Big change coming

When we bought our house, nearly two years ago, Kentaro said that at some point he'd probably have to go and work at a hospital further away than commuting distance, so he could get his specialist qualification as a pediatric surgeon.

OK, I said, that's fine. We'll do tanshin funin.

Tanshin funin is a fairly common Japanese custom. If a man gets transfered by his company to another part of Japan, frequently he'll go by himself, leaving wife and children in the place they're used to. At first I was a bit shocked by this - from a Western perspective it seemed too much like separation - but now, as a homeowner with kids in the education system, I can see why it works. The housing market works differently from the way it does in the UK and the US; houses depreciate in value like used cars, and land prices have only just stabilized after more than ten years of constant decline, so selling a house inevitably involves losing money. And moving to a new area and new schools is hard on children, particularly for biracial families who inevitably attract unwanted attention.

Louise George Kittaka, another foreign wife, has written a fun article about her own experience with tanshin funin in Tokyo Families. Like her, I've come round to the idea that it can be a positive option, so when Kentaro first mentioned the possibility of his having to move the words fairly tripped off my tongue. At that point, of course, it was all completely hypothetical, some far-off future that might or might not roll around one day.

Now that day's coming. Back last summer, Kentaro's boss and mentor suggested he might consider moving to a children's hospital in the Tokai region, about two hours away by shinkansen. In the Japanese medical world, if your boss makes a suggestion like that, it's pretty close to an order. Kentaro went up to see the hospital and meet the people, and came back impressed; they were equally impressed with him, and offered him a job. Initially he'll be on a one-year contract, which may or may not be extendable; as he needs to work for three years in an accredited institution as part of gaining specialist qualifications, he's hoping to stay there that long at least.

The hospital is in a rural area outside a provincial city. There's very little there. There won't be many other English-speaking families, and there's certainly no international Saturday school like the one Kei attends now. The kids will stand out far more than they do in relatively cosmopolitan Osaka (and they get enough comments here as it is). The boys are thoroughly settled into school and kindergarten respectively, and have made friends in the neighborhood as well as getting involved with local activities - soccer club, calligraphy class, piano lessons. The thought of uprooting them to go to a place where they'll almost certainly stick out as the only biracial children, and then to move them again after some indeterminate period, just doesn't make sense.

That's one reason - the good one - that Kentaro is moving up to Tokai while we're staying here. A more selfish reason is that I love our house too much to want to leave it. Since the age of 17 I've never lived in the same house for more than three years at a time, and that only in our last rented place - before that I'd been moving at least every two years, and often after six months or a year. Now, for the first time, I have a place that's at least partly my own (if you don't count the fact that we've sold our souls to the bank to buy it), and ever since moving in I've been determinedly putting down roots. The thought of selling it or renting it out and going back to poor-quality rented housing fills my gut with something that feels like a lead weight. (Any place we might rent would have to be poor quality, as having a cat rules us out with 99% of landlords.)

Kentaro is ten years younger than me, and as we married and had children while he was still a student he hasn't had the chances to travel and explore options that I have. Now he's ready to spread his wings, just when I'm ready to build a nest for the family. I'd never really felt the full force of our age difference until now. But I don't want to try and stop him moving on; it's important both for his career and for him as a person. So for the next one or two years, at least, we'll be living in different places, trying to work out how his next job can bring us together again.