Saturday 30 August 2008
Tuesday 26 August 2008
A week with the Hommas
A week with the Hommas! Mayumi the consummate housewife and Yasu the picture of his son Yosuke, perched on the front of the couch watching T.V. or when eating, quickly, silently, until he'd finished. Yosuke is a good mate from University and frequently stayed at various friends' homes for the summer holiday instead of flying back to Japan. I think his parents were only too willing to welcome me into their home for the second time.
The first time I stayed in Eda with the Hommas, I had a foot the size of a football and was freaking out thinking I'd contracted Deep Vein Thrombosis. It was the start of the year and my friend Julia and I had come back from a sun-kissed holiday in Thailand. Waiting on the platform for the train to Eda Julia read out the symptoms of DVT after my foot had grown in size and my pain threshold had shrunk correspondingly. It turned out to be just an infection caught from dirty sea-water and bad sandal grazes but Mrs Homma diligently took care of me nonetheless.
This time round I got a better taste of the Hommas' day-to-day life. Both work hard. At the start of the week, Yasu would return late and collapse in front of Kitajima Kousuke or Fuahara or another of the Japanese Olympians. A couple of days he returned very late, eating supper after ten and retiring to bed soon after that. On Saturday and Sunday, he worked at his laptop typing minutes for meetings held with the lawyers. A company had fiddled the books, the chief exec had fled to Greece (his last known whereabouts) with a few million and Yasu was on the case discovering new lies and scandals on a daily basis. He said it was the most interesting thing he's ever had to do at work.
Mayumi got up at 5 or earlier to prepare breakfast for Yasu and me each day. She taught a couple of Japanese lessons each week, volunteered at a hospital for children sick with cancer and discussed plans to write more childrens books with her partner, the illustrator, also sick with cancer. They've already co-authored one. Last Saturday was a house-warming party for one of her old students, Nuala from Liverpool. I was invited along too and saw a completely different side to Mayumi, excited, bustling and flitting around like she was half as old as I suppose she really is. It was nice to see, especially since I met a lot of other foreigners at the party who all made me feel like I need to grow up and start thinking of the Future and making a Plan. Each had their own story to tell of just how they'd wound up spending over 10 years, 15 years in Japan. More than one of them identified the point at which there was no turning back and several were married to Japanese spouses or carrying babes in arms. I met a few guys who met for golf and wished I could play better than swiping at the ball with clumsy, steely-eyed strokes. It was alarming, in a way, to meet people who'd stopped thinking about when they were going to return home and starting thinking about when they could holiday home.
Mayumi kick-started Japanese study seriously again for me. The evening I arrived she started tugging out and throwing at me textbooks and thick kanji books from a cupboard full of them. Before a spare key was cut for me, she encouraged I study at home when she was out, until lunchtime or whenever she'd return. In fact, it's probably time to look at some more kanji now.
The first time I stayed in Eda with the Hommas, I had a foot the size of a football and was freaking out thinking I'd contracted Deep Vein Thrombosis. It was the start of the year and my friend Julia and I had come back from a sun-kissed holiday in Thailand. Waiting on the platform for the train to Eda Julia read out the symptoms of DVT after my foot had grown in size and my pain threshold had shrunk correspondingly. It turned out to be just an infection caught from dirty sea-water and bad sandal grazes but Mrs Homma diligently took care of me nonetheless.
This time round I got a better taste of the Hommas' day-to-day life. Both work hard. At the start of the week, Yasu would return late and collapse in front of Kitajima Kousuke or Fuahara or another of the Japanese Olympians. A couple of days he returned very late, eating supper after ten and retiring to bed soon after that. On Saturday and Sunday, he worked at his laptop typing minutes for meetings held with the lawyers. A company had fiddled the books, the chief exec had fled to Greece (his last known whereabouts) with a few million and Yasu was on the case discovering new lies and scandals on a daily basis. He said it was the most interesting thing he's ever had to do at work.
Mayumi got up at 5 or earlier to prepare breakfast for Yasu and me each day. She taught a couple of Japanese lessons each week, volunteered at a hospital for children sick with cancer and discussed plans to write more childrens books with her partner, the illustrator, also sick with cancer. They've already co-authored one. Last Saturday was a house-warming party for one of her old students, Nuala from Liverpool. I was invited along too and saw a completely different side to Mayumi, excited, bustling and flitting around like she was half as old as I suppose she really is. It was nice to see, especially since I met a lot of other foreigners at the party who all made me feel like I need to grow up and start thinking of the Future and making a Plan. Each had their own story to tell of just how they'd wound up spending over 10 years, 15 years in Japan. More than one of them identified the point at which there was no turning back and several were married to Japanese spouses or carrying babes in arms. I met a few guys who met for golf and wished I could play better than swiping at the ball with clumsy, steely-eyed strokes. It was alarming, in a way, to meet people who'd stopped thinking about when they were going to return home and starting thinking about when they could holiday home.
Mayumi kick-started Japanese study seriously again for me. The evening I arrived she started tugging out and throwing at me textbooks and thick kanji books from a cupboard full of them. Before a spare key was cut for me, she encouraged I study at home when she was out, until lunchtime or whenever she'd return. In fact, it's probably time to look at some more kanji now.
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