Tag: Japanese stories

Autumn Equinox Approximately September 23rd – October 7th

By:

September 21, 202272 Seasons Essays Chieko (Calligraphy)

The scrolls are read from right to left and the dates are approximate
Autumn Equinox (Shubun 秋分)
Thunder pipes down (Kaminari sunawachi Koeoosamu 雷乃収声) Sept. 23-27
Insects wall up in shelters (Chicchu to o fusagu 蟄虫坏戸) Sept.28-Oct. 2
Waters dry up (Mizu hajimetekareru 水始涸) Oct. 3-7
Calligraphy by Chieko

Waters Dry Up

When the sweet smell of orange tea olive flowers waft through the air, it is truly autumn. After the rice is harvested, the paddy fields that were drained in advance slowly dry up into mud cracks. Darkness descends earlier in the evenings and with that, my visits to the fields become few and far between.

Around the end of September, vertical banners in the shop front would announce the arrival of new rice at our local supermarket. The rice would be followed by a flood of seasonal delicacies such as Kyoho grapes, Kosui pears, Matsutake mushrooms, and most important, the pacific saury fish, which is my favorite fall delicacy called sanma in Japanese.

“Let’s eat sanma tonight,” my mother would say as soon as she spots the fresh fish in the supermarket aisle. Their long silver bodies are piled in a Styrofoam container packed with ice. “Pick a plump one with clear eyes and yellow nose,” she would say as she passes me a tong. As I pick each fish, she would indicate with a nod or shake of her head to put them into the plastic bag.

When I was growing up in Japan in the late 70s, we ate a lot of fish prepared Himono-style. Himono are split, cleaned, salted, and partially dried small fish, mostly skipjacks and horse mackerels. Raw fish like sashimi and sushi were only served on special days when we had guests. Sanma is unique because it is only eaten for a short period in autumn, grilled and served whole with its intestines intact.

To prepare a sanma, the fish is salted generously on the outside and popped into the fish grill —every Japanese household stove is equipped with one— to be roasted under the open flame for a few minutes. It is usually served on a long plate, uncut, horizontally with its head pointed to the left. A little mound of grated daikon radish topped with a dash of soy sauce should accompany it on the side, together with a wedge of Kabosu lime to squeeze over the caramelized skin. I enjoy eating sanma because its salty and oily meat paired perfectly with the new rice, which comes out of the rice cooker softer than older rice.

The other reason I loved eating sanma when I was young was to prove my fish-eating skills to my parents. This is because the things my parents particularly respected were proper greetings and excellent chopstick skills. “So-and-so can’t even greet people properly!” my mother would say about one of my friends who didn’t say hello to her on the street.

She also said, “a person who holds chopsticks properly and eats a fish clean to the bone has a good upbringing.” Sanma is very difficult to eat clean because it has numerous fine bones along its narrow body, but because we were well-trained by my parents, my sisters and I were expert fish eaters at a young age. My parents didn’t praise us easily, but they always complimented us for eating fish properly.

Several years ago, I was in the town of Tsu on the shores of Ise bay in Mie prefecture. I was interpreting for a group of people from the US visiting pottery towns in Japan. One night, the group photographer and I ate at a little local Japanese bar with two of the American members of the group. It was sanma season and one of the Americans ordered a sanma. When the fish arrived at the table grilled to perfection, he asked for a fork and a knife and started eating the sanma. Everyone, including the bar owners and the other customers surrounded the table and watched him artfully eat the fish with the cutlery. When he finished and the sanma was eaten clean to the bone, the crowd broke into cheers. So, it’s not just my parents, but many Japanese people have unconditional respect for anyone who knows how to graciously eat a fish.

White Dew
Approximately September 8th – 22nd

By:

Ai Kanazawa

September 7, 202272 Seasons Essays Chieko (Calligraphy)

White Dew on Grass

“If you are going out to play, take your little sister with you,” my mother would occasionally say as I was hastily running out the door after school. When this happened, the sad trombone would play in my head and my exciting plans to explore the rice paddy fields had to be aborted. I couldn’t take my little sister to the fields because the bugs scared her and the water was too dangerous.

But even though I couldn’t indulge in some of the activities that I loved, I still enjoyed playing with my little sister who is only two years my junior. She was skinny and sickly when she was little and didn’t have many friends because she spent a lot of time at home. We often played together until she became healthier and started making her own friends.

