Wrapping Up

Last days with the “fam”.

I was mistaken. This year too we were not able to participate in the full festival as a family, real or not. The night before the preexwife asked my to take The Kid into Tokyo for a test. I did know that there was one scheduled but last I heard, she was allowing The Kid to skip this one for the matsuri. Perhaps that was contingent upon a condition unmet. I don’t know. All I know is that I suddenly learned that I would be taking The Kid to a school in Tokyo for a test and then catch the last part of the festival.

While at McDonalds waiting for the testing to finish, I replied to a new subscriber to my stack about the current anti foreigner sentiment in Japan. While I stand by those comments, there are other facets of the story. I’ll use Sunday’s matsuri (Japanese festival) to highlight these. This will likely be long and have threads attached to many of the themes I write about. Nothing occurs in a vacuum and pretty much everything is connected to everything else.

It was great, and I was in high spirits seeing friends I have not seen since at least early New Year’s Day as we broke down everything from the festivities of that day. And by early, I mean 3 am. The son of one of my matsuri group’s members serves in the Japanese navy. I know, technically it is the Maritime Self Defense Force, trust me, it’s a navy. Upon catching up with the participants who were taking a break in a park at the time, he saw me before I saw him and he came over and welcomed me. This was repeated many times by others through out the day.

At the next break area, my mother in law came up and asked where her daughter was. Last I saw her was a month prior for The Kid’s birthday dinner. That was the first time in over 5 and 1/2 years I had seen her without a mask. She was wearing one again on Sunday. My brother in law was there too, as he was last year, to participate in the last part of the festival. He lost his kids in a divorce when they were toddlers and I have long wondered if he was trying to use my kids as replacements for his. Too much exists on this topic to go into here.

Got to joke around and drink with my former neighbor who helped us out in a big way. He runs a small subcontracting construction company. We were doing gardening and found that below a couple of inches of top soil was nothing but rubble. Apparently, when they tear down an existing structure in Japan, there bury as much of it as they can onsite. He offered to cart the rubble away for free. He often shares with his crew, when we meet during festivals, of the time I invited he and his family over for a cook out. He feels it was a big deal to be invited to a university professor’s home for such an event, he being a lowly laborer. If only he knew. He and his crew are good people. Like and respect them a lot. I was delighted to see that they were an integral part of our local matsuri when we joined years later.

As there are several groups directly involved in the matsuri and many groups from elsewhere that help us and we help for their festivals, I am never able to talk with all I have met at a single event. With many I am lucky if I can give a nod of recognition to. This was true this year with one group in particular. They uncharacteristically did not attend the after festival drinking party and I lost my chance to talk with them one last time. I did however get to speak more, the most I ever have, with one of my former neighbor’s employees. Not only have I hefted the Mikoshi with him for several years, we have also worked together clearing out the underbrush around the shrine each year. He operates the various cutting equipment and The Kid and I would haul it away. Turns out, he lived in New Zealand for two years. He claims to have since forgotten English, I suspect that with a little use, much would come back to him. I met his daughter last year, a stunning beauty who was one of two young ladies that seemed to be competing with each other to catch one of the single and younger men as they served the groups assembled. Seems this one did as she was with one of her father’s coworkers the whole evening. They make a nice looking couple. I hope the best for them. We had a good time talking, joking and drinking. A good man, he.

Met new people as well. One is from Taiwan, here with his family, working for a computer game software company. He lives next door to one of the members of the group that is in charge of the shrine itself, an older fellow who has always treated myself and my family with generosity and kindness and is doing similar with his new next door neighbor. He lent him a hanten and brought him to the festival. As is common, to verify that his guest has indeed carried the mikoshi, he come up behind him and clapped his hands down on the unsuspecting Taiwanese’s shoulders, eliciting a response that let all know that had indeed properly carried it. Laughter all around with myself and others attesting to what his reactions already verified, yes, he did carry it and did so correctly.

