Kaika Watanabe Easterwood, a healthy baby boy weighing in at just over 3 kilograms, was born earlier this afternoon. Naoko is doing fine. We’re both extremely happy, and not a little bit relieved.
One year and counting #2
Today, March 14, is “White Day,” the day that men are expected to “pay back” the women who gave them chocolates on Valentine’s Day. (In case you didn’t know, in this country, the women give men sweets on Valentine’s, often as part of a work obligation called giri-choco). Whereas Valentine’s Day in Japan has a relationship to the day as it’s celebrated in other parts of the world (albeit reversed), White Day is a purely Japan creation. Apparently, it was created by a marshmallow company in the 60’s, who used the marketing angle of repaying Valentine’s Day gift-giving to sell their new marshmallow confection.
Not nearly as widely known — in fact, probably not known at all! — March 14 also happens to be International Marriage Day in Japan. On this day, in 1873, the Meiji government first recognized the validity of marriages between Japanese and foreigners. Certainly the first marriages between Japanese and foreigners had occurred long before that, but it seems that after a few high-profile marriages, such as that of Umetaro Kaji, whose father Katsu Kaishu had been an important figure in both the Tokugawa and Meiji goverments, to Clara Whitney, the goverment saw fit to officially give its stamp of approval.
Today, March 14th, also happens to be Naoko and I’s 1-year wedding anniversary. Now, I can assure you that our decision to get married on this day 1 year ago had nothing to do with historical facts nor the pseudo special occassion of White Day. Rather, our selection of that date was rather plebian. We had arrived in Japan the day before, and in order to expedite that visa application process, we thought it prudent to get married as soon as possible. And so, like yesterday’s post about reaching the 1-year-living-in-Japan milestone, again today yet another hard-to-believe milestone is marked in the life of Kurt Easterwood.
(I should just briefly clarify. That last sentence makes it sound like it’s hard to believe I survived a year of marriage, which can’t be further from the truth. Rather, I never in my wildest imagination thought I would ever get married in the first place, so if today I sit here in some astonishment, it is at this fact, and not the actual marriage, which continues to be the best decision of my life I ever made.)
Imag(in)ing pregancy in the floating world
The above is a cropped detail from a print entitled “Knowing the blessings of one’s parents,” by an unknown artist perhaps in 1882. The complete print depicts, from right to left, the 10 months of pregancy (above are months 4 to 7). This print comes from an online exhibition of ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock prints) and yamato-e (Japanese painting) called “Japanese Art on the Subject of Medicine”, from the Digital Clendening online archive. This archive is the digitized portion of the Clendening History of Medicine Library, at the Kansas University Medical Center.
In addition to the above print, there are two other prints depicting prenancy, here and here. The latter one, by Shoshi, is particularly fanciful, depicting a pregnant woman with six heads and 12 bodies, and therefore carrying 12 fetuses.
There are a couple of other exhibits in the Digital Clendening site that I found particularly worthwhile: Chinese Public Health Posters (the first one about cholera is a doozie), and Portrait Collection, an exhibit of over 500 portraits of physicians and scientists.