Friday, December 27, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.500

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This incident happened one New Year’s at the end of the card game called ‘kabu’, in which my uncle acted as dealer for the yearly family casino at my grandparents’ house. He had lost quite a lot to my cousin, who was his son, as usual that night and my cousin had left the table as the morning dawned. My uncle, my mother and I were left at the table and the game was about to close. My mother asked for a few more deals because she had also lost a large sum and wanted to get it back. To recover her loss quickly, she bet by the $100. The game was played for high stakes every year, but I had never seen the stakes this high. She lost in succession and her loss swelled to $500 in a flash. “This is the last bet,” she claimed in desperation and put $500 on the table. She tried to offset her total loss on the last deal of the game. All at once the tension skyrocketed and strange silence filled the room. I held my breath and withdrew my usual small bet. The cards were dealt tensely and my mother and my uncle showed their hands of fate. Both hands were ridiculously bad but my mother’s was even worse. She lost $1000. Burying her head in her hands, she repeatedly uttered, “It can’t be! Can’t be true!” I saw tears in her widely opened bloodshot eyes. Then she repeated “Oh, my… Oh, my…” in a faint voice for ten times and staggered away. I clearly remember her state of stupor. A couple of days later back in our home, I enticed her into playing ‘kabu’ with me since I learned how poorly she played it and I knew I would win. I used to receive cash as a New Year’s gift from my relatives during New Year’s and it would amount to $1000. I dangled it in front of her and said that it would be her chance to get back her loss. She took it and we played for $1000. As I had thought, she lost another $1000 to me. She said she couldn’t pay, and I offered her the installment plan. I got $100 more to my monthly allowance of $30 for the next ten months. That was the richest year in my early teens. Many years later, she failed in real estate investment and lost most of our family fortune that had been inherited for generations. The amount she lost that time was well over $1 million. And that was the money I was supposed to inherit…

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Friday, December 20, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.499

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The living room in my grandparents’ home was used for a card game when the house turned into a family casino during New Year’s. The game was a blackjack-like one called ‘kabu’ and organized by my uncle. It used to be the best treat of New Year’s for me in my childhood and early in my teens. Unlike ‘mortar roller’ I had introduced before, this game was played seriously and intensely because it was for high stakes. The players usually bet a dollar or more, sometimes as high as a hundred dollars. The farther into the night it got, the higher the bet went. The family members would leave the table one by one, as the higher bet would make them tense and deprive them of pleasure. As for me, I liked to see the game get heated so much and would play throughout the night until the game came to an end in the next morning. The usual players who stayed at the table near dawn would be my uncle who was a dealer, my eldest cousin, my mother and I. My uncle was a successor of the family by marriage and so my grandparents were his in-laws. He was on terrible terms with my grandmother who raised my eldest cousin in place of him and his wife because they were too busy working at the family farm. Consequently, he didn’t get along well with his own son either. New Year’s ‘kabu’ would become an intense battle between my uncle and my cousin by dawn. My uncle couldn’t lose especially to his son and that made the game extraordinarily thrilling. My cousin would bet more than $10 on each deal and my heart would be pounding by seeing bills on the table. My uncle would concentrate on the cards dealt to him and his son too deeply to care about my small bets. Because he would forget to count me in and settle my deal thoughtlessly each time, I would end up winning quite a big amount of money in total every year. He would summon all his strength when he saw the last card dealt to him. In spite of his prayer-like chants “Come on! Come on!”, most of the time the card would be the least one he had wanted. Hand after hand, he drew the worst card possible while my cousin was rolling on the tatami floor to stifle his giggling. As far as I remember, he had never won against my cousin. He was manly and frank, but I can still picture him going back to his room after the game in the morning light with unsteady steps, worn out, drooping, and on the verge of tears. Three months after the house was burned down, he died of cancer without becoming the head of the family…

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Friday, December 13, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.498

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I ask you to keep what you are about to read in here to yourself since it’s regarding an illegal activity I was once engaged in. Until I was about sixteen years old, my parents, my younger sister and I had visited my grandparents’ home every year during the New Year’s. Limited for that time of the year, a quiet countryside house of my grandparents’ would turn into a family casino. It consisted of three different areas. In the card game area, which was the living room, a card game called ‘kabu’ that is similar to blackjack would be played. In the coin game area, which was my grandparents’ room, would be for a game called ‘mortar roller’. And the break area, which was the dining room, would be for those who didn’t like gambling or who needed food and drink. It would be open for 24 hours but only the family members could play. The coin game was organized by my grandmother. She set up a huge china mortar for sesame on the tatami floor and the players would sit around it on the floor. They would take turns and roll a 10-yen coin, which is worth about ten cents, inside the mortar. The coin rolled along the side of the round mortar, descending gradually toward the bottom. If it landed on other coins at the bottom, the player could get them. Although the game was simple, we would be absorbed in playing and our heads and eyes were rolling with a coin above the mortar. My cousin was good at it with her own devised technique to throw in a coin. I would also win snugly with my fixation on money. Beside the excited circle, my grandfather and my father, who were not interested in gambling, would talk over Japanese tea that my grandfather would make. My grandmother would start fretting after midnight and tell us to be quiet because she had believed that the military policemen could bust in with bayonets. We laughed at her anachronism while seeing her try to mute the mortar and still live the WWII era. She upgraded the mortar one year by putting a round piece of cardboard near the bottom. The mortar’s floor was raised and became wider and flatter so that it was harder to make the coin lie on top of the other. More coins to take would be left at the bottom and the game got more exciting. Those were such fond memories and I can still hear the sound of a rolling coin inside a mortar during New Year’s. Later on, the joyful grandparents’ house was burned down by my grandmother’s carelessness with a candle. It’s gone forever…

