Monday, May 28, 2007

A welcome guest

My friend Isabelle has been staying with us since Thursday. We've known each other since 1991, when we met briefly as trainee mission partners at the Selly Oak colleges in Birmingham. I was impressed by her observations in class, which were always interesting and to the point, but we had very little actual contact during the few weeks we were both there before I went off to Japan and she later to Kenya.

It was only several years afterward that I joined an email list discussing women's ordination and noticed a number of interesting, to-the-point posts from an "Isabelle in Nairobi." On the offchance, I emailed her privately - and yes, it was the same person, and she was happy to hear from me!

Since then we've stayed in close touch by email, telephone, and face-to-face. I've left the mission society altogether, and she is no longer a missionary full-time - she has a challenging job with the European Commission in Brussels - but amazingly our friendship is deep-rooted enough to have outlasted all the changes in both our lives. She visits us yearly in Japan, and is now a well-loved godmother to Dan and an honorary member of our family. We've visited her in Brussels too, and hope to go back there again in future. She's one of the few people from life before marriage and children for whom our friendship has not only been maintained but actually deepened, and that's something very precious.

On Saturday she and I took the boys to the prefectural farm in the hills to the north of Osaka. They had a ball - feeding cows and sheep (almost getting trampled by some rather aggressive ewes at times!), seeing pigs and goats, lambs and rabbits, ducks and peacocks, and even trying their hands at milking. There were bumper cars, a little train ride, and a bouncy castle. We came across frogs and beetles, irises and violets, swallows and sparrows, in what was a perfect outing for early summer.





Isabelle is leaving tomorrow. We'll miss her, and are looking forward to the next time we meet. Whether it's in Japan, Brussels, or England, it's sure to be special.

Friday, May 25, 2007

Reprieve

Dan got me out of the bazar meeting by coughing at breakfast-time on Wednesday. I'd usually have met Kentaro's suggestion of taking him to the pediatrician with a breezy "It's nothing, he'll be fine by tomorrow," but faced with the alternative of a four-hour-plus meeting I immediately called him in sick to the kindergarten and took a lazy trip to the doctor's. So I have no idea what crafts the other mothers decided on, or when we'll be expected to hold our group manufacturing session; but sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof...

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

When life (hopefully) gives you lemons...


After a barren year last year, our little lemon tree has been flowering like mad this spring. Sadly only a few flowers have set to fruit, but there are now three tiny lemons growing against the south wall of the house. I'm watching them tenderly, watering and feeding the tree with love, in hopes that one day in summer we'll be able to go out and pick the warm fruit straight from the branch. (Yes, I'm definitely planning to make lemonade!)


Here are a couple of other flower photos, too. We don't have a garden, but like every home in the neighborhood we grow flowers and shrubs in planters around the house.



Sunday, May 20, 2007

Bazar bizarre

Having a child at kindergarten in Japan is proving an eye-opening experience. Both boys have attended daycare from the age of one, so you'd think I'd be used to it by now. But daycare is officially a welfare service, set up to assist working parents, so with the exception of having to send in the occasional spare set of clothes, lunchbox, or Halloween costume it was generally a pretty laid-back affair.

Not so kindergarten. While daycare offers support to harrassed working mothers, kindergarten gives them a whole new set of hoops to jump through. Dan's first two weeks were a maelstrom of rush-ordering custom-made bags to the kindergarten's exact size specifications, naming about 80 different items in exactly the correct spot and format, apologizing for missed buses and forgotten nametags, and frantically checking and double-checking each morning that I'd filled in all the right forms, sent the right money in the right envelope, and remembered to put both a hankerchief *and* a miniature pack of tissues in his uniform pocket. But however hard I tried, every day something else was wrong. Friday it was forgetting to stamp our name seal on the receipt for his custom-made rush slippers for the summer dance. I'd correctly named and dated the form, signed it, and sent it back on the right day - but sure enough back it came in his bag that evening, with a little note from his teacher regretting that it hadn't been properly completed. (His teacher has also offered to correct the Japanese in the notes I write her ... I think she believes I need taking thoroughly in hand if I'm to become an acceptable kindergarten mother!)

