Komaba Park

Last Wednesday I visited Natasha Caryl, whose husband, Christian, is Newsweek's correspondent here.

The Caryls and their children, Timothy and Sasha, live near Komaba Todaimae station in southwest Tokyo. I loved seeing a neighborhood with a more human scale - two-story modern houses, quiet streets, and more sky - than our expat haven with its big luxury apartment buildings. After coffee and pastries, we took a short walk to Komaba Park.

Here is Natasha outside the gate.



Inside the park, which was once owned by the aristocratic Maeda family, we first toured the family's traditional wooden Japanese teahouse (top photo, on the left). Naturally, you leave your shoes at the door to keep the tatami mats clean. The back door frames a lovely garden with enormous carp in a pond.





The guide showed us the tea room, which is ordinarily closed to the public. She pointed out the woven ceiling and inlaid, painted, wooden doors, which were wonderfully illuminated by my camera-flash.





Around the corner, about 20 Japanese people were sketching the family mansion. Do Americans ever sketch anything?




This building and some of the trees are more than 100 years old, which is very rare in Tokyo. This estate escaped significant WW II damage and American generals lived in the stone house during the postwar US occupation.

In surrounding trees, we saw enormous spiders hanging out in 3-D webs. Google tells me they are Nephila clavata spiders - about 4 inches long, including their legs.
>




Afterwards, Natalia walked me back to the train and we stopped at "Playmoland", the Playmobil store, the antidote to nature.

What a Tree!

I saw this gorgeous old tree in Komaba Park, on a walk with Natasha Caryl (her husband is the Newsweek correspondent here).

More on the park later...

Trailing Spouse - Burma edition

We thought Blaine might leave for Bangkok this weekend to cover the Burma aftermath.

(Burma, Southeast Asia and Australia are part of the empire I call Greater Blainia.)

So I'm faced with an unexpected moral dilemma: If the Burmese govt maintains its brutal crackdown, repressing millions of people, Blaine will likely not spend as much time covering that story. If Burma opens up, freeing millions of people, Blaine will probably spend weeks and/or months there - a definite challenge for us in Tokyo.

For now, we think he'll be in Tokyo for a few weeks, at least, now that the Korea negotiations are done for now.

Am I worried that Blaine could go to Burma and risk arrest or worse? A Japanese photographer was shot to death there last week.

Blaine probably couldn't get a visa from the current govt. He went there in 2000 and wrote a series of A1 stories for The New York Times, and I'm guessing that someone in the former SLORC knows how to use Google.

Trailing Spouse - Korean Summit edition

Blaine has been in Seoul all week to cover the summit between South and North Korea - find his many WaPo stories here. He'll be home tomorrow after lunch.

But we've had an improved week of solo parenting. I've gotten the morning routine better organized, so I can get them out the door by 7:55 a.m. The children love school right now and don't stall on the way out the door.

After school, I've been taking L and A to a playground to fully wear them out. We're having cooler, fall-like weather here - finally! - and that is great playdate weather. Then an early dinner and bedtime by 8pm.

Now, if only I could stop reading news websites to get more sleep.

Blaine's latest stories

The WashPost (a/k/a the WP or WaPo) published two terrific Blaine stories this weekend.

Today he has an entertaining, creepy piece about the plastic surgery capital of Asia: Seoul, South Korea. The headline is "Assembly Required" and here is the lede.

"With wide eyes, sleek cheekbones and delicately upturned noses, the soap stars look alluringly and somewhat numbingly alike -- thanks to their own visits to the scalpel-wielding wizards whose gleaming clinics are clustered in a part of this city called "Makeover Town."..."

Yesterday (Saturday), Blaine had a story about Billy's Bootcamp, an exercise fad in Japan that has earned an aging American exercise guru more than $120 million, in a country where women and men are already shockingly thin.

Here are some choice grafs:

"Feel the power!" commands Blanks, who first felt the power of infomercials in the 1990s, when TV spots for his "Tae Bo total body fitness system" made him gobs of money and helped him land appearances on "ER" and "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

"Blanks has made himself into a household name here by tapping into two lucrative streams that flow from the modern Japanese psyche: an unselfconscious passion for fads and a self-conscious concern about being overweight...."


Stories like these set Blaine apart as a newspaper writer in America, not just because they are fun to read but because he identifies and wittily explains the social contexts that give birth to trends like these. Okay, so I'm his wife, but I also know what makes a good story even better.