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Saturday, December 7, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.497

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My eyesight has grown considerably worse. The glasses I’ve used for a long time no longer fit to my deteriorated eyesight. I went to get new glasses the other day for the first time in years. During the course of years when I had paid no attention to the glasses market, the stores have become modern and sophisticated, looking like boutiques. Several different chains have their stores inside the shopping mall. They carry cool frames at the low price that people could never dream of years ago. An eyesight test was done inside the store and didn’t use an eye chart but some sort of a high-tech machine. The glasses were prepared only in twenty minutes. I had dreaded how much the new pair would cost, but they charged me far less than I had braced for. I had never imagined getting glasses would be this easy. My new pair is nifty and incredibly light. My face looks so different. With my new sharp vision, I feel like I have transformed myself into a new me. I had my first close encounter with glasses when I was in the second grade. I failed an annual eyesight test at school and the school required a further examination at the doctor’s office. That sent my mother into a near panic. Back in those days, one of the unbelievably stupid things people said in a rural area was that a girl with glasses couldn’t marry and so had no life in the future. My mother said to me, “If you need glasses, it’ll be the end of your life!” I was headed for the doctor’s office trembling with fear with my friend who had also failed the test. After the examination, the receptionist simply let my friend go, and then said to me, “Your glasses will be ready soon. Come get them at the store next to this office.” As casually as that, she handed me a death sentence. I couldn’t face the fact and told a lie to my mother that my eyes were fine. Since then, I hadn’t been able to sleep thinking that the doctor’s office would call for my glasses. Every single phone ring made me jump. My coward lie served me a couple of uneasy months but the call didn’t come after all. My glasses were smothered up. When I was eighteen, I needed glasses to get a driver’s license. I came back to the store next to the doctor’s office and, finally a decade later, got my first pair there. While I took a load off my mind at last, I failed a driving test this time. Only the glasses were left and I had cherished them up until my new pair…

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Saturday, November 30, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.496

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The Catholic school I attended had an annual event of a movie viewing. One year, the school selected a movie about Jesus Christ’s life. In the final scene, Jesus looked straight at me, which I mean was straight at the camera, and said, “I am with you always.” That line startled me. For the first time, I realized he was always with me and I was touched by the thought. Tears were rolling down my cheeks. I had a hard time to see the stairs on my way out of the movie theater because of my tears and to hide them from my friends at the same time. I had been exposed to the Christian teachings routinely through a Bible class and a daily morning prayer at school. Yet, I had never thought about it deeply like this before. As a teenager, I had believed that nothing good would ever happen to me in the future and I would have to endure a life in the prison-like world. I had constantly felt lonely and hopeless. But what if Jesus was always beside me? I wondered how helpful it would be! Although I had had numerous bad incidents with nuns at school and been unable to get along well with them, I felt like I understood a fraction of the reason why they became nuns. Imagining being a nun can be much closer to Jesus, I suddenly wanted to be one. I talked about it casually to my best friend and she burst into laughter as she thought it was my new joke. I had told her seriously for days but that was even funnier to her. My decision to be a nun hadn’t changed after one week, and at last I dared to tell my mother about it. She just flatly said, “You’re too curious and tempting about sexual matters to be a nun.” Her remark was right enough for me to come to my senses and think better of it…

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Friday, November 22, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.495

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Back in my Catholic school days, a teacher for home economics was Sister Carmela. I was in her cooking class. I had no interest in cooking at all and all I did during the class was giggling with my friends and washing the dishes. I simply couldn’t take anything in the class seriously. Home making seemed ridiculous to me, and to begin with, I could laugh endlessly when I thought about a sister called Carmela teaching how to make caramel. As I was lazy all the time chatting and giggling, Sister Carmela often had to call my name in front of the class and shush me. She also noticed I hadn’t participated in any cooking but just been doing the dishes. No matter how hard and often she scolded me for my bad attitude, I didn’t obey and kept making other students laugh. Her patience snapped at last and she called me before the principal. In my school, bad students were close to zero and a student was hardly ever called to the principal’s office. The principal was Sister Mary Catherine who reasonably believed I had done something extraordinarily wrong. But she was taken aback when Sister Carmela told her that I had fooled around during the class. She looked at her face with an impression of ‘That’s it?’ After mildly telling me to behave myself, she let me go. Sister Carmela’s punishment didn’t work and my bad behavior continued. I was in her sewing class next year. Again, I slacked and asked my friend to make a skirt for me. Sister Carmela found that out when I turned in the skirt pretending I had sewn it. That snapped her completely. She decided to appeal directly to my parents and called up my mother that evening. Over the phone, she told her at length how bad I had been in her class. She blamed my bad attitude on my mother’s lack of discipline. My mother kept apologizing for a long time, but her tone gradually changed. As Sister Carmela strongly criticized my mother’s way of raising a child, my mother suddenly yelled, “I have no reason to listen to someone who has never married nor had a child!” and hung up violently. I was stunned because it sounded to me the most insulting remark about a sister. She said to me, “Who does she think she is? She has never raised a child herself, and yet looks down on me who did raise a child. You don’t have to obey such a stuck-up person!” And Sister Carmela stopped complaining about my behavior ever since…

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Friday, November 15, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.494

