Year End Messages

Temptations    
It is tempting to lament the state of the world. Whether to the left or right, or ahead, wherever you look, depressing futures loom in store: kids bullying their pals and parents tormenting their kids, both sometimes resulting even in deaths; income disparities widening; disproportionate demographics rendering social security sour (Are longevity and  a self-selected small-family lifestyle a curse?); our social democracy life-ropes now tattered, indicted as injustice-, corruption- and inefficiency-infested; rightist eunichs steadily rebuilding a war-ready and capital-favoring country; our pauperized across-the-strait neighbor nuclear-threatening our national security; our wealthy across-the-ocean neighbor again quagmired, this time a bit farther to the west in Asia. The list barely ends but far down the road.

     But the trick is to not succumb to those temptations.   

Dwarfed 
   
Popping in from under the glaring late August sun, Hideaki could hardly see once inside Thais and Alan's living room, in their residence in Sacramento.

There on the sofa he vaguely saw someone seated, relaxed and staring out emptily into somber space. His eyes finally adjusting to the mid-day darkness, Hide finally recognized a mysterious figure, and noticed this was one occasion he needed to say hello to someone he sees for the first time. Urged by his polite instinct, he tentatively offered his hand, saying, "Hi, nice to meet you. My name is Hideaki. How are you?" The one he greeted was polite enough to answer and offer his hand, saying, "Mine’s George. And I'm curious, thank you. And you?" "Well," Hide stammered a bit, but managed to come up with his next words in time, "I'm cu-curious too, th-thank you."
     That was the beginning. That afternoon, Masami enjoyed her reunion with Thais and Alan, updating them and herself on what had happened to her family and to Thais's after they had last met; Seika played with Tyler, jumped into the house's backyard swimming pool, so deep he says afterward he nearly drowned; Hide joined the fun of the talk but, above all, he cherishes his new friendship with Curious George. 
    The next day, they hit the highway and set out on a tour of Sequoia, Yosemite and Death Valley National Parks. It was a four-family tour on a big wagon, guided by a Japanese-speaking Mormon Louis. 
　　　Sequoia, with its big and old trees like Generals Sherman and Grant, bewitched the whole families.

Hiking among the humongous old trees, they felt as if they had become dwarfs (just like Pluto, by the way, who was downgraded to a dwarf in the same summer, but that's another story. Does anyone know what happened after that? Is the rumor true that he was accepted as the eighth member by the Seven Dwarfs?).  

Yosemite, with its granite rock mountains, giant falls and serene lakes, was again fascinating. Hide hit his left shin on a rock and suffered a bit of bruise.

Death Valley was scorching hot. Devil's Golf Course and Badwater Basin made them feel as if they had wandered into Star Wars.

Their travel came to a peaceful end in Las Vegas. There they dined and wined with Chrissy and Chiang. They were now in the process of readying for their wedding next spring. Good Luck!

Studies and Plays Till He Drops   
Seika, as much a game-freak as ever, studies a lot also. He goes to his elementary school Monday through Friday with very few if any absences, of course. He also goes to juku cram school in an adjacent city four days a week: on Monday and Wednesday nights and Saturday evenings and Sunday mornings. What with homework from school and preparation for juku, he goes to bed well after eleven. Every several weeks, he takes mock exams. His grandparents Yoshifumi  and Kiyoko worry about his drill-and-kill lifestyle.       
       He also enjoys himself. On Thursdays, his school is out early. He comes home with his pals and plays games with them. He also uses the spare time watching DVDs featuring old-time mystery and hero stories. Having finished all the episodes of Ultra Q, a Japanese version of Twilight Zone, he is now consuming UltraMan series at the pace of four episodes a week.  He is transcending a forty-year-long space of time and now shares quite a lot of TV-show knowledge with his dad's generation. YouTube is another of his favorite pastime activities. It was Hideaki that got the tip on it first, but after he told him about it, Seika got addicted. Hide loves reuniting with his adolescence female idols there; Seika loves watching UltraMan, dad's childhood hero from Galaxy M73, vanquishing monsters.  

Dynamo    
     Masami is as energetic as ever. Her year began with the Back Street Boys’ Tokyo Dome concert. Hide and Seika went to Tokyo with her. The whole family went to the Nihonbashi financial district to show Seika the Bank of Japan, with its Currency Museum, Mitsukoshi, the oldest and most prestigious department store in Japan (visitors often get struck dumb at the beauty and grandeur of its much renowned wooden female deity Kissho Tennyo, and so did the family), and the Tokyo Stock Exchange. They also went to Tokyo’s tallest Metropolitan Government building. From its observation deck, they could see smog-smeared swarms of small buildings like so many scattered mah-jongg tiles close at hand and snow-capped Mt. Fuji far away. Then they parted. While she raved among the fifty thousand-strong audience brimming the stadium, Hideaki showed Seika around the now-famous otaku-emporium Akihabara. Seika got his dad to buy two new pieces of game software at an eleven-story (two basement levels included) castle outlet Yodobashi Electronics.
        She worked part-time at a Takara Standard bathroom and kitchen fixture showroom but quit it at the end of September. Is she idling away at home now? A big Noooo! She went to a Tokyo prep seminar every Wednesday for her challenge at the Interior Coordinator Stage 2 exam; attended weekly art lumiere lessons in an adjacent town; and went to Tokyo theaters to see her favorite actors.

       At the beginning of October, Masami had Lisa and David over. The pity was that Hideaki had work and could not talk with them. They came here at Japanese businessmen’s invitation and did the sights. On their way back to Narita Airport, they dropped by. 

