4° Celcius
April 26th, 2007 by StephOk, Tohoku. Seriously. 4° Celcius in late April? Snow and cherry blossoms in full bloom? Why will you not just give me a spring I can understand and enjoy? What’s with all the mystery, the cold shoulder?
It was a beautiful afternoon, if a little chilly (see title), which inspired me to interact with the elementary kids who walk past my house on the way home from school. So I set up camp in the driveway with a set of bubbles. It was all fun and games, teaching the kids how to blow with the wind, making bubbles by twirling in circles, until it degenerated into an all out screaming match for Chris’ attention, who was locked in the ivory tower of our 2-story house. Imagine you’re hard at work, staring at your computer screen, debugging some asynchronous Java script or some such nonsense, when you’re interrupted by gaggle of 6 year-olds outside your window, screaming “DANNA-SAN!”, which, directly translated, means something along the lines of “MR. HUSBAND!!!”
Ok, so I may have encouraged them to yell “Chris-san!” once. But then they took the art of yelling for attention to a new fantastic ear splitting level. “Dana-san! Come out please! Hello? Where are you? DAAAAANA SAAAAAAAAN!!!!” One ambitious little girl started running toward the house to go and physically fetch him, which is clearly the only reasonable course of action if your adorable and unyielding pleas are being ignored.
Whoa, whoa, WHOA little lady! I had to nip this one in the bud. I tried to explain in my broken Japanese that anyone inside the house is “busy”, and it’s forbidden to bother anyone by going inside the house. No exceptions. I also added that Dana-san is very shy. I hope that does the trick, or we’re going to have innumerable uninvited house guests very, very soon.
April 27th, 2007 at 1:47 am
Uninvited guests? I know what you mean. But though it´s crazy to think this, but uninvited guests are the very basis of the social interactions of entire cultures. Like here in Honduras. When did we Americans become so uncomfortable with other people that we decided we had to control their entry and exit from our lives?
April 29th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
Actually, Japan is even more extreme than the US about house guests, invited or uninvited. It’s very rare to have people over to your house socially… you would never throw a party in your house here like we would back home. Instead people will find a common place to meet that isn’t a residence. In fact, in the 9 months we’ve lived here, we’ve been invited into someone’s house only 3 times.