Meet the Ibarakis

Merry Christmas Eve to all. I’m spending this holiday season with my new host family. I’m in my new house right now, in my new room, with my own computer. This is quite a change from the last house where I wasn't allowed access to my own computer without my host mother’s permission. This is just one of a gazillion improvements. After a few hours of being here I started getting this weird feeling. I couldn’t quite pin it down. It wasn’t until I was in the bathtub when I realized, “I’m happy.” It’s quite possibly the first time I’ve been happy in my house since I’ve been in Japan.

I arrived on the 23rd in the afternoon. I don’t want to go into detail about my last morning with Watanabe-san because that would make me angry and this is a happy post. But she did extract every last moment of work out of me and took as many shots at my self-confidence as possible. She insulted my family, my country, all Americans, and me countless times. She gave me many, many reminders of why I was leaving. The first difference I noticed when I got to the Ibaraki’s house was my new host mother’s reaction to my rip stick. Watanabe-san forbade me from using it. Ibaraki-san asked me to teach her how to use it. Half an hour after I arrived I was in a Santa suit they had for me and on a bike riding with them to a friend’s house for lunch. There were lots of people coming and going and I was very confused about who everyone was for a while. The woman who picked me up from the train station wasn’t my host mother but the man was my host father. There was another man there too. It turns out he was an old exchange student the Ibarakis hosted during the summer. Shaku is a college student from Taiwan and very nice. He was dressed as Santa as well.

We arrived at the friend’s house, my host parents, their one-year-old Momiji, Shaku, and me. Ibaraki-san has me bring my rip stick with to show off to her friend’s children. There were lots of kids running about. By lots I mean four, which is a lot in a Japanese house. There were three families at lunch including us, and they all had kids. Lunch was curry and rice with lots of side dishes. Finger foods mostly. Then we had the Christmas cake again complete with candles. Japanese traditional Christmas foods seem to be fried chicken and cake. We played a fun game where everyone searched for finger puppets hidden in the house. It was like Christmasized Easter egg hunt. Inside the puppets were slips of paper telling you what you won. Usually you lost and had to spell out something with your butt. When Shaku and my host father found the double-loser puppet together, they both put on monkey costumes and spelled monkey in Japanese, which is “saru”. But of course they used Japanese characters “さる”. Very funny. I took a video. After cake I, Santa Claus, handed out presents to all the children. Most of the kids were terrified of me. One girl would stare at me constantly. Sometimes I would stare back. We would lock eyes for maybe thirty seconds, and then she’d cry. I stopped returning her gaze after a while.

We returned home and the Ibarakis assumed that I must be wiped out and gave me some time to unpack and rest before dinner. I was really tired but I couldn’t sleep I was just so excited about this house. So I started unpacking which just turned into me dumping all my clothes on the floor and leaving the rest for later. Then I went back downstairs and we all sat around the table and discussed rules, chores, schedules, and the like. I became more and more pleased with each new topic addressed. The contrast between homes is striking. Watanabe-san and I had a similar conversation the day after I arrived at her house. I kept the rulebook she made for me so I can remind myself that I’m not crazy and things really were that weird. I think the best way to illustrate the difference is with a table

Watanabe-san(W) Ibaraki-san(I)

Chores
W: Wash the bath, clean the kitchen after dinner, wash all the windows in the house, clean my room every weekend
I: Play with Momiji, help my host mother cook dinner (I requested this one because I want to learn how to cook Japanese food)

Computer/ contact home
W: Once a week for half an hour, on weekends an hour each day. Phone once every two weeks for half an hour. General philosophy: contact with home is a necessary evil to be kept at a bare minimum.
I: Unlimited access to my computer. Weak wireless signal from my room, Ethernet cable downstairs. Skype every day is excessive, other than that okay. General philosophy: my parents must worry about me so I should contact them often.

Dinner
W: Not allowed to help cook, dinner starts between 8:30 and 9:00 every night. Usually not enough food, must buy own snacks to supplement.
I: Help cook, dinner at 6:00, or whenever I get home from school. Always enough food.

Lunch
W: Buy own lunch at school, not allowed to make own bento because the kitchen is too small and I am in the way
I: Host mother makes lunch

Dealing with Problems
W:If I wanted to talk about an issue, Watanabe-san usually would get angry with me and blame it on recent contact with parents.
I: Once a week we all sit down to discuss issues and keep everything open. No holding back in this house.

Location
W: Tsuchiura - Fifteen-minute bike ride from station. 8 minutes to school by train. One hour from Tokyo.
I: Abiko - Five-minute bike ride to station. 23 minutes to school by train. Half hour from Tokyo.

Reason for hosting (guess)
W: Misses having a teenager in the house. Also for free labor.
I: Wants to share Japanese culture. Interested in helping me have a good experience in whatever way possible.

Time with Family
W: Originally scheduled to stay for the entire 10 months. So when things stopped working around 3 and ½ months, it was taken as a failure on my behalf
I: Scheduled to stay for 3 months. So when things stop working around 3 and ½ months, I’ll be gone.

