Every summer, I have the immense pleasure of staying with my Japanese family in a sleepy little Tokyo suburb called, Nishi-Oojima. Our summer vacations in Tokyo are lazy family affairs where we spend our days walking by the river, shopping at crowded train stations and eating delectable Japanese goodies (I need to spend another post about the food). And for better or worse, my mother, father and two younger sisters are forced to spend every waking moment together.
This trip was different. In a good way. No vicious sibling rivalries broke out. No one vowed not to speak to any one ever again. In a word, this trip was pleasant. I think it might have been because we are now older or maybe it’s because I’ve made a conscious effort to be less reactive. In any case, this was the first summer in which I felt completely comforted by being with my family and curious about their lives.
I found my mother on the second story of my grandparent’s house, hanging laundry out to dry off the balcony. Seeing my mother in a place so perfectly Japanese, I realized that I never had a full picture of why she moved to the United States in the first place. She was the only one out of her family to immigrate to America and I only got snippets of her motivation to leave Japan.
‘Everyone wanted to go to the United States and Japan wasn’t nice back then,’ she said as a she sipped a glass of cold beer on the second floor on my grandparent’s house. So in the late 1970s, my mother signed up to go to a language center in Seattle, passed the English test and was off to Los Angeles where she met my father three years later.
My mother wasn’t like the other Japanese girls. She was rebellious and sought comfort in a world beyond Japan. I remember she told the story of how she got into trouble in high school because she permed her hair and painted her nails once. ‘That would never happen in the U.S.,’ she said with a touch of resentment in her voice.
My mother became a United States citizen a few years ago. Regardless, every time we land in Narita I see her eyes relax to the familiar sights of skyscrapers and brilliant green rice fields and her breath slow to catch the savory smells of Japanese street food.
Although at times I feel like my mother and I are from completely different planets I respect her bravery to leave Japan and her mindfulness to appreciate her homeland.