       Her year closes with another Dome concert. In late November, she went all the way to Tokyo Dome again in central Tokyo to see and listen to Billy "Stranger" & "Honesty" Joel. The ballpark concert that would prove to allow her time travel back to her youth in the early eighties began at seven in the evening and forced her to come home a bit before midnight. Did dad and kid have a lonely night without mom? Another big no! Thanks to her absence, Hide, who usually goes to bed while Seika is enjoying taking a bath with mom, had quality time with his son: a long-missed opportunity to read Seika a book in bed, after a long absence.  

Cage Birds
 
   Their summer tour included Alcatraz Island, San Francisco Bay. Once a jailhouse compound for most heinous and violent criminals, the mid-bay small clump of land is now remodeled into a tourist attraction, though most of the confinement facilities are kept intact. The family walked through the corridors, peered through the iron grids into the cells, and sometimes glanced up at the "gallery" from which they say guns were aiming just in case. Dark and cold cells, the hard cots and flimsy sinks, and not much fun, Hide imagined. How did the vicious inmates like Al Capone, Robert "Birdman" Stroud, or George "Machine Gun" Kelly, looking at the flowering Frisco just across a strip of water, feel about being trapped in such a place? Just no better than the ailing Chrysanthemum Princess back home.
 
Taking a picture of Sam and Seika with the San Francisco skyline as the backdrop, he came up with an idea and presented it to his wife:  "Say, honey. Why don't we buy out this island and clear all those dirty buildings; have a new house of ours built and live here? Good scenery, fresh air. Nothing is so perfect." The proposition got spurned by Sam right off the bat. The reason: The commute to and from Narita where he works would be too long.
       Hideaki has been back to normal this year. He no longer flew ten times a year this year. He mostly stayed home and stuck in his den. His recent heats are to listen to, not read, English novels. Last year in New York, at a Penn Station hole-in-the-wall book store, to be precise, he encountered a Da Vinci Code audio CD set. He impulse-bought it, brought it home and listened. This got him addicted. Since then, instead of actually reading, he has come to prefer to listen rather than read. His current challenge is Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian. It takes time. Out of ten CDs, he has now come to the 8th. Is March far enough to finish the Dracula corpse search saga?
      Masami's sister Yuko and her hubby Masatoshi and son Shunsuke are in Hong Kong. Shun began elementary school. They come home two or three times a year, but spend most of the year there.       
      Masami's parents Teruaki and Hideko are fine. This year too, they went abroad: Germany and Switzerland.      
     Hideaki's parents Yoshifumi and Kiyoko are barely managing to live independently. Their conditions are not too good, having to see doctors once in a while, but mostly they can take care of themselves.

Whip Your Will
         Depressing futures menacing over the horizon notwithstanding, Hide-Sam life has been entrancing this year too. What's the secret? Tell you what. Courage is the key.   Recall how you define courage. Courage is not a windfall that inspires you because there is a bright future guaranteed; it is an act of hoping against hope, something you generate, in spite of no promises, against all odds. It takes "virtue" to pluck it up, and they've got it. Thank you very much.

     We wish you a very Merry Christmas and another  courageous New Year. 

　　   Masami, Hideaki, and Seika. 

  

It’s been quite a while since globalization became the talk of the town. Storms that raged in Seattle or Davos are fresh in memory even today. To say the world is flat is a platitude. The borderless world is a household term. Globalization is marketplaces cropping up in every nook and cranny the world over and acting just like one single trading place.

So, this year, Masami and Hideaki traded places. Masami was an outdoorswoman. In fact she never got satisfied with staying in one place. She was an avatar of the shrinking world, quick silver her middle name. Hideaki was a sedentary type. He seldom went out, even out of his own house, with a penchant for reading, thinking, watching videos, or surfing the Net. This year saw the guy and the gal the other way around. 

As hard at it as ever

Last year Sam’s efforts won her a success in the Welfare Housing Coordinator Exam; she beamed with her next ambition for a 2^nd Grade Architect certificate. She never paused. This year, she began three-nights-a-week schooling at Nikken preparatory school in February, and quit her executive secretary job at Nippon Eirich at the end of July, bent on and immersed in the study of construction-related laws, structural mechanics calculations, and drafting. Rarely out for golfing, she clung to the books and drawing board set on the after-supper dining table every evening. She also had schooling in Chiba for a three-month Housing Renovation seminar and in Ikebukuro, Tokyo for a two-day seminar for last-minute preparation for the drafting exam. The two-stage exam was in August and September. In a nutshell, she boned up and snatched the win. That was not all. She also grabbed Interior Coordinator’s and Interior Planner’s credentials into the bargain. Hers turned out a prime example of efforts never failing to pay off. It was good, Hideaki thought, indeed good in many ways. Seika, 10, saw all this. She retained, nevertheless, some remnants of her past self. She itches without at least an overseas trip a year. The Hide-Sam family went on a Washington-New York-Niagara trip towards the end of August, on her own planning. Sam, Hideaki, and Seika, not to mention Hidebo, Paddie and his kid brother Junior, enjoyed the grand capital townscapes, Gotham hustle and bustle, and soothing negative ions of the cataract mist, to their hearts’ content. 
Hideaki, a born den-dweller, might as well have been taken for a different person this year. He was busy as a bee, so to speak, with little time, to use a Japanese figure of speech, left for his seat to be warmed. Remember the bombing incidents in London on the first Thursday of July? Hide, on a school order, was to depart to London on the coming Sunday morning, leading 15 students. The kids were going to polish their English for two weeks at a Haileybury College, a wee-less-than-an-hour bus ride from the London Metropolitan Minefield. Day tours to central London had been scheduled. Given little time to debate whether to go or not, they took off. Bomb voyage?Luckily, and purely so, they each came home in one piece. Hide, on his own judgment, had all the planned London excursions called off. The excursions to Windsor-Eton, Cambridge, and Briton that replaced them were peaceful, relaxing and fun.Hide had already flown eight times when the family tour was over: twice on the trip to the UK and back, and then to LaGuardia, New York; to Ron Reagan, Washington D.C; back to JFK, New York; to Niagara; back wherefrom to New York; and finally back to Narita. This was, however, not all. More was yet coming.

