reality isn't a contributing factor

When I first arrived in New York, my mom could not for the life of her remember John's name. The John part was fine. It was the other part that tripped her up.

"What's his name again?" she'd ask me. "Hoppy? Poppy? Poppin?"

"Hoppin"

"It reminds me of Mary Poppins! Anyway, I was close."

"Yes, but one is his name and the others aren't."

"Well, they're all cute," she says as justification.

I can't really argue; it's even cuter in Japanese: ホッピン but I threatened to call her Yamada if the logic of close enough was going to be followed.

A post-script:
She did buy us tickets to see Mary Poppins on Broadway.  John is certain that it was because it reminds her of his name.  He is probably right.

Straight from John's pen

At a cafe in Tokyo. I ordered an ice coffee. It came with the little syrup container with the silver lid. Yoko ordered toast, big slices of briochey white bread served with butter and marmalade. There was an old man with all silver teeth smoking cigarettes and talking crazily to himself.

I asked what was up with him.

"He's old," said Yoko.

Read John's entire post HERE.

Inconsistency in actual quality (though not enjoyability)

First I got world news from an email:
I just heard Obama statement about Bin Laden dead. yokattane. outside white house is sugoi! mama

('Yokattane' kind of means like 'isn't that nice')

Then I got this:
It disconnects right away, Skype Call me mama

I'm going back there for a couple of weeks very shortly. I'm excited to see what comes!

Like "Nass" but maybe better

My mom arrived a few days before our wedding and bore many cards and items of well-wishing from people in Japan. At dinner the night before the wedding, she gave me one of those half-size ziplock bags with a folded kleenex inside.

Before I could open this weird package, my mom gives me some instruction: "Look inside the tish!"

I skipped just a beat while my little grey cells computed and said, "You mean tissUE?"

Then we all laughed. Anyway, in the tish was a pair of teeny-tiny cranes made by Jun-chan, my friend / mom's ex-student / future mctm for another generation. They really were absolutely amazing.

But TISH? Does it get any cuter than that?!

'Nass,' 'chako cake' and other cute things my students intuited

The confusing thing for many English learners from Japan is that there is an ever-expanding segment of the Japanese lexicon derived from a foreign language - often times English, but also French, German etc. Thus the word for bread is 'pan' after the French 'pain,' the word for backpack is 'ryukku' after the German 'rucksack' and things like apple and orange are simply that, with some necessary vowels thrown in: 'appuru' and 'orenji'

This leads all kinds of people to make the error that they can assume reverse conversions are effective, applying a rule that doesn't always apply. Like how little kids sometimes say 'runned' instead of 'ran.' One of my favorite stories entails a group of 5 & 6 year-olds who would enthusiastically shout the English for the things depicted on my flash cards: "APPLE" "ORANGE" "CABBAGE"

Then they see an eggplant, that purple 'onasu' and shout "NASS" much to my glee.

Or the half-Japanese boy who spoke with nary an accent and proudly informed me that for his snack he was going to get some chako cake.

I had an adult student tell me that she was 'grading up' her computer system, and another who wanted to talk about the new designer 'G-pan' she got.

The seamless blending of the world - it ain't easy. Anyone know where we stand with the whole Esperanto effort anyway?

a recent email (Note: this is the email in full. From the top.)

Please forward this to John.

Dear John, I hope all is well around you! Shigeru my ukulele cousin wants to know if you are doing something at the party. Nami seems really busy so I decided to write to you direct. The party is at a small live-house, and Ukulele members will perform and Kenki my student will write something for the occasion for him, me, Jun. (His music is sometimes Arabian type). If you are planning to do something like sing or play, please let me know, so I can tell Shigeru.

Nami didn't know when you arrive here but if I am not available, I will have someone meet you at airport to bring you here while Nami has to work. I am gone 9,10,11 but the house is yours. Hopefully, you arrive before so I can show you a few things around here.

I am sending this via Nami, so I don't send it to one of your relatives. I hope to hear from you soon. love, Yoko

our parents never faced this kind of vexation as youths

Skype+Parents must yeild equal parts hilarity and abject frustration. Like I love how we were troubleshooting with John's parents, on their maiden skype voyage trying to get audio and video to occur and they typed into their mood bubble thinking it was the chat window. John got them the webcam for mothers' day '09. When we log on to skype to this very day, the bubble next to his parents name says "You bought the damn thing!"

But this isn't mycrazynocalinlaws.blogspot.com

One day my mom gets a new Dell laptop with a built in webcam, which I'm excited about because I figure it means that my days of playing IT to my mom's skype are finished. So I call her and say let's skype. She turns on her computer and I see her log in to skype. I call, she answers and lo! My mom on the video! For a split second only, though, and then she is replaced by a very worried looking white Scottish-fold kitten with green eyes and human teeth.
I stare at my screen in bemused amusement. Then, this kitten begins to move: the head tilts back and forth, its eyes look this way and that, its mouth moving without any words audible. Clearly this thing is trying to communicate with me. I call my mom on the phone and try to talk her through getting rid of the cat. But now I can hear her voice matched up with the motions of this worried cat and it's freaking HILARIOUS and I can barely focus on anything. But as amazing as this kitten-mom is, I need to try and fix the problem, which is hard because my mom doesn't know what she did plus her skype is in Japanese and I have no idea what any options might even be called. So I google 'turn off cat video skype' and what I learn is: this cat thing is called an avatar; it is specific to Dell computers; and that there are many forums where people are trying to find out how to turn off the cat avatar from their parents' skype.

I guess solidarity means something: my mom is no longer alone in this world and, just as importantly, neither am I.

Directions on taking care of my baby

This probably dates to like 1980. Please click to read in full. Try not to have any food or beverage in your mouth.

Please note these are the directions in full. I came from this woman? No further explanation necessary.

A rock and a hard place

My mom suffers the same inclination of many people from her generation which is to refer to all people of Asian descent as 'Orientals,' a term that, growing up in the PC 80s, was eradicated from my vocabulary long ago but persists in hers despite my valiant efforts to update her outmoded terminology. Or maybe it's in spite of my efforts, but I digress. Talking to her about perpetuating this semi-racist usage only inspires her to argue about her rights since she herself is Oriental. My people-are-not-rugs-logic has never gotten me anywhere.

On her trip to NYC in February, of course she said Oriental and I expected to have this perennial interaction of me saying, "Use 'Asian'" and her saying, "Why?" followed by the usual back-and-forth ending with her above-mentioned go-to justification: "I'm one so I can say it if I want to."

Not to say that we didn't have just that, but after the requisite (and now more than two-decades old) song-and-dance, my mom paused, looked at me thoughtfully then announced her compromise.

"Well, can I just call myself a Jap then?"

A rock and a hard place.

Yoko waits for no blog

Can you imagine it's been more than two years since I left my island-nation-source for the Big Apple? That isn't to say that Yoko stopped being mctm. I just thought that my interactions with her strange and hilarious behavior would be so few and far between, why write on them because who's gonna care? But I now know that it is important to get these stories down in writing and up on an info cloud. You know. Just in case. Like the little prince and the extinct volcano. "One never knows..."

Skype helps a lot, too. Stay tuned for more back-posts, coming soon. Two years is a lot of hilarity to catch up on.