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Since I became the class clown at school, I was quite popular back then, not only among the students but also among the teachers. When I needed to see a teacher at the hallway in front of the teachers’ office, other teachers would come out of the office to talk with me. They would stand in a circle around me and laugh at my jokes and stories. Inevitably, it was always noisy wherever I showed up. The vice-principal was a stern, rigid teacher called Sister Maris Stella. She was the oldest sister at school and dressed in a traditional, old-fashioned Catholic gown. She was strict to students and teachers alike. Everybody tried to keep away from her because she always reproved someone for something. She would appear wherever people were buzzing, to shut them up. She had recognized that I was often a seismic center of the buzz and given me a look of ‘You again’. Every time the teachers were cracking up with me in front of the teachers’ office, she poked her long-veiled head out of the office. That was a signal for the end of the show. Teachers would disperse quickly while I stopped talking. Sometimes we failed to notice her and she stood behind the circle listening to me. The moment someone spotted her, they would walk away. In those cases, she would ask me what I was talking about. I would apologize and leave. And one thought occurred to me. She didn’t come out to reprove us. She might want to join us. Even after I realized that, I had no way to keep talking once other teachers ran away. As a result, we just kept leaving when she came up. And one day, when we were scattering at the sight of her as usual, she grabbed my arm. She said to me, “That’s it! You hate me, don’t you? I know you hate me! I know, because I hate you too!” Over her shoulder was a statue of the Virgin Mary with a plaque saying ‘Love and Humanity’. It was the most inconsistent scene I had ever experienced. Months later, there came a general-school-cleaning day. I was unlucky enough to be assigned to the school cafeteria of which Sister Maris Stella took charge. As if she got a golden opportunity, she made a slave of me. She chose the dirtiest floor just for me and made me crawl to clean up thoroughly, yelling “Not enough! Do it over!” repeatedly. I felt her revenge so strongly. Given the hatred and now the revenge, I deepened the mystery of Catholic sisters…

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Friday, November 8, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.493

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As all the people around me professed Buddhism and Shintoism, I had never been exposed to Christianity until I entered junior high school. The junior high I attended was a private Catholic convent school and most teachers were nuns. Since I had never had any contact with nuns before, they were nothing but mysterious to me. They lived together in a convent next to the school and wore a veil. They were called like Sister Catherine or Sister Patricia although they were Japanese. Until I got used to them, I had always wondered about the small basics. Do they have an ordinary Japanese name? Do they really stay single for life? Are they bold under a veil? Yes, yes, and no, I gradually learned the answers. I had studied English quite hard to catch up with other students who came from the same convent’s elementary school that gave them a head start in English education. One teacher, called Sister Judith, happened to know that and kindly found a pen pal for me. While students mostly didn’t like sisters, she was an exception. She was popular because she was friendly and beautiful. Students also respected her since she graduated from one of the most renowned universities in Japan and was the smartest sister at school. The school had the very rigid rules for uniform. If an irregular bag was spotted, it would be confiscated. I carried my personal small bag into school one day in addition to the big uniform bag, and Sister Judith caught me. She said she had to confiscate it and I begged her not to. I promised her I wouldn’t use it for school ever again. She decided to overlook my breach for once out of consideration for my emotional plea. As a stupid teenager, I was defiant to pretty much everything. I believed nothing good existed in this world. So I took my irregular bag out of my uniform bag again as soon as I passed through the school gate after school that day. I was walking toward the bus stop with the bag dangling. Someone called out my name from behind. It was Sister Judith. She didn’t return to the convent as usual and left for an errand on that particular day. She didn’t confiscate my bag, though. Instead, she was crying. “I trusted you and that was why I let you go. But you betrayed my trust. I’m bitterly disappointed in you,” she said quietly and walked away. I felt it was much better that she yelled at me and took away my bag…

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Friday, November 1, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.492

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The administration of my apartment is stingy. All the communal areas in the building are dim because they try to keep the light off as much as possible. The decorative indirect lighting at the lobby is always off. The light at the gym didn’t come on until sundown. I exercise in the morning almost in the dark when it’s bad weather. They had plucked off light bulbs one by one from the locker room of the spa, and it’s only half-lit now even though all the switches are on. The air conditioner there is turned off and a small electric fan is the only recourse in the summertime. The building’s communal TV antenna is too old to receive all channels. I’ve been unable to watch some new channels and complained to the administration about it for over a year, but they wouldn’t replace it with a new one. Finally, the light of the fire escape has been turned off since sensors were introduced a couple of months ago. This apartment has the fire escape inside the building that is also for a regular use. I prefer stairs to an elevator and use them every day. But now the whole staircase is in complete darkness when I open an exit door on the hallway. There is a time lag between the sensor and the light. Two steps forward are needed to have the sensor on and then it’s a long time before the fluorescent light comes on. By the time the light is on, I come down half the floor groping in the darkness. I’m certain people are tumbling down in case of an emergency. There was an annual fire drill the other day. The whole light of the fire escape was turned on beforehand for the drill. It’s meaningless to turn the emergency light on only for the very day of drill. I suspect that the administration know they infringe the fire law. I myself am stingy and my own apartment is dim all the time. But when an object to which I pay money is stingy, I can’t stop my endless complains. Meanwhile, I recall that one of the reasons I chose this apartment was a low monthly maintenance fee. If the administration requires a higher fee in exchange for full lighting, I may well ask them to turn off the light…

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Friday, October 25, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.491

