My Childhood (Senior Female version)

My Childhood

  

  I was born in 1949 as the first daughter of my father Teruo and my mother Haruko.  1949 was the 24th year of Showa.  It was the year of the cow according to the Chinese zodiac.  My birthday is August 23rd.  

I am a Virgo according to the Western zodiac.  Virgo means 'virgin' in English.

   My blood type is O.  My father is also type O.  But my mother is type A.  A person with blood type O is supposed to be outgoing.  But I was not so outgoing in my childhood.  I was a rather shy girl.

   Three years later after I was born, my brother Yasuo was born.  

   When World War II ended in 1945, millions of soldiers returned to their homes from the battlefields worldwide.  Many of them were young and unmarried.  They were eager to marry and start families.  The married men were also eager to have babies.  In the next fifteen years, so many children were born that this generation was nicknamed 澱aby boomers・in English.  

   In Japan, this generation is defined more narrowly as the people who were born between 1947 and 1951 and named "dankai no sedai" in Japanese by a writer, Taichi Sakaiya, in his book with that title.  

   

  My father was twenty-seven years old when I was born.  He was a first year student at a prestigious university in Tokyo when the Pacific War broke out.  In the first few years, college students were exempted from being drafted.  In 1943, this exemption was lifted and the graduation of seniors was shifted from March 1944 to September 1943.  Thus many bright young college students were sent to the battlefields in what is called Gakuto Shutsujin, which can be translated 'College Students into Battle.'

  My father was drafted into the air force after his shifted graduation at his senior year.  He was appointed one of the 'Kamikaze Divine Wind' pilots.  Many of his friends and fellow pilots were killed in the Kamikaze suicide dive-bombing.  My father was also destined to die in the Kamikaze attack.

  However, fortunately just before his mission was to be performed, the war ended virtually on August 15th and officially on September 7th, with Japan's unconditional surrender by accepting Potsdam Declaration.

  My father could come back alive from the war.  He had majored in civil engineering.  Since he had graduated from the college, he could get a job at a construction company.  It was when he was twenty-three years old.  

  At that time, it was common that the parents who have sons or daughters of marriageable age ask matchmakers to arrange a marriage.

  My father was introduced to his prospective wife, my mother, by the wife of his superior of his department in the company.   He liked my mother at the first sight.   After having gone out for three months, my father conveyed his intention to get married with her to the matchmaker.  My father's job, his income and his academic background were good enough for my mother to be willing to accept the marriage proposal.

  They got married in a Shinto shrine by a Shinto priest.  My father's superior and his wife served as the official go-between at the wedding ceremony.

  At that time only six years of elementary school was compulsory and only the best and the brightest advanced to the middle schools under the prewar old educational system.  And the middle schools were not co-educational.  Boys went to boys' middle school and girls went to girls' middle school."

  At that time very few girls attended college.  There were no co-educational colleges.  And there were very few women's colleges.  The graduates from girls' middle schools are most highly educated women at that time.  My mother was one of them.

  As I heard from my mother, the admission to those girls' schools was fairly competitive. The candidates had to take the entrance examinations.  Her class teacher gave special supplementary lessons to those who would take the entrance examination to girls' middle schools.

  The educational policy of girls' middle schools was not career-oriented, but to produce good wives, wise mothers.  Fortunately or unfortunately for my mother, she became a good wife for my father and a wise mother for us.

  I don't remember much about my toddler days.  My memory went back to my nursery school days.  At that time, there was no kindergarten in my town, either private or public.  There was only one public nursery school.  All the children in my neighborhood attended that nursery school.

  I attended the nursery school for two years until I entered elementary school at the age of six.

  When my brother was three years old, he and I went to the nursery school together.

  The teachers at the nursery school were all female.

The head teacher was a plump lady in her early-to-mid-fifties.  She usually wore a blouse and a skirt. She always wore a friendly smile for all the children. We all liked her very much. When one of the children wet his or her pants, it was always the head teacher who took care of that child.  There were some two-year-olds who still wore diapers. It was also the head teacher who changed the wet diapers. I think it was because only she had had the experience of baby rearing.  Neither my brother nor I wet our pants, since we were well taught by our mother how to handle the toilet as soon as we stopped wearing diapers.

