Onechan-sensei

So the other day on the ride back from school/day care, with both girls in car seats in the back, out of the blue onechan tries to teach imoto about the best way to cover your mouth when you sneeze, a fitting topic as both have been dealing with the sniffles for about two weeks now. She carefully explained how it's better to sneeze into your elbow rather than your hands, as you can pass along germs to other people much more easily the latter way. I reminded her about it this morning accidentally when I was telling the tsuma this story, and she proceeded to repeat the lesson, complete with the big idea, the rationale, a demonstration, and an attempt to move imoto's arm in the prescribed manner (this last part didn't go over so well). It's good to see she's learning something useful (about teaching as well as avoiding pandemics) at her hoikuen. As the elder child, I've followed in my dad's footsteps profession-wise. Now I'm wondering if onechan is predisposed to be a professor, too. I don't know whether to be proud or worried.

On Blogging and Teaching

Teaching Tuesdays have been few and far between, not to mention short and anything but sweet. It's not for lack of topics but for lack of time. Well, not just that. It's more like one of my friends was saying about the announcers in the final minutes of the Bills' heartbreaking loss to Dallas: "Just shut up! Stop saying it's over! Don't jinx us!" It's not like I've been pitching no-hitters in all my classes, but somehow it feels like to blog about any aspect of them or to begin to reflect on the effects of the Fulbright experience on my teaching in the States or on similarities and differences between my Fukuoka and my Fredonia students would be to jeopardize a streak of some sort. But I think it would be all right to suggest that my blogging here at CitizenSE while I was in Japan was a way for me to process all the reading and research I was doing to prepare for my all-new preps there, whereas this semester I've basically been teaching modified versions of familiar courses that incorporate a lot of the ideas I processed in Japan. So I don't need to blog as much here on teaching-related matters because I did so much of that during the past winter, spring, and summer.

But I do have an onechan-related teaching story for y'all. With the tsuma taking courses twice a week and working at UB three times a week this semester, I'm now dropping the girls off at and picking them up from day care, as well as getting dinner started. When the girls get tired of entertaining each other and begin to bug me while I'm trying to get organized to begin doing something resembling "cooking," I give them a snack or a drink. But only certain kinds of things--nothing sweet, for instance. The tsuma and I have been trying to drill into onechan's head that you can only have dessert after you've eaten enough real food--stuff with protein so you grow big and strong, or things with vitamins so your hair grows long long long. (Yes, those things motivate her, even if she can't pronounce vitamins exactly right yet.) But onechan has a real sweet tooth (thanks to me, I guess), so despite our efforts she's always asking if she can have some forbidden item before dinner, and we're always saying no. For some reason, this evening when I was in the middle of getting ready to cook, she asked if she could have a Peco-chan candy right then, and I told her, "sure, but if you have it now you can't have one for dessert." I guess I was curious to see what kind of choice she'd make. Well, she got the funniest look on her face--kind of shocked and horrified and suspicious and tempted all at once--paused for awhile, and finally replied in a kind of scandalized tone of voice, "Daddy, I'm going to wait. You should eat real food first." Then she went off on this long soliloquy about how ashita (tomorrow) she was going to have Peco-chan candy for dessert, too. I think she couldn't believe I had forgotten the house rule and wanted to make sure I would give her credit for correcting me. Anyway, it was one of those moments when you feel completely ratified as a teacher--"she gets it! she actually gets it!" Nice.

I should note that in fact she motored through three servings of dinner--macaroni and cheese, yellow rice, and steamed fresh green beans (hey, I never said I was agood cook!)--just so she could get to dessert, but when the time finally came she decided to have a lollipop instead of the Peco-chan candy. Then she topped it off with some apple sauce, because "it's good for you, daddy." Probably she's right, as this was home-made stuff she and imoto made at imoto's day care out of the fresh apples they were too sick to pick on Columbus Day.

Kid-Free Family Friday (Almost)

My dad has landed a pretty cool gig. The tsuma knows Michel Foucault's social security number. Moral of the story: interesting things come your way when you follow what you love. For him, it's sports and philosophy (not always in that order); for her, it's libraries and archives.

P.S.--OK, one kid thing: imoto is now following onechan's exercise program...on one of her bedposts, about 3 feet in the air. Now we can't leave the two girls alone in onechan's bedroom. I wonder when imoto will get a sense of danger.