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A couple of weeks after I set about trying to live in a city taste at home when I was a junior high student, one thing led to another and I found myself throwing a slumber party at my house with the girls in the cool group. I declared my family that the time to show the interim result of our effort for a city taste had come. I forbade my mother to work and farm on the field for two days. I ordered her to concentrate on treating the guests and to hide everything cheap and uncool in the house. For my father, I warned him not to be caught wearing muddy work clothes when he came from the field. Because of my strict instructions, my house had turned to a different place by the time I took the girls into. It was tidy, as unsightly things in the house had been crushed into an unused room. My father welcomed the girls with his tone of voice being one octave lower. The gorgeous meal was on the dinner table, as my mother had ordered a catered dinner and served it pretending she had cooked it. My grandparents were hiding in their room and holding their breath, as my mother had asked them not to spoil my plan. For breakfast, slices of toasted bread were served in a pretty basket while my family always had rice for breakfast. I had no idea where my mother had brought them out, but all the dishes and the chinaware including the breadbasket were new to me. Next to the dining area where we were having breakfast was the living room. Since we could see the room through the sideboard, my mother was sitting on a couch in the living room, apparently posing. She was watching an academic TV show that she had never watched, while sipping tea from a cup with a saucer that she had never done. Her legs were crossed and her hand was trembling for tension. She was acting a rich housewife with all her force. To see off the girls, I walked to the bus stop with them. It was a fifteen-minute walk and they asked me if I really walked this much every day for school. It seemed unbelievable to them. Although I was totally used to walking to the bus stop, it was too far for them and they got in low spirits. I had forgotten that they all lived close to a bus stop or a train station as the city girls. I did my best to impress them but I simply couldn’t adapt a city taste to the unfavorable remote location of my house…

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Saturday, October 19, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.490

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The girl who let me join the cool group at junior high was a sister of a senior student who was the most popular girl at school. As we became close, she invited me to her house. While most Japanese houses were wooden, hers was a concrete three-story house with a Western style. There were balconies and each room has an air conditioner. Her sister’s guitar and koto, which is a Japanese classical instrument, were put against the wall in the guestroom. A big poster of Disneyland hung on the ceiling of her own room. In the bathroom, bottles of expensive shampoo and conditioner were standing. Her mother fixed and served salad with her homemade dressing. Her younger sister was eating pickles as a snack, which I wondered if there could possibly be a store in Japan that carried such an exotic food. After dinner, her elder sister, the most popular student at school, took us to the cafe near the house. Every single thing they had and did was what I had never had or done or seen in my house. It looked too good to be true and I felt as if I had been in a TV show. I realized cool girls practiced a city life at home as well as outside. Then, I brought my effort to be cool at school into my home and launched a style reform of my family. I tried to civilize my family, except for my grandparents who looked hopeless, with a city taste. I exhorted them to live in a city taste and began to complain about anything rustic that was found everywhere in the house. I was an avid critic of my family’s old style. I needed to police my family with a city taste every day and in the end, saying a city taste had become my habit at home…

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Friday, October 11, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.489

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The effect of being in the cool and rich group at junior high school was much bigger than I had expected and was almost magical. I was no longer a geek at school. Other students’ attitude toward me changed dramatically and they even respected me. I jumped into the whole new world. The girls in the group looked through a teen fashion magazine and chatted about its contents zealously at lunchtime. It looked like an adult life to me, as I had never been interested in fashion, let alone talked about it with my friends. After school, they would hang around the downtown area, looking around the shops or having a snack at a fast food restaurant. I had seldom been downtown and I felt like I started a city life all of a sudden. Walking by elegant shops had never been my usual habit, and as for a fast food restaurant, I had never stepped into it before. On weekends, they would go to the movies together. My way of spending time outside school completely changed and it was almost like I began to live in America. On the other hand, there was a huge set back to be a part of the group. It was horribly costly. My scant monthly allowance didn’t last more than a week while other girls from the rich family didn’t have to care. A coin jar in the dining room in my house became empty quickly. My younger sister’s stash of money in her desk drawer had been shrinking steadily by my regular stealing. One of the girls in the group had a friend in a boys’ school and he invited us to his school’s homecoming. Since ours was a girls’ school, it was an exciting opportunity to meet boys. There, the boys asked us out after the homecoming, but I was the exclusion among the group. No one asked me out. While they were headed for a fast food restaurant, I went home, crying. Although I had been striven to keep up with my new friends, more effort was needed into being part of them. We sometimes had lunch at the school cafeteria instead of the classroom. They would buy a bowl of noodles and put all kinds of hot spice into the leftover soup. And I would be willing to drink it to crack them up. I would do anything to stay in the cool circle, including acting a totally different person by giving up being myself…

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Friday, October 4, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.488

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I spent almost the whole first year at the private junior high school as an uncool geek. Every get-cool scheme of mine had failed. Neither breaching the school rules nor joining the drama club worked. I hadn’t come up with a new idea and had hung around with my not-so-cool friends. One day we were having a hilarious time at recess with tongue twisters I had devised. I had made a list of oddly sounded words on a piece of paper and read it out quickly in front of my friends. I seemed to sound so funny and they laughed hard. As we were making a racket, other students began to look at us curiously. Some cool girls from rich families approached us and asked what was going on. They never came near uncool girls but I drew their attention this time. I showed the list and demonstrated my tongue twisters, which didn’t appeal to them at all. They sneered and left. But I realized one thing: cool girls starved for laughter because they put on airs and kept their countenance every day. If I could make them laugh regularly, they might like me and include me in their circle. I commenced my assaults in earnest. Since then, I had behaved in a silly way whenever I passed by cool rich girls at school. I made funny faces, walked by dancing weirdly, or mimicked a TV comedian. At first they just looked at me in dismay, but they were gradually interested in me. They stopped and talked to me, “You’re so funny!” Then I would press an insurance laugh with haphazard puns or gags. Since I didn’t have a talent for making people laugh basically, I was out of comic materials so easily. I had to use the fact of a farmer’s daughter to make them laugh. This last resort of mine really succeeded. Soon one of the cool girls asked me to have lunch together, and I was invited to her circle. I officially joined the cool group at last. That acted like magic and other students stopped mocking me completely. In the end, after so many trials, to be the class clown was indeed the solution to be cool at school for me…