  

  In the nursery school, when the weather was fine, we could spend lots of time on the playground outdoors. There was a slide, jungle gym, sandbox, seesaw, two swings, and two horizontal bars, one of which is a bit higher than the other one.

  Many of the children liked playing in the sandbox.  We dug in the sandbox with a shovel and made a small pond.  We put water in the pond from a pail.  We also built castles and houses. Many of the boys liked playing on the jungle gym.

  Another favorite of mine was a swing. When one of the swings was not occupied, I played on the swing.

When another girl or boy was swinging on the other swing, I tried to swing higher than the other.  When I swung so high up, I felt scared and closed my eyes at the highest point of my swing. I could open my eyes only when I swung down.

  On the first day when my brother started his nursery school, I showed him how I could swing up high on the swing. He was fascinated with my swinging so high, and wanted to be able to swing himself.  So I put him on the swing and pushed him. At first he was so scared, and jumped off the swing. But he quickly learned how to swing high, and it became his favorite play.

  

  One popular games among the girls was a group version of skipping rope. In this game, two players hold the ends of a three to four meter rope and turn it as the other players jump, one at a time.

  The rope turners start by swinging the rope away from the jumper, then making a full circle that will pass over the jumper's head.  As others in the group look on, each jumper in turn stands just outside of the whirling rope and steps in as it is about to hit the ground.  

  Then the jumper hops over the rope with both feet as many times as possible. When the jumper misses, the turners stop whirling the rope. The jumper who has missed becomes one of the turners, and they resume swinging the rope.  Then another jumper steps in.  I was so good at skipping the rope that I seldom had to be a turner.

  In wintertime, when it had snowed the previous night and the playground was covered with freshly fallen snow, we had a snowball fight.  We threw snowballs at each other.  It was fun.  When we were tired of the snowball fight, we built a snowman. We used pieces of charcoal for its eyes and mouth, and a carrot for its nose.

  When it was rainy, we played indoors.  Some of the boys played soldiers with swords made of newspapers.  Some of the girls liked to play house, asking some boys to join them to play the part of a father or brother. Some boys and girls liked playing doctors and nurses together.

  Teachers sometimes advised us to play shop with play money, using toy vegetables and fruit. Teachers also taught us how to make origami.  We folded sheets of paper into many kinds of figures; cranes, helmets, frogs, and swans.  I was the expert at cranes.

My brother was no good at origami.

  When he failed to fold paper, he crumpled the paper into a ball and threw it on the floor.

  

  I think we had a lot of fun at our nursery school.  I still remember those happy days with kind teachers and the broad smile of the head teacher.

  I sometimes wish I could return to those days, when we were innocent and had no worries.

My Hobby

My Hobby (Female version)

  I like arranging flowers.  I arrange flowers once a week.  I arrange flowers in an Ikebana style, a traditional Japanese way of flower arrangement.   These days the Western style of flower arrangements is getting popular among young women.  Therefore, when we refer to the traditional Japanese flower arrangements, we call it "Ikebana," and when we refer to the Western style of flower arrangements, we tend to use the English as it is.  Now, when I talk about the Japanese style of flower arrangements, I will use the word Ikebana.

  The word "Ikebana" has been introduced into English vocabulary and listed in English dictionaries.  An English dictionary at my hand, Webster's New World Dictionary, defines Ikebana as follows.

 Ikebana = the Japanese art of arranging cut flowers in rhythmic, decorative designs.

 When I was a young girl, Ikebana was supposed to be one of the accomplishments that young girls should acquire before marriage.  Parents, especially mothers, encourage their daughters to learn Ikebana.

  Even today some mothers advise their daughters to learn Ikebana.  The so-called culture centers provide Ikebana classes to these young women.

 Civic centers of many municipalities also provide Ikebana classes together with other culture classes.

