My host family is called Inami. It’s a family of 4, a father who is a fireman (how cool is that! Didn’t every boy at some point in his childhood desire to be a fireman?), a house-wife and two kids: a 4-year old boy Koushyou and a 7-year old girl Momo. Both of them terribly loud, quite spoilt and amazingly stubborn. The girl is nothing like a cutie, delicate Japanese I once desired. She screams most of the time, hits me and shouts at me occasionally, which just reminds me of a mini yakuza boss. I, a 21-year old am being most of the time terrorized by this 7-year old devil. I do not recall my sister ever being half as mean as this one, when she was 7. The boy is equally loud, although opposite to his sister, he does not talk to me. Whenever I try to approach Koushyou, he makes a barking-like sound and goes away. And every time he is not given what he wants, he cries very loudly. What’s wrong with these kids I kept wondering? Well, soon I learn in class that there is a wide social phenomenon of Japanese kids being 甘ったれ (amattare – an overly spoilt and dependent kid). These two begin screaming at around 6:30-7am every day, and the mother to quiet them down, shouts over them, thus only amplifying the overall sound effects. I really need no alarm to wake me up every morning. Apparently, my other program classmates have very similar ear-deafening experiences if their host family also tend to include kids.
Since the mother is home most of the time, she cleans the house every day and that includes vacuum cleaning, floor swiping and laundry (which works great for someone like me who has experienced Harvard dorm-living habits). On top of their fixation on cleanness, Japanese people have crazy but how admirable recycling habits. Each house has 5-6 trash boxes, one for different type of trash – combustible, bottles, plastic, paper, perishables etc. etc. It is really incredible how a Japanese on an individual level give so much effort to segregate the trash. And for that reason there are no public trashcans – as one cannot segregate the public trashes, one just takes the trashes with himself until he reaches a) home b) convenient store (where there are huge segregated trash containers). I wonder when US/Poland can ever reach that level of eco-awareness (I shall omit Vietnam, as it is pretty lightning years from being eco-conscious).
The breakfasts served to me was the biggest disappointment – was all western bread, butter and yoghurt. Thank god they didn't force me to eat cereal. And here I was hoping to eat the traditional meal of rice with miso soup and fish, but no, apparently too much of a bother for a typical family. To compensate for it, I get a very Japanese meal for dinner. I think I have tried everything I wanted to try – sashimi (Kanazawa’s fish is the freshest in Japan, so goes the word), tonkatsu, okonomiyaki, takoyaki, yaki soba, cold udon, unagi, ramen… . I could go on and on given all my love for food, so I guess it will suffice to say I am very more than happy with the culinary part of my experience. On the expense of my weight of course.
There is no wireless. The only one I use is a stolen one from (what I assume is) a neighboring house, which for obvious reasons is very, very slow (another reason for my blog silence). The family has wired Internet connected to their household computer, which I refused to use, mostly because it is quite inconvenient and I cannot understand the Japanese menu bar very well. For a very middle-class Japanese family, their use of Internet is surprisingly limited. Most of their free time is spent shopping or watching TV. As the father is a firefighter, his shifts are usually 24 hours long, after which he gets one or 3 days off (a very interesting working schedule), and during his days off he just spend the day around the house, playing with the kids.
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