In September, when the colorful Mirabilis flowers that adorn the warm summer evenings start to develop seeds, we would go to the flower border to collect their seeds. The black seeds, which resemble small grenades, carry white powder in the middle. We would gather the powder by cracking the seeds and then paint each other’s faces white, pretending to be putting on make-up. In Japanese, Mirabilis flowers are called “oshiroi bana,” which means “white make-up flower.”

I also frequently took my little sister to play games with my friends as “omiso”. Omiso means miso paste, and it was the name that Japanese children used to describe little ones that participated in games without having the proper rules applied to them. When my sister came along as “omisho”–this is the way she said the word because she couldn’t pronounce it properly– my friends that didn’t have younger siblings enjoyed being her temporary elder, so it worked out perfectly for everyone.

One day, I played hide-and-seek at the bus terminal with my friends. My little sister came along as omiso, but there were two problems in bringing her to play this particular game. The first problem was that she would cry whenever the seeker would find her because she was so timid. The second problem was that she would not come out at the end of each game because she became scared. So we would often stop looking for her because we didn’t want to make her cry. And on that day, as you might expect, I completely forgot about her after playing several games because she had not come out.

I jollily went home without my sister for dinner and only remembered when my mother asked in a sharp tone, “where is your sister?” as I walked into the apartment. In a hurry, I ran back and found her still hiding behind a bunch of tall grass that was her favorite hiding spot. As soon as she saw me, she burst out crying. None of the tricks that I had accumulated over the years to make her stop crying worked. As we walked home with my sister crying at the top of her lungs, every neighbor that we passed asked me what had happened to her.

My family loves to talk about this incident as “the day Ai forgot her sister” when we gather for dinner and reminisce about our old days in Chiba. As I was writing this essay, I discovered that omiso is a term that originated as an abbreviation of the word misokasu, which means miso dregs that are a good-for-nothing leftover that remain in the strainer after miso is melted in soup.

I had always assumed that it simply meant miso paste, so I was surprised by the derogatory nature of the term’s origin. But omiso continues to have an adorable ring to my ears, probably, because I remember the voice of a little girl that used to say, “Ai-chan, can I come as omisho please, take me along to play,” as I’m about to walk out of the door.

Heat Ceases
Approximately August 23rd – September 7th

By:

Ai Kanazawa

August 23, 202272 Seasons Essays Chieko (Calligraphy)

The scrolls are read from right to left and the dates are approximate
Heat Ceases (Shosho 処暑)
Cotton bolls open (Menpu hiraku 綿柎開)
Heaven and Earth become solemn (Tenchi hajimete shukusu 天地始粛）
Rice Ripens (Ka minoru 禾乃登)
Calligraphy by Chieko

Heaven and Earth Become Solemn

At the corner of the west entrance to our danchi apartment complex, there was a mini-police station called koban in Japanese. The koban was next to the terminal where the local bus shuttled residents to and from the nearest train station. There were three to four policemen assigned at this police station-cum-information center in rotation to protect our community of around 2000 families.

We didn’t know the names of these policemen because we simply called them ‘omawari-san,’ which means, ‘the person that goes around.’ True to the name, they frequently patrolled the complex on their sturdy-looking white bicycles. They chatted with the residents, listened to their concerns, and arrived quickly when there was a disturbance in our community, no matter how minor it was. We all respected and depended on the omawari-san and felt safe because they were always around.

One September day after the summer holidays, my older sister talked about an exciting project at her primary school over dinner. Her class was going to bury a time capsule that would be opened many years later, and the students discussed what should go inside. She said that someone suggested that the music album ‘Swim! Taiyaki (oyoge taiyakikun)’—a song about a fish-shaped cake filled with red bean paste that escaped the pastry shop— should go inside the time capsule. The song, which sold over 4.5 million copies, was so popular that almost every child in Japan could sing it. She said that the class agreed that it was the perfect item to put into the capsule.

As a pre-schooler, I listened intently to my older sister’s stories because I was very eager to attend primary school. I also wanted to imitate everything my older sister did, which, unfortunately, extremely annoyed her. When I heard this story, I immediately decided that I should make my own time capsule with my friends.

I acquired a small biscuit tin from my grandfather and started gathering precious items with two other friends. One of them brought his supercar Lamborghini-shaped eraser (a rare transparent one in green), and the other brought her orange yo-yo that she valued greatly. I decided to put my little glass jar of ‘star sands’ that my aunt gave me as a souvenir from Okinawa. It is funny because I was fascinated by these tiny star-shaped sands, but didn’t know where Okinawa was. I vaguely imagined that it was a tropical island with coconut trees in a foreign country.