But the bazar preparations beat everything so far. Thursday I went to my first class mothers' meeting. After a swift run-through of the gate-duty rota, we were told that for the bazar in October each class has to provide a certain number of hand-made items for sale. No problem, you might think - if you're good at handicrafts, make lots; if you're not, cheat by buying hand-made things somewhere else and passing them off as your own. (Shades of the heroine of I Don't Know How She Does It distressing mince pies the night before the Christmas bake sale...) But you can't get away with that at Dan's kindergarten. At our meeting next week, we were informed, each of the 24 mothers has to come up with one proposed craft, providing either a sample or detailed pictures and instructions. We then have to choose seven of these proposals, which will be submitted to the Bazar Committee for their consideration. The Committee will select three of them, which must then be made by hand BY THE ENTIRE CLASS OF MOTHERS TOGETHER. No pleading that I can't sew or crochet, that I haven't knitted anything for years, that I can't draw or paint for nuts and that I'm utterly challenged when it comes to beautifully crafted pictures in seventeen shades of kimono silk. No, whatever the group decides is what everyone HAS to do. Together.

There are two or three other working mothers in our class, and none of them was at the class meeting. I wonder how they manage this stuff? I was able to go last week because my translation workload was fairly low, and should really be able to attend the next meeting too (though it's due to last the entire kindergarten day, from 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., I guess becuase they expect it to take that long for us to make a decision!). But now I'm in a quandary. Do I show willing and attend, suggest a craft that I can actually make (I'm thinking lavender bags, in which case I could do something simple like stuffing in the lavender while others do the actual sewing), and then actually have to direct the other mothers should it make the final selection? Or plead work, and let the keener mothers select crafts that are completely beyond my meagre abilities?

A friend told me that at one kindergarten she knows, mothers are allowed to buy their way out of contributing handicrafts by making a donation instead. Corruption has never sounded so good.

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Golden Week (2): Children's Festival







The day after our camp, we went over to Kentaro's parents' house so the boys could take part in a Children's Day festival at the local shrine.

It's a common ritual in Shinto to carry portable shrines (mikoshi) around the streets. The deities enshrined in the main sanctuary are temporarily transferred to the mikoshi for the duration of the parade. In this particular festival, they were carried down the hill to the large Buddhist temple at the bottom, then up the steps to the Buddha hall so the deities could pay their respects to the Buddha enshrined there (Japanese religion is nothing if not syncretistic!). At that point everyone takes a well-earned break and chugs down a beer or two (fruit juice for the kids) before heading back up the hill to the shrine again.

Because it was Children's Day, two small mikoshi were brought out, one for girls and one for boys. Normally adults carry them on their shoulders, but the children's ones are carried by adults at hip height while the kids pull on two long ropes. When they reached the steps up to the temple, fathers stepped in to hoist them up. Even though they're relatively small, they're pretty heavy, and Kentaro had a bruise on his shoulder by the time the boys' one was finally at the top.

The adult mikoshi is much larger, and the guys carrying it were all pretty drunk by the time the festival rolled around, so there was a fair amount of both merriment and unease as it went up the steps. Mothers kept their children well away ... it has been dropped before now...

It was our first ever festival. Previously I'd managed to avoid taking part in Shinto events, out of a residual sense of unease at participating in non-Christian religious rituals. As faith has slipped imperceptibly away, I've finally let go of that inhibition too. It'll be fun for the boys to take part in our local shrine festival with their friends this autumn.

Golden Week (1): Camping





At the end of April and the beginning of May there's a period when five Japanese public holidays fall in the space of seven days, and the entire nation goes on holiday. Well, almost the entire nation - in previous years Kentaro has always been on duty at least part of the time (being a junior doctor, he gets the short straw when it comes to holiday cover). This year, though, his seniority has started to kick in and he only had to cover one night, so we were able to go away for a couple of days.

Everywhere books up early during Golden Week, and because Kentaro was only told his schedule the week before we hadn't been able to make reservations anywhere. So we just put the tent in the back of the car and headed over to camp by Lake Biwa for a night, where Kentaro's parents joined us for an evening barbecue on the beach.

Dan had great fun bashing in tent pegs with gusto, but Kei was more interested in catching frogs.