  When I was young, there was no such thing as a culture center or culture classes.  We attended private lessons given by certified Ikebana instructors.  These Ikebana instructors are mostly middle-aged women.

  Since Ikebana originated with tea ceremony, most of the Ikebana instructors also taught tea ceremony.  Oftentimes Buddhist nuns teach both Ikebana and tea ceremony.  Because both Ikebana and tea ceremony are closely related to Buddhism in their origins, it is only natural that Buddhist nuns are well versed in the art of Ikebana and also certified Ikebana instructors.  

  There are three leading schools of Ikebana in Japan.  They are the Ikenobo school, the Ohara School and the Sogetsu School.  Among these the Ikenobo School has the longest history, and the Sogetsu School is most modern.

  Tea ceremony was established by Sen no Rikyu.  After his death in 1591, his teachings were practiced by his disciples and handed down to the later generations.  Many different schools were established.  Among them, the Urasenke School is the most active and has the largest following.

  I started to learn Ikebana when I was a fifth grader with a Buddhist nun, who belonged to the Ikenobo School.  At the same time, I learned tea ceremony with her.  She practiced Ura Senke.

  When we learned Ikebana, we didn't have to buy the flowers ourselves.  The teacher had prepared them beforehand and we paid for them.  Then we practiced Ikebana with the prepared flowers with the guidance of the teacher.  When our arrangements satisfied the teacher, we disbanded our arrangements and brought the flowers back home.

  My house had a Japanese tatami room with an alcove.  As soon as I got back home, I arranged the flowers in a vase on the floor of the alcove, remembering how I had arranged them with the teacher.  

  

  I stopped learning Ikebana when I entered junior high school, because I was busy doing club activities every Sunday.  I belonged to the tennis club, and had to practice even on Sundays.

  I resumed my Ikebana learning when I entered college.  My former Ikebana teacher, who was a Buddhist nun, had moved somewhere.  That time I learned Ikebana with a widowed lady in the neighborhood.  She also belonged to Ikenobo School.  That time I didn't learn tea ceremony, because she didn't teach it.  

  

  For six years while I was attending junior and senior high schools, I was busy with school works and didn't have time to arrange flowers.  My mother arranged flowers to decorate the alcove once a week.  She was happy when I resumed Ikebana learning because she was freed from the duty of arranging flowers every week."

  When I got married to my husband, we lived in an apartment.  Since the apartment didn't have a tatami room, there is no alcove to put the arranged flowers in.  

  In most Japanese households, there is a shoe cupboard in the entrance hall.  There is one even in the entrance hall of the apartment.  I arranged flowers on the top of the shoe cupboard.

  Still I missed the alcove, the place most suited for Ikebana.  Therefore, when we decided to buy a house, we looked for a house that has at least one tatami room with an alcove.  Fortunately we could find a house that has an eight tatami mat room with a beautiful alcove.  I was very happy that I could decorate the alcove with my Ikebana.

  Now I am not attending any Ikebana lesson, but I arrange flowers at least once a week.  On the day I arrange flowers, I go to the flower shop to buy flowers.  It is sometimes difficult to find good flowers for my plan of Ikebana.  And flowers are rather expensive.    That's why I started to grow flowers.  And gardening became another of my favorite hobbies besides Ikebana.

  Since our house has a backyard, I decided to have a small flower garden to grow flowers I like for my Ikebana.  It was more than three years ago.

  Before I started to grow flowers, I hadn't known much about flowers.  Now I know lots about flowers.

  

  I plan my flower garden very carefully.  I always make a sketch of the garden and decide what kinds of flowers are to go where.  As you may know, there are roughly two kinds of flowers; an annual and a perennial.  

  I always start to design the garden with the perennials, because they last year after year.  I choose plants that are winter hardy and will give a good blend of color.  Many improved strains that bloom even in cold weather during the wintertime are available now because of improvements in plant breeding.

  

  Some of the flowers bloom early and some bloom late but the foliage usually lasts all season, so I have to think about the color and texture of the leaves.

  I allow each plant enough space to flourish.  I consider height as well as width, putting taller plants in the back or center.  