After filling the tin with these ‘treasures of our times’, the three of us went to a field in the southern part of the danchi, next to the rice paddy fields. As we looked for an ideal burial spot, one of my friends found a 100-yen coin. We stared at the coin for a while wondering what to do, then decided that it was best to take it to the omawari-san.

“Where did you find it?” the omawari-san asked when we arrived at the koban with the coin. The fan was blowing furiously at the station, but it was still stifling inside. We nervously explained to him that we found the coin in the field next to the rice paddy fields. To avoid any suspicion, I quickly added that we were in the field to look for a spot to bury our time capsule.

“A time capsule?” he said, and curiously eyed the tin that I was holding. “You’re going to bury that?” We quietly nodded in unison, and braced for further interrogation about its content.

But no more questions came, which was a relief to all of us. We were worried if he thought that the time capsule was a bad idea. The omawari-san picked up the coin, put it in the desk drawer, turned to us and said, “well, thank you for bringing lost items to the koban, we appreciate your cooperation,” in a very formal tone. He then smiled and pulled out a 100-yen coin from his shirt pocket, passed it to us and said, “here, this is for you, buy some ice-cream at the bread shop.”

We ran with joy to the bread shop feeling proud that the omawari-san praised us for our actions. We bought three “Home-run Bars” with the 100-yen he gave us. Home-run Bars were the cheapest ice-cream available at 30 yen each. And while we ate the ice-cream on a bench, my friend discovered that her stick had “home-run” written on it. This meant that we could get another ice-cream for free, and we were all surprised because this rarely happened.

I can’t remember how our discussion progressed after that stroke of luck, but the three of us concluded that the home-run stick and the leftover 10-yen should all go into our time capsule. We put them in the tin, went back to the field, and buried our time capsule. We then said goodbye and went home for dinner.

Three years after I buried the time capsule with my friends, our family moved to Singapore. When I returned to see my grandparents several years later, I heard whispers of several suicides that happened in the danchi after we had left. I was much older then and tried to imagine what could make people end their own lives. I also thought about the gentle omawari-san who bought us ice-cream and wondered how he was, because he would have investigated these incidents. He was no longer working at our koban, but I imagined that he must have been heartbroken that these tragedies happened in the community that he looked after.

I also never got to dig up my time capsule. While I was away, the field was paved and turned into acrylic tennis courts. When people talk about Japan’s feverish bubble-period that soon followed, I think about those tennis courts that appeared in the field where we used to play. They were jarringly out of place in the middle of the beautiful paddy fields.

Beginning of Autumn
Approximately August 8th – 22nd

By:

Ai Kanazawa

August 8, 202272 Seasons Essays Chieko (Calligraphy)

The scrolls are read from right to left and the dates are approximate
Beginning of Autumn (Risshu 立秋)
Cool winds arrive (ryofu itaru 涼風至)
Cold cicadas cry (kanzemi naku 寒蝉鳴）
Thick fog descends (nomu shokosu 蒙霧升降)
Calligraphy by Chieko

Cold Cicadas Cry

Before I started attending an international school in Singapore, I didn’t know summer holidays in Western schools were much longer than their Japanese counterparts. I clearly remember the panicked expression on my mother’s face when she discovered that I would have two months of vacation from my new school. She said she didn’t know what to do with me being idle at home for such a long period of time.

In Japanese primary schools, the summer holidays are a little over a month long, which starts around the third week of July and runs until the end of August. On the last day of school, we are assigned tons of homework and also have to thoroughly clean and empty out our classrooms. This meant that we carried home all our textbooks, indoor shoes, school lunch bags, calligraphy kits, and melodica keyboards. If you see young Japanese children walking with a lot of stuff, you will know that it is their last day of school before vacation.

During the summer holidays, there was no shortage of finding playmates in our apartment complex because most families spent the summer at home. This was because many of our fathers worked long hours and took few vacations. It seemed that our parents’ generation collectively nurtured a culture that respected men who put their work before family.

In my family, my mother, who used to work at a large department store in Yokohama, also enjoyed working. As soon as my younger sister started attending nursery school, she took up a part time job at the local bookshop. I was secretly proud of my mother because she enjoyed going to work, regardless of what other people said or thought about her. Unlike men, Japanese working mothers were often viewed as neglecting their children.