In November, when the tans he got in the UK and US had faded, Cairns, Australia was his new destination. He knew what he was running up against on this school journey: an eight-hour red-eye flight; the hot, humid weather; and the scorching sun in the southern hemisphere. But who Cairns? The tropical sea shores, emerald oceans and Great Barrier Reef beckon. Hide, now a born-again globe-trotter, gobbles up the whole itinerary of Kuranda ropeway-railway sight-seeing, snorkeling on a Green Island beach, Great Barrier Reef cruising, half-day free roaming of the city, and a Tropical Zoo visit – phew, it’s a zoo.Da Vinci Code villain Sir Leigh Teabing says, “Those who seek  the truth are more than friends. They’re brothers.” The Hide-Sam family is far beyond that. Masami delved into construction expertise and Hideaki flew over five continents and seven seas – in fact a bit fewer than that, though – for the truth of the evolving world. The parental grail hunt may have rubbed off on their son. Seika is in quest for the truth of Pettit Supermarket.Seika earns \350 a week. A \300 comes from his draining and scrubbing the bathtub every evening. He washes his own pair of shoes on Sundays. That adds another \50. This accrues a handsome sum for him to spend every week, or if he saves, every month. True, he still plays computer games on the Net mainly, and this and that game on these Nintendos and those Sonys.  But he pours all his weekly earnings into his new passion: Petit Supermarket hyper-real miniatures of market products. He now owns dozen boxes of them. He requests a new series featuring market display shelves and a kitchen fridge named Mrs. Aplenty for a Christmas present from his Grandpa and Grandma.

He studies hard also. He goes to Kumon cram school twice a week and does all its daily arithmetic and English assignments, as well as school-assigned tasks. Sam’s parents, Teruaki and Hideko, are as spry as ever. They traveled abroad twice this year too. Europe is always their favorite destination: Rome in spring and Munich, Nuremberg and Frankfurt in December.  Yuko, Sam’s sister, is in Hong Kong due to her hubby Masatoshi’s relocation. While her husband works in the subtropical office, she stays home practicing traditional Chinese calisthenics tai chi chu’an. Shunsuke, their only son, enjoys his kindergarten life with his new friends there. He wants Kabigon, a new addition to the Pokemon variety, for his Christmas present from his granddad and grandma. Hideaki’s parents Yoshifumi and Kiyoko, though not in need of any help leading lives at home, live not so actively, though they are well enough and do go out sometimes, to do shopping or to see doctors. Yoshifumi, towards the end of November, went on a bus tour crossing three prefecture borders. But he says he learned a lesson: Hours’ bus ride is no longer for him. 

Well, that’s some of what happened in 2005. We wish you a Merry Christmas and another brilliant New Year.  

Ishihara Masami, Hideaki, and Seika

Like Edna the XL-attitude diminutive fashion diva in The Incredibles, Masami and Hideaki only look forward; never back (“It distracts from the now.”). When they had to write a Christmas message about each year’s happenings, spontaneous remembrance sufficed. They just had to see sweet and bitter memories passing through their mind like a merry-go-round. Just as happened to the old-tale cobbler, after they hit the bed, dwarfs popped out of nowhere, and the next morning, voila, their year-end greetings were on the kitchen table, crisply printed out, ready to be sent out.This year, though, those kind busybodies didn’t ever seem to appear, leaving the hitherto carefree Hide-Sam high and dry. Push finally came to shove. They looked back.  