  I have to prepare stakes for supporting tall-growing, top-heavy plants such as sweet peas or chrysanthemums.  

  Next I plan bulbous plants.  My favorites are tulips, daffodils, gladioli, and dahlias.  Most of these bear showy blossoms that last only a short while.  They look best in groups.  So I plant plenty of them in a group in one place.  

  There is a garden planted with trees and shrubs in front of my house.  Most of them are flowering kinds, such as cherry trees, plum trees, camellia, daphne, and azalea.  They blossom in their respective seasons.  There are two kinds of camellia.  One bears red flowers and the other white flowers. Both of them are heavy with flowers in the wintertime.  In early spring the cherry tree is in full bloom.  Then the daphne trees start to blossom and the garden is filled with the fragrant scents from the daphne flowers.

  I often ask my husband to accompany me to the nearby garden center where I buy flower seedlings, fertilizer, and various gardening equipment.  Since I buy so many of them, I need a carrier for them.   When I want to buy many seedlings or seeds of the same kind, I go to the nursery in the next town.  The nursery usually sells only in large quantities and does not retail its products.  Since the wife of the owner of the nursery is my classmate in my high school days, I am privileged to buy as many seedlings or other products as I'd like to at the wholesale prices, which are much lower than the retail prices at the garden center.  

  In that nursery, they cultivate various beautiful orchids.  Orchids are tropical plants.  They need to be kept in a greenhouse.  In wintertime a heating system is also needed.  It is my future plan to have a small greenhouse and cultivate orchids.  

  Growing flowers requires lots of work.  All year round, I get up early in the morning to water the flowers and also weed the garden.  It is a tough work, but it is rewarding.  To arrange flowers fresh from my flower garden gives me great pleasure.

My Life 9 My Favorite Food

My Favorite Food

  I like Japanese food very much.  My favorites are sushi, sukiyaki, tempura, oden, and chawan-mushi.  If tonkatsu is counted as a Japanese food, miso-katsu is also my favorite.

  I also like udon very much.  Udon is one kind of Japanese noodles, together with soba.  In the Nagoya area people like udon better than soba.  

  In the Tokyo area, noodle shops are called sobaya, soba shop, while in the Nagoya area, they are called udonya, udon shop.  

 

  A wider kind of udon, called kishimen, is a specialty in the Nagoya area.  My most favorite kind of udon cooking is miso-nikomi, which is also a specialty in Nagoya.  Miso- nikomi is udon cooked in miso soup, but the miso used in the soup should be a special kind called akamiso, which looks dark red and is favored in the Nagoya area.

  The miso favored in the Tokyo area is whitish and called shiromiso, white miso, if literally translated.  The miso topping on miso-katsu should be akamiso.  Most of the families in our area drink miso soup using akamiso, mostly for breakfast.

   By the way, when you are served western style soup, you 'eat' it, but when you are served Japanese miso soup or another kind of soup called osumashi, which is a thin soy sauce soup, you 'drink' it.  

  The difference depends on whether you pick up the soup bowl in your hand or not.  You are not supposed to pick up the western style soup bowl off the table and bring it to your mouth.  Instead you hold the rim of the soup bowl and eat the content with a spoon.

  However, when you are served miso soup or osumashi, you are not provided with a spoon.  You are supposed to pick up the miso soup bowl with one hand, mostly with the left hand, even though you are right-handed and many people are, and bring it to your mouth and drink the soup.

  Even when you eat the ingredients of the miso soup, you should pick up the bowl and eat them with your chopsticks.

  If you eat the ingredients of the miso soup from the bowl on the table without picking it up, it is regarded as vulgar.

  In case western style soup is served in a cup, you should pick up the cup and then drink the soup. A cup is a thing to be picked up from the table.

 

  One more important thing when you eat the western style soup is that you dip your spoon away from you, not toward you, and shouldn't make sipping sounds.  It is regarded to be very vulgar.

  When you drink Japanese miso soup or clear soup, it is  OK if you make sipping sounds, if the sounds are not too  loud.