A typical summer morning started with the loudspeakers blasting the NHK radio exercise at our community park. It promptly started at 6:30 am with a piano intro and a man’s voice cheerfully narrating, “lift your arms up from the front and begin by stretching your back.” Ask anyone who attended Japanese primary schools about ‘radio exercise, No. 1’ and they will be able to show you every move because they would have done it countless times.

After the radio exercise, there were many choices for the summer day’s activity. I could join a group of friends serving up mud cakes in the sandbox, pull out my bicycle and go to the rice paddy fields to check on the bugs and frogs, simply roam the shopping area in the center of our danchi and drop in on my mother at the bookstore, or hang out with friends who were buying rubbishy plastic toys dispensed from vending machines using their monthly allowance. In the afternoons, the humid sky often developed layers of clouds rising like huge mountains that often turned into thunderstorms.

What I most enjoyed in the summer was when we could gather enough friends to play games of dodgeball in a parking lot. I became so absorbed in the games that I was often late for the 5.30pm curfew to get home. When I was late, my mother locked me out of the apartment as punishment while I cried and banged on the door, begging her to let me in.

This may sound overly harsh and unacceptable today, but it was a common practice when I was growing up. I frequently heard other children banging on doors and crying to be let in on summer evenings. Neighbors teased and said, “Ai, were you locked out again yesterday?” when they saw me. No one thought much of it, and in fact, my friends were envious because my mother never grounded me even though I was a repeat offender.

I still remember a late summer day near the end of August, when I was playing dodgeball with my friends. The sun had begun to lower when one of them shouted “look at how big and red it is today!” We all stopped and watched the sun. The dry, bell-like sound of higurashi (sunset) cicadas was filling the air and we could see our school in the distance. I felt slightly sorry for the school that seemed lonely without us. Then someone suddenly said “bye!” and started running and we all scattered and began racing home to meet our curfews.

Early Growth Abounds
Approximately May 21st-June 5th

By:

Ai Kanazawa

May 20, 202272 Seasons Essays Chieko (Calligraphy)

The scrolls are read from right to left and the dates are approximate
Early Growth Abounds (Shoman 小満)
Silkworms Start Eating Mulberry Leaves (Kaiko okite kuwao kuu 蚕起食桑）May 21-25
Safflowers Bloom (Benihana sakau 紅花栄) May 26-30
Barley Ripens (Bakushu itaru 麦秋至) May 31-June 5
<Calligraphy by Chieko>

Barley Ripens

When the loudspeakers in our neighborhood blared the song “Seven Baby Chicks” at 5pm, it was time to return home for dinner:

Crow, why do you caw so?
Because up in the mountain
I have seven adorable baby chicks…

I really disliked this song because I always wanted to play outside longer and had very little interest in going home to eat. Decades later, I was amused whenever my nephews and nieces fell asleep at the dinner table because it confirmed that apathy for eating ran deep in my family during infancy.

But occasionally I was excited about food, in particular when my mother made us barley rice, called mugigohan, which was a mixture of white rice and rolled barley. A rolled barley looks just like a whiter rolled oat and it is flat with a line running down the center. When I spotted these telltale faint brown lines mixed into the rice, I would exclaim with joy. I picked the barley out with chopsticks and popped them individually into my mouth to enjoy their chewy texture. “Mugi is healthy, but a politician once said it’s food for the poor people,” my mother would often say as we ate our mugigohan. This made me think that “politicians” are nasty if they were telling poor people what to eat.

The word mugi in Japanese means wheat or barley. A rolled barley is called oshimugi, and barley tea is called mugicha. The other mugi that we grew up with was mugiwara boushi, which means straw hats. When we were young, many parents made us put on straw hats during the summer and because of this, they are synonymous in our minds with carefree adventures and summer holidays. So, anime fans, it is no coincidence that the protagonist “Luffy” of the popular anime series, “One Piece,” wears a straw hat as he continues his adventures while building friendships.

