote in Japan, so my opinion isn't worth the pixels it's appearing on your screen in anyway....

Forest escape

Now the rains have lifted, we open the curtains each morning to deep blue skies and the incessant metallic shrilling of cicadas. By eleven you could fry an egg on the balcony, and to open the front door in the afternoon is to step into the hot blast from a sauna. Most days the boys and I stay inside until early evening, but with the windows shut tight to keep the air conditioning in we all find ourselves getting a little frayed by the end of the day. So on Wednesday I drove them up to Mino Park, in the hills that bound Osaka to the north, for some forest therapy.

Mino is the closest summer getaway to Osaka, and one of the nicest for a day trip. A path winds up through deep woods along a swift-flowing river, with deep pools teeming with stippled brown fish, past an insect museum and onward to a high waterfall. Getting the boys out of the car and started up the path was hard - the first few hundred meters were punctuated by continual complaints that they were tired, their thermoses were too heavy, their fishing nets were too hard to carry, the monkeys who live in the forest were sure to attack us - but once we were a little way into the woods, their negativity fell away and the peace of the river carried us laughing and playing up the hill.


First stop was the insect museum. Though the boys enjoyed the tanks of beetles and scary-looking centipedes, their real aim was to get to the butterfly house, where hundreds of butterflies fly freely and the boys tried again and again to lift them gently up from flowers onto their outstretched fingers.














Then we trekked on up the hill to the waterfall. On the way up we'd passed a monkey, sitting high on a rock wall overlooking the path. The forest monkeys can sometimes be quite aggressive in trying to steal food, but if you're not openly holding something edible they generally leave people alone. This one followed us up the path a little way, before it decided that we weren't all that interesting and settled down at a corner to wait for the next group to come along.



After the steep walk, we ate lunch sitting in the cool spray from the waterfall before deciding we deserved ices. The shop where we bought Dan's chocolate icecream and Kei's strawberry kakigori (ice shavings topped with syrup) had something I've never seen before: a mineral-water foot spa below one of the tables, where you could sip your drink while cooling off your feet from the mountain climb. We ate our ices outside for fear of spilling, and then spent a happy ten minutes splashing our feet in the cool spring water.






























By the time the boys had played for an hour in the river, made friends with a half-Japanese, half-Russian boy they met there, and run with him all the way down the path to the bottom of the mountain again, they were both exhausted and deeply content. This is what summer holidays are meant to be like; the perfect antidote to the confinement of the city.

Money down the drain

A very pleasant repair guy came out from the manufacturers today and got the washing machine working again. Turns out it wasn't mainly the paper blocking it, but coins to the value of 210 yen, against which the paper had wadded up. Kentaro has been muttering that we've been wasting money recently, and I guess this proves his point - in our household it's literally going down the drain.

The 5,400 yen (a bit over 21 pounds, or 45 dollars) it cost to clean out the washing machine definitely falls into the "down the drain" category, too. Still, it's times like this I'm glad to live in Japan. I can't imagine a British plumber coming out the next working day and doing that sort of job for the same sort of price.

"Look, Mummy, Pokemon writing!"

What NOT to do at the start of the summer holidays...

.... decide your child's book bag looks a bit grubby and throw it in the washing machine while he's eating lunch, without checking first to see if there's anything inside.

(BIG mistake number 1.)

Kei finished school this morning for the summer holidays, and was invited to a friend's house for the afternoon. After lunch he came skipping up: "Where's my book bag, Mummy?"

I assumed he wanted it to carry his Nintendo and snacks to his friend's house.

"It's in the washing machine. You'll have to take your rucksack."

His face crumpled in shock.

"But my summer homework's in it! We're all going to Shinya's to get started on our homework together. Shinya told me specially to bring it."

He'd taken his satchel to school this morning as well as his book bag, and until today had always brought his homework home in that. In my hurry to get everything washed, I hadn't realized the book bag was heavier than it should be. I rushed frantically to the washing machine. Maybe I could somehow separate the pages and dry them out?

But the finished load at the bottom of the machine was smothered in small flakes of pink and grey paper. I fished out his book bag and opened it. Empty. I'd turned Kei's summer homework into papier mache, and the holidays hadn't even started yet.

Ooops. And I thought I'd been doing so well at this kindergarten/school mother thing lately.

