Blaine's latest

Never fear, Washington Post! While Blaine's family is on vacation, Blaine is not slacking off!

Just in the past week, Blaine wrote stories about...

Tokyo's governor calls America "selfish"

The impact of the slowing global economy

Japan's "killer" work ethic - which actually kills people

North Korea kills a South Korean tourist

What a hard-working correspondent!

U.S. visit

Lucinda, Arno and I are back in the United States on vacation, visiting my parents in Denver. Blaine will arrive next weekend. The trip over with the children wasn't easy: 2 hr bus trip to Narita, 2 hours waiting at Narita, 9 hours to San Francisco, luggage customs and a quick wait in SF, and then 2 hours to Denver. A very long day that repeated itself.

I hoped that the kids might sleep on the long plane ride; it is, after all, a night flight. But Arno fell asleep literally as the plane was making its final approach to S.F. and I had to carry him off like a sack of apples. Fortunately, they both slept on the way to Denver because I have no idea how I would have entertained them. (I don't sleep much on planes in any case.)

Lucinda handed the jet lag like a champ: the first night in Denver, she slept for 15 hours! The same night, Arno slept for 4 hours, woke up at 1:30 a.m. and refused to rest until he passed out at noon. Finally, on day 3, he fell asleep at 5 p.m. and slept till 7 a.m. - and then we were back in business.

We're in Denver for 3 weeks, probably the most time I've spent here in nearly 20 years. We're doing lots of swimming, some shopping, lots of playing in grandparents' backyards, and I've signed the children up for various summer camps. I'm also actively trying to relax rules that I'd set up in Tokyo to make life there easier; here, Arno can wear his Superman pajamas to his summer camp if he wants to (I'd banned them from preschool because he wanted to wear them every day).

Lucinda and Arno are quite happy about life at the moment and curiously seem more mature and independent than they did even a few weeks ago in Tokyo. I'm not sure if it's because they're just older or because they've learned to handle themselves in new situations as we've lived in Japan. In either case, it's a very welcome development.

Wishing on July 7

There are "wishing trees" popping up on market streets in Tokyo to celebrate Tanabata, "the evening of the seventh" on July 7, or 7/7.

Wikipedia tells me that the Japanese festival was inspired by a Chinese story. In Japan, though, it's celebrated by writing wishes on colorful paper and hanging the papers on bamboo trees with ribbon.

We were having an ice cream cone recently when we saw this Tanabata tree.


An older man in work clothes, who was carrying a big can of Sapporo and was clearly a little drunk (but quiet) saw Lucinda and Arno and handed them some paper and a fat black pen so they could participate.

Here's Arno's wish:


And Lucinda's wish. (She's thinking of Kaila, her Seattle friend, whom she'll see in a few weeks.)

The Tooth Fairy

It's been a big month for Lucinda. She turned 6. She learned to swim. And today she lost a tooth!

Through sources I cannot reveal, I'm told she left the following note (along with her tooth, of course) under her pillow:

"Dear tooth Farea. I wont to see you. Pleas Tace a piccher av your self and Rite bak. By Lucinda (then she signed her name as she writes it in Japanese) PS I wont to no wy you clect teeth. Can I cip my tooth?"


The tooth fairy responded thusly:

Dear Lucinda,

Thank you for your note! I like getting notes from kids. And thank you for showing me your tooth. Congratulations!

You asked me to take a picture of myself - but fairies are magic and cannot be photographed. I hope you understand.

You asked why I collect teeth. I do that to show children that losing your baby teeth is an important part of growing up and something you will always remember. In this case, I am happy to leave your tooth with you to keep. I'll be back when you lose the next one!

(signed) The T.F.

P.S. Please keep brushing your beautiful teeth - in the morning and at bedtime!

Train fashion

I haven't done justice this year to the fashion thing in Tokyo, mainly because I often feel self-conscious about asking people if I can photograph them - even if they are wearing the most outrageous outfits and clearly want to be noticed.

