Nojiri

Image via WikipediaNojiri. Cold lake waters surrounded by high mountains. Magical summers. Cozy winters.

It was the magic summer retreat of our childhood. We started going to Lake Nojiri soon after we moved from Matsue to Itami, near Osaka. The summers in Kansai were unbearably humid, and an escape to the mountains, living for a short time in a community of other expats, was just the prescription for our family to recharge and re-energize in preparation for the daily grind.

And so we set off, one hot July or August day around 1966 or 1967 from Itami, taking the Meishin Expressway to Nagoya, thence local roads through such towns as Shiojiri, Matsumoto, Nagano, finally arriving at Shinanomachi, a small villiage with quaint Minka and a difficult Japanese dialect. The trip was long, much longer than planned, hot and dusty (our car didn't have air conditioning) and the six of us (mom and dad in front, the four of us in back) constantly bickered to see who could be made most miserable. [To this day I dislike driving or riding long distances by automobile.] By the time we arrive, it is near midnight and pitch black. We get lost in the gravel trails around the lake, making an orbit around before finally stumbling on the gaijinmura (foreigners' village), where our bleary-eyed friends greet us and hustle us off to bed for the night. The night air is cool. Almost cold. A nice change from Osaka, I think.

I don't remember much from our first visit other than that we stayed in a cabin for a week at the base of the mountains and didn't have to do much climbing. The way to the lake was through the woods, filled with fresh smells, black earth, an abundance of various ferns, and occasional white birch trees. Nojiri was spectacular, and there was no way not to fall in love with it.

The lake was deep and cold, even at the height of the dog days of summer. The mountains came out of the water and rose to breathtaking heights. Kurohime and Miyoko-kogen may have even had patches of snow from the long winter. The drinking water was sweet and cold, fed by natural springs, and had to be fetched by the bucket.

It was the start of a yearly trek, and the source of many fond memories... and the subject of later posts :-)

Matsue, early '60s (part 2), Learning Japanese

As I said in the first part of this post, we had a lot of Snow in Matsue... this photo was taken around 1962-3 with my younger brother and sister playing in the snow.

We lived a bit away from the center of town. There were lots of rice paddies around us.

Most of our friends were Japanese. We spoke English with our parents, and Japanese with our housekeeper and with the other kids in the neighborhood.

We had a TV... black and white, of course, and all of the programs were in Japanese. I still remember my favorite TV shows from this period... a puppet show called "Chirorinmura," and an animated show about a boy robot superhero, "Tetsuwan Atomu" (Astro Boy).

People sometimes ask me "how did you learn to speak Japanese so well?" I'm tempted to ask back, "so, how did you learn to speak English so well?" But, I usually swallow that urge (you know, you try it a couple of times and see the blank expressions on faces, and know they don't comprehend?), and say... "...well, I grew up in Japan." Which starts the dreaded "wow, how long did you live there" thread, in which I tell my life story about going to Japan at the age of 6, no, my parents weren't Mercenaries, they were Missionaries, and so on.

So learning Japanese, (at least the spoken language) for me, wasn't something I did. It just happened, from necessity. From hearing it spoken before I could utter a word, from playing with the neighbors, watching TV, from sharing a japanese-english language with my siblings that nobody else could understand, ...from living. I didn't learn Japanese... I lived Japanese, and it became part of my fabric that remains to this day, so that, after months or years of not speaking, I can slip back into it as if I were still there, using it every day.

I don't remember a lot about Matsue, except for the snow, for the sea, running around the yard with other kids (we had the biggest yard, and an actual lawn!), rice paddies and frogs filling summer nights with noise, riding trains, endless Sundays at church, dirt roads and gravel roads, and people always staring at me. Of course, I thought all this was normal. And it was.

See my Japan map.

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