When they looked back, the year 2004, it seemed, had already started in 2003, or even more before. In other words, this eventful year had been meant to be. The stream of events had already started in 2003. When they waved good-by and thanks to the well-rounded guy clad in red and white back in 2003, they had already packed up for a journey to the Grand Canyon --- over the turn of the year. They witnessed the towering Zion cliffs, snow-blanketed and mist-shrouded Bryce Canyon, freezing Monument Valley, and of course, the grandeur of the Grand Canyon: the end-of-year sunset, crisp view of the Milky Way the family together looked up to on their way back from supper, and 2004’s first daybreak on the edge of the chasm that could gulp oceans down. The stopover at Las Vegas on their way back enabled a reunion with the Nyreens also.
Traveling twice all the way to the United States in one year may sound like luxury. It really is, for a family that lives on a school teacher’s chickenfeed salary. Thanks, however, to Masami, who boasts her skill to make her hubby’s earnings double its worth, selling already unnecessary goods and buying rock-bottom price necessities on the Internet, they could afford the second trip, this time to the Yellow Stone National Park in summer. After seeing the Great Salt Lake and Mormon monuments during their stopover at Salt Lake City, they flew to South Dakota, starting their bus journey. On the way, they met four presidents in Rapid City and a now only half completed Crazy Horse Native American chieftain, carved in rock; circled the sky-scraping basaltic Devil’s Tower (encounters with the swell-headed aliens not included); and arrived at last in the Yellow Stone National Park. Old Faithful (the namesake of the hotel they stayed at) and Castle Geyser, Mammoth Hot Springs terraces, grazing American bison hordes, a long-horned moose, and fossil digging were just part of what they had.
 The year sure has been a stream of fascinating events, but the one that Seika made occur dwarfed everything else.Television has been in the living room for long. It is always on, speaking, singing, dancing and acting. It is so close we even scarcely feel its existence; a mere extension of our workaday living. But everything changes when someone close, very close, gets exposed on it. Especially when Seika, the apple of our eye, appears on Japan’s nationwide public broadcaster’s Sunday afternoon variety show, all the family members, close and distant relatives, school mates and teachers, coworkers, neighbors and acquaintances --- get excited.  
When it was announced that an NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) show would come around to Narita to shoot its Sunday, September 26, 2004 installment, and hold an audition for it on the preceding Saturday, Seika insisted he sign up. Masami, suddenly a stage Mom, took him to the audition, saw him pass it, then the next day, found herself waiting with him on the wing for his turn to come. There were five audition-selected entrants, and Seika was the fourth to go on stage. From among his large assortment of mnemonic feats, at the NHK director’s insistence after the audition, Seika recited all the names of Japan’s post-war prime ministers, plus their contemporary highlights. He won Grand Prix, along with a trophy, the emcees’ autographs, a Swatch watch, and a portable CD player (the one he now uses to practice a little bit of English). The feat again had already been destined to happen even before 2004, because Seika had always flabbergasted folks by reciting all the names of not only Japanese prime ministers, but also all the Japanese emperors and all the presidents and all the states and their capitals of the United States --- since years ago. Masami, a born challenge-seeker, had already in 2003 conceived an ambition of taking a test for a Housing Welfare Coordinator qualification. Studying day and night (even listening to lecture tapes driving to and from work), she passed the July exam and is now officially qualified. Her next ambition being to get a Second-Grade Architect qualification, she goes to specialist school on Sunday mornings and listens to make-up and review lectures on the Internet. This year for Hideaki, not like always, was a series of drab and disappointing experiences. In early summer, he took the TOEIC English proficiency test and tried to grab another perfect-score feat. He fell 10 points short and only scored a frustrating 980. In fall, he was driving Seika one evening to an ENT doctor in the twilight hour. Scarcely had his car rolled out into the main street out of an alley when a screeching noise was heard, and bong, a compact hit the right-side front fender of his car. The compact bounced and hit another waiting to turn into the same alley Hideaki had pulled out of. It took as long as nearly seven weeks to settle on the damage compensation. Luckily, no one involved was injured, including Seika and Hideaki, to the relief of the whole family. 
In contrast to his son’s foul-ups, Yoshifumi, Hideaki’s father, seems as spry as ever, at least intellectually. Meiji Shrine, the mausoleum for Emperor Meiji, annually conducts a Japanese short-poem contest. Yoshi had faithfully devoted his tour de force every year and never heard any notice from the sanctuary. This year, however, by depicting his own blessings at a three-generation dinner table, he won a prize and was invited to the prize-awarding ceremony in Harajuku, Tokyo, allowing his wife Kiyoko to feel proud once again.  Teruaki and Hideko, Masami’s parents, are fine as usual. They took two overseas trips to Europe. They stayed at Teru’s old German acquaintance’s in May, and visited Italy in November. While at home, they together enjoy practicing tai chi. Teru works part-time at night at a community center and Hideko sings as an amateur chorus group member.  Yuko, Sam’s sister, and her hubby Masatoshi moved in spring from Yokohama to Kawasaki, both in the same Kanagawa Prefecture. Their son Shunsuke is in his second year in kindergarten. Teru and Hideko drove two hours to Kawasaki to see his field day. In September, the family went to Palau, in the Central Pacific, and made a one-week holiday. Masatoshi’s main purpose there was to sleep and rest, period. He wakes up early, works his tail off in the office until late and comes home and hits the hay in the wee hours most of the days. Keep your fingers crossed that he keeps in shape. Well, this has been part of what happened this year. We wish you a Merry Christmas and another brilliant New Year!  Masami, Hideaki and Seika

Everything that has a beginning, has an end. So says the Matrix prophet, and so may go the Hide-Sam family’s year 2003, which went, not as usual, with none of its glob-trotting. For one silly reason or another, Hide-Sam has had to settle for several petty local tours, if you count them so, for most of the year again this year. By the time this message arrives at their friends throughout the world, however, they will have managed to get away from it all: they’ll be seeing this passing year off and witnessing 2004’s dawn, away from home, at one of the cliff edges of the Grand Canyon, Arizona, USA. Hideaki may remember the outgoing 2003 for long, because for him it began and ends with two separate impressive public exposures.Early in the year, in January and March, articles on English learning he wrote at the request of a Treasure Island publisher were carried in its Takara-jima magazine extra issues, hitting the bookstore shelves throughout the nation. The publisher, having heard about the TOEIC perfect score he had won last year, had phoned him one night and coveted him for contribution. This was his first media exposure and gave his family a handsome sum. Hideaki, at his wife’s suggestion, opted to spend the dough to buy two Marie Laurencin lithographs and have them framed. One is now hanging in their bedroom, the other in the closet waiting for its eventual turn for a change.Later in the year, in October, he gave serial lectures, not for his usual languid lads and lasses, but for adult English enthusiasts, their age ranging between 25 and well above 70. The city hall-organized adult enlightenment seminar received full-capacity sign-ups well before the deadline and was held for five consecutive Saturdays. Even after two or three weeks had passed after its beginning, people who heard about it called in for permission for attendance. Weeks before the seminar termination, attendees began asking Hideaki when his seminar like it would be held next; whether he was willing to teach in their English learning gathering at the Community Center.  For Masami also, this year marked a beginning and an end: her forties have begun and her thirties ended. Confucius says the onset of his forties terminated his hesitation. Masami at forty, however, still wavers between this and that: whether to continue with her gal-Friday job or to knock it all off and pick up some new knowledge and skills to start something wholly new.Golf has been her constant enthusiasm the whole year round, despite quite a contingency. One stormy night in October, tornadoes raided her neighborhood driving range, leaving its facility almost entirely written-off. As the next day’s news footage showed, its towering net-suspending metal pillars got twisted like so many stampeding dinosaurs’ necks. She has had to change her practice site to somewhere a bit out in the backwoods since then. While she perspires practicing hitting the small balls, on two nights a week before this happening and on one after, Seika has to eat lonely supper alone with Dad. Any way, those minor accidents notwithstanding, she made her golf course debut this year and has since visited several courses with her pals, enjoying her new hobby to her heart’s content.   Seika seems to enjoy his Mumbo Club after-school daycare hours more than his school life. Along with his peers, he digs the garden and builds canals, explores the backyard forests, bakes and eats sweet potatoes in the bonfires of fallen leaves in the garden. He could not spend a Mom&Dad-less night in its summer camp last year, but this year he could stay and sleep overnight with his pals in one of the tents in the Mumbo garden.After finishing his homework, he nightly visits his grandpa Yoshifumi and plays shogi (Japanese chess). He hates losing, so Yoshi offers him a win or two sometimes. While with them, he also orates about the new erudition he acquired during the daytime and leaves his grandparents speechless much to their pleasant surprise. Grandma Kiyoko’s responsibility is to deliver him back home, just less than twenty footsteps away from her kitchen door.  Teruaki and Hideko are fit as a pair of fiddles. They practice Taijiquan once every week, and walk briskly half an hour every evening. They traveled to Germany and revisited where Teru worked when young. Teru found some people who still remember the buildings and places he had seen back then and could no longer see now. They moved house in early June to where Hideaki and Masami lived. The condo Teru and Hide used to live in was on the third floor and it was gradually becoming hard to climb up and down the stairs every time. So they set their eyes on the Hide-Sam condo that had been rented out after they had moved out to their new house. Having renovated the whole space, they are now leading a whole new life in a whole new environment.  Yuko, Masatoshi and their son Shunsuke are doing fine. Shunsuke is now a kindergartener. With Hubby often abroad on business, Yuko comes home to Teru and Hideko with Shusuke, much to the grandparents’ delight. When Shusuke comes, Seika, ordinarily reluctant to stay away from his mom, gladly joins in to stay overnight at granddad and grandma’s. In the fall, Teru and Hideko went to Yokohama to watch Shunsuke’s first field day. It was a trip of three hours one way by car.  Well, that’s part of the news this year. We sincerely wish you all a Very Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year.  

