November

November has always been an eventful time of year for our family, leading directly into what is popularly considered the "holiday season," but it made for an especially long and resource-draining time for us.

It actually starts with my mother Akiko's birthday on October 28, which is the fifth day of the Scorpio. In fact, everybody in the family is a Scorpio except me.

My older brother Ryo's birthday is on 11/4. My dad's, 11/5. My younger brother Yutaka's, 11/12.

It doesn't stop there. 11/12 is also the birthday of Ryo's wife, Naomi.
Yutaka's wife, Dawn, was born on 11/9.

***

Starting next year, we will be remembering 11/22 as the day Dad died.

11/22 was also the day our family first moved to the US in 1969 - or so says Ryo. I wouldn't know. I was literally in the womb at the time.

***

The Japanese are fond of coming up with goroawase, a form of word play that reads (in this case) a set of numbers as a phrase, and therefore adds another meaning.

Because the number "1" is read ichi, it can be shortened to i. The number "2" is usually read as ni, but when you count quantities, two of something is futatsu, which can be shortened to fu.

"11" is usually read juuichi to mean "eleven," but in goroawase can be read as ii. Similarly, "22" is usually read nijuuni to mean "twenty-two," but in word play can be read as fuufu.

Ii means "good" or "nice." Fuufu means "married couple."

Hence, the date 11/22 is known as ii fuufu no hi - Nice Married Couple's Day.

My parents were married on 11/10. They were married for 55 years.
My father fought hard to live, time and again over the last years of his life, but in the rare moments that he showed weakness, his primary concern was that Mom would be taken care of when he's gone.
My mother, in turn, despite her own difficulties, put on a brave face and hardly ever left his bedside, no matter where the hospital was.
At every hospital he was in, the nurses regarded their marriage as an ideal to strive for.

Ii fuufu, indeed.

By the way, I was born an Aquarius on 2/15. Black sheep? Perhaps.
My wife Shizuki was born a Cancer on 7/10.
I hope you will help celebrate my birthday, dear reader, because my wife won't.

***

A bit more goroawase.

2, 4, 6, 9, 11.
Does this sequence of numbers mean anything to you?
Think of the months of the year: February, April, June, September, November.
If you ever wanted to know the months that don't have 31 days, there you are.

The sequence is read in goroawase as nishi muku samurai.

Like I said above, "2" is ni. "4" is read yon or shi. "6" is usually roku, but when counting quantities, six of something is muttsu, which can be shortened to mu. "9" is kyuu or ku. Put them together, and you get nishi muku, which means "facing west."

The big mystery is samurai. Why is November "samurai"?

I admit to not having known this until recently, but there are several theories about this, the most plausible being that the kanji for juuichi is written 十一, which, if you write them vertically, looks like another kanji: 士. This kanji is the second kanji in bushi: 武士, which is another word for samurai (which, by the way, has its own kanji: 侍).

Dad was born, married, and died in the month of the samurai.

And after 40 years, almost exactly half of his life, of living in Southern California, he looked to the west, across the ocean, and chose Japan as his final resting place.

But that's another story.

Samurai Scars

One night, when I was a teen, we had company over at our house, as we occasionally did. They were the families of several of my father's colleagues. One of the guests' daughters, who was younger than me, so probably pre-teen at the time, innocently asked my father what had happened to his forehead.

My father had a pronounced scar on his forehead, accentuated by a bump the size and shape of a peanut, slightly off center and running vertically almost two inches. So I don't blame the girl for asking.

My father told her that when he was a young boy, he was struck by the sword of a samurai.

The girl may or may not have been emotionally traumatized for life upon hearing this, but if you know 20th-century Japanese history, you would know that this was a joke. As ancient as my father may have been, there were, in fact, no samurais (at least not officially) by the time he was born.

But he was also fond of telling us - and this story seems more true - about when he was a kid, one of his older sisters (12 years his senior) took him and another sister aside, sat them down on the tatami floor, sat herself down facing them, and placed a katana in front of her, as she told them that if Japan were to lose World War II and the Americans were to invade the land and come into their house, she was going to kill him and his sister before killing herself with that sword, rather than live with the humiliation that they were sure to suffer. Well, Japan did lose the war, and was occupied for a while, but thankfully, none of the other stuff happened, and the hot-blooded big sister (my aunt Taeko) continues to live in relatively good physical and mental health, as does the other sister in the story, Kyoko, who is three years older than Dad.

In fact, Aunts Taeko and Kyoko are now the two sole survivors of five siblings, my father, Tetsuya, having been the youngest. Their older brother Shun-ichi had died years ago. Older sister Reiko, more recently. It was quite sad that they had to see their younger brother wither on the hospital bed. "I don't think this is the end. I think he's going to recover from this," said Aunt Kyoko. I wasn't so sure, and deep down, I don't think she was, either.

The day before Dad died, Aunt Kyoko and I had lunch at the restaurant in the hospital. Through many stories both known and unknown to me, she painted a picture of my father in his youth - a boy who lost his mother at two years old, a kid who got bullied because of the scar on his forehead (and whose beautiful, heroic sister - her words - came to his rescue by throwing the bullies’ shoes into the river!), a teen who fought back through hard work to enter university on scholarship and become a successful businessman later. He was perhaps among the last of a generation with old-fashioned values, who grew up with wartime hunger and horror, and helped build Japan to literally rise up from the ashes through perseverance and hard work. “He is a samurai - the last samurai,” she said, obviously alluding to the Tom Cruise movie.

While desperately trying to AVOID naming this blog "The Last Samurai," I already knew this series of essays was going to have a samurai theme, so to hear her utter those words was reassuring. In spirit and in attitude, he was considered old-school even among his own peers. He had an iron will and an unshakable commitment to integrity that demanded nothing but the best out of anyone who associated with him - and that included colleagues and family.

As dedicated as he was to his work, I never questioned his devotion to us, but he was strict. He was not violent, but there was nobody I feared more than him. If I were to dare challenge him with my teenage idiot mind, he would run circles around me with impenetrable logic and forceful speech. He made me feel like I HAD to get away from his grip on me, which was part of why I chose to go to Japan for college. Ten years later, when I was physically suffering, he invited me back home to the US. It was only after I had gotten married, another eleven years later, that I was able to stand up to him, and half of that was by me shutting down all attempts at communication from him. I had to have a kid of my own, and admit to my troubles at the time, to finally drop all pretenses and effectively communicate with him as an adult.

For better AND for worse, he was the most influential man in my life, but there is so much that he was able to achieve in his life that I will never even come close to achieving in mine. Just to skim the basics, he helped bring a fledgling musical instruments company from Japan to flourish in the US, and that was before he decided to become an author and write four books on Japan-US business and cultural relations - all while providing for a family of five in a foreign land whose official language was not his mother tongue.

But another reason he left the company was because of a debilitating illness that caused him unimaginable physical pain. One ailment seemed to pile on top of another as he grew older. It was a near-miracle that he lived so long after an especially life-altering operation in 2011. His mind was as sharp as ever until very near the end, but over the last six years of his life, he was essentially a broken man.

I will be touching on all of these themes in this blog. Including the real reason for the scar on his forehead. And, no, I have not seen the Tom Cruise movie.

First Entry

My father passed away on November 22, 2017. He was 81 years old.
I will be writing a series of essays in his memory.
I will also most likely be making constant adjustments to the look of the blog.
Not to mention editing posts even after posting them (like I'm doing here).
I've already lost count on how many times I've changed the blog title.