What follows is likely to come across as strange, for it was. Soon after the party at a chain izakaya began, three beautiful young ladies arrived. They caught everyone’s eyes, mine included. I took them for college students for they were attired in a fashion similar to my college students, though they wore stockings, which is not common on my campuses. Must be someone’s daughters, I surmised, but if they didn’t participate in the festival, why would they come? Most of us are elderly and married with me being among the youngest at 55. They were seated the farthest from me as possible.

At some point, I looked over and they were all smiling and waving at me. I beckoned them over and they came and sat across from me. One turned out to be the younger sister of the woman who served everyone last year and seems to have caught her man. The other two were her climates. The are seniors in high school. Younger than I thought, I was not far off as my students are just a year older. Still, surprised that high school girls dressed that way. I am used to seeing high school students in the school uniforms even on weekends.

I am used to female students flirting with and even making passes at me. There is a long history of female students falling for their male teachers. The classroom dynamic seems to play a huge part. I have a captive audience and I, as the teacher, am in charge. Many seem to like guys in charge. Of course, this is because they are a captive audience, they students and I the teacher. There is also the fact that there are those who hope to get special consideration when it comes time to assess their work. I have always believed that any attraction they may have is due to the enforced proximity we are to each other and that if not meeting in the classroom, they wouldn’t give me the time of day. Not a complaint, just a statement of fact, one I do not hold against them, though I might have if I encountered such when I was much younger. Why would I expect teens and young twenty somethings to have any interest in me, I’m a fat 55 year old with whitening hair? Yet, here were these three 17 year old beauties chatting me up.

Why, then, is my wife throwing all this away, taking it all from me? I can’t be hideous if young babes are hitting on me. Do bad people have so many friends from diverse groups of people? Apart from the matsuri groups, all our friends were first my friends. We met the woman whose bother recently passed away, written about earlier, through me. She has stated many times that it was something about me that led her to talk with me in the elevator we shared up to our common floor, she never talks with strangers, especially foreigners, but did that day. It spawned a two decade long friendship that includes traveling together, meeting her friends and family and she hosting us when my parents came to visit. This only scratches the surface. It is going to be incredibly hard when I break the news to her that I have been thrown out and will soon be leaving Japan for good.

What will all these good people think of me with only my wife’s telling of why she threw me out? What will they think of her? I haven’t attended any matsuri meetings this year and have successfully evaded my friends in whenever I chanced upon them around town out of fear of having to lie to them, I had to keep the divorce secret to protect the kids. The preexwife has been attending the music troupe’s practice with the kids for months. How will revealing the dissolution of the marriage affect the kids with their friends in the music troupe? Between their friend’s parents and the preexwife, which will also affect the kids?

How will it affect all these good people who have gone out of their way to make me feel welcome and a full member of their community? Will they feel duped? I can’t exactly expect the exwife to be singing my praises. Will they feel that their investment in our friendship was wasted? Will they be less likely to be as good to others as they were to me?

As bad as getting cast out of one’s family is, for me it is truly being cast out of my entire community. After 25 years in Japan, 20 years in my current residence, a quarter century building personal relationships with the locals, I will soon be alone, amongst strangers that will see me no differently than they see the few but supremely obnoxious foreign tourists and newly arrived immigrants. It is likely that the apartments that I find with owners that will rent to foreigners will be in a building of nothing but non Japanese. I just had business cards printed at the med school’s print shop with the school’s logo. With these and attired in suit and tie, I hope to convince more potential land lords to rent to me. Years ago as a college student, it was hard for foreigners to find suitable housing. A Japanese friend at the time lived in a Gaijin House. Appalling. One room, smaller than a closet, accommodated two engineers, one from the UK and the other from India. Other rooms similar. Zero privacy and dirty. Like something out of a slum during the Victorian age. Things are better now, but not like they are (were?) in my college town.

These last four paragraphs are far clumsier than I would like. Finding it hard to express these.