We have to hurry again. Christmas, or even New Year is pressing on. The time to look back and remember another busy year of ours has once again come around. And this year is something special we can never miss. (Did we say this last year too? Forget it.) You’d have to wait a century and a decade until 2112 should you want to talk about a year that made a numerical palindrome like this. Boy, would we have to live a long life Methuselah would pale before!  

Busy busing and biking
“Old habits die hard,” says an English proverb, and, according to a Japanese saying, “You can’t fight the traits that run in your blood.”For Seika, this year was a true watershed, in that he entered elementary school and Mumbo Club after-school care center, made a lot of friends, and, above all the other exciting new challenges, started commuting by bus. Busing expanded his world in the true sense of the word. He got hooked on route buses.All began with his begging to go out with Masami no matter what the destinations were. Wherever he went in his Mom’s Prius, he kept his eyes wide open like big saucers and looked for bus stops on the roadsides. Then he avidly learned how to read the destination signs on the buses he saw come and go; asked how far those places were. One day Hideaki came home with a full-color map from City Hall with the detailed bus routes and stops, and tacked it on the wall of their living room. Seika kept looking at it day in and day out and memorized all the routes and bus stop names, and also all the place names of their surrounding areas. When the summer holiday began, he loudly uttered his wish to visit the bus termini he had seen on the buses or on the map. Beginning with a Jimbei Pump House terminus, he went in a car Hideaki or Masami drove to Yukawa Depot and Tamatsukuri, both Narita New Town’s innermost termini; Sawara, a city two municipalities away; Oomuro, out in Narita backwoods; JR Yachimata Station, three municipalities away; and Tsukiawase, beyond the Tone River and out in adjacent Ibaragi Prefecture. Each time, he got on the bus alone, spent an hour or so in the bus until it took him back to Narita Station Terminal (sometimes making friends with girls who he called “pretty” that happened to get on board midway, and enjoying chatting with them), paid the right amount for a fare, got off and walked back home, all by himself. On the way, he heard the in-car announcement and found out how the mysterious bus stop names he had seen on the map on the living room wall were pronounced. His lectures (including what those bus stops are called) came in order after his adventures. The blood of Masami the globetrotter runs in him.At the beginning of the same summer, Seika mastered riding his bicycle, finally without the training wheels. When Daiei, an ailing big supermarket chain, withdrew from the town next to Narita in late July, Hideaki and Masami found a brand new bicycle on closedown sale. They hesitated a bit, but knowing Seika had been practicing biking on a rusty second-hand bike, they bought it. Seika at first showed only nominal interest in it, but he took his daily trips to and from the house of his friend Nobu on that brand new bicycle the whole summer. Nobu lives only less than fifty yards away.   

Busy with balls
Irritated and fed up with the permanently allergy-stricken thus sedentary Hideaki, Masami decided to begin practicing golf and tennis, not with him. She found out a tennis club at the far edge of the New Town and signed up. On Saturdays, when both she and Seika are off, they go together and take separate lessons. At least for now, Seika’s prospect for playing in Wimbledon in the future seems less than slim. The likelihood of Masami’s dream of getting slender legs through exercise to come true seems as slim too. Two nights a week, after eating supper with Seika and Hideaki, she goes alone to a neighborhood driving range and practices. She got a golf bag with Cookie Monster printed on it for a birthday gift from Hideaki. What about the stuff that has to go in it? Which leads us to how Masami makes twofold use of her hubby’s chicken-feed income. Besides tennis and golf ball, she also avidly plays mouse ball, and got the golf clubs she carries in it in a Net auction, at a rock-bottom discount. She’s now a heavy Net auction addict, with her Net-trophies arriving every less than three days. How cheaply she got them, including many daily necessities, is what she proudly brags about of late to anyone every chance she gets. 