Anyway, I recently saw these four young women on a train when I was coming back from Costco. When I took out my camera and asked if I could take a photo, they jumped into a pose!


I'm going to try to get more fashion-detail stuff in later posts, but these women do represent a lot of what we see on the streets, like the shag haircuts, thigh-high black knee socks or tights with white shoes, yellow baby-doll dresses and high heels with almost everything.

And it seems like almost every woman in Tokyo carries a designer bag; Louis Vuitton does 40 percent of its business here - and even this woman has one.



Here's another trend in Tokyo: jeweled fingernails, to go with jewel-covered cell phones. (click pic to really see the jewels)



More fashion to come...

Summer night

The weather in Tokyo lately has been delightful. I'd been warned about the rainy seasion from mid-June to mid-July: that it would rain most days with a blustery wind that would soak us and shred our umbrellas.

Instead, we've had a string of lovely, cool-enough days with some rain, but not too much rain. And we're really enjoying it. The other night, we went swimming at the Tokyo American Club, took the bus home, ate soba and tempura at a century-old noodle restaurant, and walked home through Azabu Juban in 70-degree pleasantness.

Flower pots

Tokyo is a concrete city. Except for parks and planters outside buildings, almost anything Earthlike is covered by a road, sidewalk, house, apartment building, or something else that is flat and paved.

But people try really, really hard to bring a little green into the picture - mainly with flower pots. Some of the pots are old and cracked but sometimes everything is very deliberately and artfully done - like outdoor ikebana. I've even seen planters used for growing strawberries, zucchini, and tomatoes.

I hope it's not too many pictures, but I liked finding this citified greenery. (Click a pic if you want a better view.)

These are houses we pass on the way to Lucinda's or Arno's school.




A restaurant on a busy street.


The front steps of an apartment building.


A wall overlooking a parking lot next to a few tiny homes. (My favorite photo.)


Outside the post office in the Azabu Juban neighborhood near our house.


A flower shop sets the mood.


These tiny stone planters were for sale outside a stone-masonry store.


I spotted this rooftop garden from the third floor balcony at Starbucks in Azabu Juban. Here's the building...


...and this is the rooftop closeup.


We'll be back in Seattle for vacation in a few weeks; for now, this is our green.

Blaine's latest...

Blaine had three more Condi and N Korea-related stories over the weekend. His job is a heap of hard work.

US sends shipment of wheat

SecState fails to solveS Korean protests about US beef.

and

N Korea blows up cooling tower.

Arno's suggestion

Arno said the following at dinner tonight: "I think we should have another baby. Babies are cute. If it's a girl, we could call her Rose. If it's a boy, we should call him Superhero S."

Me: "So, his nickname would be Supe?"
Arno: "No, just Superman S."

Some discussion.

Arno: "Or we could call him Astroman."
Blaine: "His nickname could be Ass."
Lucinda: "I think we should call the baby Stinky Cheese."
Arno: "I want you to call me Astroman."

We are NOT, by the way, having any more children. We told the kids that we're happy with two.

Trailing spouse: Condi Rice edition

Blaine is in Kyoto covering Condi Rice's trip to Japan and (tomorrow) to South Korea in advance of the Group of Eight summit here in early July.

His first story, about the removal of N Korea from the US list of terror-supporting nations, is in the front page on Friday's Washington Post. He'll travel to Seoul with the Secretary of State tomorrow for 24 hours. Blaine does not love covering these sorts of big news events as much as I do, but I keep telling him it's pretty cool nonetheless.

If he gets a private audience w/the SecState, I want him to ask Rice about Barack Obama. Maybe he could get her to say something interesting? She is so controlled (though well-spoken) in her pronouncements, but maybe he could drag some US political news out of the event.

Blaine's latest...

... is a funny story about fancy, electricity-guzzling Japanese toilets!

