Fond memories

We've been back in the US for three whole months, and I completely let the blog slide. It was difficult to look back at our lovely three years in Japan at the same time when I and our whole family had to face front and live in the present. It's also hard to know what to write about life in the US without the novelty and cultural differences that I found in Tokyo on a daily basis.

(I'll just add here, briefly, that if you ever have the chance to be an expat, do it. It's a fantastic way to live for months or years - whatever you can manage.)

But heck, why not try to write about life today? I'll do my best, but might throw in some photos (like the one of our family at the Great Wall) that I never managed to publish on the blog before this.

And to get things started, I'll quote Arno, who tonight became very teary about missing his friends in Tokyo -- especially his best friend Marcel -- and his school, Willowbrook, where he spent three delightful years.

Arno was completely comfortable and confident at Willowbrook; it was an ideal situation for him. All of the teachers knew him and Arno knew, with absolute certainty, that he would be greeted with smiles every day. That feeling of specialness is harder to find in a public-school kindergarten with 26 other students, no matter how skilled the teacher.

So tonight, thinking about his friends in Tokyo, he pulled out his Willowbrook yearbooks and scanned the photographs and cried a bit. And then he said, "I have fond memories of Willowbrook." (Seriously, the kid is about to turn 6 and used the word "fond.") As we all do of Tokyo and our many adventures and friends there.

Groceries

7 days to go until our departure, and I'm cleaning and throwing stuff away like crazy. What's in our pantry? Flour, sugar, brown sugar, baking soda... chocolate chips!

So we've just made a last batch of cookies in our lame French oven -- perfect timing for Arno's sayonara playdate this afternoon.

Back to the U.S.

It's official: we're leaving Tokyo and moving back to Seattle on June 29. We've had a terrific 3 years here -- an excellent family adventure, with great friends, schools and restaurants! -- and it's time to return to "normal" life with a car, backyard and wild salmon on the bbq.

Next projects: Blaine is leaving The Washington Post and will write his third book, "Escape from Camp 14," about a young man who was born in the North Korean gulag and escaped when he was in his early 20s. I'll start looking for work. And Lucinda and Arno will join the ranks at the Seattle public schools.

I've been lax about posting on this blog in recent months, after (1) my computer broke, (2) my camera broke, and (3) as I've been more focused on trying to get a job that would keep us in Japan. (Despite best efforts -- and a lot of support and help from friends -- my job prospects here did not pan out.)

I'll try to post some photos, at least, of some of the sights we've seen in Asia that didn't see daylight yet. Thanks for reading my blog!

Progress

A red-letter day in the Tokyo American Club swimming pool, as Arno bravely pushed off from the wall this afternoon and swam about 5 feet to me! A first, after months of swim lessons last year and 2 lessons this spring. Then he swam across the lap lane about 40 times. Very exciting!

Lucinda, meanwhile, says TAC's Mini-Mudsharks swim team is "likable" - much more likable, in fact, than expected because I signed her up without asking. She has 3 smooth, relatively efficient strokes so far (butterfly is TK) and likes swimming on the clock. L has so far not enjoyed games with hard-to-identify rules and strategy (like soccer), but she seems to enjoy the self-directed, self-control of swimming - and maybe running? We'll see what develops.

Lucinda types: "I LOVE SWIMMING ALOT!"

Spring flowers

I already wrote about sakura (cherry blossom) fashion. Now here are some snaps from our annual picnics (hanami) under the cherries.

Last weekend, the peak of the flower experience, we went to Shinjuku Gyoen, a huge, well-kept park near Shinjuku station, with many families from Arno's school, Willowbrook. Crowds lined up outside the gates to get in.


Blaine took this gorgeous shot that expresses the pure hanami experience of picnicking beneath the boughs.


Arno took charge of my camera and delivered this self-portrait...


... and a shot of his parents. I am drinking a can of hot green tea purchased from a vending machine.


Lucinda and Arno


The finale to this year's hanami was in Kinuta Koen (Kinuta Park) in Sendagaya-ku, Tokyo, at the Willowbrook spring picnic. Amazing trees!


An elegantly dressed older lady brought out to gaze at the blossoms.


And Arno's Take/Takenoko (Bamboo/Bamboo shoots) class this year.


Happy spring!

Living in the present

"Mom, what's a typewriter?" - Arno, born in 2004, asked tonight.

Blaine's latest...

are two stories about women and social pressures in Japan and South Korea.