Busy with the bulletin-board
Hideaki’s 2002 has been as epochal as Seika’s.Until recently, when a question “What is your hobby?” was raised, Hideaki’s immediate answer was, “My wife” period. But this summer, his short list of hobbies was joined by something new. Now he answers, “My wife and the Net BBS.”A web-site All About Japan, the Japanese affiliate of US’s About.com, is run by Masami’s college classmate and About’s editor in chief Sayuri Sacchie Morikawa, and through that connection, he came to know about its BBS in early spring. Once he began posting in summer, he got hooked. Ordinarily he goes to bed at 9:30, even earlier than Seika, but after he got addicted, he sometimes stays up until 11 p.m. writing his messages, at times in English at one of his opponents’ urge, and gets up at 5:10 to see if there is any reply. He mainly discusses the deplorable English education situation in Japan. He castigates many lax English teachers who lack even the basic speaking command of the very language they daily teach. This has turned out to be fairly controversial. He’s made many foes on the BBS, but also found a few soul mates never to be found in his own workplace.Teacher of English, he has been applying himself to the TOEIC English proficiency test. He started off with the score of 920 out of 990 in 1992, got a nearly perfect 975 in 2000, and this year finally grabbed the perfect 990 in May 2002. Now he stands atop all the other 79 thousand applicants throughout the world.  

Vertiego in San Diego
San Diego. The sound of it rings to Masami like a place of pilgrimage long longed for. One year after the confounded terrorists and Seika’s fevers ruined her plans to visit San Diego, she stood up to take twofold revenge or more. You know who she is. This year, she would conquer the South Californian port resort at long last. Swimming in a plush-hotel pool, visiting theme parks, and aquariums, even shopping around for a house to live after Hideaki’s retirement were already on her itinerary last year. The peak attraction was San Diego Zoo. All the three of them were just astounded by its vastness. After strolling under the punishing sun, resting in the tree shades and being overjoyed with a big serving of ice cream, Seika resumed walking and found himself at the end of a long line that led to the panda house. Seeing people remain orderly and none breaking into the line, Hideaki couldn’t help asking Masami beside him, “Why is it called pandamonium?” And then the aerial ropeway. Hung more than 200 feet high mid-air above the zoo ground and able to see for miles around, Masami kept screaming all the way. Hence the title.  

We wish you a very merry Christmas and a happy new year.  

Love,  Hideaki, Masami and Seika 

Do you still remember that we are in a new age?And do you remember how it felt like when you arrived in a new century, in a new millennium?Well, for us, it’s been like visiting a country never before visited. Before arriving, we were blown up with expectations. It’s a new century out there. A brave new world must be in store for us. A whole new set of rules, a new order, a new paradigm. We’re finally getting away from it all. Once we have arrived, however, we still have to breathe and eat to stay active; catch colds and feel embarrassed with pants down; and work to bring home even the base bacon. Nothing whatsoever new in the newly arrived age, either! We even tend to forget we are on this side of the new millennium.“Nothing” may be too much to say still. There’ve been a few new happenings worth telling this year, just as many as there were in any year of the past century. For Masami, the born globetrotter, this has been a helluva year. And so too may next year.The Hide-Sam family went overseas every summer in the last century. They went to Hawaii, New York, Thai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Florida, Guam, Seattle-Vancouver, and Las Vegas, with Masami always as the planner. From the beginning of the year, Masami was planning on a trip to San Diego, California. Swimming in a plush-hotel pool, visiting theme parks and aquariums, even shopping around for a house to live after Hideaki’s retirement were on her itinerary. Seika’s frequent fevers in spring, however, forced her to take too many paid days off. At first, she considered settling for Hawaii, or even Guam where they could visit by taking fewer days off because there is less or little jet-lag time loss. Such a hassle would only take away from the joy, she thought, so they went on a three-day bus tour on Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. Cairns, Australia during the year-end break was her next hope; then she wouldn’t have to take paid days off; they could be back before New Year. Alas, the world changed in September. Suddenly air travel became everybody’s nightmare. They couldn’t take their jewel kid with them overseas. Masami could, but his grandpas and grandmas wouldn’t let them. Especially after winning in late September a Mickey-relieved suitcase with all its inside lined with Mickey-printed cloth in a net lottery, she hates terrorists, she hates war, she hates being stuck home. The September-11 incident also changed Hideaki’s fate. On a school journey, he was to go to Sydney, Australia in November. From the beginning of the year, he was reading Sydney Morning Herald via the Internet, studying Australian history and Sydney geography, and singing its national anthem Advance Australian Fair every night. Alas, the school journey was called off towards the end of September by the principal at the suggestion of the all-powerful MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Science and Technology). The plan was changed and the new destination was Osaka and Kyoto, the east-Japan megalopolises. The second day of their five-day tour was to be dedicated to the kuidaore Dine & Die District in the Dotonbori, Osaka. That morning, he presented his students with his presents. Out of pity for the ruined trip to Australia, he’d managed by all means to get hold of five packs each of two Australian delicacies, crocodile and kangaroo jerky. He wishes he could put the blame on the kuidaore visit and that the problem would go away as the Dine & Die memory faded away, but his Battle of the Bulge is now years long, carried over from the last century.  It’s always said that there’re three important things for children. They are study, study and study. It’s been such a year for Seika. Seeing Dad and Mom using the computer, he has learned to play games on the Internet and to use the Encarta Encyclopedia. Hearing his father recite all the US Presidents’ names, he has learned them all. He dwarfs his father even. Consulting Encarta, he can recognize all the faces that go with those names. His father only recites all the family names but Seika, by consulting Encarta, has learned all the first, middle and family names of all the US Presidents. Do you know what the “S” in Harry S Truman stands for? Seika does. By the end of summer, he learned to recite all the US states and their capitals, all the names of all the Japanese Emperors; and all the Showa-to-Heisei-era Japanese Prime Ministers’ names. For those who fear lest all work and no play make him dull: No problem. He plays a lot of Game Boy Advance, with no good effects on his eyesight. He plays with Lego on his own while telling a lot of self-made stories, board games with his Dad, Japanese chess with his granddad. He has finally founded the Ishihara Children’s Toy Research Institute in his tatami-matted den and is hard at it as self-proclaimed president-cum-chief researcher-cum-gofer-cum-janitor. He says that his room, though looking like a mess on the surface, is in fact carefully planned arranged, and insists that Mom’s vacuum not trespass on the Institute’s premises. He is still learning how to ride a bicycle. This year, he has learned to straddle his de-outrigged bicycle and to barely walk on his tiptoes. He still prefers moving forward with his feet down to pedaling the bike on his own. Masami’s parents Teruaki and Hideko traveled to Germany, Hungary and Czech in spring. Teru is still learning German. Hideko, leader of a community chorus group this year, successfully held a singing presentation in fall. Seika attended the session, saw his grandma sing and compliment, and clapped. This year for Hideaki’s father Yoshifumi was monumental. He wrote his autobiography and compiled the Japanese short verses he had made for the last quarter century, and published them in a book. Mobilized as a proofreader, Hideaki unexpectedly found out about his father’s hitherto hidden youth experience. His wife Kiyoko was mostly in bed and lost weight. She was weak in summer, but towards the end of the year, she seems to have recovered and is all right. We wish you a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. (Phew, W would, but this year we finally don’t have to be so Texas-sized as “a Happy Millennium.”) 

