Okaasan

For the last three weeks now, I’ve observed a quintessential house-wife in my host mother: rising at 4:30 each morning (I know this because I have woken up to her moving through the corridor), she prepares breakfast, school lunches, and watches over Youko as she studies; they sleep in the same room, as is custom for the youngest child in many Japanese families, and so Youko lives by her mother’s chronometer. I wake up some time around half past six, eat, and leave by seven thirty for HIF. When I get home, usually after five, Okaasan—Japanese for “mother” (お母さん)—is either busy preparing dinner or doing some other house-hold chore, or, twice a week, she is volunteering as a teacher’s aid at a local private learning center for small children, a kind of cram school for five year olds.
Okaasan is a competent household manager, and such is her pride in her station that she feels a slight wariness for what she sees as the lack of “tradition” in Hokkaido. Originally from Osaka, Okaasan grew up in an old, well defined, and settled cultural setting; one in which families meet for formal marriage interviews, a tradition developed from the older custom of dowry negotiation and the concept of marriage as a contractual agreement between parents, not children; and one in which a woman’s role as the manager of the household, and not as a breadwinner, retains strength in a way long ago faded in the United States.
Hokkaido, by comparison, is a young and freewheeling place; the northern island, whose current name can loosely translate to “[By way of] the North Sea Road,” is separated from the main island, Honshu, by a straight so narrow that on a clear night one can see across to the other side from the top of Mt. Hakodate, not very far from my home. As close as the two are, though, Japanese from Honshu only crossed to Hokkaido during the Edo period, in the seventeenth century; in many ways, the history of the Japanese in Hokkaido is no older than that of Europeans in America. As a result, in Okaasan’s view, the old ways of Osaka do not easily translate here; marriages without interviews are the norm, elopements are not uncommon, the incidence of divorce is far higher here than in Honshu, and women work and raise children at a rate that, it seems, Okaasan needed to get used to during her twenty some years here (*point of clarification: this is all relative. Hokkaido’s women still work far less prevalently after having children than do their counterparts in America).
As much as she has seemed to accept this, though, Okaasan still makes a great deal of her role as a typical Japanese homemaker. I have several times found myself in the awkward position where Okaasan will ask me whether my own mother does things the same way at home in America. These range from questions about how we share meals as a family, to whether or not Mom handles the bills. While there is no reason that these questions should, in themselves, pose me any grave concern, they come from Okaasan riding on a certain tone of moral certainty that, while not malicious, begs the question of whether Okaasan judges me, my mother, or even my upbringing by the answer I give. Add the fact that my own mother is a working professional who did not choose the hearth as her calling, and I find the need to word my responses very carefully.
Then again, there are times when Okaasan seems positively un-house-wifely. One day at breakfast, I was describing how I climbed Mt. Fuji when I was Tokyo the summer before, and almost immediately upon hearing the word “mountain” (Yama 山) , Okaasan began her own story about her mountain-climbing days, in her twenties, when she had just moved to Hokkaido for school. Initially I tried to finish my own story about Fuji, but I stopped when I began to look at her; Okaasan’s entire manner had changed. Her almost constant semi-stern demeanor, the one best suited to dealing with three children at home from moment to moment, had melted away like snow in a rainstorm, and was replaced with an eager smile and eyes that were as excited as a little girl’s.
Her posture had changed, too; her hands, almost instinctively holding something and, if not, down at her sides a la femme japonais—that is, still and controlled—were now wildly moving in pantomime, her back bent so that she leaned forward, groaning as if she really were climbing a mountain. I nodded politely in interest to her story, but what really intrigued me was her. There is clearly a woman in Okaasan that I will never get to know: the twenty-something mountain climber with eyes that smiled. This was surely the woman that my host-father met, fell in love with in that most distressing Hokkaido way, and started a family with.
Seeing Okaasan this way was almost like meeting someone for the first time, and it impressed upon me the effect of years. Certainly I will be different twenty years from now, but the idea that I may become almost unrecognizable, that the years may bury my 18 year-old self to provide a floor for my 38 year-old self to stand on, has never occurred to me before, and is a not mildly disconcerting feeling. I can only hope that, if it does happen that way, that I, like Okaasan, may not forget what it is like to be a young traveler with eyes that smile, at least on occasion.