I was pretty nervous about visiting my host family in Japan. It's been 8 years since I moved there, and 6 years since I last saw them. Also, my host brother Hiroshi crashed his motorcycle and was in a coma for almost a year and is severely brain damaged. From the letters and phone calls I really didn't know what to expect. It turns out Hiroshi can't walk or talk, but he's pretty mobile on his wheelchair. He seems kind of like a five year old kid. He always wants to kiss your hand and if you don't let him he goes nuts and yells and turns the lights on and off. It seems like an easy thing to read into him but I'm sure that I could sense his old personality even though he can't communicate at all.
It's interesting the different ways his injury affects their lives. The kotatsu was replaced with a western style table so that he could wheel around it and the living room is now filled with things like his toilet and hadicap ramp. Also they can't keep any food in the refrigerator because he is constantly looking in the fridge and got fat and they had to put him on a diet. So now all the food that they buy they have to cook right away or hide upstairs.
For some reason I felt the saddest when I saw his old room which was completely unchanged in seven years and a funny sign on his door that says "if someone is in here it is extremely important to knock (three times is best)" which he tacked up after his parents walked in on him smoking. Since he can't walk and his room is on the second floor, I'm sure he hasn't been in it since the accident. I wonder why they haven't cleaned out his room or at least taken that sign off his door. I think I would have done that.
I didn't expect how intense it would be to go back in to a life that I had mostly forgotten. Even with Hiroshi affecting their lives a lot, it felt like hardly anything had changed. My host mother did my laundry and cooked three delicious meals every day. My room was exactly the same as when I left. Some books I had left on a shelf hadn't moved at all. The daily routine was still basically the same, with the host dad leaving early and coming home late and the mom working around the house all day. Even Taishi was still living in the same room, although he's been working as a mechanic at a Toyota dealership for the last four years. One night he brought a girl over and it was just like old times when he used to jam the thin sliding door shut and crank up the Titanic theme song on repeat so people wouldn't hear him getting it on.
My room:
Taishi's room (with less beer cans and cigarette butts on the floor than usual):
Sometimes I wish I could relive parts of my life, and this might be the closest I will ever come to that. I biked the same 10 mile route to school that I biked six days a week for a year, and I was surprised how easily I remembered all the turns, since it was long and windy and I could never tell you which way to go at any turn without actually being there. I biked to the park where I used to go make out with an old girlfriend and on the way there smelled the same unique mix of the rice fields and the auto crushing plant which physically caused some kind of pavlovian rush of the exact same adrenaline I used to feel as a teenage boy knowing I was about to get some.
I didn't really think to take many pictures of my day to day life in Japan, and there's not much that reminds me of it so it's the part of my life that I remember and think about the least, even though it was a really important time for me. And so every place I went while I was there brought back some memory that I hadn't thought of in years. This time I took a few pictures, although I don't know if they will be interesting to anyone except me.
I hope this post isn't getting too long, but it's better than those endless travel emails you get from people, and I won't put weird details at the end to see who kept reading the whole thing.
What it looks like around where I lived:
Where I used to take a bath every day:
A typical meal: (I had to eat this one up in my room so Hiroshi wouldn't see it, so this is also my desk)