This story has all sorts of nice timing: just before the G-8 summit in Hokkaido, Japan, when there will be international pressure to talk energy conservation, and with such high global oil prices. And who can resist a potty story?

In case you haven't seen one of these up close, here's one of our bottom-washing seat-warmers.


And the fantastic control panel, with translation by our real-estate management company. The graphics are everything.

Mt. Takao

I'm going to blog about Blaine's trip with the kids, Blaise, Adrienne and their children to Mt. Takao because I've got the photos and Adrienne is giving me the details. (She'll post about the trip on her blog, too.) How great to get the kids into the woods for some fresh air and greenery.

They went on the Keio line from Shinjuku station. 45 mins or so. Lucinda agreed to put a barrette in her hair to get her bangs out of her face.


They climbed on some stones, walked up some steps...


... took the cable car up the mountain where, at the top, they found a 100-yen mechanized train to climb on.



At the top, a lovely temple and this outbuilding. Nice red lantern.


A big Buddha caught Eliot's attention.


Blaine enjoyed hanging out with Blaise.


These tall cedar trees are very soothing; I'll have to go along next time. Arno and Lucinda are really glad to see Anselm and Eliot - their Seattle cousins. (I can tell that it's going to be tough times when Anselm and his family fly home.)


Then lunch: thick noodle soup and tempura. Yum!

Visitors!

We have our first non-family visitors, our friends Blaise, Adrienne, Anselm and Eliot from Seattle. I'm frankly envious of their freedom here: the freedom to travel and experience Japan as a vacation and not as a place to live and work and go to school.

But there is a side benefit. They are nudging us out of our routine. Blaine went with them today to take the kids to Mt. Takao, a short mountain that's about an hour's train ride from central Tokyo. (I was working at my magazine.) There's a cable car that takes you up to the top and some steps that Arno whined about but then conquered. They played hide and seek and had ice cream and met me at Shinjuku station with chocolate smears on their shirts. They were happy.

Another benefit of Adrienne's visit, for me, is that we're having some interesting chats about parenting. It's vastly helpful to see other parents in action, if only to show options for what we do.

I'm realizing that summer is a challenge for Lucinda, especially, because she misses the structure of regular school days, and it's a challenge for me because I like my school-hour freedom to do what I want, to read, to swim, to look around Tokyo. End result: she makes lots of demands, I end up saying "no" a lot, and we get annoyed with her more often. With parenting, you always have to find a new solution to a new problem.

Not missing

Ack, the week got away from me without the slightest bit of blogging. Was it really Monday that I wrote the last post?

The kids are in summer schools with limited hours, which limits my hours to read, write, blog or swim. And I'm editing another magazine issue, about Tokyo's cultural and city life that will be offered at the Beijing Olympics to promote Tokyo's bid for the 2016 summer games.

As usual, my editing gives me a delightful window into Japanese culture; this time, I'm learning about "Edo-komon" stencil-dyed kimono, the Tokyo subway, Tokyo "city within a city" neighborhoods, advanced metal-molding, and kabuki theater. It feels like I'm auditing a class on Japanese culture and history, with an emphasis on Edo, as Tokyo was called in the 17th, 18th and mid-19th centuries.

I'll find some websites that convey what I'm learning and post them - this week, hopefully, if I can shake myself loose.

Equal parenting?

The NYT magazine has a big piece about "Equal Parenting" that is pretty interesting for any parent to consider, and perhaps more so for a trailing spouse.

The story focuses on a family in which father and mother split responsibilities and time spent taking care of home and children. Each parent works professionally for about 30 hrs per week and they endeavor to share childcare, grocery shopping, cooking, and housecleaning. In the web video accompanying the story (an effective summary of the long piece, if you don't have time to read the whole thing), the dad explains that to equalize laundry-washing, he does the dark loads and she does the light loads.