P.P.S.--Well, one more: onechan is starting to tell some pretty surreal stories. Like the time in the car this past week when, fed up with missing all the animal carcasses on and to the sides of the local roads we've been driving on lately, she started telling us a story about a kaba (hippo), no, wait, a mama and a baby, who jumped over the car on their way to a really big puddle--but you missed them, daddy. Well, yeah.

Sister Acts

I only have one younger brother and no other siblings, so I'm familiar with a certain kind of brotherly dynamic. The tsuma only has one older sister and no other siblings, so I'm pretty dependent on her experience to figure out what to expect from onechan and imoto as they grow up. What I'm looking for from Blogoramaville are a broader set of perspectives. Feel free to respond any time.

Imoto is almost a year and a half and onechan will be four at the end of the year, so we've already been living in interesting times, so to speak. Not so long ago, Imoto got jealous of our watching a home video from the first month of onechan's life for the first time since she was born. At times, it seems as if onechan is the "m" and imoto the "s" in a sadomasochistic relationship. We've drilled "don't hurt the baby!" so successfully into onechan's head that lately I've been sounding like a self-defense instructor: "Don't just lie there crying! She'll only keep pulling your hair!" Overall, of course, they love each other to death, and there's nothing cuter than listening to onechan chatter away in cutesy Japanese when she's trying to teach imoto something or convince her to do something. We're even beginning to feel comfortable letting them play alone together in another room for a half an hour at a time (or until the screaming reaches a certain pitch, whichever comes first), relatively confident that the metaphor in the previous sentence will remain merely metaphorical.

It's just that as an imoto herself, the tsuma tends to see things from imoto's perspective more easily than from onechan's. As an onichan, I suppose I do the opposite, although of course it's easier to see when someone else is doing it. So if we can just get enough descriptions of sister acts from the netizens of Blogoramaville, we might be able to temper our natural sibling biases enough to...I don't know, be better parents? That seems a little ambitious, doesn't it? Just give us some good stories and we'll be satisfied.

Onechan Has a Few Questions for Blogoramaville

Last night the topic of technology came up somehow and in the process of offering onechan a working definition ("technology is something people make to get something done") and examples ("a pencil is writing technology," "a crayon is drawing technology"), she not only came up with good examples of her own ("a toilet," "a computer," "a sink"), but also threw me for a loop with some others that I've taken the liberty of turning into questions for Blogoramaville:

1. Is food a technology? At first I was going to answer that the means of growing, raising, and preparing food were technologies, but food itself wasn't. But then I thought of the way corn (right?) was at first inedible in its naturally occurring varieties, and early humans in the Americas (right?) actually bred those varieties together and made it edible (where's Jared Diamond when you need him? oh yeah, in one of those boxes from Japan I never unpacked....). Then I thought of genetically engineered foods. So, Blogoramaville, what say ye? Is corn a technology? What about the genetically-engineered food itself (as opposed to the technologies used to make it)?

2. Are people a technology? I asked onechan how people get made, and she paused for a long time, and finally said, "Byoin." Once I got over my disappointment that she didn't come up with "aliens" and satisfaction that whatever Baptist training she got at her yochien didn't stick enough for her to answer "Kamisama" (God), I started thinking about her actual answer. Now, I might be willing to concede that hospitals are a people-making technology, in the senses they help babies get born and with the caveat that I didn't really want to get into exactly how people are made with her. But the idea that byoin make people threw me for a loop until I started wondering about genetic engineering again--in that sense, could people make people for certain purposes, and would those people then be technology? Now I've been thinking about human institutions like the family and slavery and the corporation.... Blogoramaville, what say ye?

Inquiring toddlers want to know!

Toddlers Gone Wild

So it's somehow fitting that just as I'm reading Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, which is a funny take on familial embarrassings, imoto decided to show me what it's all about. At this semester's Women's Studies symposium the other day, she got it into her head to head for the podium, try to stare down the speaker (a new colleague who specializes in 19th C American women writers), and then toddle off, yanking off her tank top as she went. As there were only about, oh, 20 people out of the 50 there with an angle to see her doing this, it wasn't so bad, but by the third time she tried it (yeah, I kept bringing her back in the room after wrestling her shirt back on in the hallway--victory of hope over experience, fine line between bravery and stupidity and all that), pretty much everyone had checked out her belly button.