I pacified Kei's floods of angry tears with abject apologies and the promise to go straight round to his school that afternoon to pick up another set, and took him over to his friend's house. Shinya's mother collapsed into uncontrollable giggles when I told her why Kei didn't have his homework with him. I left him playing Nintendo with five other first-graders, and went over to the school to tell them what had happened.

Kei's teacher had to try very hard to stifle her laughter too. Fortunately she had a spare set of homework prints, but then came the really embarrassing part.

"What else was in there? Is anything missing?"

"I have no idea," I confessed miserably. "The pieces are far too small to tell what they were. But there must have been a colored sheet in there, because a lot of them are pink ...."

"Ah, the health record. That's very important. You need to stamp your seal on it, and bring it back at the beginning of next term. I'll have to make out another one for you, and it'll take a little time."

Bowing repeatedly in shame, I promised to come back later and pick it up. The teacher saw me out, hand over mouth, her eyes dancing with mirth as she sympathetically assured me that everyone makes mistakes sometimes. I bet she can't wait to add this story to her "idiot parents" repertoire.

But my idiocy wasn't over yet. When I got home with Dan, I looked at the disgusting pile at the bottom of the machine, thought about how much work it would take to pick all the pieces off by hand, and decided to do what I usually do if I leave a tissue in the wash - run the washer repeatedly on the rinse cycle until all the paper is washed away.

(BIG mistake number 2.)

Half an hour later, as I was hard at work at an already overdue translation, the washing machine started beeping. I opened the lid with a feeling of foreboding. It was full of water heavily clouded with paper flakes. I stopped the cycle, set it to Drain, and pressed Start. Nothing happened.

Oooooooops.

So although Kei has another set of homework to keep him happy (and I even went back to pick up his reissued health record too), we now have a totally clogged-up washing machine. So far this evening I've fished out all the paper-covered clothes and rinsed them in the bath, bailed the water out of the washer with a bowl and poured it down the sink (through a fishing net to avoid blocking the drains as well!), and unscrewed the beater part at the bottom of the drum to see if I could clear the place where the water drains out. No luck at this point. Once the boys have gone to bed, I'll turn it on its side and unscrew the drain pipe from the bottom, to see if I can clear it out from that end. Watch this space and wish me luck....

Thank goodness, Kentaro is on night duty tonight, so with a bit of luck I can get it sorted out before he comes home tomorrow. He'll add it to his catalogue of proofs of my lack of common sense, and my inability to think about what I'm doing until it's too late. Days like this, I really think he might be right.


Update: We'll have to call out someone to repair the wretched thing. I did manage to unscrew the drain section from the bottom and remove a five-yen coin that had got stuck there, which I was hopeful would do the trick - but no, the water still isn't draining out. Rats.

A single strawberry

Finally, I made it to a kindergarten mothers' craft session this morning. It started at 9:30 a.m., but as the text message from the class representative said "Just coming for part of the time is fine," I finished off a translation before getting there at 11. All the others were already there, heads bent intently over their sewing.

"Do you do embroidery?" asked Haruhito's mother brightly.

"Uh ... no, not really, but I'll try ...."

Another woman handed me a small semicircle of red felt.

"Start out by sewing white seeds on, like this."

She showed me a sheet of paper covered in complicated patterns for what looked like different varieties of fruit.

Meekly I took a needle and some embroidery thread from the basket on the low table, and set to work. I didn't have a clue what I was supposed to be making.

"It's a strawberry, look."

Hideaki's mother, quietly kneeling next to me, passed me a piece of delectable-looking sponge cake covered in whipped cream, strawberries, and pink flowers, made of felt and painstakingly sewn together with tiny embroidery stitches. I gulped and nodded.

"Are you all right? You're staring into space ..." giggled Haruhito's mother.

An hour later, after a few false starts and a lot of surreptitious glances at how the others were doing it, I'd managed to put together a passable strawberry. Next to me on one side, Hideaki's mother was finishing a luscious melon. Haruhito's mother was putting the final touches to a bunch of perfect tiny grapes on the other. The others had already finished their tasks and were endulging in some rather bawdy speculation about a woman whose twins had turned out to have different fathers.

My strawberry, the melon, and the grapes were added to the fruit basket, and our class bazar craft-making was finished for this year. The results were amazing. As if the cake and fruits weren't enough, there was also a hamburger with at least eight layers, and two different lunchboxes. My favorite is the tiny octopus. (In real life, mothers cut sausages so they look like octopuses to make their children's lunchboxes fun - it's a knack I've yet to master. The felt one is even cuter than the sausages!)






