Sons,
Marry someone beautiful, so your old man can enjoy looking at her.
Marry someone smart and funny, so he can enjoy talking to her.
Marry someone nice, so he can enjoy spending time with her.
In short, marry someone like the woman your old man was lucky enough to find.
Love,
Dad
I am a big fan of the Nobuko Takahashi Kakeibo[1] Clinic, an advice column published in Fukuoka’s Living Magazine, and have been reading it for many years. In the column Ms. Takahashi answers personal finance questions posed by Japanese housewives and gives advice on how to deal with the challenges facing their families. It offers an unusually candid look into the personal finances of the typical Japanese family.
In one of her more recent posts, a 28-year-old housewife and mother of a five-month-old baby girl wonders if it might be better to buy a house sooner rather than later.
The housewife writes:
“My husband and I married two years ago. Wishing to devote myself to raising our child, I quit my job and became a stay-at-home mother. Compared to when my husband and I were both working, our income is now half what it used to be. Although I’m somewhat uneasy about our finances, I enjoy raising our daughter and, because our home is a happy one, it hasn’t been hard for us to cut down on expenditures.
“First off, we reduced our pocket money and took a second look at what we had been spending on our cellphones. We seldom, if ever, eat out, and are able to economize by cooking for ourselves at home. Large expenditures, such as insurance are paid in annual installments and we’re trying reduce costs wherever possible. We also put aside a little every month. My husband’s varies by as much as 100,000 yen a month depending on how much overtime pay he earns. Our expenses, on the other hand, are fairly stable at the amounts I have indicated below.
“Recently, my husband’s parents have suggested that we build a house near theirs and we’re now thinking of buying one in the near future. I’ve heard, among other things that the tax deduction for homeowners will be reduced and the tax on property increased, so I’m wondering if we should make haste in buying a home or wait. Also, how much cash should we put down? We’re taking another look at our insurance premiums to see if we can save money there. We look forward to hearing from you.”
Mr. & Mrs. T of Kitakyūshū City
Husband (31), Wife (28), Daughter (5 months)
Income
Husband’s monthly income 240,000 yen
Children’s allowance from government 13,000 yen
253,000 yen per month
Rent 58,000 yen
Food 26,000 yen
Utilities 18,000 yen
Cellphones (2) 15,500 yen
Misc. 2,000 yen
Medical Costs 1,000 yen
Gasoline 20,000 yen
Entertainment 5,000 yen
Misc. 15,000 yen
Child Care Related Costs 7,000 yen
Husband’s Allowance 30,000 yen
Wife’s Allowance 10,000 yen
Wife’s Life Insurance 2,000 yen
Education Insurance 5,000 yen
Car Insurance 5,000 yen
Total 219,500 yen
Surplus 33,500 yen
Annual Bonus 960,000 yen
Annual Costs
Car Insurance (2 cars) 85,000 yen
Car Inspection 100,000 yen
Husband’s Life Insurance 38,400 yen
Educational Insurance 116,000 yen
Savings
Husband’s Savings (1) 2,200,000 yen
Husband’s Savings (2) 5,300,000 yen
Wife’s Savings 2,200,000 yen
Child’s Saving 200,000 yen
Before I go on to Takahashi's advice, I'd like to point out that the husband earns a modest annual salary of 3.8 million yen, or about $38,000 a year. The two of them, however, have ¥9.9 million (or $99,000) in savings. According to CNN/Money's net worth calculator, the average median net worth for an American in Mr. & Mrs. T's age group is only $8,525, and $34,375 for his income level.
Japan is commonly believed to be an expensive place to live as evidenced by melons selling for a hundred dollars each. But in actuality, it can be an easy place to sock your money away. Medical costs, thanks to an excellent national healthcare system are unbelievably low, rent is reasonable if you’re willing to compromise on location and size, public transportation makes owning a car with all its related costs unnecessary, and taxes are not very high.
“Even though your income has been reduced by half, you still manage to run a monthly surplus and have already saved close to 10 million yen. What’s more, you have the goal of building your own home and are putting effort into saving money to that end. Keep up the good work.
“You asked when the best time to buy a house was. Earlier is not always better. It’s important to keep in mind that there are three periods in a person’s life when they can purchase a home.
“The first is when low interest rates, tax deductions, a fall in house prices, and so on make it advantageous for you to buy a house.
“The second is related to your life cycle. You should determine whether it is a good time to move by looking at the start of your child’s entry into a new school or the needs of your parents and so on.
“And the third, is by looking at your personal finances. Can you safely buy a home—have you got enough money to put up front and is your situation stable enough for you to afford to make payments?
“It is ideal when all three of these come together at the same time, but you should at least prioritize the second and third points. In your case, you need to check whether there is a chance that your husband will be transferred in the future, and you should think about your relationship with his parents. You should also look into how much more you are able to save from now on and how much you’ll be able to spend on a house. Until you do that, you won’t be able to determine how much you of a down payment you should make.