To: Our friends

 

 

Was the year 2000 one of the dragon soaring into the clouds, a jewel in its claw (as the Chinese Zodiac goes); a divide between a decade and a dozen years after the Hide-Sam matrimony; or a dress-rehearsal for the yet-to-arrive third millennium, much touted by many hasty minds as already here about a year ago? Had it been a dragon's year, it should have dragged our economy and politics out of the much too protracted doldrums. It certainly did not. Workplaces are leaner and meaner, politics more farcical than ever. Was it just another landing on our way to the next family floor? No. The Hide-Sam marriage is something definitely different, ever more loving and exciting than ever. Thank you very much. Nor was this the new millennium's year one, but just another doorstep to the new century. We even doubt if there's a key under the doormat.

 

Waxing nostalgic about the passing year aside, the tense cannot be past; again, we've got to hurry. There's no time we can afford to lose before sending out our annual memoir, while we are, not were, still in the year 2000.

 

This has been a year of trips. As soon as the last new year arrived, both Ishiharas, parents included, and Nambas went on a trip to the hibernating resort in the southern part of the Boso peninsula, not very far from where they live. Both sets of their parents had fun sharing relaxed and peaceful time, savoring fresh marine delicacies, and above all, seeing the kaleidoscope of Seika's facial expressions while enjoying watching a fur seal show of a sea life park. In summer, the Hide-Sam family revisited Hawaii for the first time in six years. One of the purposes was to show Seika Waioli Chapel, where they had wedded. 'Kool' was the impression he got. A circle-island tour that Masami broached and they took on day five turned out a great enjoyment. The white sands on Kailua and Sun Set Beaches, China Man's Hat, and the Dole Plantation maze are still all unforgettable merry memories. With her lion heart and his allegiance, Hideaki keenly realized, theirs is an unbeatable team. But for Masami, he couldn't have even dreamed of driving on the island. Seoul, South Korea, now free from missile-menace thanks to Kim Dae Jung, was their third destination. Seika had fun in Lotte World, the amusement park. Masami saw the proof of Chosun dishes in the eating. Hideaki bought a box of ginseng tea powder in hopes of better health and made a new pair of glasses. Low prices and amicable people made impressions. The sights of the urban highway and subway systems still keep Hideaki wondering why this country is deemed poorer than his own shabby inefficient home country.

 

Seika, now five since summer, can both read all and write part of Japanese syllabary. To some adults' surprise, he reads some Chinese characters; recites part of the multiplication table; adds single-digit numbers; and mentions the prime ministers' names. He makes good judgements. One day he went with his father to a nearby shopping mall to see a show by two heroes from Galaxy M75. When Hideaki returned after browsing at a bookshop to where Seika was supposedly enjoying the show, the show had been over and there was no Seika. In other words, he (which he?) got lost. Hideaki scurried around the whole mall, frantic, in search of Seika. Missing, abduction, a picture on the milk carton were some of the words that crossed his mind. Seika, on the other hand, did not cry, and went to the toy department where he usually spends time while Mom is shopping, and continued enjoying himself. He was sure Dad would find him there sooner or later. He rides his bicycle, still out-rigged. The only skill he acquired since last year is to brake when the speed is up.

  

Masami, a born learner, continues to apply herself to German study. In November, she took the fourth-grade Test of German Proficiency. Though the official results have not been announced, Masami says she's assured of her success. Hopefully, her efforts paid off and will still go on. Passing the second-grade test by 40 is her next ambition. The Internet-access recently cable-facilitated has enabled Masami to spend substantial lengths of time web-surfing. Sickened by the domestic zero interest rates, she'd been looking for a new way in the stock market and now is staking her nest egg via a virtual security company, with a great ambition of making a fortune out of it. Well, so far, making another Bill Gates is NOT a snap. Her struggling, trial and error will continue into the coming century…till she lucks out. May she not get cricks from clicks and God bless her!

