Tuesday, November 12, 2013
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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