“You also need to be careful about rises in the interest rate, reductions in the deduction for homeowners, supply and demand, and so on. A fall in the supply of building materials and carpenters, for example, can cause the price of building a home to rise considerably, which makes it easy for construction companies to cut corners.
“You might want to also take a second look at purchasing some additional life insurance for your husband. If necessary, you can always work full time, but if you add a life insurance policy to your home loan, you can receive up to 10 million yen in the event that your husband passes away. Otherwise, you might want to take out another policy on your husband.”
Whaddya think?
[1] A kakeibo (家計簿) is a family account book. Any Japanese housewife worth her salt (almost wrote “worth her mustard”) will keep a detailed record of her family’s expenditures and keep a the purse strings tight.
The word nakōdo (仲人) means "matchmaker or go-between". In the past, when arranged marriages or o-miai were more common, the nakōdo would seek out suitable prospects for a man or woman and introduce them with photos and a resume.
Now, something I didn't until very recently know about this o-miai business is the money involved. A matchmaker could earn a million yen or more for a successful match, quite a bit of cash ($10K~). And he or she would be given gifts every summer and winter until his or her death. Not a bad gig.
Insurance salesladies often took on this service as a side business as they had a large number of contacts and were privy to all kinds of private information.
Even today, when more and more couples are marrying for "love", nakōdo are still invited to perform a ceremonial role at the wedding itself. If the groom is, for instance, a doctor, he might invite one of his professors or an important doctor from his hospital to do the duty. The nakōdo will receive from ¥500,000 to over ¥1,000,000 for this service, which usually amounts to sitting in front of everyone at the wedding, making a long and tedious speech and then getting drunk.
As of today, I hereby throw my hat into the nakōdo business for the low, low cost of ¥350,000 a pop. I'm sure I can scrounge up a mourning coat somewhere and, more importantly, I promise I will not to get too stinking drunk and embarrass everyone at the nuptials.
You know where you ca--HIC--can find me.
Life just seems to be getting harder and harder for the beleaguered Japanese salaryman. According to a June 28th article in Mainabi News, the average monthly allowance for salarymen today has fallen to ¥38,457, the lowest since the asset price bubble burst in 1991. This is also the second lowest amount since the annual survey started being held in 1979.
While salarymen in their fifties saw a modest gain in their monthly pocket money--up a miserable 56 yen to ¥41,331--those in their twenties and thirties found their allowance dropping by 2,743 yen to ¥38,480 and 2,976 yen to ¥37,093, respectively. Men in their forties had the most meager of allowances at only ¥36,924, a slight improvement of 469 yen over last year.
Among the younger generation, single salarymen had an average monthly allowance of ¥46,175 (down 4,219 yen from last year). Their counterparts with children, however, had a mere ¥29,552 in pocket money every month.
The above graph provides some historical perspective. It shows the change in pocket money from 1979, when the average allowance was ¥30,600 to 2003 when it was ¥42,700. The most generous allowance (¥76,000) was seen in 1990 at the height of the bubble when the Nikkei average peaked at ¥39,915. The drop seen in 2003 is attributed to a number of factors: the start of the Iraq War, the SARS epidemic, restructuring in the banking industry, and the Nikkei average falling to ¥7,909.
You can file the following under "Articles I do NOT want my wife to read".
The survey mentioned in yesterday’s posting detailed the spending habits of salarymen, finding that the average price for lunch, while up eight yen, was only ¥518, suggesting that the “one-coin lunch” [1] trend was as strong as ever. 30.7% of salarymen’s lunches consisted of bentō brought to work from home, up from 28% last year. 24.9% of lunches were bentō that had been purchased (down from 25.2%). 19.2% of lunches were eaten out (up from 17.3%). And finally 17.2% of lunches were served by their company's canteen or shokudō.
When out drinking, salarymen in 2013 spend on average ¥3,474 (up 614 yen), bringing the amount up to the 2011 level. This, however, is the third lowest amount since 1999 when the survey began inquiring about spending habits.
40-year-olds are spending an average of 905 yen more this year when out drinking (¥3,525); 50-year-olds, 1,284 yen more (¥4,114).
On average, salarymen go drinking 2.2 times per month (down 0.2), spending ¥7,689, an increase of ¥746 over last year, which witnessed the lowest amount spent on drinking outside. This year is the second lowest.
Of those salarymen who control the family finances, only 6% said they intended to increase their own allowances. 5.5% replied that they would lower it. The remaining 88.5% said that they didn’t expect to see any change in the amount of pocket money they had.
I wrote the piece above back in 2013. (I am in the process of transferring my old blog content to my new website.) Curiosity had me look for more recent data. The following graph is from June of 2020. I suspect that as the pandemic has worsened, so have the circumstances of those poor salarymen.
Pocket money by age and sex.
