Life at my Host Family's Home

(The neighborhood of Ryosanji)



Memories of Life in Ryosanji





The house I spent 10 months at was never what I’d expected before coming to Japan. It was both old and modern; a mix of the 1960s, pre-war Japan, and 21st commodities sprinkled about in rooms sparingly. It was a traditional Japanese house built with none of the Western trappings that have become so common in those numerous shallow and often tacky homes of contemporary Japanese construction. What existed in this home was character and acknowledgement of Japanese culture, rather than an enshrined shunning of Japanese architectural heritage so encased in the numerous new homes that now replace many of Japan’s old houses. A wall encasing a garden with a large roofed gate adorned the front of the house. Inside there was a sizable traditional Japanese garden. Peering into the garden are great large windows which are shrouded by pull down bamboo sheets. The house is constructed out of fine wood that is deep in the hue of dark browns and feint reds seen in the cedars of forests found all over Japan.













The interior of the home was always a little bit of a confusion of style, purpose, and design compared to the façade of the outside structure. While some sections, such as the living room, the butsudan room, and other multipurpose rooms, including the upstairs bedrooms in the middle section of the house were all fairly traditional in layout, other areas were quite different. The kitchen, minus 40 year old appliances, is a true relic of the 1960s. Its drab colors and layout always seemed like such a collision of style compared to the adjacent tatami floored living room. I remember the kitchen as always being so cluttered and never in any state of true cleanliness or order for too long. Always the dishes were out drying on the racks. Cups for water sat constantly partially empty along the table ledge near the water cooler. In the warm months fruit flies buzzed in their crazed patterns among the trash bag and recyclables, finding whatever leftover food that still remained pasted to the damp surface of assorted plastic containers. Often Obaa-chan (grandma) would have come in at some time from the fields, tracking dirt and briers along with an assortment of seeds onto the floor. In the sink and next to it on the countertops she would usually leave the produce she had picked from the fields along with pots of different wild flowers that she’d found for the house. Frequently, okaa-san (mother) would come back home in the evening around 6:30 or 7 and exclaim in surprise and dismay about the “mess” that was on the floor and in the kitchen. And so that was life was in at the Umekage household.

I never did venture into all of the corners of the house. Often I had wanted to see what was in the “white” tower of the far left of the house where Hitomi lived. Once when no one was home I had went as far past Obaa-chan’s room until the staircase that led to Hitomi’s room. I crept up it, but both fearing and feeling a strong pang of shame and embarrassment, I turned back down no matter how curious I still remained. That room to the day I left remained the one area of the house I never saw. Creeping about like the way I was, I felt like a thief or some type of spy. It didn’t feel right.

I'm back. Why did I go?

It has been a long time since I have tried writing anything on this blog, but it’s a good time as any to start writing again! So I am back, back after two years or so of inactivity. The last time I wrote an entry on this blog I had not yet gone to Japan for my year of postgraduate high school study abroad. Now, I have just finished my freshman year of college at George Washington University and have also come back from that one year in Japan.

The way I look at Japan has changed rather a bit since I last wrote anything on this blog. When I think back at how I spoke and understood Japan a few years ago I really feel like I was very naïve about so many things. I am not sure I will ever have such an amazing experience in quite the way I did during that one year of going to school and living with a host family ever again if I am to go back to Japan. Somehow when I left I could not help but feel a sensation of having just experienced a truly definitive and unique moment in my life. Admittedly, ever since coming back home to America and going to college for the past year, life here has never felt as exciting or as interesting. I went to Japan knowledgeable, or so I thought I was, but came back much more matured, fluent, and starkly aware of all of the things that I had assumed incorrectly about Japanese culture and society. Even though I had read so many history books out of my deep passion for Japanese history and culture over the previous five years before my year abroad, and even though I had been to Japan twice before, this time I truly “lived” in Japan. It was not a short exchange trip, and it was not even a trip. It was a year of my life.

When I left to Japan back in the summer of 2007 I was hoping to get a chance to see a part of Japan that is so rarely understood, especially for foreigners of all ages. I wanted to understand what it is like to grow up as a teenager in contemporary Japan. I wanted to know what people my age went through; the hardships and joys of it all. Somehow no matter how many books, articles, and even classes I took on Japan, so much of what it meant to be a young adult in Japan remained so mystified to me. Often when I would read books by western authors speaking about Japanese youth and Japanese schools, the “Japanese youth” in these books would always seem to be so elusive as a subject. Somehow, even if the authors, such as John Nathan, or Alex Kerr, both fluent Japanese speaking American long-term residents of Japan met and talked with Japanese teenagers in their books, I could not help but notice a clear disconnect of comprehension of motives and feelings from the author’s standpoints in their writing. Clearly, just speaking the language did not give all of the tools for succeeding in interpreting Japanese youth culture. And so I began to get curious, in fact more than just curious, I wanted literally to go out and see for myself what it was that the authors of books and articles I was reading were failing to learn. I wanted to go out and learn about Japan’s youth as someone of the same age. I think it began to dawn on me that one of the main problems was that none of these writers had actually ever grown up within a Japanese household, gone to Japanese school, sat through all of those awful boring lecture classes and examinations, and then participated in that common of all routines for a great many Japanese students, commuting to and from school, often a long multi hour trip. By chance and luck of time and place, I had just the opportunity to do all of these things. Rather than waiting for someone to go out there and write and tell the whole world about what it is like to be young and growing up in contemporary Japanese society, I realized I could do all of this myself. And from here on out I became settled on a mission of exploration. I became focused on being my own sociologist. I had an active and imaginative mind, I also had my interest, and I had my language skills. I was set to go.

Well I might have been prepared to go, but as with any great journey, there was a lot that I did not really comprehend. I would find out within the first few weeks one the first lessons about life in Japan, it can be pretty lonely to be a young person there. In addition, I would also discover just how many aspects of youth culture in Japan I had never read or heard about, and just how precisely difficult it was for any of these experiences to go through, not only just as a Japanese teenager, but especially for as an outsider.

Ultimately, I would get more than I thought possible. I got access to Japanese society that as an adult, or even just as a college student visiting or living in Japan, no foreigner can ever witness or take part in. In the midst of my time there, I often appreciated just how lucky I was in light of knowing that I was not going to have the ability to speak with Japanese people so openly and on such an equal footing as I would at Japanese high school. Just like people growing up anywhere around the world, but even more so perhaps in Japanese society, it becomes difficult if not downright frustrating to crack the wall of communication with adults of all ages once they are in a place where society oppresses them into being a certain way.
Although by the end of my year there I had become accepted by classmates and school in such a way that I felt like I truly belonged in my environment as opposed to how difficult school life was when I first came to Japan.