So was this as embarrassing as onechan's love of "exercise," which entails finding the nearest pole-like object (it started as the kitchen table leg in our apartment in Fukuoka, but quickly graduated onto many other tall, thin, cylindrical things) and kind of, well, embracing it, suspending herself above the ground for as long she can? Well, yeah, except for the time at the wedding of one of the tsuma's best friends a few weeks ago when onechan found a pole holding up a tent covering the outdoor dance floor and proceeded to get her exercise in front of, oh, about half the guests at this very big post-wedding dinner.

Clearly imoto was just hot and onechan wants a strong upper body so she can climb to the top of any playground structure whenever she feels like it, but to be on the safe side I'm brainstorming ways to talk them out of exotic dancing as a career path. Just in case.

Saturday School Then and Now

Just like my little brother and I did, my two daughters go to Saturday school. Just as my parents drove us to New Hartford for Hebrew school, the tsuma and I drive onechan and imoto to Buffalo for yochien. I wonder if the resemblances will end there.

My parents both grew up in heavily Jewish communities in post-W.W.-II era Brooklyn and, later, Long Island. My brother and I grew up as two of the four Jewish kids in Clinton, NY. So we went, rather unwillingly, to Hebrew school, until we had our Bar Mitzvahs--and then stopped. We were only taught enough Hebrew to make it through our Torah readings--and that's about as much as we learned. We identified as upstate New Yorkers, not as Jewish Americans.

Onechan and imoto have dual Japanese and U.S. citizenship. The tsuma and I hope their year in Japan came at just the right time, linguistically speaking, and that Saturday yochien in Buffalo can tide them over until we get back for our next extended stay. From what I've seen of the teachers and the set-up, they have decent odds at keeping connected with Japanese language and culture. Onechan is already loving to learn the hiragana and katakana writing systems that I struggled over last fall. She was "drawing words," as she put it to me later, for an hour straight last week. She seems to really like her sensei, too. But as good as they are, what's really going to keep her Japanese developing is her peer group there--and so far, only she and a 6-year-old girl whose Japanese is far behind her are the only ones in the class. We've heard two more kids might join up this week, so we'll see tomorrow. Her Fukuoka yochien friends and her cousins in Okinawa are mostly too young right now to enjoy talking on the phone with her (that is, over Skype), so she's going to have to rely on her Buffalo yochien friends until imoto gets old enough to start having conversations in Japanese with her.

So both girls are light years ahead of where my brother and I were at their ages. Perhaps if my grandparents had tried to pass down Yiddish, we could have become bilingual at a young age, too. But it's clear that they wanted their children to be monolingual in English. When my dad's mom was in late stages of Alzheimer's, a long time ago now, there was a period when she was mostly living in her memories of the Depression era. She would often correct our English when we visited her and our grandfather in Long Island, particularly irritated by my brother's and my upstate accents and bad pronunciation/enunciation according to her standards of correct English (which were quite correct). Although she spoke Yiddish with her sister and her husband her whole life, she didn't try to teach more than a word here or there to her grandchildren.

That's history for you. Our grandparents came to America just before anti-immigration and anti-immigrant sentiment peaked with the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act--a time when the KKK was reviving, when nativism and 100%-Americanism set the standards of inclusion and exclusion, when immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were of ambiguous and uncertain racial status (not-quite-white, at best). Our parents were born at a time when the U.S. racial order was undergoing a historic shift, one that has proven to be more deeply-rooted and extensive than the unfinished revolution of the later civil rights movement: the opening-up of whiteness to the previously racialized immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th century, first on a kind of conditional "white ethnic" status and later simply white. Perhaps if we had grown up downstate, my brother and I would have taken part in the "ethnic revivals" of the 1970s, but most likely not. Between our grandfather's Holocaust-induced disbelief and our father's profession of philosophy (not to mention our childhoods in the college towns of Clinton, Chapel Hill, and Palo Alto), it's difficult to imagine us being seriously attracted to Judaism or Jewish culture.