As of June 2020, the average allowance/pocket money of male company employees was ¥39,419 a month, the highest level in the past five years, according to a study by the Shinsei Bank. This represented an increase of ¥2,672 over the previous year. Those in their 20s had on average ¥41,377 to blow every month. Meanwhile those in their 30s had ¥37,874; those in their 40s, ¥36,449; and those in their 50s, ¥41,987.
Female company employees had on average ¥33,854 in pocket money every month, or ¥585 more than the previous year.
When comparing men at different life stages, single men had on average ¥46,714, while their married counterparts had to get by on about ¥30,000. The older the salaryman’s children, the smaller his allowance and the less his wife and children like him.
As to why there has been an increase in spending money, 76.1% of salarymen reported that their salary had increase. 19.3% had taken on side jobs. 14.8% made money investing in stocks. While 53.3% of women said that their salary had increased, 15.6% said that cost of living had fallen, giving them extra money to spend on themselves.
Among those who saw their allowances fall, 40.2% said it was due to a fall in their income; 28.0%, an increase in the cost of living; 17.8%, increased cost of children’s education. Similarly, 44.8% of woman who had smaller allowances said that it was because their salary had been cut; 30.4%, due to increased cost of living; and 14.4% because of increased costs related to their children’s education.
Now that spring break has started, I'm back to my routine of getting up around four in order to write and get other work done before my wife and sons wake. As a result, I tend to nod off around noon.
Normally, I'll go to my office and take a nap on the sofa, but the living room was just starting to get some good sunlight, so I decided to crash there.
I'm fast asleep when an alarm goes off, shocking me into an agitated state of murky awareness like I'd just been zapped with a defibrillator. I pick up my phone, thinking that I must have set the alarm by accident . . . when "thunk" . . . I hear the microwave door being shut. It was the microwave chime that woke me.
Half awake, I lumber over to the kitchen and find my wife drinking coffee.
"You're up already? You should go back to sleep."
"How long was I asleep?"
"Only five minutes."
I let out a groan, wave her away, then drag myself back to my office.
As I'm walking down the hallways, she tells me that she's going to take a nap herself. It's tempting to wake her up in ten minutes, but the woman can sleep through earthquakes and Cat-5 typhoons.
Ever since I was a young boy my sleep has often been filled with the most vividly surreal fantasies. I used to write the dreams down, hoping to benefit from the nocturnal peeks into my subconscious, but no more. It never did much good. Last night, however, I had an odd dream that’s worth sharing.
I am back in the States visiting family when I am confronted by a man who claims to be the custodian of my two boys.
My two boys?
Yes, your two boys.
But my boys are with me, I say.
These two boys are illegitimate, the man tells me in a hushed voice.
Now, I might be the least suitable person out there to start casting stones at other sinners, but since getting married I have led a commendably chaste life. The nice thing about it is, I don’t have to fake conjugal bliss: I am a truly happily married man. And yet here is this man accusing me of fathering two boys outside of my marriage. I have to find out what it is all about.
We’re in a house that has the appearance of a somewhat sterile romper room. The room that I’m now in has a sloping, padded floor for children to roll down on. At the top of the slope is an African American child about four or five years of age. The man says that Jimmy is one of my boys.
Jimmy comes sliding down, landing at my feet. When he looks up at me, there is no denying that the boy is mine: he is the spit and image of me, only with darker skin and a wild afro.
I’m led out through a door on the right, which opens on to a maze of sorts. Another boy is hiding behind a padded partition.
This is your other son, the man tells me.
The boy has light blond hair and is about the same age of Jimmy.
The man informs me that the boy’s mother is filing a paternity suit against me right this instant. The woman is sitting at a table with her lawyer.
I’ve never met the woman before. Never seen her before in my life. I’m also doing the math in my head. The boys are four or five years old, conceived five or six years ago. I’ve been married for six and a half years and have been faithful all that time. The kids cannot be mine.
This paternity suit is a sham, I say. Good luck trying to get any money out of me!
But, going back to the room where Jimmy is, I can’t help but feel that the boy is mine. Did I get drunk and donate sperm when I was a student? Who knows?
I ask Jimmy if he wants to come live in Japan with me.
He nods yes.
Okay, I say, but first thing’s first. That name has got to go! From now on, you’re Séamus. Got that?
He nods again.
I don’t know how I’m going to break the news to my wife, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. I take Séamus’s hand and as we are leaving the room, he points to a large plastic illuminated Virgin Mary high up on the wall and shouts angrily, “I don’t need you anymore!”
Bud Clark, future Mayor of Portland, OR, in the iconic “Expose Yourself” to Art Poster
On Sunday evening we received an email from the kids’ school informing us that one of the cooks in the kitchen had contracted COVID-19. (Uh-oh.) The school assured us parents that the person in question had had no contact with teachers or students. It also said that the remaining cooking staff had been sent home to quarantine for two weeks. What’s more, professional cleaners had been brought in to disinfect the kitchen and related areas over the weekend. As a result of the steps that had been taken, kids would be able to go to school on Monday with only one change: there would be no apple jam in Monday’s school lunch as the infected person had been in charge of it.
