The Road Less Traveled

Homestay #1: The Maeda Family

Sunday, November 30th, 2008 by Rintaun | Uncategorized

How’s it going, everyone? With Thanksgiving and Christmas coming on, everybody’s probably getting pretty busy with (not-really-)last-minute shopping, and I hear you even get snow there. I consider myself lucky that Japan is a country that doesn’t get much snow, or at least hasn’t yet. But there are probably the first sightings of Christmas lights (there are here, too), sales on turkeys (we don’t have those), and all kinds of other seasonal things, many of which are mimicked by Japan, but most of which are not.

I wish I could be there. I miss you all, and hope you have a great Thanksgiving!

But that’s neither here nor there. What I’m writing about today is my first homestay experience. I decided to skip over the University Festival, because I can pretty much sum the 3 days up in a couple sentences: I didn’t go Saturday, Sunday I ate a lot of good food, and Monday I saw an awesome comedy performance. All in all, it was pretty fun, but pretty much everything thus far in Japan (except MAYBE that beautiful view from the peak of Mt. Misen on Miyajima island) was overshadowed pretty easily by the homestay this past weekend.

So, anyway, Saturday and Sunday I did my first homestay, and I gave a few little details about the family I was going to be staying with, but I’ll just pretty much reiterate it here. I was staying with the Maeda family, which consisted of the mother, father, grandmother, and 3 children, a 10-year-old boy named Shoichiro, and 7-year-old twins, a girl and a boy, named Misato and Kenjiro. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.

Breakfast starts at 7:30am here in the dorm, and we had to be ON the bus before 8am. So Saturday morning, we had about 20 minutes to eat before we had to leave. Suffice it to say that this tight (and early) schedule had all of us a bit tired, annoyed, and in a bad mood. But we got on the bus and made our way to Kasahara Middle School, where we were having an international day of sorts with the students. The students had done their best to plan many different activities for us, and in the end, it did turn out being quite a bit of fun, but very few of us were in a good mood going into it.

We basically spent the enter day there. We got there at maybe 9am, and the program went until 4pm. Everybody’s class did different things, but I’m just going to skip over that to get to the good part. Anyway, at 4pm, the Middle School’s program was over and it was time to meet our host families.

They called each student and family together one by one, and I ended up being 3rd to last. I had spotted my family pretty early on, though, because it’s not difficult to pick out a Japanese family with 3 young children, especially when 2 of them are clearly the same age. When we met, the kids were all very shy, and wouldn’t really talk to me. I introduced myself, and after some prodding by their mother, they introduced themselves — in English. You might recall from my previous entry that the information sheet I received said “Ability of English – Poor”… apparently this was just another example of Japanese modesty, which was honestly a bit of a relief.

Going into the whole thing, I was a bit nervous, didn’t really know what to say or do, and while all things considered, I was looking forward to it, there was more than a small part of me that was dreading the homestay.

After the families and students were all introduced to each other, and they had a few short words from people on the PTA and such, we were on our way. We got to the car, and pretty much the entire ride home, the kids wouldn’t talk to me… they were still being pretty shy. Their mother kept telling them to ask me questions, and saying “Japanese is okay too! He knows Japanese!” but they were pretty quiet the entire ride. On the way home we stopped at the father’s work, a ceramics factory where they make tiles. He just had to lock up the office, so he was in and out pretty quickly. His name was Ichiro, and he spoke English about as well as I can speak Japanese. He said early on that he’d speak to me in English, but I could just respond in Japanese, because then everybody is getting practice. So that’s pretty much what we did the entire time.

There were a few times when we couldn’t figure out how to say something in English (for him) or Japanese (for me), and those times we’d switch back to normal, but they were pretty few and far between, which was good.

When we got to the house, I was really surprised… the house was big, which isn’t normal at all for Japan. It was a traditional Japanese home, and it was very nice. We got there just as their grandmother got home, and so I got to meet her, too. They gave me a quick tour around the house and then we settled in the living room at the kotatsu (basically a short floor table with a heater under it and a blanket draping from the sides to keep you warm), while the kids finished up their homework.

I was really impressed by their homework. Shoichiro and Kenjiro were doing math homework, and though Kenjiro’s was just normal 2nd-grader math, and pretty easy, Shoichiro’s was problems like 1.7 / (3/5), and he was doing them rather quickly, in his head. Misato was doing writing homework, and copying down sentence after sentence, practicing the kanji. She wrote really neatly… much more neatly than I do. :/ But I found out that while I know more kanji than Kenjiro and Misato (2nd graders), their level is as high as I can function at a consistent rate in written Japanese. So I could actually read a lot of their books and stuff, which was nice.

Shoichiro and Kenjiro (I’m going to use Sho and Ken from now on… it’s just easier) finished their homework first, and we started playing some card games, like Old Maid (the Japanese name is “babanuki”), and a bunch of other games. Eventually Misato finished her homework and joined in as well. We pretty much just played various different games for the next hour or two until dinner was ready, and they all really opened up during that time, which was good.

