Warning: Stalking gaijin lurking nearby!!!

I admit it, I'm weird when it comes to Japanese people, especially ones I see in the U.S. I want to have some sort of excuse to go and meet them. Especially college age Japanese girls. I just love 'em. They are so much fun!! Genki and happy and full of life--always ready for a joke or a good time. Mardel and I went up to the Mt. Vernon/Burlington/La Conner area recently for a weekend trip. We kept seeing these cute Japanese college girls up there. Skagit College must have a big ESL program that specializes in Japanese students, like Green River and Bellevue College do. Anyway, I wanted to meet them all, and adopt them all. I told Mardel my big dream is to someday have one of the girls I've hosted come back to the U.S. to study and maybe live nearby so that I can have a Japanese family with grandkids and everything. I'm pathetic. o_O

Anyway, this picture was taken in Nara on the last day of our trip in 2003. It was of a group of junior high girls (think Usagi Tsukino from Sailor Moon) that was part of a larger school group that had come to visit the temples for their school trip. I could have scooped them all up and taken them home. Really, they must've thought I was a weird, foreign stalker, the way I kept staring. Still--don't they look cute in their uniforms? All public and most private junior and senior high schools in Japan make students wear uniforms. They vary from school to school. They also change a bit from summer to winter. These are pretty basic summer uniforms.

One thing I've noticed about Japanese junior high girls is that they often are pretty chunky. They seem to gain a bunch of baby fat in junior high and then either lose it or diet it off by high school. Which is funny considering the way the manga always seems to show them as scrawny little things when they're in junior high. Wishful thinking, I guess.

Shoe, shoe baby

A few days ago the idea came to me to do a blog about my memories of my trips to Japan, based on random pictures I pull out of the dozens that Bill and I have taken over the years. I may also include memories of our student's visits, too, as it's a piece of Japan that comes to visit me from time to time. Anyway, the first picture I thought of putting up was this one. It took me some time to find it as it's not one I took--rather, it's one Bill took, scanned into the computer and then printed out as part of a composite of photographs of the Kubos. I may do a post about those pictures another time.

This one highlights a fond memory I have of Etsuko Kubo, Hiroko's mother. It's tradition in Japan to remove your shoes before entering a house; it certainly keeps the floors clean. The entry way is called the genkan. It's often a step or two below the main floors of the house. The Kubo's was relatively new at the time we visited (Oct. 2001) owing to the house being new. The floors in the entry were an attractive granite. Every time we'd enter the house we'd take our shoes off. However, Bill and I being the sloppy little America-jin gaijin we are, we would leave our shoes just any whichaway we took them off. Mr. Kubo and Hiroko weren't too much better, really, which is why this picture evokes memories of Etsuko. Every day I would see her methodically and neatly straighten out our shoes so that the toes pointed outward towards the door; making it much easier for us to slip our shoes on and go. She never appeared to scold anybody for this; she just did it quietly. But it struck me as fitting her neat, tidy, methodical personality. Hiroko told us once her mother was a "daemon!!!" because she could be tyrannical about making Hiroko study (Etsuko was an elementary school teacher before she retired). But to me she is a wonderful, thougthful, caring person, and I love her very much and miss her a lot.

We hope to return to Japan this November, and are planning to stay with the Kubos or Hiroko and her husband. I look very much to seeing Etsuko again, and once more observe her untiring effort to make sure all our shoes are neatly pointed the right way so we can go out and get on with life, just like Etsuko does.