I asked my wife why the school would even bother mentioning the jam.
“Because some petty-minded parent would complain,” she replied. “There was no apple jam in my child’s school lunch!”
True. True.
Now, I wouldn’t say we were on pins and needles about this, but still I was checking my email every now and again to see if a cluster would develop at the school.
Well, late Monday night, we got another email from the school. Fortunately it was about a different kind of exposure.
“What is it,” my wife asked, her voice tense.
Just another pervert, I answered.
“Oh, what a relief!”
Oh, the joy of being an American citizen!
I am finally getting around registering my second son as a Yank, three years after his birth. (Sorry, son.) For those American expats, who are soon to become parents this can be an exasperating, time-consuming process, which entails, in addition to a stiff drink for the patience you’ll find in it, completing the following forms:
DS-2029, Consular Report of Birth Application.
DS-11, Passport application.
SS-5, Social Security application.
The original birth certificate which requires a visit to the Ministry of Justice if the child is a “half”, something I learned only after getting into an altercation with a senior employee at the local Ward Office. (This is so unlike me, but those SOBs at the Ward Office have a way of bringing out the worst in a person.) This, of course, needs to be translated into the blessed Mother Tongue: ‘Murrican.
An affidavit of the child’s name. (Now, one thing nice about the U.S., is that they allow you to choose a name different than the one on the Japanese birth certificate if you like. Your daughter can, for example, be named Hanako Yamada in Japan and Bianca X. Witherspoon in the U.S.)
The original, plus one photocopy, of the parents’ marriage certificate, which in my case will require going back to the ward office, and apologizing for the misunderstanding the other day. (Sigh.) Oh, yes, this needs to be translated into English, too.
Original plus one photocopy of proof of termination of all prior marriages. (As if going through with the divorce wasn’t painful enough, now I have to beg the Ward Office to provide proof that I am a scoundrel. They’re on to me.)
Evidence of parents’ citizenship, original plus one photocopy.
Evidence of physical presence, such as high school and/or college transcripts (which I actually do have and like to whip out from time to time to prove what a marvelous student I was. No one believes me. The impudence!), wage statements (Wages? Y’gotta be kidding. Why do you think I came to Japan in the first place, silly?), credit card bills, former passports, etc.
Both parents’ IDs. Originals and copies, but of course.
The application fee. Now we’re getting somewhere.
Mug shots of the child for the passport.
One self-addressed, “LetterPack Plus” envelope.
Two days in and I’m just scratching the surface of paperwork. Fortunately, the Tokyo Embassy’s website (see Citizen’s services) does an outstanding job in walking you through the process. They also provide templates for translating the necessary Japanese documents.
Now, back to the paperwork. Better fortify myself with another gin and tonic before I take that next step.
I don't know if it is the Japanese language (which has a sentence structure of SOV, where the subject and object are often implied rather than stated) or if this is a problem that all married men regardless of race have, but most of my conversations with my wife go something like this:
Wife starts conversation while I am in another room, “Hidé-chan mumble mumble mumble.”
”What?”
”Hidé-chan mumble mumble mumble.
”Huh??”
”Hidé-chan.”
”Hidé-chan what?”
”Hidé-chan.”
”I heard you say Hidé-chan the first time!!” (Growing exasperated.) “What the did you say before and after Hidé-chan???”
”Oh. I was just saying, every time I call Hidé-chan's mother to ask if he would like to join us . . . mumble mumble mumble.”
“Ugh.”
Or.
Wife (talking to me while I'm eating potato chips) and thus all but deaf: “Mumble, mumble, mumble, mumble . . . closed . . . mumble.”
“Huh?”
”Mumble, mumble, closed.”
”What??”
”Closed!”
”What's closed?!”
”The store!”
”What store?!?!”
”The store I just told you about?”
”Huh? When?”
I could go on and on.
Now it's not so much that my wife is constantly mumbling. It's more an issue of her starting conversations when a normal human being is not expected to be listening or to able to hear. I cannot, for example, hear what she is trying to say to me when I am on the balcony and she is in the living room, or when I am in the shower, or when she is using the hairdryer, or . . . I'm not the Bionic Woman. I don't have a bionic ear.
“Why do you think you ended up staying so long in Japan?” Azami asks.
I have my pet theories; the top contender being this: to discover, à la Breakfast of Champions, how much a man can take before he ends up hanging himself.
“Hmm.”
“I think the reason you came to Japan,” she says, “was to meet me. Don’t you think so, too?”
Who knows? Maybe she is right. Then again, maybe she is wrong. Even if she were right, what would my coming to Japan have meant to all the other women I met along the way? Did I come to Japan to meet them, as well?
I give Azami a noncommittal shrug.
