Mrs Terauchi beamed and chuckled and thanked me for agreeing to have dinner with her friends. ‘We must leave now, sensei, they are waiting.’
‘But what about my bike?’ I repeated. ‘I need to bring it.’
‘You can ride your bike to Mrs Kiguchi’s house. That is where we will have dinner. It is not far. I will drive my car. You follow me, sensei.’
With that she hopped in her car and sped off. I was hard-pressed to keep up with her. She drove badly, speeding up during up-hill stretches – which constituted most of the journey – causing numerous near misses at intersections, and getting tooted at by pretty much everyone. Each time I caught up with her, she slammed on the brakes so I nearly crashed into the back of her car.
Eventually we started to go downhill and Mrs Terauchi now chose to drive like a snail. My brakes screeched constantly as I tried to avoid her rear bumper. It wasn’t until we arrived at our destination twenty-five minutes later that I realised she had taken me in a complete circle. We were now only four minutes away from the school.
We had arrived at a large beautiful wooden Japanese home, set within a stunning traditional garden. Big flat stones formed an enchanting path through an emerald-green carpet of moss. Tall stone lanterns stood among carefully tended bonsai trees, and flowers in dazzling colours grew in clumps next to rows of tomato plants. Beyond the house were fields of newly planted rice paddies, and in the distance towered the misty Kanan mountain range.
It was the most picturesque Japanese house I had ever seen.
Mrs Terauchi’s friends were waiting eagerly inside. I could hear them chattering behind a thinly veiled window, and as I walked up to the door there was a patter of racing feet. The vast front door opened, and four smiling faces greeted me.
‘My friends, sensei is here. Let’s give him some dinner.’ Mrs Terauchi clapped her hands and the four faces erupted in high-pitched laughter.
‘Welcome sensei, welcome,’ they chorused. ‘Please enter.’
I removed my shoes and stepped into the magnificent home. As I tried to take in the interior, I was bustled through to the dining room by Mrs Terauchi.
The women had taken their places at the dinner table. ‘Time for introductions,’ announced Mrs Terauchi. ‘This is our host, Mrs Kiguchi. She has a lovely home, don’t you think?’ I agreed enthusiastically and everyone clapped and laughed.
Mrs Kiguchi stood and shook my hand. She had a noble way of carrying herself, and a friendly twinkle in her eye. ‘I cannot speak English. I am so sorry,’ she said in Japanese, bowing her head. I smiled, and said that I was so happy to visit such a lovely home.
Mrs Kiguchi laughed loudly and quickly covered her mouth. ‘My home is not so nice,’ she said modestly. ‘Thank you for coming.
Mrs Tanaka, Mrs Tsubota and Mrs Matsui all spoke English with varying levels of ability. No one, however, was as outspoken as Mrs Terauchi, and it was no wonder that she had become the group’s spokesperson.
Mrs Kiguchi quietly whispered to Mrs Terauchi, who nodded along happily. ‘Yes, yes, I think so too,’ she said.
‘Sensei, you look hungry,’ she said, turning to me. ‘It is time for us to have dinner. I hope you like Japanese food. We have prepared you a welcome feast.’
Dishes started arriving from the kitchen. A large plate of steamed vegetables. Another piled high with okonomiayaki pancakes. A bowl of beef stew. A bowl of garden salad. A bowl of potato salad. A plate of tempura vegetables. A platter of sushi and an assortment of raw fish.
My eyes bulged, my stomach rumbled.
Mrs Kiguchi sat on my right, eager to serve me beer, orange juice or sake. Mrs Tanaka and Mrs Matsui filled my plate with food, and everyone sat back and waited for me to take the first bite.
I thanked them all again for having gone to such trouble, and bit into a large piece of tempura pumpkin. It was delicious, and I indicated as much to my host. Everyone clapped and Mrs Kiguchi laughed. I noticed she had a habit of nodding her head and covering her mouth when she laughed.
This first dinner with the group was a tremendously happy occasion. I managed to polish off three large okonomiayaki pancakes, and several platefuls of beef stew, sushi, vegetables and salad. We chattered until late in the evening, and I did not even notice that it had grown dark outside.