This story looks at why Japanese women are so thin - and they are incredibly thin. While American women have gained weight - obesity has risen from 17 percent to 35 percent since 1980, Japanese women (other than those over age 70) have actually lost weight over the past 25 years.

If you go into most clothing stores here, even Banana Republic in expat-friendly Roppongi Hills, there aren't many items over a size 6 and size 0 is very common. (This, and the fact that almost everything is sized for shorter people, saves me heaps of time and money.) In the US, many women gain weight during pregnancy and never lose it, but several Japanese moms at Arno's or Lucinda's school have had babies and bounce back below 100 lbs within a few months.

But many women take thinness to scary levels; it's anecdotal, of course, but I've seen many more anorexic women here than I ever did in NYC.

Blaine's second story (which actually ran first) is about the difficulties of being a working mother in South Korea. One woman, a marketing executive with a 6-yr-old son, took out full-page newspaper advertisements to declare "I Am a Bad Woman" because she is sick of being criticized by her husband, son and mother-in-law for continuing to work.

The story includes this astonishing statistic: "South Korean law allows a full year of subsidized parental leave, but intense peer pressure at work means that working mothers usually take little time off, according to government surveys. Only about 35,000 parents in this country of 49 million people (my italics) took advantage of child-care leave subsidies last year."

It's fascinating to compare lifestyles in Japan and other countries we visit to the American way of life; every country has its own specific pathologies. In Japan, it's incredibly difficult for Japanese women to have full-time, high-powered jobs and also have children - in part because Japan's immigration laws don't allow them to hire lower-cost immigrants for childcare. (Expats with certain work visas can, by contrast, hire immigrants as nannies.) The Japanese also smoke much more than Americans do.

But it's impossible not to live here and not recognize that the U.S. has serious food issues. It's not just about obesity rates, but (I think) because the food industry creates and Americans accept a high-volume array of processed foods that have too much salt, sugar, fat and calories. In Japan, food is seasonal, served in much smaller but still filling portions and lacks the American corn-syrupy sweetness, even in chocolate. Arno recently took a small bite of a Milky Way that was leftover from Halloween, declared it was too sweet, didn't eat the rest.

Year of the Tiger

Lucinda, Arno and I went to Yokohama's Chinatown last weekend to see the Chinese New Year festivities. Lots of fun. To kick off the post, here's video of a dragon dance in the parade.



Snapshots: The gate to Chinatown


Roasted chestnuts for sale. Lucinda loves them, and Arno tried them (very rare development) and liked them!


An old traditional house on the main street.


A dog, sitting in a stroller and wearing a dress with a denim skirt. (You have to look closely, but it's definitely a skirt.)


Lucinda, wearing a dress purchased by her grandparents in Beijing, and Arno, in a Chinese devil mask; in Japanese, it's called an "oni."


Lunch for sale: heaps of pork (I think).


Lucinda's lunch: a steamed meat bun from a street stall for 200 yen ($2).


Chinese children led the parade with dragon puppets.


The emperor, who spoke very good English when he wished the children "Happy New Year."


Another creature came over to greet us.


On to the rest of the Year of the Tiger!

Snowy morning

We had a treat this morning: actual feathery snow falling as we walked to school. Very rare in our Tokyo experience.

Chiang Mai

The best stretch of our trip was 3 days in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, an hourlong flight north of Bangkok. (Interior flights in Thailand are only about $100/person, fantastically cheap.)

Chiang Mai is Thailand's cultural capital, influenced by northern "hill tribes" -- in the photo above, Lucinda is wearing a traditional hill-tribe hat -- as well as Burma (to the west), China (north) and Laos (east). Wikipedia tells me there are nearly 200,000 city residents, with 1 million in the metro area. But it didn't feel crowded and had much less grime than Bangkok.

Our hotel, Yaang Come Village, booked on Expedia for about $200/nite, was lovely. Its entrance-building is next to a massive rubber tree (you can see Arno's tiny shape next to it in the second foto).



Our room had murals painted on the walls. (Click foto for a closer look.)


The sweetest hotel accoutrement was this tennis-y bug zapper. You press a button, swing away - and fry mosquitoes! Revenge for years of bug bites. (Our hotel attendant warned the kids not to play with it.)


Our first afternoon, we walked to Chiang Mai's "old city" to see the excellent Sunday Market. It wasn't crowded at dusk but was packed by 8pm.