“You came here to meet me,” she continues with such confidence it’s hard to disagree. “Waited ten years, teaching all that time, so that you could learn what you really wanted and find the person you really needed.”
Well, at least she is convinced and that has to count for something, I suppose.
I’ve long had the gut feeling that existence is basically meaningless. No rhyme or reason to it all. But, humans being human can’t help trying to assign meaning and order to their otherwise chaotic, random lives and interpret life’s happenings with some kind of bias, be it religious, mythical, or philosophical. There is nothing wrong with that if it brings you closer to your “bliss”. A decade, though, is an awfully long time to look for someone, even someone like Azami.
“Ten years,” I say with an exaggerated grimace. “Why’d you make me wait so goddamn long?”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. If we were meant to be together, why then didn’t you come around sooner, say, when you were still a freshman in high school? I wasn’t getting any younger, you know.”
The day is coming to an end.
The wind stills and the street below my balcony grows quiet.
A week has come and gone. Time passes too quickly.
One moment there is a phone call from a familiar voice and a visit by a woman I have come to love.
But, the next moment, I am saying good-bye, and am alone again,
My skin can feel it: time and love waits for no one.
I sometimes think that the only reason we have memories is that we might recall in bad times those times when we were happier. And with those memories, we are accoutred for our journey on,
Through the desert.
Small drops of water on a parched tongue.
I can get so thirsty at times.
But all I can do is press on,
One step at a time,
Each step sinking in the sand as I,
Search for the next oasis,
That is you.
Ask a simple question—i.e. “If you are a foreigner currently or formerly married to a Japanese citizen, did your spouse keep his/her Japanese family name after getting married to you?”)—and you will surely get an angry reply like this:
"I was married to a Japanese man, and yes - he kept his name. You seem to be assuming that the only people who marry foriengers are Japanese WOMEN. I happen to be a foreign woman who married a Japanese man. I kept my name because it's my name - why would I change it? Women don't "belong" to their husband; why should they change their name?"
Ugh. I wasn't assume anything. And why do you assume that as a man I was assuming something? Sheesh.
Statistically, Japanese men are far more likely to marry foreign women than Japanese women. This is something I have known for years. They tend, however, to marry other Asian women (Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Thai, etc.). Japanese women, on the other hand, marry in decreasing order Koreans, Americans, Chinese, British nationals, and so on.
What I am trying to look into—again, no assumptions; that’s why I’m asking—is what motivates people (particularly Japanese women) to either keep their Japanese maiden name or take their husband's upon marriage to a foreigner. Also, what motivates foreign men/women to adopt their Japanese spouse’s family name?
Ultimately, what I want to look at is what family name Western parents of half-Japanese children (i.e. children who are likely to look "half") are choosing for their kids and what motivates it. I also want to know what challenges, if any, they may have had if they had chosen the Western family name.
One of my friends is half Japanese/half American, but looks for the most part like a Japanese man. Since his wife is Japanese, their children look, as you would suspect, Japanese. But, they all have his American family name written in katakana on their name tags at school. Whenever they change schools/grades and are introduced to new classmates, everyone is surprised by how good their Japanese is. Seeing the American name, the other kids brains assume the kids are 100% American rather than 75% Japanese.
As for my own children, they look very . . . hard to say. They don't look Japanese at all, but they speak Hakata-ben and have my wife's family name. Wherever we go, people look at the boys and start speaking in broken English to them.
Here are some stats on "international marriage": http://www.lifeaaa.jp/27.html
If you are a foreign resident in Japan who is married to a Japanese national, please have a look at this short survey at Survey Monkey.
My wife made an interesting observation after spending the day with an old friend: "Ideas about the proper way to raise children are like a religion. It's like I belong to this sect. My friend belongs to another sect. And just like you shouldn't say 'My God is the One True God and yours is a blasphemy.' it's hard to tell someone that their way of raising a child may be wrong."
She was referring in particular to the Boob Tube and how some families have the TV on all day long like BGM in their homes. "How can you talk to your children or read to them if you've always got the TV on?"
As with religion—you won't really know if you were right or completely wrong until you die (even then you still may not have an answer)—when it comes to kids, you won't know if your policies worked until the kids grow up and go out into the world.
The other day, our sons (“Cain and Abel”) were at their grandparents. (Heaven on earth!) I plopped down on the sofa and looked at the black screen of my TV. I thought about turning it on to watch the news, but the effort to get off my arse and do so was too much. Inertia has a way of keeping you verring out of habit. It occurred to me that for many people the effort required to turn off the TV and open a book, instead, is often too much for many people, too.