Straw hat also reminds me of the advertisement for the movie “The Proof of the Man” which was widely broadcast on TV in the summer of 1977. The movie was adapted from a popular murder mystery book written by Morimura Seiichi. I was too young at the time so I actually never saw the movie or read the book, but I vividly remember the commercial that started with an image of a straw hat falling into a ravine. The scene was accompanied by a poem by Saijo Yaso, called “My Hat,” somberly read by the voice of a young man:

Mother,
I wonder what became of my hat
The straw hat that fell into the bottom of a ravine
On the way from Usui to Kiritsumi
That summer…

I think most Japanese children who grew up in this era learned the beginning of this poem thanks to that TV commercial. It was, when I think back, the first time I heard a poem read aloud and experienced how words can evoke feelings.

I felt great sympathy for this man without his hat because I thought about the terrible feeling when I lost something and of the woefulness of having to tell mother. Once, probably a few months after watching the commercial, I lost my water bottle at school and my mother asked where it was. I said in a solemn tone, “mother, I wonder what became of my water bottle…,” at which point she burst out laughing. “You are just impossible,” she groaned, and laughed until tears were streaming down her face.

Beginning of Summer
Approximately May 5th – 20th

By:

Ai Kanazawa

May 5, 202272 Seasons Essays Chieko (Calligraphy)

Frogs Start to Cry

When I was a little girl, I never saw my father during the week because he left for work before the children woke up and came home after we went to sleep. When he was home on the weekends, he was always very tired. If my sisters and I begged him to play, he would often suggest, “sure, let’s pretend to nap,” at which point we immediately refused and ran off. When we returned, we found our father snoring on the tatami mat with my baby sister on his side. She was a constant victim to his scheme because she quickly fell asleep “pretending” next to my father.

I think many Japanese salaryman fathers in the 1970s were just like mine, overworked and exhausted, because, it seemed, they were on a mission to contribute to Japan’s rapid growth and industrialization. My father couldn’t play with us often and, ironically, that’s the reason I vividly remember the times when he did. We played badminton in the car park and the Reversi board game that was popular in Japan at the time. These times were fun, but out of all the things I did with my father, I enjoyed singing with him the most.

My father had tuberculosis when he was in high school that almost took his life, and he lost a part of his lung through an operation. A big scar remains across his back that always surprised people when we went to the swimming pool together. When we were very young, my father told us that the scar was made by a big cat that clawed at him in a dark alley. So we never went into dark alleys.

After spending two years in the hospital, the doctor suggested to my father to take up singing as therapy to improve his lung capacity and breathing. My father obediently joined a choir for several years and because of this, he loved to sing and taught us many songs.

The Frogs’ Song (kaeruno uta) was one of the first songs that everyone, including my little sister, could sing because it was simple and short. Like the song “row, row, row your boat”, the song is sung in a round and as a child I thought that we really sounded like a group of frogs when we sang the “gwa gwa” part together. Until recently, I was convinced that this song was Japanese in origin but discovered to my surprise that the melody is from a German folk song from the 19th century called Froschgesang.

For my father’s work, our young family moved to the suburban areas of Kanagawa, Fukuoka, and Chiba in a span of a few years. In Chiba, there were many rice paddies close to our apartment. In the early summer when these fields were filled with water, a massive chorus of frogs could be heard. These frogs laid eggs that looked like delicate strings of beads covered in jelly.

Once, my friend and I went to look for tadpoles in the rice paddies after daycare. We loudly sang the Frogs’ Song in an endless loop as we walked in our rain boots because this never-ending song was perfect for our childish persistence, and we were happy that no adult was telling us to stop. When we arrived at the rice paddies, we saw many tadpoles swimming in the shallow warm water.

Some tadpoles had already started to grow legs. We gently scooped a few in our hands and flipped them to look at the spirals in their bellies. We were completely absorbed in our play until my friend tried to take a step and lost her boot in the mud. We pulled and pulled to retrieve it, but the suction of the mud was too strong. Soon the boot disappeared completely into the mud, and we had to give up because the five o’clock song played from the loudspeakers and this was the time that we had to go home.

My friend used my shoulder to hop on her single booted foot, so we trudged very slowly. As darkness began to fall, we started sobbing quietly as we walked. I felt responsible for her boot and hoped that her mother won’t scold her for losing it. I was also worried that my mother would be angry when I got home covered in mud.

I can’t remember my friend’s name now, or what happened after we got home that evening. Shortly after the incident, my friend moved away because her father had to work in Kansai. My father also stopped singing because the opportunities simply disappeared from our lives as we grew up. Now when I hear frogs cry, I think about singing the Frog’s Song with my father, and the little orange rain boot stuck in the rice paddy field.