MotherVerse

I just got the latest issue of MotherVerse, which features a deeply moving essay by my good friend Michele Corkery. Michele and I both took part in the Ploughshares Writers Conference a few years ago, back before we had children. There’s also an essay by me, on the birth of my twins in Japan, which will appear in the anthology This Changes Everything: the Challenges of Motherhood in the fall. (I’ll keep you posted about that.)

One of the things I like about MotherVerse is that the editors strive to present the voices of mothers around the world. In this issue, there’s a story by Taiwanese writer/mother Eugenia Chao. The previous issue had a story set in India. I’m looking forward to learning more about mothering around the world through this new journal.

Obligation Chocolate

The Japanese Valentine’s Day practice of giving chocolate to boys was confected (pun intended) by chocolatiers in this country. Not only have Japanese women been conned into spending lots of yen on chocolate for their honeys, but also they’re expected to give giri choco (obligation choolate) to guys in the office, etc. According to Kaori Shoji’s article in today’s newspaper, sales of giri-choco amount to 30 billion yen each year. My husband heard on the radio that 70 percent of Japanese women hate Valentine’s Day. It must be a drag having to buy chocolate for men you don’t really like. My advice: stop buying the chocolate, ladies!

This whole thing gave me an idea for another commercial holiday. How about if we have a day when we give books to the people on our lists?

Signs that My Daughter is Japanese

1. When she is playing with her dolls, she makes them bow to each other.
2. Her favorite dessert is red beans in syrup.
3. She wants to be Sailor Moon when she grows up.
4. She is looking forward to giving chocolate to a boy that she likes on Valentine’s Day.

As for #4, I don’t think she even realized until this year that girls give boys chocolate on February 14 (and get nothing themselves). In the past, she has gotten cards from her grandparents in the United States, and candy from her Japanese grandmother and from me. This year, her teacher talked to her about who she’d be giving chocolate to and she also saw the whole thing enacted in a cartoon on TV. So today, after school, we went to the grocery store. She picked out a large bar of chocolate in a Pokemon box (after I told her the one with wrapping and silver ribbons was a bit much for a six-year-old) and brought it home and wrapped it herself. She cut a red heart out of origami paper and wrote her name and this boy’s name on it. The other six boys in her kindergarten will be getting giri chocolate - one KitKat each.

Where on Earth is My Bagel?

How’s this for a book concept: A little boy in rural Korea suddenly has a hankering for a New York bagel. That’s the story sisters Frances and Ginger Park set out to tell in their modern fable Where on Earth is My Bagel? Grace Lin’s illustrations of the boy, Yum Yung, and the Korean countryside bring the story to life. My son, a Japanese-American boy living in rural Japan likes bagels, which have been hard to get around here up till recently. I thought he’d like this book, and he did.

A bit of trivia: Co-author Frances Park and I had short stories in the same issue of Chaminade Literary Review several years ago.

Writing Open the Mind

The first time I met Andy Couturier here in Tokushima, we went to a coffee shop and started writing crazily, in an attempt to lose sense of meaning. I can’t say I succeeded, but having Andy as a guru certainly changed the way I felt about my craft. At the time, I was working on a novel, trying to make every word publishable. But Andy reintroduced me to writing for fun, for the pure joy of it. I was later privileged to join one of his workshops,where we tried many of the experiments in Andy’s recently published book Writing Open the Mind. The section headings are intriguing in themselves: Oysters in the Mouth, Aroma Shiftings, Mess Makings and Energy Risings, Word Kleptocracy, etc. I guarantee you that as soon as you crack open this book, you’ll be itching to write.

Wheels

For some time now Lilia has been very effectively communicating her desire for a wheelchair. I understand her wanting to be independent and mobile, but I also understand her inclination to be lazy. I worry that if she has a wheelchair, she will completely give up on physical therapy. If she put as much energy into trying to walk as she did in resisting her therapist, I believe she’d make some progress! Nevertheless, after talking it over with her father and various teachers and therapists, I’ve decided to order a wheelchair for her. Today, during her PT session, Lilia mostly played house by herself while I perused catalogs with her therapist. In one catalog, a kid in a wheelchair was playing field hockey in a living room with other kids. In another picture, a couple of kids were piled onto the wheelchair. Wheelchairs are fun! Wheelchairs are strong! And cute - there was one upholstered in a pink panda print.

