Thursdays

.Shortly before the panic, one of my vocational schools relocated to near the Tokyo Dome. Tokyo Dome City includes the Dome and the park around it replete with restaurants, shopping, various amusement park rides including a Ferris Wheel, off track betting, and at least two theaters. Though it has changed significantly in the past 30 years since I first visited, the area is one I have been familiar with since the late 90s when I studied a nice walk’s distance away. There are (were?) two martial arts gear stores opposite the park along the same street that I frequented while practicing kendo and iaido. I saw Ichiro play here when he was still with the Orix Blue Wave, before he was recruited by the MLB and went on to a stunning career in the States. I currently have lunch here on the days I teach at this school, which this year is every Thursday for a couple of months.

During the last Golden Week unmarred by the panic and the rubble it leaves behind, we took the Kid here to their first and last Hero show. Think Power Rangers. Not exactly, but close enough. They loved it and the Kid decked out in the uniform they had on hand for pictures is one of my most cherished photos of the Kid. They wanted to go again and I at least wanted to bring them again, but the panic cancelled the show and closed the rides for a number of years. Now reopened and 6 years after that trip, they are too old for it. Just another of the incalculable experiences stolen from them and all kids because adults were scared shitless cuz Covid.

By Summer 2022, a few things reopened, if only to be shut down again with a new lock down lite. One of these was filming the Japanese tv show “Shoten” in front of live audiences at the Korakuen theater in Tokyo Dome City. This was a show I watched often while a college student here and again when I first returned to teach. Surprisingly, the Kid developed a love for it, being their favorite TV program until recently. It was the one and only TV show we had to record each week in case something came up, preventing us from watching it when broadcast. It is similar in format to “Whose Line Is It?”, not something young children would usually be interested in, but the kid loved it.

The wife applied for the ticket lottery to be in one of the first live audiences since the start of the panic and she scored tickets for all of us. We made a day of it and despite having to leave a seat open between each of us even though we were members of the same household and having to wear masks, it was an unbelievably wonderful day trip for us as a family. We ate lunch at a TexMex restaurant in the park. Got good seats for the show and were able to get photos taken of us in front of the set. After the show we went up in the Ferris Wheel and then walked leisurely to Kanda for dinner, stopping along the way at a store owned and operated by a friend who is a wood block print artist whose works usually include cats.

Instead of taking the train to the closet station to our home, we disembarked at the express station and walked home from there stopping first at the local brew pub for craft beer for my wife and I and snacks and fresh juice for the kids. Closer to home, we stopped at the Hokkaido bar (Since closed cuz covid) across the street from the shrine, owned and operated by a member of the matsuri group for beer made exclusively for the Hokkaido market that his parents kept him supplied with. We enjoyed Hokkaido pub food and watched a pay for view MMA tournament in which a local fighter won. A wonderfully great, stupendously awesome family day. As we neared home, I thought to myself that we may just be able to right the listing ship that was our relationship.

Until we actually got home. Just before leaving, I asked preexwife if Foo, our elderly cat with kidney problems, was out of the kids’ room as she was upstairs. I checked all the rooms down stairs and chased Mia out of the living room. She said that she had checked. However, when we got home, Foo was discovered to have been locked in the kids’s room all day without food, water and litter box. This was early June, it was warm outside with the breeze but gets hot inside the house without the ac on and the windows closed and we already knew that Foo had bad kidneys. I was not happy, especially given that I asked and was told that Foo was not in the room. I did not yell at my wife, but I sternly told her that we must be more careful, especially given Foo’s poor health and how hot the days are. But the preexwife is entirely intolerant of even the suggestion of blame and just shrugged it off with the Japanese equivalent of “Oh well.”. This ticked me off and now I did yell, slamming my hand on the table as I yelled “Not “Oh well”, you could have killed Foo and may have made her condition worse, shortening her life. We need to be more careful.”. She started her usual ploy to shift blame to me but I was not having it this time, she could have killed our cat, and in my engine room voice which I had never before used in front of her said that that was enough, that she messed up that I was not going to be up arguing until 3 am again over this. She immediately ran upstairs. While upset at what happen to our poor elderly Foo cat, and her attitude over it making it worse, I was pleased with what for a short time I thought was finally a solution to fights lasting until the mid morning. I thought that until she came town a little later and said, “I don’t want to live with you any more.”.

Looking up from typing a substack post on the day, I saw an expression upon her face that I had never seen before in the 18 years of marriage at that point plus the two and a half years we were together prior to it. Together with a statement that in my book, is like a gun, do not draw it unless prepared to use it, her expression caused a long physical, mental and emotional pause to overtake me. Not quite paralysis, but perhaps its nearest cousin. After an unknown number of moments, I told her that life will be hard for her without me around for her to blame everything on. She screeched “You feel the same way?!”, and ran crying back upstairs. Immediately I began emailing friends in the States asking about the housing and job markets in the areas and then began apartment hunting here as I would need some time to wind things up before leaving. Late in the morning, exhausted, I finally pulled the guest futons out of the tatami mat room closet a slept down stairs. The kids were very concerned.

Not another word was spoken of the event. It being two weeks before my birthday, I wondered what she would do. If she did nothing, I decided to see that as a signal to leave. If she gave me a birthday gift or dinner or anything, then I would treat it as a display of judgement as poor as drawing an unloaded gun on an intruder and move on.

My birthday came off as usual, but damage had been done. It proved without a doubt what I had observed bits of here and there. There is probably a name for either the behavior or what lies behind it. While any minor error on my part is in her mind proof positive of my desire to make her life harder, my inability to function as an adult or an insult, such as accidentally putting a desert spoon in with the desert forks in the tableware tray that causes a nonstop torrent of criticism punctuated with yelling for hours, a major screw up on her part, like that with the cat or when she left the Kid, then just a baby in the child seat of the bicycle and it falling over pinning the Kid between our fence that could have acted like a cheese grater on the baby’s face if the angle had been a bit different and the bike is nothing more that an “Oh well” situation, if she does it. Foo crossed the rainbow bridge 6 months later. There is no way to know if being locked alone in a hot room all day without food, water and toilet hastened her demise but it would have nice to not have to wonder if it did.

All of this comes flooding back upon my consciousness as I have my before class lunch in Tokyo Dome City with the Ferris Wheel we happily rode 3 years ago in view.

How I long for the five years with my kid that were stolen from me. The shows, games, trips and events we could have shared, the rides we could have ridden on together. True, we had some, but not as many as we should have, indeed would have had if not for reservations being cancelled, cuz Covid. Not only did the panic pressure an already fractured relationship causing it to break, it stole the last few years from my time with my kids and helped turn them into beings they were less likely to be without the unnatural, life change influences of 5 years of Covid madness.