I thought Bangkok's famous night market was quite dull: heaps of counterfeit Gucci, Polo, Chanel, Dior, Vuitton, etc. We quickly realized that Chiang Mai's market was going to be more genuine - not just for tourists - when we saw the table of cooked bugs for sale, including...


...fried grasshoppers and...


...grubs with a leafy seasoning. I once wrote a story for The Boston Globe about a "bug chef" in Washington State, but this was the real thing.


Other curiosities: Monks buying books.


A girl dressed for a stage performance.


We bought street food for supper and Blaine made the best choice. From this woman, who was cooking in clay pots on a side street...


...Blaine bought spicy curry-noodles for about 25 cents. The most delicious dish of the whole vacation.


Here was my favorite dish, which Lucinda and I bought at Chiang Mai's regular night market. Mango sticky rice for 50 baht, or about $1.50.

Arno's joke

Whilst eating his Cheerios this morning:

"Why did the chicken cross the playground? To get to other slide."

(With credit to Elmo.)

Hong Island

Thailand has fantastic diving near Krabi, and you can take a longtail boat to famously beautiful islands like Ko Phi Phi or James Bond Island to see fish. When we considered day trips, though - with Lucinda, a good swimmer, and Arno, who can't swim and is fully capable of whining his way through the most delightful scenery - we decided to take a much easier snorkeling trip to Ko Hong (Hong Island).

We hired a longtail boat for about 1200 baht (33 baht = $1, so that's about $40 for the day), including lunch. Our captain, who said his name was Jack, met us after breakfast.


We arrived at Ko Hong a half-hour later, the second boat to anchor - and the beach was almost empty (see top photo and below).


Lucinda, almost always willing to try new things, enjoyed snorkeling; Arno was predictably a bit anxious about the novelty but enjoyed looking for shells on the beach. Then some beer-drinking Germans (beer at 10 a.m.!) gave us some slices of bread to feed colorful fish who swarmed around us in a frenzy.



A little later, we walked into the island's interior and learned, by way of wooden boats flung 100 meters into the jungle, that Ko Hong was slammed by the 2004 tsunami, causing some deaths and injuries. (Here's one person's account of it.) There hadn't been any tsunami damage at our hotel or in Ao Nang, as (I think) that slice of shoreline was protected by Phuket, to the west.


Ko Hong has a neat geology: limestone formations that make the rock look like dripping candle wax.


After lunch, when it was high tide, "Captain Jack" took us around to the other side of the island to see its lagoon. Quite beautiful views, as you float through the narrow entrance.



The water was very warm and only a few feet deep over flat, soft sand. So Lucinda, Arno (buck-naked by that point) and I climbed out of the boat and walked around.



It was an easy adventure, without being too much adventure, for everyone.

The Beach

We flew south from Bangkok to Krabi province (a quick hour on a packed Airbus) on Thailand's west coast. Krabi is vastly more sedate (I'm told) than Phuket, with pleasant beaches and massive limestone rock formations for climbers. This is what we saw on the way to our hotel.


The Sheraton Resort in Krabi was comfortable and well-designed, though a bit dull - a fine place to decompress from Tokyo life. There's a good breakfast brunch, a small "kids' club" with arts and crafts, hammocks, free internet, and a powdery beach on the Andaman Sea. The downside to the resort was the $100/night (!!) fee to borrow an extra twin bed; last year, the Westin in Bali didn't charge anything.



The best features were the resort's two huge swimming pools. They were wonderfully warm with varying depths; I swam laps and the children spent hours playing in them, often with an 8-year-old American girl whose family (from Michigan) lives in Shanghai.


There wasn't much to see near our hotel, just a few restaurants plus laundry, tchotchke and massage shops, so we twice went to Ao Nang, a touristy beach village with long rows of shops selling counterfeit stuff and handmade suits.


Fortunately, Ao Nang's beach is quite picturesque, with traditional "long-tail boats" anchored offshore and cliffs in the background. We took a stroll and the children hunted for quality shells.


Then we had supper (twice) at Ao Nang's beachfront restaurant row.


Our Lonely Planet guide suggested Sala Bua & Lo Spuntino, which has Thai and Italian menus, and it was fantastic. Every restaurant has an ice-filled "boat" at the entrance to show the daily seafood catch: massive prawns, shiny clams, mussels, fish, crabs and Andaman lobsters.


We ordered crab and prawn pasta one night, and seafood pizza the next...


...and Lucinda and I indulged in shockingly good, fresh "watermelon shakes."


We all enjoyed the sunset (behind Phuket island in the distance).