Dreaming Of Sakura...

Little TF, Mr. TF, and I leave Japan with a mixture of sadness and peace.  Sadness, because the life that we spent three years building is over.  Peace, because we know that, in living here, we did our best.  Little TF and I saw just about everything on the island of Honshu that there was to see.  Mr. TF covered Okinawa for us.  I took a baby TF on every trip that I took- a port call visit to see Mr. TF in Thailand, a girls' trip to Seoul, a nuclear evacuation to Guam and the States, and a sightseeing trip with my mom and brother to Taipei.  We celebrated the ends of deployments with family trips to balmy Vietnam and Malaysia, and choked on putrid, chilly smog in Beijing. Mr. TF flew earthquake relief missions to the Tohoku region and joined the Australian military for exercises in the Outback.  Little TF made special American and Japanese friends at her preschool, and stole the hearts of our neighbors.  I did my best to learn how to live in our neighborhood and learn (very poor) Japanese.  We leave with full hearts, grateful for the resources and incredible opportunities that we were given to explore our corner of Asia.  We set our faces towards our homeland, with no regrets about our time in Japan.

 I leave Japan, though, with one yearning unfulfilled...I will not see the sakura bloom this spring.  If you're in Japan at the end of this March/April, would you go see some cherry blossoms for me?  I have two favorite places that I think you'll really like.

My first favorite place for ohanami, or flower-viewing, is really any local park in Japan. On the weekends, the parks will be packed; to avoid the enormous crowds it's best to go during the weekdays.  Everyone with a lunch break will still head out to relax under the fluffy white trees, but there will be more space to stretch out and enjoy the views.

To properly celebrate ohanami, a picnic is a must.  I recommend cherry blossom tea from Lupicia, fresh strawberries, and some sakura mochi, of course.  Toss in a couple bento boxes and a blanket, and you are all set!  

As you lounge, munch on snacks, and watch the wind swirl delicate sakura petals into the sky, don't be surprised if you are invited to join one of the local groups of partygoers.  In fact, as a foreigner (especially if you are female), you can pretty much count on it.  Ohanami seems to loosen up the normally formal and reserved Japanese and bring out a surprising amount of English-  perhaps it has something to do with the copious amounts of beer that go hand in hand with ohanami parties.  

On one particularly memorable day, my friend and I were invited to join a group of bamboo flute students and their teacher.  The men were taking a break from their class to appreciate the sakura.  After plying us with sticks of yakitori (grilled chicken) and Sapporo beers (yes to the chicken, no thank-you to the beer), the class got up and gave us an impromptu concert under the trees.  The haunting, breathy notes of the bamboo flutes, played to the tune of Amazing Grace; caught up by the breeze to dance with the cherry blossom petals, remain one of my most special memories of Japan.  

So grateful that they shared their day with us.

The sheet music for the bamboo flutes

You have to head to Tokyo for my other favorite sakura-viewing location- Yasukuni Shrine.  Yasukuni enshrines the over two million souls of those who died for the imperial family of Japan, including women, students, soldiers, and kamikaze. As such, it is also Japan's most controversial shrine.  Yasukuni Shrine is also of note for another reason...Tokyo's official Sakura Tree is located within the shrine's environs.  Tokyo's cherry blossom season does not officially start until this tree is in bloom!   

Go at lunch time and grab food at one of the many booths that crowd the avenue below the shrine. I recommend the takoyaki (fried octopus balls) and sakura-flavored ice cream!

Yasukuni's massive, torii-gated entrance

Pass through the shrine's gates, which are crested with the Imperial Chrysanthemum, and walk into a dream.  Every tree inside the gates is a sakura tree, and their delicate pink clouds fill the entire space.  The cherry blossom- which symbolizes the beauty and fleetingness of life- is also a metaphor for the kamikaze pilot, whose brief life was short, but made beautiful in his service to the Emperor.  During WWII, the Japanese government even propagated the idea that cherry blossoms were the reincarnated souls of dead soldiers.  