So do our stories fulfill the classic melting pot script? With my brother marrying into a big Polish Catholic family and their four kids growing up in the classic suburban mode, perhaps so. Or maybe the ethnic similarities (we're part Polish and part Hungarian) outweigh the religious differences there, so that onechan's and imoto's cousins' childhoods will echo their grandparents' somewhat. In any case, it's pretty clear that onechan's and imoto's childhoods will be something different. In what ways and with what effects remains to be seen.

On Growing Up Too Fast

Onechan's been saying some things since we moved away from Fukuoka that are really heart-breaking. Here are a few:

• "I want to be a baby again."
  
• "I miss my friends at the yochien."
  
• "I miss my friends at Chiba."
  
• "I miss my friends at [her old day care place in Fredonia]." [This after realizing that yesterday was her last day there--next Tuesday she starts at the university children's center we're calling her hoikuen to link it to and distinguish it from her yochien.]
  
• "I want an onechan. A big girl." [This after playing with an 8-year-old all day yesterday and a 5-going-on-6-year-old half the day today.]
  

These aren't so bad on their own, but in context, they are. I'm not just talking body language and tone of voice. I'm talking about the kind of reception onechan and the tsuma have been getting when they primarily use Japanese out in public here in western NY. (I guess imoto would be getting it, too, if she used more than two words regularly.) Let's just say that they've already gotten more nasty looks and cold shoulders in just over two weeks here than I got the entire year using English in public anywhere in Japan. It would be bad enough on its own, but onechan is old enough to notice it.

Fortunately, it hasn't been all bad. Reuniting with her friends has been great, if awkward at first. With her best friend, onechan slipped into her Fukuoka friendship mode, chattering away in Japanese almost continuously while role-playing various games. In a larger group of old and new faculty kid friends, she went back to her mode on the first few weeks of yochien--quiet observation, tagging along, imitating what the kids were doing, and eventually loosening up.

And it's not like it's not going to get better quickly. Her Fredonia hoikuen is set up remarkably similarly to her Fukuoka yochien, and she started playing with the kids in her room right away when we visited it last week. She's been speaking English her whole life, unlike Japanese, which she's really only started speaking seriously with people other than her mom since January, so it shouldn't take her long to be able to express herself as well in English as Japanese. Her Buffalo hoikuen every Saturday will at least get her speaking and learning Japanese on a regular basis, not to mention interacting with Japanese and Japanese-American kids. And the tsuma and I are doing everything we can to help her stay bilingual, have lots of play time her friends in Fredonia on Sundays, and learn to deal with the eyes on her when she speaks Japanese in public.

But still, it's a complicated homecoming--and worse, onechan is starting to notice the complications. It had to happen eventually, but a part of me was hoping it would come much much later. Staying up worrying about it isn't going to make it any better, so time to sign off. (But I can't help noticing that the day care costs for both girls going twice a week here in western NY are roughly twice what they were in Fukuoka for onechan to go to yochien every weekday, plus get swimming lessons on Fridays with many of her classmates....)

Itai vs. Dame: On Conversations with a 16-Month-Old

Imoto's first language, to the extent she uses language, is Japanese. I'll be writing about onechan's adjustment to life in English tomorrow, but today I want to look at imoto's. Unlike her older sister, who started using words like "wan-wan" (the sound a dog makes in Japanese, but also the name of the lead character on Inai Inai Ba, both girls' favorite toddlers' show on Japanese tv) and "atta" (that--often in reference to a dog she spotted in the distance while we were driving around) from a very young age and built up quite an extensive vocabulary of complaints in Japanese in the first half of her first year, imoto has been much more what we expected from a toddler hearing both Japanese and English at home. She's a real listener and in Dunkirk has gone back to doing what she was doing our last month in Fukuoka--repeating a lot of words and sounds. (For a stretch there in Chiba, she was talking in phrases and sentences in a language mostly of her own invention.) Every once in a while she'll pull out the right word in the right contest ("ohayo" to baba one morning, "owata" when she finished breakfast this morning), just to show off what she knows. But she's found she can get around all day mainly using only two words: "mama" and "itai."

At first, I thought she was calling me "Mama" mistakenly, or out of a desire to tease me (this is actually quite plausible, given her sense of humor--she started doing "inai inai ba" [peekaboo] to other people and giggling uproariously at the drop of a hat before she was 6 months old, if memory serves [and it usually doesn't]), but then I realized that she uses "mama" to let someone else know that she wants something from them. When pressed, she'll throw in another word--like "gigi" for some kind of drink (again confusing, because that's the baby word for grandpa, really)--to specify what it is she wants. But in most circumstances, she'll repeat "mama" until someone figures out what she wants.