Moon Festival

Tonight we went to Nishimachi, Lucinda's school, to celebrate Otsukimi, the Japanese moon-viewing festival.

In the gym, we watched a program about the holiday, which celebrates the harvest and full moon.



The sixth grade staged a play of the Otsukimi legend, called "The Rabbit in the Moon". Here's the simplified version:

In the story, the "old man of the moon" looks down on Earth and sees three friends, a rabbit, a monkey and a fox.



To find out which of the three animals is the kindest, the old man in the moon comes down to Earth disguised as a beggar and asks the three to find food for him.



The monkey brings fruit; the fox brings fish. The rabbit offers to throw himself into a fire and cook himself as food for the beggar.

Hearing this, the beggar turns himself back into the Old-Man-of-the-Moon and invites the rabbit to live with him in the moon. This is why the Japanese people believe that when the moon is shining brightly, they can see the rabbit there pounding rice.



After the play, students waited in line to look at the moon from the school observatory; the moon was behind a nearby building, oh well. Many girls (Japanese and non-Japanese) and their mothers wore "yukata", or cotton kimonos, to the celebration.





The kids snacked on Otsukimi treats - rice-flour balls filled with red-bean paste and rice crackers and made a rabbit-in-the-moon with paint.




Finally, a teacher helped Lucinda fold an origami rabbit for an Otsukimi scene on paper, and Arno giggled when Blaine tickled him.

Learning Japanese

Lucinda is soaking up the lessons from her daily, 40-minute Japanese class, and today she announced that she'd learned to write her name in Katakana, one of the three Japanese alphabets. She showed me on a recent drawing.



It's not 100 percent right, but it's darn close to "Ru-shi-n-da" if you look at this katakana map.

How much for an artichoke?

I didn't anticipate one of the biggest challenges to adapting U.S. family life to Tokyo.

In Seattle, we could find a broad selection of the best vegetables and fruits at prices we could handle, even at Whole Foods. But some produce that we loved to eat in Seattle, like grapes and blueberries, corn and artichokes, are a costly minefield here.

Today at one grocery store that had generally reasonable prices, even for imported goods, I saw a 1/2 pint box of blueberries for $6, a half-pint of raspberries for $10, and corn for $2/ear. And these artichokes.



That's right: one artichoke costs 1575 yen - about $14! And it wasn't even a great-looking artichoke.

We are adjusting our cooking and eating accordingly.

Children's Castle

Lucinda, Arno and I tested another weekend children's hangout: The National Children's Castle, a multi-million $$ play center near fashionable Omotesando. It's a lot like the Tokyo Metropolitan Children's Hall, but this is the paid version. (400 yen per child, 500 yen per adult - or about $4 and $5 if you ballpark currency exchange.)

The two best attractions at the Children's Castle are the rooftop playground and the 3rd floor art room. The roof has a maze of nets and tunnels to climb through, but the kids absolutely loved jumping into these balls.




In the art room, there is a totally cool, huge white board for the kids to paint on. This would be such a great addition to any children's museum - there's a drain underneath so it must get hosed down every night.




There's also a wooden indoor play structure called...




...and low-tech games, like air hockey without the air. In the home-play section, Lucinda put Japanese dolls on tiny futons.




Afterwards, I took them to McDonald's for lunch, their first-ever McDonald's meal. I decided not to tell them about the restaurant's American identity because I didn't want to make it even more alluring.




In Seattle, Blaine liked to take the kids to Red Mill for burgers, fries and milkshakes, but we haven't found a suitable replacement here.

At McDonalds's, Lucinda scarfed down her burger and fries, spotted the milkshake ads and declared, "On Daddy's birthday, we should surprise him and bring him here for supper!"

Diapers for sale

On the plus side, Arno has effectively potty trained himself in the past week. He even wakes up at night to pee! This is a welcome surprise, because Lucinda followed her own schedule (as usual) on this front.

Now I can sell the 4 boxes of diapers I bought at Costco in Seattle, and cut down on my burnable trash collection!

Long weekend

Some days with children are not fun - and this was one of them. On days like this, I remind myself not to blame Tokyo, but being here adds a degree of difficulty to the average, not-fun day.

Lucinda and Arno dragged Blaine out of bed to make pancakes, and within an hour, they were squabbling, shouting, screeching and driving us crazy. When will they be old enough to play by themselves in the morning?