One of the nice things about living in Japan is that there is always some festival or holiday to look forward to. Unlike America where once the holiday season ends with New Year's or, ho-hum, the feast of the Epiphany on January sixth, there is a long lull in festive events, in Japan something fun is always just around the corner. Once Christmas has passed, the trees come down and up go the kadomatsu and other New Year's decorations. After the five or six-day drinking, eating, and TV-viewing binge known as O-Shôgatsu, or the Japanese New Year, comes Tôka Ebisu, a festival honoring Ebisu, the patron deity of businesses and fisheries. At around the same time, the Coming-of-Age Day celebration celebrating the entry into adulthood of the nation's twenty-year olds, is held. There is the bean-throwing exorcism known as Setsu-bun in early February, as well as a number of local festivals held in shrines and temples in the meantime.
On Sunday, I went to Fukuoka's main Ebisu shrine which is located just outside of Higashi Park. While I sometimes miss the New Year's celebrations do to travel, I always manage to get back in time to attend the Tôka Ebisu festival.
Like most other festivals held throughout the year in Japan, you'll find the usual demisé food stalls selling o-konomiyaki (below), jumbo yakitori, and so on. What makes Tôka Ebisu different, however, is the number of stalls selling good luck items featuring the seven lucky gods (Shichi Fukujin) of which Ebisu is one, talismansand other trinkets to ward off bad luck, and so on.
The festival also attracts a much different class of people. Whereas you can see many young men and women at the harvest festival Hôjoya (also known as Hôjoe), the people attending Tôka Ebisu tend to be older and "tarnished", making it an interesting place to people watch. I never fail to find the middled aged mamas of "snacks", rough-looking men who look as if Ebisu hasn't been very generous to them, and others desperate for an auspicious start to the new business year.
This year, there seemed to be far more people at the festival than usual. Perhaps it was the weather, perhaps it was that after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami everyone is hoping for a bit of luck.
Sweet roasted chestnuts.
If you look closely at the apex of the crowd in the picture above you can see an upside down red fish, a sea bream. This is a symbol of Ebisu who is often depicted carrying one. In Japanese the sea bream is called tai which rhymes with medetai, meaning “happy”, “auspicious”, or “successful”. Real sea bream are often displayed at a celebratory gatherings, such as New Years, the end of sumô tournaments, engagement ceremonies, and so on.
Just beyond the red sea bream is a procession of the Hakata Geiki, a troupe of geisha working in Fukuoka City. I’ll write about them in a later post in the coming months. Incidentally, the photo on the cover of my second novel, A Woman’s Nails, was taken at this event several years ago.
The geisha making their way to the shrine. This procession is held every year at the height of the Tôka Ebisu festival and worth seeing. This year we just happened to be there when it was taking place.
Another feature of Tôka Ebisu is the drawing that is held at the shrine. On either side of the shinden there are booths selling tickets.
The first time I attended the festival was over ten years ago and didn’t know what to expect. So, when I pulled out one of the lots from a hexegonal box and the Shintô priest shouted, “Ôatari!” (Jackpot!), my mind filled with delicious possibilities: a new car? A trip to Hawaii? Cash? I had never ever won so much as a cakewalk or bingo game before. Needless to say, I was quite excited.
As another priest pounded out several beats on a drum and shouted “Ôatari,” the first priest pulled out a huge red fan from a pile of trinkets and talismans behind him and passed it to me. The fan had 商売繁盛 (shôbai hanjô, “prosperity in business”) written on it in large white characters. Prosperous was the last thing I felt.
That didn’t stop me, however, from going back year after year and trying my luck. In the past, the tickets were only ¥1,500. Today, they go for ¥2,000 each—so much for the deflationary pressure we are told has been pushing prices lower and lower—and where I once bought two or three of the tickets, I now only buy one.
Over the years I have “won” two of those large red shôbai hanjô fans, a massive wooden paddle as big as a cricket bat that has 一斗二升五合[1] written on it, a plate featuring Ebisu-sama, a wooden piggy bank, a calendar, and a small Ebisu doll.
A dutiful follower of this cult of Ebisu, I went on the tenth of January last year. The weather was awful—freezing cold and rainy—and I had been forced to wait under a canopy that leaked like a sieve for a good hour and a half until my wife and son showed up.
When they finally did, I was in a foul mood. My pant legs and shoes soaking wet, the cold was beginning to seep into my bones.
“Let’s just get the damn thing and head on home, okay?” I grumbled to my wife. “It’s freezing!”
We hurried into the shrine, which thanks to the lousy weather was not as crowded as it usually can be during the festival. There was only a handful of people in line for the drawing.
Well, no sooner had we handed over our ¥2000 at the reception desk than the man at the counter said, “Congratulations, you’re our twenty-five-thousandth visitor.” Or something like that. He had us fill out a form and then asked us to follow him to the place where the lots were drawn. After handing the form to the priest with the box containing the lots, I was told to pull one of the sticks out. It didn’t matter which. I did so and gave it to the priest who stood up and, turning on a microphone, said he had a big announcement to make.
“We have a major prize for our twenty-five-thousandth visitor today!” Another priest started banging away at a drum. The other priests in the shinden stopped what they were doing, stood up, and started clapping in unison. After a number of Banzais, the priest handed over a massive and cumbersome bamboo rake to me. It was adorned with ceramic depictions of the gods Ebisu and Daikoku, a red sea bream, a bale of rice, and other auspicious items.
