I grew up in a five-person family, with my parents and two brothers, one older and one younger. My parents live in Yokohama, a suburban city 45 minutes outside of central Tokyo, and each of my brother has a place and a steady job in Tokyo. Above is my father Shuzo, 65, calm but stubborn, indifferent to others but pushy about his own ideas. An retired government officer, avid Christian, wants to publish his book on a Christian philosopher/politician he's been studying.
for the last so many years, once every week my father goes for a little one hour walk through the nearby park by the stream, taking Momo, our 13 year-old Shiba dog, on his way he picks up trash -plastic bags, wrappers, cans and bottles. The park has surprisingly few trash bins -it could be their policy for keeping homeless people away. Fence has been built under the bridge where a few homeless people once created their cardboard dwellings.
Tetsuro, my younger brother, works for a video production company that does everything from producing and editing video project to playing soccer and baseball. Disagrees completely with me on the existence of spiritual energy force, as he beleives that all the energy can be calculated by scientific device existing today, while, visiting his home in Yokohama he can get easily annoyed by the way our mother treats her mother (our grandmother) who's suffereing something similar to Alzheimer. He takes pleasure in pursuasively punishing a small injusts around him. Send him to iPod store for a small repair and he won't come out of there without making a scene.
Eiko, my grandmother is 87 years old and she's very forgetful. She doesn't know where she is or who we are, and says things that don't seem to make sense to anyone but herself. She claims her joint pain (sort of like Arthritis) but my parents don't take her seriously, at least as much as she would have liked them to. So she screams out of her pain as my mother using her perky and cheering force, tries to get her up on her feet each morning. 'I'm sorry,' Eiko says. 'I don't want anybody to see me like this.' I get to do some reiki practice on her. her shoulders, back, arms, everything feels small, dry and weak like a fruit left out for ages.
[left]And there's Kazue, my mother with her granddaugter (my niece) Momoka and grammy Eiko. Kazue has recently been chosen to be the vise-president of Japan's leading association of female Christians. They publish magazines, hold lectures on ecological, environmental and domestic economical issues, hold charity concerts and homemade cupcake sales, work with NGO's in Bangradesh and many other places. Kazue has learned six or seven foreign languages including most recently Mongolian. She likes things to be in order, family to be in harmony and can't seem to deal with situations when they are not. Instead she seems to act all perfect as if nothing has been wrong. [right]Tatsuro, my older brother, who's not in this picture -I didn't have a chance to take a really good picture of him- has been married to Miho and have two children. My niece Momoka (6) and my nephew Reitarou (2). Momoka only met me twice before in her life, when she was 3 and 5, during my brief visit to Japan, yet she remembers "Uncle Toshichan from New York" well and we always make good friends. She starts the first grade of her primary school this April.
in December 2006 at Adorama camera store in New York City I bought an used Nikon FE2 -old school, all manual, the beginner's SLR camera. 120 bucks or so, I was alright to use it up completely to the end of its functional life. And as it seems, just as I ended my 3 month journey through Cambodia then back to Thailand and arrive at Tokyo Narita airport, I asked a person to take a picture of me and my mother, and that's when the camera stopped working, with the shutter stuck and mirror flipped up.
P.S. entering this part almost 9 months after the fact I just have to notify that, December of 2007 the Nikon camera has come back to its life sevral times and has been continuously fulfilling me with visual pleasure.
