Category: Japan – Family

Kaika with Naoko, October 10, 2003. Taken with Yashica Electro 35 GS, on Kodak HD 400.

We went to the local branch of the cheap “conveyor belt” sushi family restaurant chain known as Kappa Sushi last night. It seemed like the whole town had the same idea as it was packed. Naoko said it was on account of the heat (no one, including my mother-in-law, apparently wanted to spend anytime in the kitchen) and that it was the last day of summer vacation for some folks.

The Kappa Sushi chain of sushi restaurants is about as low on the totem pole of sushi restaurants as you can go, every plate is 100 yen, the staff are exclusively high school students whose high-pitched voices fill the loudspeakers, there are way too many kids running around, and the sushi is, well, fairly pedestrian. I suspect most folk would say the sushi is barely edible. If you tell other Japanese you went to Kappa Sushi, they usually respond down their noses with derision. But frankly the place suits me just fine. With four mouths to feed (Kaika for now just a spectator, as the above photo shows), the price is right, and honestly, for me the sushi is just fine. Their draught beer hits the spot dead on too.

(A few more photos, all taken with the cellphone, are here.)

As I sit here at the computer, the next door neighbors are preparing for a funeral, and probably not getting any sleep. We came home earlier tonight after going out to eat, to find an ambulance with lights flashing parked outside our house. It was too wide to enter the alleyway that runs alongside our house, and which leads to said neighbor’s house, so the ambulance parked on the main street in front of our’s.

The in-laws quickly got the information that a son of the family of said house had died, though how they didn’t find out. The ambulance actually left, without taking the body, for first the police had to come and check something, perhaps for signs of foul play. They eventually came, in a plain Honda compact car, but all wearing the same blue uniform. Later, an ambulance which may have been the same one as before returned, presumably to pick up the body. And now, a few hours later, as I sit at this computer in the room of our house that is closest to theirs, only a couple of meters away really, I can hear the coming and goings of presumably relatives who live close by.

We don’t know how the son died. Supposedly he had “mental problems” though who knows what that really means. Could have been a suicide, could have been something related to the heat of the last two days. Everyone speculating. They think the mother must be away on a trip, that somehow her absence is significant in all this. At least no one has seen her recently.

No one had seen the son recently either, in fact Naoko says she hadn’t seen him since we’ve been here (one and a half years). They only hear stuff, like the business about the “mental problems” or that the son hated his father.

And I heard this tonight, from Naoko, who heard it from her mother, who heard it from the now-dead son’s mother: when the son found out that his next-door neighbors had had a new baby and that the father was a white foreigner, he had remarked that mixed white-Japanese parents produce the cutest children. This is the kind of stuff that travels back and forth between neighbors around here. For her part, the son’s mother, one of the few people in this neighborhood who actually acknowledges my existence with greetings and what-not, gave us 10,000 yen (roughly $80 USD) when Kaika was born. I feel strangely tied to these neighbors, bound by proximity, and fourth-hand information.

Naoko went to bed early tonight, for she says tomorrow someone will probably come around to ask the family to help out with arrangements, make tea and cakes for the visitors who will surely come. This is a customary thing done here.

The son was said to have been 39, which if true means he was just a year older than I.