Mrs Terauchi, meanwhile, had become slightly tipsy. She had, she informed me, lived in England for seven years after graduating from college. She then announced to the women that Christchurch was the capital of New Zealand and also the biggest city, the country had a population of six million people and the inhabitants were all Scottish.
At the end of the dinner, Mrs Kiguchi shyly approached me and asked in Japanese if I would agree to return to her home every second Monday afternoon for English conversation with her and her friends. I keenly accepted.
Everyone clapped and Mrs Tsubota shook my hand. ‘We are your Japanese mothers,’ she said. ‘We want to cook you nice food, and help you in your life in Japan. We will take care of you if you ever have any problems. We are happy to have met you.’
And so my fortnightly meetings with my Japanese mothers began. Filled with laughter, gossip and food, they soon became one of my highlights. The mothers would complain about their husbands and their in-laws, wonder what New Zealand women were like, and continually ask if I had any plans for marriage. At the end of the evening, Mrs Kiguchi would pass me an envelope filled with 10,000 yen. The mothers would then refuse to accept my polite attempt to turn down the money. On one occasion when I had steadfastly refused to take their envelope, Mrs Terauchi quietly slipped it into my backpack when I wasn’t looking.
As I was leaving, Mrs Kiguchi would race off to the kitchen and return with a bag of chocolate or fruit, insisting I take them home for a snack. The elderly women would then kneel delicately on the front porch and wave goodbye as I wheeled my bike down Mrs Kiguchi’s carefully manicured driveway.
In time Mrs Terauchi started to become a bit of a handful. It seemed she was attempting to upstage me to protect her role as group leader. At random moments she would pipe up and inform us all of her knowledge of the outside world.
‘New Zealanders love to eat entire pigs, including their brains, and do so quite regularly,’ she once told us.
I assured everyone that I had never eaten a pig’s brain.
‘Well, Koreans eat dogs,’ she countered. ‘You can buy dead dogs in Korean marketplaces.’
I admitted that this was possibly true in some areas of Korea. Mrs Terauchi smiled. Her point had been made.
During my next visit she announced that most of Europe had sunk to third-world levels because all the buildings were old, the pipes were dirty, and everyone was drinking grubby water. Also, Westerners didn’t use sugar when cooking, and had a dark and heavy culture.
She frequently brought up hardships that she had experienced during World War II, and once told us that, because of a complete lack of food throughout the entire country, she had been forced to eat grass for several months.
Mrs Kiguchi raised her eyebrows. She herself had been able to eat very well during the war, she said sternly, looking at Mrs Terauchi. ‘Did you live in a cave?’
Everyone laughed. Mrs Terauchi was, for once, lost for words.
10
Under the weather
Japanese doctors are renowned for two things, prescribing swags of antibiotics for even the most mild sniffly nose and skirting around some of the more difficult illnesses, such as cancer, by deciding it would not be in the patient’s best interest for them to be informed of their true condition. Thus it was novel that when the school principal, Mr Kazama, was diagnosed with cancer at the start of the year, his doctors had informed him of this and prescribed life-saving treatment.
Mr Kazama had fortunately bounced back very quickly, and as soon as he arrived back at school in April he sent a newsletter to the entire school community, saying how thankful he was that his doctor had decided to tell him he had cancer as this had allowed him
to seek the necessary treatment and get better. He prayed that the Japanese medical system would move towards a more enlightened era, in which all cancer patients would be informed of their illness, instead of it being swept under the carpet as was common practice.
Mr Kazama was interested in how New Zealand doctors would deal with patients suffering from illnesses such as cancer or HIV/AIDS. I assured him they would inform the patient immediately. He nodded sadly. Japanese doctors, he explained, believed it was not in their patients’ best interest to fret about serious illnesses, and a patient would make a speedier recovery if they thought they had a simple flu or head cold. The real reason, he confided, was that the doctors did not have the courage to be the bearers of bad news and inform someone they were going to die.