  In my family, it is always my mother who cooks and does  the other household chores. A typical Japanese husband is supposed to come home very tired and late from his  company during the week, and to say only three words to  his wife after he comes home.

  The first is meshi. Then his wife prepares his dinner.

  Then after dinner he says furo, and she draws his bath.  Finally, he says futon, and she rolls out his bed and he goes to sleep.

  My father as a husband is not so bad as the stereotyped husband, but it is also true that he doesn't do any  housekeeping work.

  Since my mother is not working and has never had a job, she has been accustomed to the status of a full-time housewife, and seems to be satisfied with managing the household.

  Actually it is my mother who takes care of the family finances.  The monthly salary my father receives from his  work is electronically transferred to the bank from his company, and he can't bring the salary home himself.  It is my mother who goes to the bank and withdraws his salary.

 

  It is also my mother who decides the monthly allowances for my father and also for me.  Sometimes I'm confused who is the master or mistress of my family.

  Now I'm pretty sure that the one who has the power over the family finances is the head of the family.  

  My mother, however, often tells me that the relationship between a husband and a wife will drastically change in the future when I get married.  In my parents' time, it had been a socially accepted system that men work to provide for their families, while their wives stay home and manage the household.  

  Now more and more women want to have full-time jobs and choose to be working wives.  Those women hope to find husbands who will be understanding and help with the housework, or even share it.  They are likely to expect greater mutuality and companionship in marriage.

  These changes will effectively alter the Japanese perception that homemaking and child care are primarily a woman's responsibility.  Men will also have to be responsible for homemaking and child care.

  With this idea, my mother has always tried to teach me to cook simple dishes and asked me to do the dishes after the meals.  When my family has sukiyaki, mostly for dinner, it is always I who prepares it."

  As you may agree, each Japanese family has its own way of cooking sukiyaki.  When my parents had sukiyaki for the first time after their marriage, my mother prepared it.  

  My mother's way was so different from the way my father's family had cooked it that my father was not happy at first.  Now my father has become quite accustomed to my mother's sukiyaki.  He even likes it better than the sukiyaki his mother, that is, my grandmother, cooked for him.  

 So my sukiyaki cooking was inherited from my mother.

  Now I'll tell you how I cook sukiyaki.

  The first thing I attend to when I prepare sukiyaki is to go to the supermarket and choose good beef.  The best beef for sukiyaki is well-marbled beef with thin streaks of fat, shimofuri-niku in Japanese.

  The next important thing, when you cook sukiyaki, is to choose a good skillet.  Nowadays more and more families prefer to use an electric skillet.  My family sticks to a thick cast-iron skillet inherited from my mother's family.

  We set it over a table burner on the dining table.  Before putting any ingredients in the skillet, I preheat it for several minutes.  When I can see it is hot enough, I put in one or two pieces of suet with long chopsticks and melt them in the skillet until the bottom of the skillet is well greased.

  Then I put two to four slices of beef in the skillet, pour in a little soy sauce, and sprinkle the meat with a little sugar.

  I cook for a minute, stir, and turn the meat over.  If we are hungry and can't wait any more, especially because of the good smell of the meat being saut馥d in the soy sauce,

  I serve the meat to whoever wants the first service.  Then I put in more slices of meat.

  I repeat the procedure and then, if everybody is willing to wait for the next service, I push the meat to one side of the skillet and add scallions, mushrooms, tofu, shirataki, greens and bamboo shoots in more or less equal amounts, sprinkle them with a small cup of sake and cook for an additional four to five minutes.  Now anybody can transfer the contents to an individual bowl.

 

  When we eat sukiyaki, we put a raw egg in a bowl, beat it and dip the ingredients in it.  I think it is a standard way of eating sukiyaki in most of the Japanese families and also in sukiyaki restaurants.

  While eating myself, I check the temperature of the skillet from time to time.  If it seems too hot and food begins to stick or burn, I lower the heat or cool the skillet more quickly by adding a drop or two of cold water to the sauce.

 After everybody has had enough of the meat and other ingredients, we cook udon in the remaining thick broth."