We had curry rice for dinner, which was very good. There were several side dishes along with it, which were good, but I think the spicy chicken strips were the best. I don’t really know the names of the others, or, really, what they were… After dinner, I took a shower/bath. Japanese baths are a bit different than American ones, which you’ll need to know if you ever come to Japan. In Japan, you completely wash yourself off in the shower BEFORE you get in the bath, then after you’re clean, you get in. Everybody shares the same bath water, and you don’t want to get it dirty.

Anyway, I didn’t spend long in the bath, because that’s pretty rude. After that, the kids were taking their baths, so I watched a little TV, which I mostly didn’t understand, and then read some children’s books. It actually was pretty slow going, because I’m not use to reading actual books like that. After they were done, we played some more games and finally went to bed around 10pm.

I slept until 7:30am. I was really, really tired. It was odd being woken up by small children, especially in Japanese. But wake up I did, and ate breakfast, which was also odd… it was various things on hotdog buns, but I don’t really know what the things were, except that I think they had mayonnaise in them. Oh well. It could’ve been worse, I guess.

[Note: I wrote the above about 11 days ago, so sorry if it's a bit outdated now. XD]

Anyway, after breakfast we sat around for a couple hours (it was raining outside, or we would’ve been out there) and played card games and the like. After that they were looking through books with animals in it and asking me the English names. A lot of them were different types of birds, lizards, and fish which I just didn’t know the names of, so I was like “uh… ‘bird’” or something like that. Then the parents got in on it also, and got out like three big books and went through pretty much all three of them, asking the names of many different types of animals (luckily, I *did* know the names of many of them…). It was pretty fun, actually. After I said the name of the animal, they all diligently repeated it, trying to get the pronunciation right. After a solid 20 or 30 minutes of this, they asked what I’d like to do.

I honestly had no ideas. I’m not from around here, and I’ve only been here for like 2 months, so I don’t really know what there is to do. Pretty much whenever anybody at Chubu goes to do something “fun”, it’s either karaoke, drinking, or both. Neither of which I’m really interested in, to be honest. So I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do. They offered up several suggestions, and finally we settled on going to the Nagoya Port Aquarium.

We were in the neighboring prefecture, Gifu, but really just right across the border. Even so, it was a good hour drive to the aquarium. It was a little slow getting into it once we got there (fish aren’t really my thing), but it was fun. Apparently, until this year, the Nagoya Aquarium had a killer whale named “Kuu-chan”, but this year it died, unfortunately. So they had all kinds of memorials and stuff like that. We got out picture taken in front of the memorial, and though it was a bit pricey at 1000 yen, I went ahead and bought it anyway, just so I would have a nice souvenir from my trip there with them. It’s sitting on my shelf, now, surrounded by souvenirs that I’ve gotten at the various other places we’ve been. And whenever I look at it, it makes me happy, because it was a really good time.

After that we wandered around. There were a lot of fish. We watched some short Gundam film, which was entirely in Japanese; I mostly understood it, but it was a bit complex for the kids. I’m not really sure why it was showing, but it was interesting I guess…

Pretty much the last thing we did at the aquarium was to watch the dolphin show, which was pretty cool. If you’ve seen one before, you probably know what I’m talking about. I was rather impressed, actually. The dolphins were able to jump like 15 meters (about 50 feet) out of the water, and did all sorts of other cool tricks. We had a really good time.

It ended up that we basically had to go straight from the aquarium in Nagoya back to the middle school so they could drop me off, although we did stop on the way for a late lunch. Pretty much on both the trip to and from the aquarium, the kids fell asleep in the car, which meant that while I didn’t get to talk to them a whole lot, I did get to have a pretty good conversation with their parents. It was a good time.

Finally we got back to the middle school, and it was a bit awkward. We all knew that we’d be parting ways in pretty short order, but didn’t really want to say it. It actually ended up being like another hour before all the formalities of speeches and thanks were done. The very end was pretty emotional… a lot of people were crying, and I’m pretty sure everyone wished it could’ve been longer. A lot of people went into the trip nervous and afraid, not really sure they wanted to be doing it, and I’m pretty sure everyone came out of the experience very happy with how it turned out. I fall into all of those groups.

As the bus pulled out of the middle school to take us home, we were all leaning out the windows waving to our families. I wish it could’ve been longer, but even considering how short it was, the experience was pretty amazing, and I can easily say that it is, so far, my best experience here in Japan. Hopefully in February, when we go to Asuke and do a homestay for an entire week (or more, maybe? I don’t know the exact details yet), it’ll be just as good or better. But in the mean time, my homestay family made it very clear that I was not only welcome to come visit again, but that I should pretty much make a point of doing so more than once. And hopefully I’ll be able to find the time in my ridiculously busy schedule to do so. Maybe around Christmas? Who knows.

Anyway, that’s pretty much the end of the story of homestay #1. Though many of you will probably never have the chance to participate in something like this… if you do, take it. It was an amazing experience for me, and I’m never going to forget my other family.

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