Then Blaine told me he felt sick - and he also had to work this afternoon, which meant that I was solo-parenting for the seventh day in a row. (Blaine was in South Korea last week and took a reporting trip to Yokohama on Saturday. He is working like a dog.)

I scrambled and took the kids to a park, Hibiya Koen, near the Imperial Palace, where there was a playground we hadn't visited. It started off well: we emerged from the subway to see Tokyo's version of Nature with a pond, turtles on a rock, ducks and a German garden where several people were painting the scenery from benches.





On to the playground which, like so many Tokyo playgrounds, looks like something you'd find in Romania, circa 1978. Run-down equipment with a bit of rust, on dirt sprinkled with scrubby weeds. Not inspiring.





On the plus side, the park was the finish line for a charity 10k run, and there was a guitarist singing in English. I'd been feeling bummed out, but the kids threw themselves into playing, and pretty soon were chasing each other around.



Then they got tired and Lucinda started whining, but sometimes I can't just make it easy and take a taxi home. Instead I dragged them back to the subway and then decided I should buy groceries - which meant taking the kids into a new store where I couldn't find anything.

Soon enough, they were running down the aisles and pulling colored marshmallows off the shelves and I was hollering at them while I scrambled to buy meat and veggie. And THEN we walked home. Do you ever compound mistakes by making new ones that are just as irrational?

In Seattle, I'd arranged our family life to minimize hassles. Tokyo is more of an adventure, but sometimes it's an adventure in exhaustion.

Big Digger

We have a new stop on our walk home, a small construction site near Lucinda's and Arno's schools where a digger and a concrete crusher are tearing away the foundation of an old building.



The kids are fascinated to see these machines up close.



Progress seems slow, perhaps because the concrete is laced with rebar. One machine pounds into the concrete, then welders move in to slice the rebar, and the digger strains out the biggest rocks.

Dog day

Dogs are a huge deal here, and they are a good substitute for children in a country where having kids is expensive and a career-killer for most women. I often see 20-somethings carrying tiny, super-fancy dogs in designer purses.

This morning, this woman walked by the Starbucks in Roppongi Hills with her two pups in a stroller.



When I asked if I could take a picture, she fluffed them up, stood a few feet away and made kissing sounds to perk them up for the camera.



Later, I saw this fancy store: Pet Esthe. There's a doggie dress in the window!

Practicing for Earthquakes

After a few weeks of practice, Lucinda's kindergarten held an earthquake drill today.

The "earthquake" occurred at 1:50 p.m. Parents were asked to leave home at 1:50 p.m. and walk to school (most families live nearby) to pick up their child in person.

Lucinda told me what happened after the teacher announced, Earthquake! The kids duck under the nearest table. When the shaking stops, her teacher hands out silver, pointed, padded hoods that the children wear to protect them from falling debris and (I assume, because of the silver fabric) to keep them warm.

When I arrived at the kindergarten at about 2:20 p.m., school administrators in white helmets were waiting outside.



Lucinda and her classmates, in their hoods, were sitting quietly at a table reading books. Lucinda told me not to laugh about the hood, and she looks a little sheepish here. (I warned her that I was bringing my camera.)




I had to present an emergency card to her teacher before she could leave with me.



Then her teacher praised her for sitting quietly and following directions, and Lucinda walked to the ground-floor window and climbed out. (Here's a photo of her classmate doing the same.)



I have bought boxed emergency supplies - three days of food, water and a blanket - but some people have cookstoves, fuel, boxes of canned goods and thousands of dollars in cash in their homes, just in case.

Blaine's latest...

... is a story about a homeless man living in a park near our house.

I noticed this man at the playground. He was sitting on a bench behind the enormous wooden play structure that Arno imagined was a pirate ship. His jacket, on a hangar, was hanging in a tree and his "outdoor shoes" were placed neatly at the base of the tree.

This could not be more different than a New York Times story I wrote about homeless alcoholics in Seattle, who ran up huge bills in emergency rooms and the drunk tank - and were now living for free (or with low rent) in apartments where they could drink and pass out, and save taxpayer dollars.

Sun and fashion

Most days here are still muggy and hot, in the 90s. I imagine it's like being in the South in mid-summer without ocean breezes or an air-conditioned car, and wearing shorts and T-shirts is the only option for many expat women who are pushing strollers up and down Tokyo's hills.

But many Japanese women manage the heat differently: with parasols, huge tinted visors, white gloves and a long black shirt and pants. This woman was on a rooftop playground with her son yesterday.



Maybe I'll try it next summer?