"Itai!" is what you say when you're hurt in Japanese--like "ow" or "ouch" in English. But imoto uses "itai" for anything she doesn't like. She'll throw herself on the ground and repeatedly scream "itai" if stop her from doing something she really wants, for instance, which got us all kinds of looks when she did this in public in Fukuoka, Chiba, and Tokyo. Nothing like the sight of a gaijin carrying around a gaijin-looking toddler who's screaming "itai" into his ear in a supermarket to get the concerned looks....

Imoto's gone from being the Happy Science Girl to being the Fearless Stunt Girl. Thanks to onechan and her friends, imoto is all into climbing everything, "because it's there." So the words she most often hears from the tsuma and me are ones like

• "dame!" [dah-meh]: stop it!
  
• "abunai": that's dangerous!
  
• "kyotskute": be careful!
  
• "yasashii": be nice/gentle!
  

That last one usually comes up when onechan's throwing a tantrum of her own and of course becomes an easy target for pinching, poking, and hair-pulling.

These last two weeks, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, imoto has been going with her big sister to the day care place onechan went to most of the year before we left for Fukuoka. From next Tuesday on, however, she's on her own. Onechan is graduating to my university's children's center (more on this tomorrow). Oh, and did I mention that as much of a daddy's girl onechan is, imoto is a mommy's girl, and more? So of course we're more worried about how she's going to adjust to day care in a second language than onechan, for whom our anxieties are more diffuse and complex (on which more tomorrow).

As we were getting ready to leave Japan, I kind of figured that imoto would have the easiest transition of us all, but now I'm wondering if hers is going to be the most difficult, and by how far. It's hard enough for onechan to get her head around the fact that the way she talked to her friends in Japan will be incomprehensible to her friends in Fredonia and Dunkirk, much less the idea that most adults in the U.S. have even less Japanese than her dad (whom she's been teaching about a word a day)--what imoto will make of all this, I have no idea. I know she'll adjust and adapt eventually--but in what ways and with what effects on her personality and her Japanese, I just don't know.

The folks in Buffalo we are just starting to get to know who organize or use the yochien-like day care arrangement on Saturday mornings and Japanese language classes for older kids all emphasize that once the kids hit elementary school, it's tough to get them to keep speaking Japanese at home. But we haven't heard so much yet about 1-year-olds' adjustments. If you have, please let us know--thanks!

Starting Over

It's the first day of school! Which means it's time to announce a new programming schedule here at CitizenSE, now that the blog is on American time (even if I'm not yet).

Teaching Tuesday: I still won't blog about current students, but I will offer some reflections on the way I approach and handle teaching now that I'm back in the U.S. again.

Service Wednesday: After a service-free year in Japan, I should have one or two interesting thoughts on what it's like to ease myself back into the kinds of institution-building activities I devoted a good deal of my pre-tenure time to.

Free-form Thursday: Combines and replaces the old Unexpected Hawthorne Wednesday, CitizenSE Hawthorniana Link-o-rama Friday, and What Would Hawthorne Say.

Family Friday: Onechan will be having a yochien-like experience every Saturday in Buffalo, so combined with her American hoikuen and imoto's beginning onechan's old day-care arrangement on Tuesdays and Thursdays in Fredonia, I'll have plenty of stories to tell.

Research Weekend: A less quirky but more inclusive name than the old CitizenSE's Latest Crazy Hawthorne Idea, but basically fulfills the same function and allows me to make my old Close Reading Tuesday and Intertextual Thursday posts a little more substantive.

Yes, I'm turning CitizenSE into a less research-centric blog than it has been in the past. The leave is most definitely over, but it's not just that. I figure I ought to try to better represent the full range of things I'm doing as a tenured professor. They're new enough and strange enough again to me after gaining some distance on them over the past year, literally and figuratively, that I should be able to do something interesting with them. And since my core audience seems to consist of fantastically-talented and incredibly-prolific graduate students, giving some perspective on (professional) life off the Research I track may be of interest to them.