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Friday, September 27, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.487

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I don’t change my hairstyle a lot. I’m quite particular over it, but once my inflexible details are materialized on my head, I stay that way for a long time. The problem is the length. Since I’m a cheap person, I keep frequency of my visit to a hair salon as low as I can. As a result, I need to have my hair cut short at every visit to make the next visit further. But it’s not a case that the shorter the better. Because my favorite particular hairstyle is feminine, I need to keep some length. That causes tug-of-war with a hairdresser. When I go to the hair salon, my hair has usually gotten quite long and the hairdresser has to cut it more than ten inches to the shortest possible length for my style. He or she is always unwilling to do so. Although I request loud and clear, they try to make sure over and over. Then they bring an extra mirror behind my head. Showing and pointing my hair on the back, they still make sure the length I ask for. Despite my repeated confirmations, my hair ends up longer than I requested when it’s done each time. A hairdresser once told me that girls sometimes cry when their hair is cut short. I suppose those experiences make them reluctant to cut hair drastically. I totally don’t understand those who cry just for an undesirable hairstyle. There is too much to cry for in this world beside a hairstyle. My mother used to want me to wear a boyish hairstyle. While my younger sister had long hair, I wasn’t allowed it and my hair was always short like a boy. I got defiant and made my hair long when I was seven. My mother persistently told me to cut it, but I wanted to wear long hair for once. My uncle lived with us at that time. He saw our battle over long hair every day and said that he would cut my hair in the middle of the night while I was sleeping. He said it as a joke but I took it as a serious threat. I had suffered from insomnia and his remark made it even worse. I was too afraid to sleep, thinking he would come in to cut my hair if I fell asleep. I usually lay spreading my hair on the pillow but had lain hiding my hair tensely for some nights. Now, I can enjoy a feminine style as much as I like. I went to a hair salon the other day. A new hairdresser unusually cut my hair to exactly what I asked for. It has finally gotten short and I feel tidy and refreshed…

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Saturday, September 21, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.486

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When Queen Elizabeth II came to Japan a long time ago, she paid a visit at an imperial villa located in my hometown. A procession of their cars passed on the street near my neighborhood. The small hamlet I used to live was swallowed by this huge event. People were agog to get a glimpse of Queen of England and that was the talk of the town. They had their relatives over just for the procession, which my family also did. I was a child who was a big fan of a teen-boy group called ‘Zutorubi’. The group was a pop idle of the teenage girls. Its name ‘Zutorubi’ came from what is pronounced ‘The Beatles’ upside down. As the name implies, it was a comic group rather than a handsome boy group. My mother never approved of me being a fan of them. When the time for the Queen’s procession approached and my whole family including my relatives and my grandmother, who had a bad leg and usually didn’t like to go out, were excitedly about to leave the house, my mother noticed I didn’t prepare to go out. I was sitting in front of the TV. The procession time coincided with my favorite TV show of ‘Zutorubi’ and I chose ‘Zutorubi’ over Queen. Naturally my mother gaped at me when I said I wouldn’t go. “Are you out of your mind? It’s Queen Elizabeth!” she said furiously. “It’s the chance of a lifetime! You can see ‘Zutorubi’ every week!” Still, there was no comparison to me between that week’s ‘Zutorubi’ and once-in-a-lifetime Queen. “You will regret this for the rest of your life!” My mother left taking a parting shot. Literally all residents in my hamlet gathered alongside the street. Even the bedridden people were carried out of their houses to see Queen. It was quite certain that I was the only one that stayed at home. If a burglar had been working in my neighborhood at that time, he or she would have had a good haul. When I finished watching the show in rapture, my family came home. They told me they got a glimpse of Queen’s face and how beautiful she was. My mother threatened that I made a grievous mistake and not seeing Queen would harm my life in the future. I didn’t understand how, and still doesn’t…

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Saturday, September 14, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.485

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One of fun places to visit in my childhood was my mother’s parents’ home. I liked to see my grandparents and my cousins. My mother’s sister, or my aunt, had succeeded the family by taking her husband into the family as a son-in-law of my grandparents. Although every visit was fun for me, constant domestic disputes were rampant in the family since three generations lived together under one roof. Every time the dispute aggravated, they turned to a fortune teller. Strangely, the fortune tellers almost always attributed the problem to their dining room, particularly the position of the stove in the kitchen. One fortune teller said that the place for fire in the house was wrong and they remodeled the kitchen to move the stove. As their disputes weren’t settled, they asked another fortune teller for help. They were again told the direction of the stove was evil and redid the kitchen. They had repeated this process for numerous times and eventually the kitchen got back to exactly what it had originally been. They heavily relied on not only fortune telling but psychic things overall. When countless kitchen remodeling didn’t stop their disputes and a fight between my grandparents and my uncle got really ugly, he cut my grandfather’s cherished persimmon tree in anger. And soon, my uncle began to complain of a pain in his leg. The pain was too severe for him to walk or to sleep. He saw a doctor, who couldn’t find anything wrong in his leg. Because the pain was felt like his leg was being cut with a saw, he was convinced that it was caused by a curse of the persimmon tree he had cut. He and my aunt called an exorcist for purification, and his pain was gone in an instant. To me it seemed, and still does, that remorse simply caused the pain. The rift was never mended and their house, although it had accepted every piece of fortune tellers’ advice for good luck, burned to the ground twenty years or so later. By the time the new house was built, my grandfather and my uncle had passed away, and my grandmother and my aunt had been in the hospital. They never lived together again, so the disputes finally ended…