As you can see from my nerdy chart, there are many reasons to like this family better. The only downside is I’m farther away from school. But even that doesn’t matter. There are three parts to that aspect. 1. More expensive train ticket. 2. Wake up earlier for school. 3. Farther away from friends. If my host mother makes my lunch, then I don’t have to buy groceries, and that more than compensates for the ticket. If I don’t clean the kitchen after a late dinner, then I can go to bed way earlier and still end up with more sleep than at the Watanabes. When I hang out with friends, it’s usually meeting someone like Tokyo or Disney Sea, both of which I’m closer to. Or I hang out with the track team after practice so I’m already at school. So being farther away from school is a deceptive downside in that it isn’t a downside at all.

I don’t want to make it seem like living with the Watanabes was hell. There were a lost of positive aspects. I had a big room; my host mother was easy to talk to when she wasn't angry with me for leaving my coat on the couch… But even those positive points are overshadowed here. My room here is approximately one square mile. My bed actually fits me. Ibaraki-san is far easier to talk to, and her husband is interested in me as well. I’m trying really hard not to bad-mouth the Watanabes. I am grateful to them for accepting a stranger into their home and I learned a ton of Japanese there. It’s just that I came away with many more angry, sad, depressed, and disappointed memories than happy ones. I think the best way for me to bad-mouth them at this point is just to not talk about them.

So ends the first day with the Ibarakis. I fell asleep happy but bewildered, still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Maybe when they saw my room they would flip, or after a few days start ignoring me or something. I wasn’t quite used to all the kindness. I awoke in the morning to my host father knocking on my door with a tray of food. Eggs and bacon, toast and rolls, yogurt and slices of orange. I love getting breakfast delivered to my room, although it makes me feel a bit high and mighty. I’m going to try to beat breakfast to the table in the future. The original plan in the was for my host mother to show me to the train station by bike, but Momiji came down with a fever in the night. She had to be taken to the hospital at four in the morning. Everything is good now but my host father drove me instead. I rode the train to school and got a feel of how long it is. Not bad. Plus I love reading on the train and this gives me more time to do so. My bike is currently still at Tsuchiura station. The bike thing is a bit complicated. I use two bikes. In Tsuchiura, one to get from home to the station, and one from the station to school. The one for school was on loan from the Watanabes, so I returned it before I left. That leaves a bike I bought for home-to-station. That one is currently at the station. My family here has bike for me to use in Abiko, so I need to move my bike in Tsuchiura to the station near my school at some point over winter break. For now, I walk to track practice.

Practice today was a pain. We did relay races after a 3km warm-up. I hate relays. I’m a distance runner. My idea of fun is a nice six-mile run on a clear, slightly cold, sunny day. I do not like sprinting 200 meters eight times. It’s a different kind of pain from distance running. It’s not fun. Only in cases of basketball, Frisbee, soccer, and such is sprinting fun. So it sucked and it went forever. But afterwards we all went to karaoke so that made up for it. Karaoke was very fun. I’ve never done it before. I can see the attraction. They put you in a private soundproofed room with couches and a TV. The controls to the karaoke machine are wireless and intense. The sound quality is amazing. You can do all sorts of neat stuff to your voice through the mike. I sang English songs because I can’t Japanese read fast enough. I practice though and I’m getting better at it. My friends thought reading the English that fast was the coolest thing in the world. Very fun.

Getting to karaoke was a bit of a hassle though. There was a place a few kilometers from school. I didn’t have a bike so I had to jog beside my friends while they carried by stuff. Then to get home I rode two buses and a train. I think it’s a testament to my Japanese that I understood directions on how to get home from the lady in the karaoke place without writing anything down, including a bus transfer. Okay, I wrote down the name of the stop to transfer but I didn’t look at it afterwards. I got home around 5:30. We had a quick dinner and then my host father and I were out at 6:00 to go to church in Toride. They found a Catholic mass for me on Christmas Eve. He even went with me, despite the fact that he’s not Catholic. I’m not sure if they’re Christian or not. It was a half hour drive to the church. It was a full service, but the church was so small that the mass was only an hour long. I was a little surprised for a Christmas Eve mass. I noticed something about the priest here, well all the priests I’ve seen. I’ve been to four churches here, three Catholic and one Lutheran. All the Catholic priests are old white guys. They’re all in the sixties or later. The Lutheran minister is a young guy, in his thirties I’d say. Is the Catholic Church getting any new priests? Or will the whole organization collapse in ten years?
Anyway, that was my Christmas Eve. We got home and I played with Momiji while Ibaraki-san heated up some frozen pizza. Teriyaki chicken pizza is very good. And the strips of dried seaweed on top were a good addition. Momiji is adorable. She doesn’t remember who I am when I come home yet. So I’ve met her once but she’s met me three times. It doesn’t take long for me to have her giggling though. Peek-a-boo works in Japanese. And it never gets old. Now it’s off to bed. Tomorrow is Christmas. I’m scheduled to skype my family and say hi to all my cousins whom I haven’t seen in a lifetime and half. Then it’s off to someplace with my host father dressed as Santa Claus to hand out presents to neighborhood children. Merry Christmas everyone.