Looking back over my summer output here, it's clear that the travel, talks, and teaching took a toll on my Hawthorne blogging. Putting myself back on a schedule may help CitizenSE get back on track--and help me regain my momentum on my primary research projects. We'll see!

Zutto Zutto Tomodachi; and, The Collected Adventures of Sparkychan and Gojochan (Thus Far)

Cross-posted at Mostly Harmless

Has a better ring to it than "best friends 4evah," right? Well, it has about the same meaning. It's a line from the song onechan and her friends sang at the graduation ceremony for the older kids in her yochien this past spring. Since we're leaving Fukuoka before she can get to take part in a similar ceremony herself--in fact, we've already spent a full day in Chiba--I'm taking a break tonight from LPGA blogging to convey a big "sayonara" to all the Fukuoka friends she's leaving.

Maybe their parents can read them the Collected Adventures of Sparkychan and Gojochan (Thus Far), courtesy of Uncle Bill Benzon, and leave a comment or three here for him and onechan....

July 9: For onechan [in response to this and that]
July 10: The discussion continues
July 11: Onechan's Adventure [in response to this]
July 12: Where's Onechan? and Calling Onechan! Calling Onechan!
July 14: Help is on the way and There They Are! Yippieeee! [in response to this]
July 17: Onechan's Choice
July 19: Calling all kidz! Calling all kidz! [in response to this]
July 23: Sigh
July 28: Catch you later alligator
August 1: Where's the bunny rabbit?

[Update (8/3/07): New one--Onechan Tells a Story]

[Update (8/11/07): Another new one--The Little Worm from Kansas]

[Update (8/14/07): And another--Twas brillig]

[Update (8/16/07): And yet another--Sparkychan & Gojochan Adventure Time Mystery Theatre]

[Update (8/21/07): Check the comments on the last installment (thus far) for onechan's and imoto's immediate reactions to Sparkychan and Gojochan showing up in Dunkirk!]

A Real Citizen of Somewhere Else Moment

So on the way to the local Matsuri festival, the tsuma voted in yesterday's historic parliamentary defeat for the LDP. Inside the junior high school gym, onechan and I had the following conversation.

Onechan: What is mama doing?
Me: She's voting.
O: I want to vote, too!
Me: You can't yet. You have to be older.
O: Go-sai? [Five?]
Me: No, bigger. Like 18 or 20.
O: You should vote, too.
Me: I can't vote in Japan. I can only vote in America.
O: Why?
Me: Well, you have to be a citizen to vote. Mama's a citizen of Japan. I'm a citizen of the U.S.
O: America?
Me: Yeah. So I can only vote in America. And mama can only vote in Japan. But you and imoto can vote in both countries when you get old enough.
O: [not that impressed]
Me: And then when you're even older you'll have to decide which one country you want to be a citizen of.
O: [not that impressed]
Me: OK, mama's done. Time to go to the festival!
O: Yeah!!

Programming Note

Sorry to report that blogging here will get sparser and lazier for the rest of the month and into August. Although my last class meets in a few minutes, I'll be busy grading and meeting with personal and family friends for farewells during our last two weeks here in Fukuoka. We're cramming a trip to Kagoshima into the second half of this week, as well (here's hoping the forecasts for another early typhoon in southern Kyushu turn out to be wrong this time). And let's not forget boxing, shipping, packing, and giving away our stuff. Fortunately we can leave some things with the tsuma's family in Chiba, where we'll be from July 31 through August 14th, but while there I'll be hanging with onechan and imoto's cousins for the first week and then grading the last set of papers during the second week. So I guess what I'm saying is that Citizen of Somewhere Else will be a bit of a lower priority than it's been even in the past two months. I'll try to make up for the lack of quantity here with quality when I do post. But my five regular readers know how rare that is even when the law of averages is working in my favor! But it's entirely possible the next time you "hear" from me here, this blog will be back on Eastern Standard Time. Or is that Daylight Savings?

Somebody Tell Neil Gaiman

Thanks to the brilliant Bill Benzon, Gojira's telling Tie-Dye Hana Kuma onechan adventure stories over at Mostly Harmless. Reminds me of certain Sandman issues!

P.S.: Somebody (else?) tell me how to get real titles for my posts!