  One of the English teachers in my high school days, who had lived in the States, once told us that when we cook sukiyaki for American guests, we should take care not to use sugar and also not to serve raw eggs.

  Many Americans don't like sugar because they think sugar will make them fatter, even though they love sweet cakes and other sweets as long as they can't see the sugar in spite of the fact these sweets contain lots of sugar.

  As for raw eggs, they simply don't have the habit of eating eggs raw.

  It is OK to eat sukiyaki without raw eggs, but the sukiyaki cooked only in soy sauce without sugar will be very salty.

  What should we do?  The English teacher told us that there is soy sauce pre-sweetened with sugar.  If they don't see the sugar, Americans don't care and they like sukiyaki cooked in sweetened soy sauce.  It's easy to cheat Americans!

  Many Japanese people think that Americans or Europeans don't eat raw fish, and therefore don't eat sushi.  The English teacher also told us that now more and more Americans and Europeans like sushi very much.  Now in most of the major cities in the States and Europe, there are sushi bars, as they are called in English.  "

  In many cases these sushi bars are operated by Japanese owners, and sushi is prepared by Japanese sushi chefs.

I've heard that there is even a sushi shop equipped with an automatic sushi maker.  I think it's typically American.  

  My family sometimes goes to a sushi bar on one of the family's birthdays, not so often because my mother says that at a sushi bar they add lots of salt to the vinegared rice and too much salt is not good for our health.  

  I'll tell you more about my mother's cautiousness about salted foods in more detail later.

  On such an occasion we sit at the bar, and order nigirizushi, hand-molded sushi, if translated into English, with the toppings each of us like.  The raw fish and shellfish for the toppings are displayed in a glass case on the bar in front of us.

  The chefs working behind the bar make the nigirizushi we order, picking up the fishes in the glass case.  My favorite kinds of toppings are salmon, mackerel, squid, octopus, squilla, all kinds of shellfish, especially abalone, and cooked egg.  As for abalone, I prefer the one sauted in salad oil to the raw one.

  My father likes tuna, especially the fatty belly, or toro in Japanese.  My mother likes conger eel, which is usually broiled and brushed with thick sweetened soy sauce, called tare in Japanese. "

  Since toro and abalone are expensive items, my mother, who is responsible for the payment and afraid of a high bill, complains if we order those items.  

  If three of us eat sushi until we are full and my father drinks sake, the bill may amount to nearly 20,000 yen.  

  My mother, who is the finance minister in my family, is not happy about the expense.  

  Nigirizushi is not the only kind of sushi we like.  Like most Japanese people, when we would like to eat nigirizushi, we go to a sushi bar.  However, we eat sushi at home, too.

  It's fun to make and easy to prepare temakizushi.  We just set the sushi rice, various kinds of fillings, seaweed, nori in Japanese, and condiments, which are usually soy sauce, Japanese horseradish, wasabi in Japanese, and vinegared ginger, out on the table.

  Each of us rolls the sushi of our choice with seaweed.  When we have temakizushi at home, we are careful not to add much salt and moreover we don't have to be worried about the bill.  We can eat temakizushi to our heart's content.  

  Another kind of Japanese dish I am good at cooking is curry rice.  Most English dictionaries name this as either 'curry and rice' or 'curried rice.'  

  But in my opinion, curried rice is more appropriately the dish called 'dry curry' in the menu of Japanese restaurants, and 'curry and rice' doesn't necessarily mean curry-flavored sauce on top of the rice.  When it is served with curry-flavored sauce on top of the rice, it is nothing but 'curry rice.'

 

  You may wonder that curry rice is a Japanese dish.  The words used in the naming are surely English, but it originated in Japan, and is a Japanese invention.  Curry powder itself was brought to Japan by the English at the end of the Edo period.  During the late Meiji period the Japanese version of curry roux was developed and curry rice began to be served in Japanese restaurants.

  Since curry roux began to be sold in prepackaged blocks for easy preparation, Japanese housewives started to cook curry rice at home and it rapidly became popular among children.  

  I have always liked my mother's curry rice since early childhood.