 

For Hideaki, this has been a year of his temperatures too soaring into the clouds. Twice in summer, once early in July and next in mid-August, he contracted a bad cold from Seika. Seika soon recovered but Hideaki's temperature rose to over 39 degrees Celsius (102 degrees　F) and, on the second occasion, stayed up and confined him in bed for a week. The family trip to Hawaii must have been ruined had Masami not insisted just two days before departure that he visit a different doctor, grab a different febrifuge and embark on the plane to Hawaii with it. It was not only his fever that skyrocketed this year. Remember he is an English teacher? In Japan, English is earning a whole new place, with some heavyweights advocating making it the nation's second official language. (They're talkin' `bout Global Literacy, ha.) Only the teachers'　salaries stay the same. Yes, amid the clamor, he remembered it. He took a TOEIC test in May and scored a nearly perfect 975, out of 990. Once in 1992, he had taken one and scored 920.

 

We wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy, and this time genuinely New, Millennium. The key is under the potted poinsettia.

 

Masami, Hideaki and Seika Ishihara (registered since 1989.)

 

P.S. Let us officially announce that we have virtually moved to a new address.

xxxx@yyy.zzzz
We still live where we lived in the real world, so feel free to drop by when you come near.

   

- Hideaki, Masami and Seika 

Whims make life fun. A life led only methodically can be suffocating. Perhaps not at last year’s end, though. After managing to send out their Christmas cards in time and shaking hands with the well-rounded annual visitor in red and white, Hideaki and Masami got a sudden whim of taking Seika to Tokyo Disneyland. That would be fun. It would be less crowded than usual there. They actually went December 27 and had one day that was fun, and severely cold. At the year’s very end, Seika had chicken pox. Their family doc said both Hideaki and Masami were feared to have been infected. They got vaccination shots, cancelled almost all their yearend and New Year plans. One whim sure led to a wanton year opening. (Seika soon recovered.) 

Well, where were we? Yes. 1999’s quirky beginning. 

Quirky or not, Masami will have been with the industrial-mixer company for 15 months towards this yearend. Already an old hand at her gal-Friday job, she finds herself heavily depended upon in the office, sometimes so much so that she feels like grumbling. She translates, goes on pickup or send-off errands to and from the station or the airport, books hotel rooms, trains and flights for her colleagues, fixes and serves coffee for visitors, prepares for and attends mixer exhibitions (has to come home late on such occasions). Talking of quirky, she began learning German this year, since hers is a German-affiliated firm. One day in fall, she got a call from the German head office, and managed to handle business in German. Phew.  

It has been another stormy year for Hideaki. He had been grumbling about his increasing gray hair. Its number still increased this year. He began training as a spoken English proficiency tester in early spring. His stomach-boring struggle continued for four months from February through May until he got a certificate. In late July, he took a dozen students to Australia on a school journey. Among those staying there for two weeks, Hideaki was the only one who fell sick for home. How much did the two-week ordeal pay him? A small pittance. Anyway, maybe you should not make a prophet when you go around with twelve students. In charge of graduating students this year, Hideaki found this fall chock full of work and stress. For him, there was no room for quirkiness. Phew. 

Seika is growing, and growing well. At four, he can ride a bicycle, if outrigged. He’s already learned all the Japanese syllable letters, and reads his picture books to Dad in bed. He plays all day at nursery school with his pals, and bites back when bitten sometimes by some of them. He returned home one day with an adhesive-attached patch of gauze on the shoulder, and, according to him, so did Yuki and Mune. He can state his name, age and address. He did actually, when he went around on his own and got missing in the nearby Toys’R’Us. He sure gives them heart-wrenching moments. Phew. 

Las Vegas was this year’s destination for the summer journey. Why the town of gambling and prostitution for a family trip with a four-year-old? No. Las Vegas today is neither Sodom nor Gomorrah any more; it’s thrilling theme parks, opulent shopping malls, conventions and exhibitions, and a one-day Hoover Dam and Lake Mead tour (a picture taken therein enclosed), and, to cap it all, if old acquaintances live there, it is a perfect place for a family with a kid. A visit to Masami’s host sister Chrissy Nyreen and her fiance Chiang Lin’s home was both fun and inspiring. Masami enjoyed talking to Chrissy after a long separation. Hideaki was impressed by Chiang’s unpretentious but confident modus vivendi. Of all the exciting theme park attractions there, the Star Trek’s Clingons the villains enthralled Seika the most; they appeared in real flesh while he was waiting in line with Mom and Dad. He still wants to be there again. Hideaki could hardly find his English at the sight of their menacing looks, and barely shook hands with one of them and got a picture taken by Masami.   

Masami’s parents Teruaki and Hideko traveled to Paris, Rome and London in spring. They had originally planned a trip to Eastern Europe, but with their tour package cancelled due to too few signups, they reconciled themselves. Next year, Teru declared, they will not. Yuko, Masami’s kid sister, had a baby boy in September. With Yuko living a three-hour train ride away and not fit enough to give birth back in Narita, Hideko moved into Yuko’s apartment for one month each both before and after the childbirth and took care of Yuko, the baby and her busy husband who never returns home from work before midnight. Luckily, the baby arrived safe and sound and was named Shunsuke.   

This sure was an honorable and memorable year for Hideaki’s parents Yoshifumi and Kiyoko. Having served as a volunteer (read unpaid) probation officer taking care of former prisoners, Yoshi was awarded a Blue Ribbon Medal by the government. Customarily, both winners and their spouses are invited to the Imperial Palace for the award giving ceremony. Yoshi and Kiyo were among them this year. They at long last in their life saw their long-cherished dream, which they doubted would ever materialize in this life, come true. They witnessed the Emperor in person, much to their feeling of being honored and rewarded. Well, so much for this year. We wish you all Merry Christmas and a not-so-whimsical New Year.  

Masami, Hideaki and Seika