Host Family Visit!

Let’s host family!

You could probably find the above title somewhere in Japan—they really like doing that. (Let’s~~).

Anyway, on Saturday, June 27th, I spent the day with my host family. Even though I was still sick, it was a pretty good day. I met my host mother and one of the sisters at 1 in front of Building 47 (aka where I live). I was kind of nervous—it’s really hard conversing with only a year or so of Japanese. You can do basic stuff, but if you listen to regular speech, at best you will be able to get the gist. Just like English, Japanese leave out words, shorten things, and use slang, which even varies by region.

They mostly asked me questions while we were in the car. We got on the subject of music I like, and they got excited when I mentioned I like Orange Range (オレンジレンジ)。I didn’t realize they were so popular, and they’re not actually one of my main favorites. Luckily, the conversation was only about as nerve-wracking for me as a conversation in English with complete strangers would have been.

We did some sight-seeing: Oyama Jinja, an old samurai house, and we walked around the older district of Kanazawa. After that, we went to a big mall, which was pretty interesting—though it wasn’t too different than American malls. We took pictures at a photo booth that was WAY more advanced than anything I’ve seen in the US. You could even draw pictures and write on them afterward with some sort of photo editor outside the booth part. After that, we headed to a supermarket. Carts here are tiny, and instead of the bars being close together in order to hold the groceries, they simply put in a basket for that specific purpose. It’s kind of hard to explain, and I’m not sure why they do that…I never saw anybody actually carrying a basket, anyway.

We got a bunch of stuff for the dinner—chicken, fish, shrimp, carrots, a big apple, part of a watermelon, cucumber, nori for the sushi, etc. There was more than that even… After that we went to their house—and it was big--REALLY big for a Japanese house. I think the grandfather, mother, father, two daughters, and one of the daughter’s 1 year old live there. I’m not sure if the daughter’s husband lives in the house too… Japanese family structure is a bit complicated, but I’ll get into that another time in a culture post. FYI, in Japan, you’re an ‘adult’ when you’ve gotten married, NOT when you’ve moved out of your parents’ house as it is in America. That difference actually really changes cultural expectations. I’ll also get to that later.

The youngest family member is Souta-kun, the 1-year-old. He was ADORABLE. Sometimes he was shy, but he’d also start laughing out of nowhere about the goofiest things, like most American kids. He was pretty smart, too. Technically he’s 18 months, but I still feel like he was ahead of the curve. His mom is Rumi, and she’s 25. Then Misato, who I spent most of the day with, is 20 and also goes to KIT. The grandfather was early 80s, and he kind of just did his own thing. Then there was the mother and father. The father was the hardest to understand, but the mother and Misato generally tried to use Japanese they thought I would understand. Plus, Misato had a sweet electronic dictionary, so when we frequently ran into a verbal roadblocks, it was really, really useful. Clark-sensei said that many students and working adults in general have those dictionaries that have a bunch of functions besides merely translating.

Dinner was delicious. We made our own sushi, and they also had soumen, cold Japanese ramen noodles, along with a sort of potato salad that was pretty delicious, too. For desert there was fruit with my host mother cut up—the apple was cut up in a really interesting way that I’d never seen before. So much attention is paid to appearance here, it’s pretty impressive.

After dinner, we rested in the living room for a bit. Just before we left to take me back to my apartment, my host mother gave me omiyage (gifts/souvenirs), which I totally wasn’t expecting. I got a beautiful fan, a postcard of sorts that has a message written in Japanese calligraphy that talks about a once-in-a-lifetime meaning, and Misato had picked out her favorite candies, ChocoBouru (ChocoBall), for me as a gift. I had actually been there when my host mom picked out the card, so I knew I didn’t do anything that made them feel like they needed to give me another gift. For example, if you admire something too much, Japanese will feel indebted to give it to you. Or, if you hand them two separate gifts, they’ll feel like they need to give you two back. Gift-giving is also much more complicated in Japan than in the US, as you can see.

They drove me back around 9. I think I was one of the last to get back, so I was pretty glad I got to spend a good full day with them. I’m really glad I got to meet them, I just wish my Japanese had been better so I could have communicated more!