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Friday, September 6, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.484

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When I was five or six years old and visited my grandparents’ home, an acquaintance of the family’s showed up. He is good at fortune telling, at least known to the family so. My grandparents’ family deeply depended on fortune telling for almost everything, including my mother’s marriage and the building of their new house. They excitedly brought me to the man and asked him to see my future. According to him, by just looking at someone’s ear, he could tell the future. Surrounded by almost all members of the family, I was made to show my ear to him. As soon as he saw my ear, he shouted, “Oh! This is an ear of a family’s successor!” I had never seen him before, and was introduced to him only as a child related to them. But in my family, I had been already looked on as a successor because I was a firstborn and there was no boy. Since the man uttered an accurate situation, they were so impressed and said in unison that the man surely could see the future. I, on the other hand, was shocked. Succeeding my family meant living at the same house with my parents and bearing the same last name all my life. While I had been told I would success the family, I still had clung to a little hope of freedom and secretly enjoyed imagining my future. Although I had only a younger sister so far, my parent may have a baby boy in future and then my secret wish would come true. I could choose my husband by myself and could live wherever I want. But when the man declared I was destined to be a successor, I saw my hope crushed. I felt all doors of possibilities slammed shut. Now I knew where I would live, what my last name would be, and even which grave I would be buried in. While I despaired, they congratulated me joyfully, as if good news were delivered. “Good for you! You are a successor! It’s your destiny!” Decades later, the man’s fortune telling proved wrong after all. I left home and live where I want. My last name is unchanged all right, but of my own free will…

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Saturday, August 31, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.483

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Cheap clothes are squashed into every closet in my small apartment. I can’t stop buying clothes that are being sold over 70% off, and I can’t throw away my old clothes either, all because I’m too cheap. Lately, more and more online stores have carried a sale and reduced the price by more than 70%. The big price reduction is poured out of a computer and assaults me. As a result, my wardrobe has been getting bigger while there isn’t any more room to store my clothes. It appears that I buy new clothes not because I need them but because I want to get 70% or more off. I pay for the reduced prices not for the clothes themselves and put the cart before the horse, as the saying goes. I love the feeling to have saved a lot of money although I could have saved more money if I didn’t buy in the first place. Whenever I find a rack of clearance items at a boutique in a mall, I walk in straight to the rack and ransack. Clearance clothes are generally what are left unsold because they didn’t attract customers. Unpopular clothes in Japan mean my favorite. Japanese people like dim colors with vague patterns, while I like red and orange with big clear patterns such as flowers. To me, the clearance rack is a collection of treasure. I used to get clothes at a supermarket but now I shop at a boutique, as it has even lower prices. The other day at a boutique, I found a box of free hangers that had a sign saying ‘Take freely’. Without buying anything there, I asked a prim saleswoman if I could take some. “Go right ahead,” she said, but laughing. Her superior attitude made me feel poor. It’s unclear whether or not I improved my social status by shopping at a boutique instead of a supermarket, but I certainly remain lowly either way…

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Saturday, August 24, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.482

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To participate an extracurricular activity at junior high, the students needed to submit the parent’s consent paper. I asked my mother for one since I had decided to join the drama club. When I said that I had chosen an extracurricular activity, she was excited and eager to know which one. She had pictured me in various extracurricular activities and been very interested in my choice. I asked her which one she had wanted for me to choose and she said, “Any activity is fine, except one!” She told me that she had one particular activity she would reject in her mind, but other than that one, she would be willing to agree. “A drama club!” I proudly declared. She was too astounded to speak. Her glow in her eyes quickly vanished and great disappointment replaced it. It seemed I had uttered the exact one she had in her mind. Her particular activity to reject was a drama club. She whimpered, “Why…? Why are you always doing exactly what I want the least?” She couldn’t believe I chose a drama club of all activities. As I asked what was wrong with it, she told me about her schooldays. She had joined every single extracurricular activity of her school, which she was proud because she said she earned large experience by that, while she sounded just a quitter to me. Even then, she said, she excluded the drama club and it was the only activity she didn’t join. According to her, a drama club was a haunt of delinquent students and decent students wouldn’t near it. She refused to sign the parent’s consent paper for me. But she couldn’t change my iron determination and I kept pestering her to sign the paper. A few days later, she was overcome by my persistent, clamorous demand and signed reluctantly. At last, I was no longer an interim member, and now I was supposed to be cool at school as a formal member of the drama club. The thing was, the fact that the star students in the drama club looked ordinary and the activities were boring had spread among other students by then. The fever for the drama club had passed away. On the contrary, they thought only weird students could take sober activities in the drama club. Practicing voice exercises every day as a formal member, I realized this wasn’t the solution to be cool after all. I had to figure out yet another way…

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Saturday, August 17, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.481

