Japanese Home Away From Home: The BW’s First Home

When Mr. Hirata picked Makiko, Sue, and I up at Kanzaki train station, he took us to the old neighborhood where we saw our home from 1997-1999! The school board or city or whoever owned the house no longer lodges foreign teachers here.

Here is the view from our front door.

We were invited into Mrs. Kubo’s house for some green tea and conversation in her tatami room. Note the mini shrine / temple in the background. Mr. Hirata was instrumental in orchestrating our visit to Kanzaki by being in touch with our old neighbors, Sue’s old boss Ohkuma, Toshiko (daughter Higuchi) Makiko, and Naoko. We’re on Facebook with most of these people but Mr. Hirata handled all of the organizing details with aplomb.

The unidentified man on the back right is Toshiko’s husband. Mike and Judy Berg, do you remember touring Mrs. Kubo’s house in 1998?

Makiko identified herself to everyone using the words “home stay”. It was great to introduce Makiko to our Kyushu friends!

Mrs Kubo’s oldest child, Asako is now living in Chiba, just east of Tokyo. She was Sue’s junior high student and later my private English conversation student. She’s around 30 now. Mrs. Kubo also showed us photos of her two sons who I used to play baseball with in the street. We did not even recognize these boys.

Mrs. Kubo should definitely come to Minnesota for a visit. She would love it here! Actually, we extended the invitation to all of our old Japanese friends to visit us here.

Mr. and Mrs. Higuchi, our immediate neighbor to the left, arranged for us to go inside of our old home. These two people are the current residents of our Japanese house. Can you believe they let us come in to look around? The house looks the same but just more decorated and somehow more Japanese than when we lived there. On top of all of this, we were presented with a hand-made craft from the shelf above his TV. Amazing!

From here we headed over to the Hirata house for the reunion party. What a great time! Mike, who was feeling worn out from his Grand Day in Nakatsu, did not attend this festive evening but everyone there asked about Susan’s “Chichi”, her dad.