Lilia is already pretty good at getting around in a wheelchair. She can turn and brake, even though no one has ever taught her how to use one. After PT, I was chatting with her therapist. Lilia took off down the hall in one of the center’s wheelchairs. She disappeared around the corner and when I went to see what she was up to, I found the chair parked next to a sofa. Lilia was sitting there looking at picture books. She managed to change positions with no help at all.

A Few More Thoughts…

Today’s headline in The Japan Times is “Koizumi puts bill for female succession on back burner.” You can just hear the whoosh of breath as those conservatives in the Diet let out a great big “Whew!”

I wish the very best for the princesses, but I can’t help thinking that Kiko-sama, at 39, is of an advanced maternal age. It’s pretty obvious that she’s also been under pressure to conceive a boy and that this baby isn’t just a happy surprise. Will they do an amnio? And what if it turns out to be another girl? And, forgive me for saying this, but what if it turned out to be a boy with Down’s Syndrome? Would everyone suddenly rethink what it means to be disabled? Or would the child be hidden away and never spoken about again? Or worse?

It also occurred to me that it would be rather interesting if Aiko-sama did become Empress and marry a foreigner, like maybe royalty from an Asian country. I know it’ll never happen, but think of it: the Japanese could suddenly have a good relationship with another Asian nation with just one wedding! Isn’t that what they used to do in Europe?

The Princess is Pregnant!

The big news in Japan is that Princess Kiko, wife of Prince Akishino, is pregnant. This complicates matters for the Crown Prince and Princess Masako and their only child, Princess Aiko. The government has been considering changing the law of succession which currently allows only male heirs to take the throne in order to allow Aiko to become Empress. Those who are against this change argue that if Princess Aiko marries a commoner, she’ll become a commoner too and the royal family will be just like everyone else. According to law, when a woman is married, her name is struck from her biological family’s registry and added to her husband’s registry. That’s what happened to the Emperor’s daughter when she married a couple of months ago. Now she is presumably an ordinary housewife. This could be circumvented, I think, if the Crown Prince and Princess were to adopt Princess Aiko’s commoner husband, just as sons-in-law are adopted in non-noble families with only girls. Some lawmaker said, “What if Princess Aiko gpes abroad and marries a foreigner with blond hair and blue eyes?” Well, that would be the end of the world, wouldn’t it?!

Keeping the World Safe for Democracy

I just finished reading Evan Wright’s gonzo account of being embedded with the Marines of the First Recon Battalion as they headed for Baghdad. Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War pretty much puts to rest the notion that the U.S. military is made up of underprivileged youths who were duped into service with the promise of travel and money for college. The guys in First Recon were there because they wanted to be, and they had no illusions about why they were there.

Early on, “a twenty-year-old redheaded corporal jumps up as more helicopters fly north. ‘Get some!’ he screams. Then he adds, ‘They kill hundreds of people, those pilots. I would have loved to have flown the plane that dropped the bomb on Japan. A couple dudes killed hundreds of thousands. That f**cking rules! Yeah!’”

The Ritual

Today we engaged in the age-old Japanese ritual of Shopping for Desks for our soon-to-be first graders. All over Japan, thousands of parents of 6-year-olds are doing the same thing. There is probably not a seven-year-old in the land that doesn’t have a desk for the voluminous amounts of homework he/she will be doing over the next twelve years. I myself did not have a desk until I came to Japan at the age of 22 and dragged a used desk out of the garbage up five flights of stairs to my 3DK apartment. I didn’t have any homework at Lake Hills Elementary School and I think I mostly sprawled across my bed in high school and college.

The husband and I had a brief tiff in the furniture store when I tried to tell him that a swivel chair with no arms is not the best seat for a kid who can’t even stand up. Lilia’s therapists are always emphasizing that it’s difficult for Lilia to concentrate on studying when she has to worry about keeping her balance. Yoshi is apparently in denial. We bought the swivel chair anyway, but I’m going to look into having a chair specially made for her.

Anyway, party’s over kids. Pack up the toys ’cause you won’t be playing much come April.