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The junior high school I attended had the high school on the same premises. Both students shared most facilities and some extracurricular activities. The school held a welcoming assembly for the first-year students at junior high and freshmen in high school. It was for school’s extracurricular activities to recruit a new member and all activities were introduced on the stage. The main show was a play by the drama club, which was a huge hit. The cast members were the high school students, who performed a dramatic love story so well in glittering dresses. I had never seen a play at a theater before and I was struck by the power of the stage. It was beautiful, glamorous and dreamy. I couldn’t believe this somber Catholic school had a brilliant drama club like that. It was like Hollywood suddenly appeared in my school. Since it was girls’ school, the male parts were played by female students in male attire. They were so handsome and students of the female part were so beautiful. The whole first-year students were fascinated by the play and had kept talking about it in rapture for days after the assembly. The drama club was a joint extracurricular activity of junior high and high school. As I had been searching for the way to be cool at school, I thought I now really found the answer: join the drama club. The club accepted interim members before they joined formally. I took part in an activity as an interim member after class. Almost 100 first-year students were there as the interim members. The senior high school students taught us voice exercises and tongue twisters. Among them I spotted the cast members of the play. Although they had been stars at school, they looked ordinary girls in the school uniform without the costume and makeup. We had practiced voice exercises and tongue twisters for the whole week and almost 100 new comers got down to six. They were just attracted by the glamor of the stage and couldn’t stand steady, inconspicuous everyday training. I was one of the surviving six because I knew there would be long training days before getting on the stage, and also because I believed the drama club was the only hope to become cool. I decided to join it formally…

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Saturday, August 10, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.480

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Since I started junior high, almost every move of mine had invited mockery for a couple of months and I seriously needed to put an end to it. I analyzed the source of mockery. It seemed my unsophisticated looks and my common sense, that had been cultivated in an old-fashioned stingy family living in an out-of-the-way hamlet, were too different from other students’ and that caused ridicule. To stop being laughed, I had to become urbane and cool somehow. One day, a lecture on the school regulations was given by the school morals teacher. He cited two conducts as the most disorderly: to thin a uniform leather bag by pouring hot water in it, and to wear uniform indoor shoes with their ends folded inside. I thought that was it. I found the way to be cool at school. As soon as I came home from school, I poured hot water into my uniform bag in the bathroom while hearing my mother saying to my sister, “Look! She has gone mad at last by going to that weird school every day!” and put the bag under the heavy shelves all night. By the next morning, the leather had shrunk and an illegal thin bag was completed. My fight-back against contempt has begun. I showed up at school dangling the thin bag and stepping on the ends of my indoor shoes with my heels. I was the first one among the first-year students to breach the school rules, and I was thus supposed to be the coolest girl. Oddly though, nothing changed and they treated me the same way as before. I looked at myself carefully and found a big fat vinyl bag beside my thin bag. Because my bag was too thin to hold all necessary stuff for school, I had to put my stuff in my supplementary uniform bag that was filled to bursting as a result. It looked so uncool. The first game plan of my battle failed miserably…

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Saturday, August 3, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.479

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In junior high school, there was an excursion day every six months. All students wore the school uniform every day, but we were allowed to wear plain clothes on an excursion. Although my mother suggested wearing something I already had, I demanded new clothes for the first excursion day in junior high now that I wasn’t in the local elementary school any more but in the privileged school in the city. She reluctantly took me to the local shopping arcade and got me a T-shirt and a denim skirt. I was in a good mood wearing the new clothes on the excursion day, but that good mood dissipated easily at the meeting place even before the excursion started. The school was girls’ school and the students’ plain clothes weren’t plain at all. They were wearing fancy clothes, casual but not inexpensive. I had forgotten the school was privileged and its students were all rich girls. My clothes were plainest, and apparently cheapest. I had never seen other students out of uniform and didn’t know what kind of clothes they would wear for an excursion. I was in a wrong outfit but it was too late. “Is your style some kind of cheap-chic?” a girl mocked my clothes that my mother had thought were costly and had complained repeatedly. I should have bought clothes at a department store in the city not at a mom-and-pop shop in the local arcade. And I also learned that I couldn’t depend on my mother’s sense of money any more…

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Friday, July 26, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.478

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When I lived with my family in my hometown, taking a cab from home caused a commotion every time. There used to be a small lot that my family had inherited from our ancestors three blocks away from our house. A local propane company had rented the lot and used it as a filling station. My family used propane for cooking and our tanks were filled for free as part of the rent. My father would carry the empty tanks on his truck and have them filled at the lot. The station was quite desolate and no one was working there mostly. My father would leave the tanks when no one was around, ask for filling by calling and go get the filled tanks later. We called the lot ‘Propane’. Cabs in Japan ran on propane gas and a local owner-driven cab union also used our ‘Propane’ as its filling station for their cabs. My hometown was in such a remote area that a cab seldom came to pump there. On very rare occasions, we needed to take a cab from home. Since I was little, it had been a mystery to me that my family walked to ‘Propane’ instead of calling a cab by phone. To take a cab, we would walk three blocks and waited for a cab at ‘Propane’ although it might never come. I had asked my parents or my grandparents a hundred times why we wouldn’t call and take a cab from home. Their answers always mystified me: “We have ‘Propane’!” I knew we cooked with free propane, but owning the lot didn’t mean a free cab. We paid for a cab whether we took it from home or from ‘Propane’. Sometimes, we happened to see someone working at ‘Propane’, and once in a while there was a man who recognized us. When a man knew we owned the lot, he would greet us politely and call a cab for us from a tiny shabby shack that stood there. I suspected my family expected that special treatment and wanted to feel like VIPs by taking a cab at ‘Propane’. Sadly, we had an almost one in a million chance for that and neither a man nor a cab was there usually. As the solution, my father walked two more blocks to the busy street to catch a cab and bring it to ‘Propane’ for us, or he even went back home to call a cab to ‘Propane’ and take it from there. In this degree, it was impossible for me to comprehend what we were doing any more and everything was nothing but madness. I still can’t make sense out of what we did for a cab…

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Friday, July 19, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.477

