Midnight Mutterings | Thinking about Japan-Part 2

||| MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS by JACKIE BATES |||

If memory serves, Kyoko, Susumu and Yuki (age4) were the third or fourth Japanese family to move into the house next door in Seattle in the 1980s. I had begun to lose interest in my exotic next door neighbors and didn’t rush to make contact when they moved in. Then one cold, late morning, I saw the mother and child walking up the slippery, steep hill to our houses. The mother was stepping gingerly in her heels, her bare legs looking especially cold in the wind. I was driving and stopped offer them a ride for the the last few blocks. Once they realized I was their next door neighbor, they gratefully climbed into my little Toyota Corolla station wagon. That was the beginning of one of the most important friendships of my life.

Kyoko, at age 27, was very pretty and looked much younger than she was. Her high voice added to her already youthful appearance, and it took me several weeks to put my prejudices aside to realize her acute intelligence and observation abilities. One of the things that surprised me is that she was very, very funny. To have such a keen sense of humor seemed so difficult to me for one in a new culture and language. Of course, I soon came to realize that all three members of their little family were particularly acute in their observations and understanding of American culture as it was in Seattle in the eighties. I learned so much about my own language and culture from them as well as what they shared with me about their own.

I don’t remember what we talked about that day or how we quickly became such good friends in the days and years to come. Susumu, was different from the Japanese fathers who preceded and followed him in the house next door. Not nearly as conservative about gender roles as the others, or even his American counterparts, he seemed to think everyone could and should do anything without restriction that needed doing or that interested them. For example, he did not drive a car, leaving that to his wife Kyoko, though he was able and willing to do all maintenance and repair of their, and my, car. As I came to know him better, I learned he was in the rigorous fellowship program in hematology and stem cell transplant at UW. He apparently didn’t understand that American doctors (and, I assume those in Japan) did not give away their time, knowledge, and medical skills randomly to anyone to who needed them. Even our ca, benefited from Susumu’s surgery and follow up care for an abscess at the base of his tail.

In one incident, Susumu asked me to read a paper he had written in English and was going to present at an upcoming conference as well as submit for publication. Because I had a degree in medical technology and had done the practicum in hematology, I spoke the language well enough to understand the subject. I only had a couple of ideas about sentence structure and graph illustration. I pointed those out to Susumu, and suggested that he have his secretary make the minor changes. He laughed and admitted he had typed it himself on a manual typewriter, which was the only option at the time. The most modern office machine was an electric ‘Selectric’ machine. Home computers were limited to an Apple II, a 27 pound Kaypro or a $5,000 Hewlett Packard. He just laughed when I offered him my fancy electric Olivetti with its 120 character memory. He also confided that he was ‘the only man in Japan who cooked for his family.’

This was at a time when, as I learned from my sequence of Japanese neighbors, married women who were professionally educated could not practice their specialties as long as their specialties until they were widowed. One next door wife, before Kyoko, trained as a dermatologist who could not practice in Japan, told me her mother, a psychiatrist, had just begun to work after my neighbor’s father had died. She also said that women without professional training, had to take maintenance jobs, such as street sweeping, on the death of their husbands, as married women had no wealth of their own to support them in widowhood. I assume, decades later, such practices have changed.

I made a lot of mistakes, not knowing enough about Japanese cultural family practices. One of the most dramatic was when I took the Takegawa family camping on the peninsula. We went in their car packed with equipment I had or had borrowed. I had my own tiny tent and sleeping bag and cooking equipment (which Susumu took over as cook). For their family I had a larger tent, two adult zip together sleeping bags and a child size bag for Yuki. When it began to rain during the night, I crawled out of my tent to make sure car windows were closed, only to find Susumu leaning against the car, smoking. I hadn’t understood that Japanese tradition meant that mothers and children sleep together until the children are a certain age. Kyoko and Yuki occupied the zip together bags, leaving only the child size bag unoccupied. Later, I asked Kyoko if camping was popular in Japan. Kind as always, Kyoko smiled and told me, too late, ‘In Japan, children go camping.’

Another mistake was dragging Kyoko to yard sales, where she bought nothing, telling me later that she would never use anything previously owned by someone else, as it would be dirty in a way that could never be uncontaminated. When I said that we Americans brag about bargains, she countered that her Japanese friends lied that they paid more than they actually did for items, for prestige points. I never knew Kyoko to brag about anything, especially not her child, as it would bring bad fortune if she brought attention to herself or her child. Only much later, Kyoko admitted she trained as an attorney or barrister, that theirs was an arranged marriage, with Susumu writing an application, and not being truthful about his smoking. I assume he typed it himself.