Needless to say, all this instilled in me a severe mistrust of the Japanese medical system. I prayed I would not fall ill, and had a recurrent nightmare of breaking a limb that would then be left to heal incorrectly with the support of a couple of Hello Kitty Band-Aids. I drank miso soup every day, ate fruit and vegetables regularly, and had extra helpings at meals if I started to feel run down.
In July, as I approached my one-year anniversary in Japan, my luck finally ran out and I came down with a head cold that sucked every ounce of energy from my body. After I had spent all weekend in bed, Monday dawned and I summoned all my strength to get to school. Normally, I would have taken the day off and watched sumo wrestling on television, but my illness coincided with the one week of the year that required my attendance. My new supervisor, Mr Horrii, and I were to spend Monday and Tuesday touring Kanan Town’s five elementary schools attempting to promote English-language learning with the town’s tiniest students. The visits had been painstakingly scheduled by the Board of Education, and a last-minute cancellation would cause Mr Horrii to lose an incredible amount of face with the school principals.
After a few dizzy spells in various classrooms, I noticed that my head cold had shifted to my throat. My glands were swelling up like golf balls, and eating, drinking and even swallowing were causing my whole body to convulse in pain. Doing my best to ignore my deteriorating condition, I threw my flagging energy into introductory lessons and games of ‘fruit basket’. I met some ‘super-handicapped’ children who, Mr Horrii informed me, would be too handicapped to graduate to junior high school and would instead proceed to a special-needs school across town. One girl with a bushy monobrow started sniffing my jeans and then barked at me. I jumped in surprise, but no one else batted an eyelid. Another girl foamed at the mouth during class and then began to crow. Again, she was studiously ignored.
On Wednesday, the day after the elementary school visits, I woke up blind: during the night my eyes had oozed and crusted over. My entire body ached and I felt faint. Stupidly, I cycled off to school, and spent a dire day full of first-grade classes in rooms with no air-conditioning.
On Thursday, I again displayed idiotic disregard for my wellbeing. It was the day of the school swimming sports, and I had promised Mr Higo that I would participate in the students v. teachers relay race. In my fluey state I forgot to pack sunscreen, sun hat or sunglasses and spent the morning by the pool, sweating, convulsing and slowly turning pink. However, my lunch of potato salad, noodles and ice-cream seemed to soothe my throat and I began to feel a little better – so much so that I assessed myself as fit and ready to compete in the swimming race.
Mr Higo, the first-grade PE teacher Mr Nakata, the second-grade PE teacher Mrs Nonaka and I were to take on the third-grade boys’ relay team. When my team-mates voted unanimously that I should be the starting member, I grew suddenly nervous. As well as not having performed a racing dive in years, it was possible that during a throat convulsion I would swallow a lungful of water and sink to the bottom of the pool.
The start of race was called. Loud cheers went up when my name was announced and then when our team took our starting positions. My self-doubt vanished as quickly as it had arisen. Most of our opponents were tiny; the tallest came up only to my chest. However, I had been advised that one of them was the fastest swimmer in the school. The previous year’s athletics race had taught me never to underestimate any of the students, and I didn’t intend to go easy on them.
I waved to the crowd one last time and bent forward to take my mark. Mr Terada raised the starter’s gun and pulled the trigger.
Bang! I did a perfect dive into the pool and took off. I hadn’t been in a pool in over a year and hadn’t participated in a swimming race for several years, but none of this seemed to matter. I cut through the water like a torpedo and made it to the other end without needing to take a breath. I tagged off to Mr Nakata and looked around hastily. The students were still half a pool length behind, and flailing around feebly. I hoisted myself out of the pool and watched as the teachers’ team sailed to an easy victory.
On Friday night I went to the local medical clinic, where the resident doctor announced that I had a fever, a cold and a bad throat. I was given a bag of pills and sent home to bed. By Sunday my bag of magic pills was beginning to run out. The next night my nose bled like a fire hose and I had a pounding headache. For the tenth day straight I went to bed early. I woke the next day with a burning throat and one eye swollen shut. When I sneezed the pain was about the worst I’d ever experienced.