Let me tell you, I couldn’t have been more thrilled had I won a trip to Hawaii.
I don’t know if it is thanks to Ebisu-sama, my son whose arrival in my life signaled the beginning of things finally going my way, or plain dumb luck, but last year ended up being the very best year ever in so many ways.
When you’ve already won the jackpot, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to continue dropping quarters into the slot machine, and yet that is essentially what we did by returning to the Ebisu festival this year and trying our hand at the drawing again.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” my wife said.
“I know, I know,” I replied. “But still, it would be nice to get one of those boats with the seven lucky gods in it. I’ve always wanted one for the collection.”
Sure enough, Ebisu wasn’t as generous to us this year: we got a simple little wooden abacus. I suppose the message the gods are trying to tell us is that we should be more careful about how we spend money. Duly noted, Ebisu-sama!
[1] Ask your Japanese friends to try reading 一斗二升五合and most of them will be stumped. It is a riddle of sorts employing 斗, 升, 合 all of which are traditional Japanese measures of volume.
一斗 (itto, about 18 liters) is equal to ten 升 (shô, about 1.8 liters). 一斗, then, can be said to equal 五升の倍 (go shô no bai), which means “five shô doubled”. 五升の倍 (go shô no bai) is synonymous with 御商売 (go shôbai) which means “one’s business or trade”. Got that?
二升 (nishô). 升 can also be read masu. 二升 here is read “masu masu” which sounds like 益々 (masu masu), meaning “more and more”, “steadily”, and so on.
五合 (go gô, 5 x 0.18 liters, or 0.9 liters) is one half of a shô or 半升 (hanjô) which sounds the same as 繁盛 (hanjô, prosperity). So, putting it all together 一斗二升五合 can be read “Go-shôbai masu masu hanjô!” (御商売益々繁盛), meaning something to the effect that your business or trade will enjoy increasing prosperity.
Pat was driving, and as we passed the turnoff for a shopping center she invited us to picture a four-burner stove.
“Gas or electric?” Hugh asked, and she said that it didn’t matter.
This was not a real stove but a symbolic one, used to prove a point at a management seminar she’d once attended. “One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work.” The gist, she said, was that in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.
Pat has her own business, a good one that’s allowing her to retire at fifty-five. She owns three houses, and two cars, but, even without the stuff, she seems like a genuinely happy person. And that alone constitutes success.
I asked which two burners she had cut off, and she said that the first to go had been family. After that, she switched off her health. “How about you?”
I thought for a moment, and said that I’d cut off my friends. “It’s nothing to be proud of, but after meeting Hugh I quit making an effort.”
“And what else?” she asked.
“Health, I guess.”
Hugh’s answer was work.
“And?”
“Just work,” he said.
From "Laugh, Kookaburra" by David Sedaris, printed in The New Yorker
I normally don’t read Sedaris for mind-bending existential content, but his short story “Laugh, Kookaburra” had me thinking about life and the choices I have made over the years, the “burners” I have turned off or down to low.
Shortly before I remarried, my fiancée would take me over to her parents’ home in the suburbs on Sundays and lock me up in their washitsu—a sparse Japanese-style room with tatami mats—forcing me to write for five or six hours straight. I had a good idea for a book that just needed to be written down, but I was having a devil of a time making any progress on it.
Being locked up in that room for hours on end was torture at first. Whenever I would try to venture out of the room, my girlfriend, who kept guard over me in an adjacent room, would turn me around, shove me back in and say, “Two more hours!”
“Two more? Can’t I have a drink of something or a smoke?”
“No!”
So back in I would go, and kneel down on the tatami only to stare for minutes on end at the empty white page on my MacBook, the cursor flash-flash-flashing as if to taunt me: “You got nothing. And you used to think you had what it took to be a writer! Hah! You got nothing!"
But it worked. After a few weeks, I started to get into the groove and before I knew it I was writing almost every day, usually in the morning, but sometimes at night until I had finished Rokuban. And when I had finished Rokuban, I then went on to do a major overhaul of A Woman’s Nails and managed to get through it without it being too painful. Then, I went on to the next work, and the next, and the next.
Where just completing a novel had once seemed like an insurmountable task, now I was faced with a new challenge: how to sell the novels I was now finishing.
The improved productivity came partially from turning down one of those four burners: friends. I seldom go out for drinks or dinner anymore. If I do, it’s usually by myself. I used to hate being alone, but nowadays it doesn’t bother me in the least. Sometimes I prefer it as I can get stuff done while I’m eating—reading, catching up on the news, and so on.
Being in Japan allowed me to turn the “Family Burner” down to low for about a decade and a half, but then I got married and had kids and now that burner is on full-blast, stealing gas from the other burners.
“Go to the doctor’s,” she says.