Time Flies When You're Not on a Schedule

I've been keeping up with my kids/family blogging mostly at Mostly Harmless, but I'm going to take advantage of the freedom from the CitizenSE Programming Schedule to fill you in on the events of the extended weekend and the doings of the Dramatis Personae here in Fukuoka. With less than two months to go in the Fulbright year, we are already missing it and already nostalgic for it. So we've been doing a lot together as a family and meeting other families, trying to pack as much into the time remaining here that we can.

Onechan has started taking swimming lessons on Fridays with her yochien classmates, so after giving her a few sessions on her own "to get her feet wet" without us, this past Friday we decided to see what it was like. We got to take a 10-minute bus ride from the yochien to the pool, riding with the middle class of three in her yochien, their teacher, and the other parents (well, moms) and younger siblings. It was a lot of fun to see and hear the kids' rapid mood swings, from the excited race to the yochien gate to see who would be first to get in line for the bus to the exuberant conversation as the bus left the school bus to the first dispute that lead to tears to getting excited again as the bus pulled into the pool lot. We could only wonder what onechan's ride was like--the younger and older classes were on a different bus. When we got to the pool, we waited with the other moms and younger siblings in a glass-enclosed area as the yochien kids went into the locker room to change and eventually emerged into the pool area. All three classes had to march in, following their leader, then line up for warm-up dancing/stretching, then march over to the part of the lane that was blocked off for them. Onechan was in a group of two girls and two boys (the youngest in the yochien). They practiced getting in the pool, jumping up and down in the water, getting water on their face and heads (and wiping it away from their eyes), holding hands and converging on the center of their circle and moving back away from it, going under and inside and under and outside a floating hula hoop (which invariably got raised a bit so they wouldn't have to submerge completely if they didn't want to), then going through the same hula hoop held perpendicular to and partly above the water surface (most would lift it higher so they could get under without getting their faces wet), then running in a circle while the teacher made waves, and on to other games to get them comfortable in the water and used to being wet. Right next to them, the middle and oldest classes were running through the same exercises more quickly and going on to more advanced things. There was no real drama, except when onechan tripped and her teacher had to do a quick rescue (she didn't cry at the time, only when they were waiting for the bus to return to the yochien, and then only for a little bit), but it was totally hilarious and cute to watch her and her friends in the water. You could really see the kids' personalities in the different ways they approached doing the same thing--and how different many of them were in the water from the way we were used to seeing them in the playground at the yochien. We got a bit sad that we wouldn't get to see onechan doing what the middle and oldest classes did in the coming years, but for the most part were too busy cracking up to worry at the time.

The next day, we also got to see a bunch of kids together--this time, ages 4-12--when we sat in on an English Day for an elementary school that one of my Japanese professor friends helped organize and which his oldest daughter attends. Like with the swimming lessons, the kids were divided into groups by age and performed skits or sang songs that allowed them to learn together, without anyone being put on the spot or singled out. With all the parents and younger siblings in attendance for this two-hour program, there must have been 50 kids and 30 adults there. My friend said that he started volunteered in April, teaching English for the youngest kids after school; each week, more and more kids signed up, until he had to start turning them away after the class reached double digits. So there's great interest and enthusiasm in English in this eastern suburb of Fukuoka. After the program ended, we visited the professor's family at their house. The girls loved playing with their 6-year-old girl, 4-year-old boy, and 3-year-old boy. We went shopping at Costco for barbecue materials and ended up staying until 10 pm. We would have stayed overnight with them, but we didn't bring diapers for imoto and we had another meeting set up with a different Japanese professor's family in a different part of town on Sunday morning. This visit also involved a train ride out of the central city area and then a car ride to their actual residence. The girls had a great time playing with their 3-year-old daughter and her neighbors at their small apartment complex. Onechan never quite got the hang of riding a bike or jumping rope, but she sure got a lot of practice. And imoto learned what skinning her knee felt like, as she kept trying to walk too fast on the sloped and rough pavement. We got a chance to talk about living in the States with the professor and his wife, the first of many conversations to come, as they will be moving to western Pennsylvania in late July so he can do some advanced graduate work and professional development. We're already looking ahead to getting together in the States.

One of the amazing things about the Fulbright year has been seeing what the lives of couples with young children in Fukuoka are like. We've been fortunate to get to know many families with infants through the kominkan system, many parents with pre-school kids through onechan's yochien, international couples with largely younger children through the Mixi group that meets at various places in the city as well as online, and even some families with kids in elementary and secondary schools through my faculty contacts. It's given us a lot to think about in terms of what's best for our own children and what options we can and should pursue as an international family.

