My interest in Nippon had
been growing steadily since the age of 13 when I tried my first piece of
sushi. At the time, there weren’t Japanese restaurants on every street corner
the way there are now. Back then, Chinese take-out was considered exotic.
1st photo in Tokyo; vending machines
So my love of raw salmon
translated into a love of everything Japanese and at the tender age of 22 I put
everything I owned into storage, as many clothes as I could possibly fit into
one suitcase, and I was off.
The ride to the airport,
besides being uncomfortable because my parents were in the same car, was somber.
“You know they light people on fire in China, don’t you?” asked my father over
his shoulder as he drove.
At the airport, things got
worse. My dad, who was wearing the shortest short shorts known to man, broke
down into tears while my mom made me check my ticket and passport for the
millionth time, “just to make sure they’re still there.”
“Okay, well… see you in a
year,” I said jokingly as I crossed the line into the unknown.
cheesu!
So this was my new home; a
one-bedroom apartment in Koshigaya, Japan. Nice kitchen, nice living room,
interesting washroom (how does that work?).
The bedroom floor was
traditional and covered in tatami mats. Little did I know that it was also
covered in hundreds, or thousands, of mites. “Mom,” I cried on the phone a
couple of days later, hysterical, “it’s awful. There are mites everywhere, even
in my underwear drawer, and I can’t get rid of them.”
My mother always liked to
tell me that Dettol took care of everything. Parachlorometaxylenol, or Dettol,
is a cleaning solution so powerful it doesn’t need advertising. It just works.
In the case of mites, it’s
absorbed through their skin before it kills them as a result of toxic shock.
While the mites were slowly
dying I was going through my own version of shock; culture shock. The honeymoon
phase of my time in Japan had come to an abrupt end and I was no longer amused
by people pulling out my “yellow” hair for closer inspection. Similarly,
Japanese housewives wearing teddy-bear themed aprons at the grocery store made
me want to commit violent acts. I was now knee-deep in the rejection phase.
JET photo; blondinka much?
But as any “gaijin” knows,
this too shall pass.
Halfway through my stint in
Japan I hit my stride. I could speak the language relatively well, I had made a
couple of great friends and I was really enjoying everything Japan had to
offer. On weekends, I would set out with a long list of things to do and
actually do them.
spot the gaijin, aka me
This is when my mother decided it was time for a visit.
purikura
Both she and her Japanese
friend Taeko stayed with me for a week in February. Taeko is the person who first
introduced us to sushi in Montreal so it was a little surreal seeing her in my
very own Japanese pad (definitely not maxi).
It was still pretty cold when
they visited and my apartment didn’t have central heating. My mother was
shocked.
“Couldn’t we put this space heater closer to us?” she asked one night as she shivered uncontrollably in bed (this coming from the woman who always told me to be careful about literally everything).
“We could but we’d probably catch on fire. What would dad think then?”
“Couldn’t we put this space heater closer to us?” she asked one night as she shivered uncontrollably in bed (this coming from the woman who always told me to be careful about literally everything).
“We could but we’d probably catch on fire. What would dad think then?”