Over the next three days my state of health fluctuated alarmingly. There were times when I was feverish and considered getting medical help. These were followed by times when I felt fine and decided I could recover without putting myself through the ordeal of trying to get admitted to a Japanese-speaking hospital. Then at night I would become woozy again, and wake up the next morning aching and gummed up.
I was approaching my third weekend of feeling like hell. A local family, the Tsubois, had kindly invited me to dinner at their home and I did not want to cancel at the last minute. My body, though, had decided to apply the brakes. By the time I got to Tsubois’ I could hardly eat, and after managing a few small mouthfuls I excused myself, went home and fell asleep.
I awoke in agony. I called the school and said I would be taking the morning off. I arrived at the medical clinic when it opened at nine and waited in line for an hour. The doctor I had seen only a few days earlier took one look at my throat and announced that I had tonsillitis. I would be transferred to a specialist clinic, where the most likely treatment would be sticking a syringe into my mouth, down my throat and injecting my inflamed tonsils.
The nurses in the specialist clinic did little to alleviate my panic. After they had delivered a few painful pokes and prods and mashed my poor swollen glands with an ice block stick, they hooked me up to an intravenous drip and left me to lie on a hard bed that was too short for me.
After an hour, I was wheeled on my short little bed to a respiratory device and told to inhale a purple gas for several minutes. I had absolutely no idea what this was all about, but after a few puffs I no longer cared. The magic gas eliminated the pain in my throat, and my fevered brow became light and fluffy. I was given a big bag of medicine – twice as big as the one I’d received the previous week – and told to return for another drip session the next day. Within a couple of days, I was on the mend. The swelling in my throat subsided and I was finally able to cope with eating solid food again. My medicinal ice-cream lunch break, however, was strictly maintained for the next few weeks.
Baseball, baseball, baseball – the entire nation of Japan seemed be going loopy over the sport. It was mid July and the national baseball season was in full swing. As well as this, the national high school league was about to kick off, thereby plunging Japan into baseball overload. Baseball was on television, in the newspapers, and was the constant topic of conversation in the staffroom.
I was trying my best to avoid the sport completely, much as I had tried to avoid getting sick for the past year. I kept my head down and attempted to focus on my fast approaching second summer holiday in Japan. Healthwise, I was on the mend and looking forward to making full use of the
six-week break.
With only one week of the school term left, my resistance to the baseball bug finally broke down. I decided to go and watch a game with my friends Blake and Justin. None of us had ever been interested in baseball, but rumours of the Hanshin Tigers’ rowdy supporters had tweaked our interest, and we were keen to see what fun could be had.
Hanshin, at this time far and away the worst baseball team in Japan, was currently enjoying a seven-match losing streak. The Osaka supporters, however, readily forgave their beloved team’s poor performance, and their cheering and loud chants were the pride of the prefecture.
Justin, Blake and I sneakily took the afternoon off work and snuck out of our respective schools in time to beat rush-hour traffic and get to the game for the opening pitch. When we arrived, Hanshin Stadium was nearly full. Most of the spectators were decked from head to foot in the Tigers’ grey and yellow team colours, and carrying trumpets, clackers and giant plastic drumsticks, which they banged together to produce a clanging sound.
The crowd was divided into sections. The front of each section was patrolled by stern-faced chant leaders wearing oversized bandanas and proudly flashing the badge of a Japanese official – white satin gloves. The leaders were taking their roles extremely seriously, shrilly blowing their whistles and conducting the pre-match chants with the precision of police officers directing traffic.
The first ball of the game was pitched to a fanfare of hooting trumpets and clacking drumsticks. The innings then settled into the sluggish, boring pace of any other baseball game on Earth, and we eagerly held our breath for some drunken revelry from the crowd. Perhaps some witty insults or sledging would be fired at the outfield players? Maybe a large inflatable object would be thrown on to the field. Perhaps even a streaker?
We waited …
The first player struck out and walked back to the dugout.
Under the Osakan Sun Page 14