“I’d rather just stay in bed and sleep.”
“No, you have to go,” she insists. “Besides, it’s much cheaper to see the doctor than buy over-the-counter drugs.”
“Okay, okay.” She has a point. So I crawl out of the futon, shower, then stagger in muted delirium to my doctor’s clinic.
Because it’s a Saturday, the clinic is somewhat busier than usual. Several men are having their physicals. Two women in the waiting room look as sick as I feel. After about fifteen minutes, I’m summoned to the doctor’s room. When I tell her what my symptoms are—achy body, high fever, headache, fatigue—she recommends the old tickle the brain with a twig up nostril. What can I do but submit? But then the test turns out negative meaning I was tortured for the nurse’s kicks alone. Another chat with my doctor; we decide which meds I want; and then I return to the waiting room until the receptionist can ring me up. (This being Japan, of course, it comes to only $15.)
Checking my watch, I see I haven’t got enough time to pick up the meds from the pharmacy downstairs before work starts, so I head home instead.
Once home I ask my wife if she can pick up the meds for me.
“Sure.”
“Fantastic. I appreciate it.”
An hour later, I ask if she got the meds.
“I can’t go out with my face looking like this.”
Ugh.
Another 90 minutes later, I ask again if she picked up my medicine.
“Not yet.”
Four hours later, my wife returns.
“Got the meds,” I asked.
“No. All the pharmacies were closed.”
Argh! Why the hell did you insist upon my going to the doctor’s then?!?!
So, another night of mediocre, lightweight drugstore pills for me. Maybe some negi (green onions) will do the trick?
A recent op-ed piece about the sorry lot of foreign men "trapped" in Japan reminded me of the following story:
A few years back, I met a French guy at the beach. An architect living and working in Tokyo, he was passing through Fukuoka on his way to Kagoshima. He asked if I minded sitting down and talking with him. Not at all, I said.
You seem to have made it, he said.
He was referring to my family who was with me at the beach that day. I suppose we looked like a happy, carefree family, the four of us playing in the sand.
“What’s the secret,” he asked.
“Time,” I replied. “I’ve been here for over twenty years and have been through more rough patches than I can count—financial ups and downs, problems at work, frustrations and heartbreak, to name a few.”
The Frenchman explained that he had recently been dumped. Happened right out of the blue. One day they were living together, just as happy as a couple could be, and the next day she vanished. Poof!
“That happened to me about three times,” I told him.
He looked like he was about to start crying.
“Let me buy you a beer,” I said, getting up.
When I returned with the beer, I had the following advice: “One, you’re lucky you found a sympathetic ear today because I’ve been there myself. You probably won’t be so lucky next time, so do what you’ve already told yourself to do.” He had scrawled SHUT UP! on the inside of his forearms. “Two, start fucking. Put some bodies between you and the girl and, trust me, you’ll start feeling better. Three, focus on your career, pour yourself into you work. And, four, be patient, because nothing heals like time.”
Cheers, we said, clinking our beer bottles together.
Went out with an old(ish) friend for the first time in years tonight.
Before she got knocked up, we used to meet up about once a week, sometimes more. After the pregnancy, she like many women in Japan focused on raising her child. At about the same time a number of good drinking buddies of mine (all women) were transferred out of Fukuoka. It was as if all my close friends had been ripped away from me.
But then, I married and before long became a father myself.
In the meantime, the friend separated from her husband, got pregnant again, postponed the divorce and . . . six years passed like one whirl on a merry-go-round.
We had a couple of drinks at one place, then went to another place and had a few more. It was like old times, but we weren't young, single, or childless anymore.
I have written about this woman before in my book "Kampai"--buy it Goddammit--but tonight I realized there were a lot of things I still didn't know about her.
I knew she was from a broken home, but didn't know the details until tonight.
Her parents divorced when she was still in elementary school. Her mother worked as a hostess at a snack to support her and her younger brother. She bandied around schools due to her mother's frequent moving. Never in the better parts of town, of course.
Still, she managed to grow up into a descent, if somewhat brusque adult. (I think it was the coarseness of her character that attracted me to her in the first place.)
Tonight she told me that she had no contact with her father for over two decades when one day she was at a DIY center where she saw a man who looked just like her. She asked him if he was a Mr. So-and-so and he said yes.
"I'm your daughter."
Imagine that.
Now consider that that particular day was her father's very last day of work. He was retiring.
She said the two of them shed a lot of tears and I can imagine it. I almost started crying myself when I heard the story.
The man had since married and had more children, so their chance meeting was awkward to say the least. Since that day, the two have remained in contact, but always in secret. She says she feels like a lover more than a daughter the way they have to sneak around just to meet. But, I guess, it's better than pretending to be strangers.
Sometimes Japanese over-complicate relationships, especially the ones which have turned sour.
Enough.
http://www.aonghascrowe.com/journal/2013/2/1/divorce-japanese-style.html