Blaine and I certainly reflect how different our responsibilities are in Tokyo vs. Seattle. Here, he often wakes up to deal with editors around 7 a.m. before the Post is put to bed the previous night in D.C., and sometimes (or, recently, often) writes on deadline at night to get a news story on the Web. My days, meanwhile, are governed by the kids' schedules: school dropoffs, pickups, swim lessons, playdates, birthday parties. Some days it seems, and feels, very unequal from a feminist point of view because I spend so much more time with the kids. But the truth is that, on the whole, I have more time to myself (more than Blaine does, that is) when the kids are at school to see friends, have coffee, or exercise, while he picks up the slack when I have editing or writing deadlines.

What will be really interesting, then, is how we shift our family responsibilities if (or, more likely, when) I'm also working full time at some point in the future.

What do you think of equal parenting? Possible? Desirable? No way?

Earthquakes

We feel a lot of earthquakes in Japan - not every day, but enough to notice when you've never experienced an earthquake before Japan. I've been woken up a few times by shaking, which is so weird because you barely figure out what's happening before the moment passes and you go back to sleep.

This morning just before 9 a.m., there were two big quakes - 6 minutes apart, higher than 6 on the Richter scale - in the same spot about 200 miles north of Tokyo that killed several people, and it also shook Tokyo. Here's the Japan Meteorological Agency's diagram for the first and the second.

I was on Skype making a doctor's appointment for this summer in Seattle when our kitchen table started to rock back and forth irregularly, like it was on a boat. "We're having an earthquake!" I told the receptionist. "Are you okay?" she said, alarmed. "Yeah, it happens all the time here," I said. (Turns out that the shaking in Tokyo was only a 2, not much really, but a friend who lives on the 20th floor said her apt building was really swaying.)

What's really weird about earthquakes, I think, is that your brain races to establish a regular pattern to the shaking, as if you might rationally predict when it might end. But there isn't any pattern. The earth lurches around for a while - sometimes a hard shake, sometimes a weird rocking, sometimes for a few seconds, sometimes for more seconds - and then it's over, kaput.

Still, the China earthquake and this one remind me, yet again, that we have to revisit our earthquake preparedness situation.

Last day of K

It's so hard to believe: tomorrow is the last day of kindergarten and Arno's preschool year. Day 1 seems like it was about 2 months ago.

We're so proud of the kids, especially Lucinda, who missed her Seattle friends so much but had a terrific year and made wonderful progress in reading, writing, math and early Japanese. Arno also had a great year, learned how to go to school, listen to teachers, take turns and make friends.

For expats here, Year 1 pretty much ends when school is out. Families started leaving tonight (the day before the last day of school) and most people will be away for 1-2 months until school starts again. We'll be here to enjoy the early summer, before a vacation to skip August's too-hot weather.

Blaine's almost-latest

... is about the mass murder in Tokyo on Sunday. Fortunately, this doesn't happen too often here.

Party on

I'm learning that early June in Tokyo is party season. There are, for example, heaps of "sayonara parties" for people who are moving away this summer after several years here.

It's also prime-time for birthday parties for kids (including Lucinda) with summer birthdays, because lots of families want to gather school friends one last time before expat families leave town for (typically) one or two months of vacation in Europe, the US, Hawaii, Bali, Thailand or some combination of the above. Last Sunday, the kids went to a party for one of Lucinda's friends from 10:30am to 1pm, followed by a party for one of Arno's friends until 2:30pm.

And last week, we went to the Australian embassy at the invitation of Arno's friend, Ceinwyn, for a children's "disco party" (see photograph above). Imagine yourself in a room with a few dozen energetic preschoolers - most of them dressed as princesses - screaming their heads off as they do the limbo, while Lucinda grouses for a half hour that she wants a Coca-Cola. A much-appreciated invitation, but a seriously headache-inducing experience.

Blowing bubbles

This is what passes for outdoor activity at our Tokyo house: blowing bubbles on the front steps.


We do miss our big green backyard in Seattle!