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Since January, I had been pondering on the cause of a rash on my face in earnest. It was possible that my pollen allergy got stronger this year. Or, I took a bath too long and too often because it had become my daily routine to go to the communal spa in my apartment building both in the morning and in the evening. Or, the kind of cosmetics I had used for more than five years suddenly disagreed with my skin. I had to try everything to get rid of this inconvenience. My favorite bath time got shorter and I changed cosmetics. Yet nothing worked. Meanwhile, Tulip finished the tour and broke up again in the beginning of July. And at the same time, I started having a red rash around my eyes. I despaired. My eyes were comically swollen and I looked just like Bart Simpson. There was no way to hide my face or to go outside any more. It happened the day after I had basil pasta for dinner. Something clicked in my head suddenly. Back in January, I found a pouch of basil pasta sauce at a very low price online. I had bought it regularly and had it quite often since then. I keep a journal every day a little too in detail, with my weight and the maximum temperature of the day, what I did, what time I did it, and what I ate. I looked through my journal and noticed that every time the rash got aggravated, I had basil pasta the night before. As I had never had a food allergy, it was a blind spot. I stopped eating basil pasta and ten days later, my rash, at long last, disappeared. The long battle was over. The cause was my favorite dish, but what kind of idiot takes six months to find it…?

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Friday, July 12, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.476

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The decisive reason I chose music as my career is Tulip. It’s a Japanese pop and rock band. They literally changed my life and have still had influence on my songs. They broke up years ago but over the past decade, they were sporadically reunited and on tour for a limited time. Those occasions are extremely precious to me since I constantly crave their concert. In late January, I happened to see a poster of them at a convenience store. It told about their reunion and the limited time tour. I was so excited that I nearly screamed there. It was then that my long torment of an allergy has begun. Besides a pollen allergy, I had never had an allergy in my life. But I found a reddish rash at the lower part of my both cheeks one morning, which seemed some allergic reaction. During the days when I arranged the tickets for Tulip’s concerts, the rash had gotten worse. It was red and itchy and covered the lower half of my face that was swollen. I looked terrible. I walked drooping my head to hide my face with my hair every day. I selected three concerts of Tulip’s tour since I couldn’t afford all venues much as I wanted, and they were held monthly between April and June. Each venue I got the ticket for was far from my home and I needed to book the hotel and the train. I doubt if words can convey how embarrassing it was to make three trips wearing the red rash on my face. I had dreamed of Tulip’s another reunion for five and a half years and when it finally became a reality, I went to their three concerts looking awful with a red, swollen face…

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Friday, July 5, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.475

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I go to extremes about a trend. Either I’m one of the last ones to catch up, or one of the first ones. While I claim it was I who brought trends of western boots and a shag cut hairstyle into Japan, mostly a trend has gone out before I catch up. I still don’t know what Tamagotchi is, that everyone was once crazy about. When I bought a bean bag doll for the first time, it had a bargain price as a clearance sale for unsold goods. As for my digital life, although I’ve been online since the early days of the Internet, I got my first cell phone merely five years ago. And just recently, I finally understood the attraction of Twitter and have been caught by it. I opened my account there a few years ago but I had tweeted once a day as a rather obligatory routine. I had signed up the web service with which I gained followers in return for following them. So, I had some followers but I had never glanced through others’ tweets not to mention replied. Now that I found how to enjoy Twitter and started it afresh, I sorted out my followings. I unfollowed all of them because they were from the web service and I didn’t follow them out of my interest. Instantly, the number of my followers began to decrease accordingly because I broke the exchange. My followers have been dwindling away drastically day by day since then. Soon I’m going to have no followers although I enjoy tweeting more than ever. I added some new followings that I ‘m really interested in. Except for a couple of Japanese comedians, my favorite band Tulip and a former Formula One driver, I follow fictional characters such as Snoopy, Homer and Spongebob. As their tweets amuse me so much everyday, I feel like I live in a fantasy world. Tweeting only to fictional characters with no followers around, I will not be much different from strange people who murmur to themselves in public…

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Friday, June 28, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.474

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In my childhood, I was instructed by my mother that hair wasn’t a thing to wash everyday. She told me that once a week was more than enough. I had believed it was common knowledge all through my elementary school life. Soon after I started my junior high life at the privileged school, I realized that my mother’s instruction was utterly wrong. A girl in the same class asked me if I washed my hair everyday. It wasn’t a question really, but a criticism of my dirty hair. “Not everyday, but I wash it every other day,” I lied, as I sensed ‘once a week’ seemed unacceptable to her. But my false answer upset her so much enough. She nearly screamed, “Every other day? You don’t wash it everyday? Gross!” She looked at me as if I were some kind of disgusting creature. For the first time in my life, I found that hair should be washed everyday. I also noticed other girls’ hair was decisively different from mine other than cleanliness. Our school rules regulated strictly the length of our bangs. They shouldn’t reach down to our eyebrows. Back then, I had had my hair cut at a barbershop with my father. Because my father was a regular customer there, the barber wouldn’t charge us when I only needed to have my bangs cut. My bangs were cut straight well above my eyebrows like a line while other girls’ bangs were somehow fancy. I learned that they went to beauty salons and hairdressers cut their bangs. Since that day, I wash my hair every single day to this day. My mother once told me that I would get cancer for this. Needless to say, I stopped going to the barbershop. My mother groaned over extra expense for that. Near the school, there was a small bakery. The storekeeper was an old lady who was always holding a small dog. The dog had the ugliest face I had ever seen. It became famous for its ugliness among the students. One day, another girl in my class casually said that dog looked like me. Other girls unanimously agreed and laughed. Having a face like such an ugly dog, I felt washing my hair everyday was quite pointless…

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