Lavender bags definitely wouldn't have made the grade. I'm so glad that's over for this year, but am wondering how on earth we can top this next time. When I'll definitely have to do better than a single measly strawberry.

To be honest, though, I enjoyed myself. No-one was annoyed that work and inexperience meant I couldn't manage more of a contribution, and now we've all got past our initial politeness with each other, the class mothers are turning into a friendly, lively group with a surprisingly down-to-earth sense of humor. Crafts and bazars notwithstanding, I think this year is going to be all right.

Tanabata

July 7 is when Japan celebrates the Tanabata festival. Branches of bamboo grass are festooned with paper decorations, and children write their wishes for the year on long strips of paper that they hang from the branches. This is the Tanabata branch at our local public library, which has been up for the past couple of weeks (a bit like Christmas trees going up early in the UK).


The festival itself dates from medieval times, when it was a ritual of the stately Heian court, but the story it celebrates is actually an old Chinese folk tale. There are many versions, of which this is one.

The Heavenly Emperor had a beautiful daughter, the Weaver Princess (Orihime, the star Vega). She wove such lovely clothes that her father was very proud of her. Because she worked so hard, however, she had never had the time to fall in love, and she became sad and lonely. When the Emperor became aware of her sadness he arranged her marriage with a cowherd (Hikoboshi, the star Altair). The two of them fell deeply in love and were blissfully happy - so happy that the Weaver Princess neglected her work, and the Emperor no longer had any beautiful clothes to wear. Angry with the lovers, he ordered them to be separated, and they were forced to live on either side of the River of Heaven (the Milky Way). But he agreed to allow them to meet just once a year, and on the seventh day of the seventh month the heavenly boatman of the moon)comes to ferry the Weaver Princess across the Milky Way to meet her beloved cowherd.

If the Weaver Princess neglects her work during the year, the Emperor may cause it to rain to prevent their meeting. If this happens, however, magpies may fly into the heavens and make a bridge for the Princess to cross for her assignation with her husband.

Clearly the Japanese work ethic hasn't changed much since medieval times! Career women working too hard to have time for romance is commonplace these days, and husband and wife being separated because of work sounds a lot like tanshin funin, though that generally involves the husband moving away to follow his job while wife and children stay put to ensure the stability of the children's education. I wonder how much work (and love as a once-yearly reward for work) was emphasized in the original Chinese legend, and how much is Japanese adaptation?

Dan's kindergarten festival last week was actually a Tanabata celebration. The kindergarten yard was bright with lanterns and decorations, and the children dressed up in yukata summer kimono to perform songs and dances in front of their watching families.



Kei got into the mood and wore his yukata too. This is the two boys looking rather bored, waiting for things to start. Dan has noticed someone else with a camera and is reflexively starting to make the peace sign.



The festival started with all the children singing the kindergarten song.



Then came the class performances. Boys and girls in Dan's year danced separately, with the girls doing a fetching flower dance to Okinawan music while the boys were fighting ninjas. Gender stereotyping? In a Japanese kindergarten? Whatever gave you that idea?





Next everyone danced the Soran Bushi bon odori dance together, with its memorable lyrics: "Yaren soran soran soran soran soran hai hai!", after which there were fireworks. Fireworks displays are another traditional Japanese summer event, and the large ones are spectacular, but as this was a kindergarten we just had a few Roman candles.



Then all the kindergarteners got a lantern to take home, and we trailed our way back to the car with the boys arguing the whole way about whose turn it was to hold it. (They were pretty tired by that stage.)



We now have our own little bamboo branch up at home, with decorations hand-made by Dan at kindergarten. His wish says "I want to be Geki Blue!" (one of the Gekiranger superheros on TV - we don't even watch it at home, but playing rangers is one ofthe most popular games for three-year-old boys). Kei's says "I want to be a soccer player."



My wish this year is for good health and no major upheavals. I think Ume-chan the cat's is to be left in peace to sleep! What's yours?

Various updates

It's a busy week translation-wise, so just time for a few quick updates on previous posts.

All our suzumushi this year have turned out to be females. That's probably because you're supposed to spray the earth holding the eggs with water once a month or so throughout the winter, but as I put the tank in the back of the cupboard and completely forgot about it the soil dried out completely. Usually we've had forty or fifty little crickets hatching - this year there's only six. And, as I said, they're all females. Those girls must be strong to have survived such neglect! Fortunately the pet shop near Kei's school sells suzumushi, so when they're old enough I'll buy a few males and arrange a matchmaking session, to be sure we have some eggs again in the autumn. This winter I'll put a note on the cupboard door to remind me to keep spraying...