But home is calling us, too. There have been a few births among faculty friends and news of more to come in the fall and winter. There have been new hires in my department and elsewhere. We're already making plans to send our stuff back to the States, get the utilities for the house back in our name, and have a new Prius ready for us to buy when we get back in mid-August. The tsuma is signing up for courses in her Masters in Library Science program that starts in late August around the time my semester does. It's hard to anticipate how much the place has changed in our absence--or assess how much we have. But it's hard not to try.

Maybe imoto's recent clinginess--calling for her mom whenever she's out of sight, wanting me to hold her as much as possible and crying when I leave for work--is tied to this feeling we have of being in two places at once, and neither. Speaking of which, it's time to finish what I need to do here in the office and head home!

This Is Not a Post

It's just a number: 155. Or rather, more than 345 to go.

My latest crazy idea is that anyone reading this non-post click on the link above and get Scott Eric Kaufman blogging again. He's writing on Wharton and listening to Asia, people. We need to stage a blogoramawide intervention. Asia!

This is a crisis that makes CitizenSE's first troll being a white supremacist insignificant (check out the comments on yesterday's post if you wish--I pledged not to delete his there so long as he doesn't delete mine on his).

End non-post. Back to bloggy solidarity.

Dramatis Personae

It occurs to me that my use of Japanese and references to my family members here on CitizenSE may be confusing or off-putting to most of the people who come here accidentally through google or other web searches. And even my handful of semi-regular readers will no doubt appreciate a playbill. Plus, I don't have time to do any serious blogging today--or, apparently, if you look over the most recent third of my posts here, for the past month or so. In any case, one of the reasons to blog is to tell funny (and other) stories about your family. So without further ado, may I present...

CitizenSE Dramatis Personae

[note on pronouncing Japanese: the alphabet consists of variations on the vowels (spelled here phonetically) "ah" "ee" "ooh" "ay" (or "eh" if you're Canadian) and "oh" (such as kah-key-koo-kay-koh); all syllables end in vowels; double vowels means drag the vowel sound out for another beat, although often people in Japan represent the dragged out "oh" sound as "ou" instead of "oo," mistakenly thinking that's any clearer (there's no good solution--"ohhh" looks stupid and sounds kinda pornographic, for instance, but until Americans learn to read hiragana and katakana, we're stuck with romaji)]

The Tsuma, She-Who-Will-Not-Be-Mentioned-on-Blogs: just call her the International Women of Mystery I'm married to; also known as mama or okaasan to the musume futari.

Musume Futari: our two daughters, who have too many aliases to list here.

Onechan, Uh Oh Diva Girl: our older daughter, the sansai onnanoko (3-year-old girl), who goes to yochien (a Baptist pre-K day care/school arrangement for half the day, even though the only Christians in the family are the awesome Catholic family my brother married into), loves Pretty Cure, Dora, and PowerPuff Girls (even though we haven't yet let her see the original version), likes to wear skirts ("I want to be a girl!"), and responded to my joke that there ought to be a Cure Yada ("no way!") to go with Cure White, Black, Egret, Dream, Rouge, Mint, Lemonade, and the rest) with a pause for thought followed by the suggestion, "and a Cure Cough-y!" Yup, she's a comedian, too. (We've all been coughing off and on since January.)

Imoto, Happy Sporty Science Girl: our younger daughter, the juukagetsu akachan (10-month-old baby), who not only can do all the things I bragged about a couple of posts ago, but also is into opening and closing doors, standing up in her stroller, dropping things to see what happens, putting everything in her mouth, screeching with delight, giggling, expressing frustration in all kinds of hilariously cute non-verbal ways, and trying to learn to walk and imitate the words coming out of our mouths at roughly the same time (onechan would always swing from one to the other in that awesome 6-18-month transformation from barely-rolling-over baby to a toddler).

Baba, Gigi, Grandma, Grandpa: the Japanese and American grandparents, respectively.

Various tomodachi (friends) of the kazuko (family), to be named later. There--fun, easy, and quick. Maybe will be able to actually do a close reading tomorrow. We'll see.