The beetle larvae are still showing no signs of pupating, though they grow monstrously fatter by the day.

Two of the tadpoles have turned into frogs, though one died before we could get it to a pond. The last one is still stubbornly refusing to grow its front legs yet, lurking at the bottom of its tank like a teenager who's reluctant to grow up and leave home.

And I finally have an idea about what crafts I'm supposed to be making for the kindergarten bazar! Work deadlines meant I missed the last two class meetings, but at the boys' swimming lesson last week I ran into another mother who told me they'd spent several hours cutting out tiny cakes and lunchbox items out of felt. (Japanese lunchboxes are pieces of art in themselves, in case you're wondering just why anyone would bother making toy ones.) There's another craft-making session next week, and to try to redeem myself I'm going to really make an effort to get there. Not that I think I'm capable of cutting out beautiful little felt food items, but perhaps I can glue them into boxes or something.

Dan's kindergarten has some photographs up here of his summer festival, held last Thursday. This is one of the best ones of him, doing a ninja dance with the other boys in his class. I'll try and get some of my own photos up in the next few days.

Goal!

I have to confess, I'd never been a soccer fan. Watching it on TV always seemed marginally less interesting than watching laundry go round in the washing machine. In fact, I once said as much to a then-boyfriend who came out to ask why I was sitting by myself in the kitchen, rather than joining him and his flatmates watching Cameroon playing in the World Cup. (An incident that probably had a lot to do with the collapse of our relationship soon after.)

But being in Japan has converted me to the "beautiful game." It started with Japan's qualification for the World Cup finals. In 1994 Japan had lost out on a place in the finals when Iraq scored against them in the final minute of the last qualifying match, so when the winning goal went in in extra time in the final qualifier for 1998 the entire nation was on its feet. Watching the match on TV late at night with Kentaro (which for me at the time was genuine proof of love) it was impossible not to catch something of his joy and enthusiasm. And that of the other residents of his shaky old apartment building with its paper-thin walls - the cheering from the other apartments practically took the roof off.

Then in 2002 the World Cup was actually held in Japan. England held their training camp on Awaji Island, close to Osaka, and I was one of scores of translators dragooned into registering as temporary police interpreters because the prefectural police were terrified that the English would descend on the city and trash it. I remember being in an "international exchange" session that suumer with a group of high school students, who on being asked what their image was of England as a country chorused in unison "Hooligans!" In the event, there were almost no arrests at all, England supporters partied peacefully with Japanese in the streets, Japan made the second round (we always try to forget about arch-rival South Korea getting to the quarterfinals), and the future of soccer in this country was assured.

Kei and Dan both think of themselves as budding Beckhams or Nakamuras, and in April Kei started soccer school two weekends a month. Through the soccer school, we were given free tickets to see our local team, Gamba Osaka, playing FC Tokyo last weekend. It wasn't something I'd have thought of myself - but since we had the tickets, and Kei would have sulked for at least a year if we hadn't gone....

It was great!! I'd had no idea the atmosphere would be so good-natured. Families with two-year-olds dressed in Gamba jerseys that hung below their knees, young couples on dates, elderly women with orange-dyed hair chatting loudly in broad Osaka dialect, high school girls giggling and taking pictures of each other with their cellphones, men in their forties and fifties sitting quietly but erupting with the rest when Gamba had a chance at goal ... the crowd couldn't have been further removed from my 1980s British image of drunken yobs out for a fight. We were too late to find anywhere to sit, but even standing for the whole match didn't feel like a hardship.

Gamba Osaka is currently top of the J-League, and they went all out to show the home crowd a good time. FC Tokyo scored two early goals, but Gamba clawed one back just before half-time, and then came out again for a second-half goalfest that left the FC Tokyo defence looking as if they wanted to crawl off the pitch and hide. The final score was 6-2, and it would have been seven if another goal hadn't been disallowed for a dodgy offside call. The crowd was ecstatic, and so were we.

So I'm sure this won't be our last soccer match. Kei is already asking to go to a Gamba game as his birthday treat in September, and will be off to soccer school on Sunday with even more enthusiasm than before (if that's possible). Now the boys just have to choose whether they want to play for Japan or England when they grow up.