You can't miss Tokyo's Official Sakura Tree- it stands next to the shrine's Noh stage and is surrounded by a bamboo fence and photographers.

After you leave the shrine, stroll back through the torii gates to the bottom of the avenue, and then head up the bridge and cross over the street to the Chidorigafuchi Senbotsusah Boen gardens and surrounding moat.  Expect this park to be packed at all times during cherry blossom season.  

To escape the crowds, rent a boat and drift under the sweeping sakura branches that dip into the water.

 So, Japan, this is the end.  Thank-you for teaching me to appreciate the moment through tea ceremony. Thank-you for giving me a small taste of what it feels like to be a minority- I will take that greater awareness to my own country.  You showed me, through the earthquake, that life is a gift and can end at any moment.  I will always be grateful that you send me through the rest of my life with the knowledge that nothing truly worth doing is easy.

I promised Little TF that I will bring her back to visit her early childhood, someday.  Preferably after you get that Tokai Earthquake out of your system.  So I do not say sayonara- good-bye.  Instead, I leave with mata oai shimasho- see you, again.  


A special thank-you also goes out to my English students, and one very dear friend (you know who you are).  Thank-you all for being my fact-checkers, explaining Japanese customs and ways of thinking, and making sure I got to where I needed to go.  You taught me more than I could ever teach you.  


Yasukuni Shrine is accessed via Kudanshita Station on the Hanzomon, Tozai, and Shinjuku Subway lines.  Boat rentals in Chidorigafuchi Senbotsusah Boen are daily, from sunrise to sunset, and go from early April to late November.  

Disclaimer:  I do my best to make sure all my information is accurate.  However, details may change or I may just be flat-out wrong.  Please let me know if something needs a correction.  Thank-you!

It's Time To Move On...

Our apartment is almost empty.

In Japan:

A few remaining boxes, rolled-up rugs, and the porch furniture on the roof- that we never ended up using because Japan's swampy summers are too damn hot- are all that remain.  The car is sold.  Little TF is attending the last day of her beloved preschool.  We have moved back into the Navy Lodge for the quickly fading remainder of our time here.  Our safety deposit is going to be returned- hopefully mostly intact.  Neighbors and the veggie man down the street will soon receive reluctant, good-bye bows.

In the United States:

Our old car, that we left in a California storage facility, has arrived at our new destination on the East Coast.  We close on our first home in March.  Little TF's already been accepted into a preschool for next year, and can even finish out this school year if she wants.  My brother is getting married this spring, and we've got a bridesmaid dress and a flower girl dress hogging space in our luggage.  Mr. TF has been slated for a mid-spring deployment, and Little TF and I have summer plans at my parents' house to prove it.

Those of us who answer the military's call, for whatever reason that may be, slip so easily out of one life and into another.  It only takes a couple weeks to completely pack up our lives and send them somewhere else. At the same time, it's not so easy. My family has spent the last three years building a beautiful life in Japan.  Deployment stress, natural disaster stress, not speaking the language stress, it all became less and less stressful until it became...normal?  (Well, not the natural disaster stress.  I'm still holding my breath against the looming Tokai Earthquake until our airplane wheels leave the ground.)  Walking to the grocery store every day, chatting in fragmented Japanese with our local flower vendor, listening to the children singing at the preschool across the street, catching a view of Mt. Fuji as I hang out the laundry...that's all become normal, too.  I already miss it. 

Friends and family say, "You must be so excited to move back to the States!" And I am.  The United States is my home.  But I am a bit fearful that I don't quite remember how to be an American.  My English is sometimes a bit off...hearing a majority of only Japanese or broken English spoken means I have started to occasionally stumble over my grammar, and can't remember little-used words (What do we call that shelter that cars park underneath?  Two days later- carport!  That's it!).  American-sized food portions in restaurants look grotesquely excessive, and American cars look shockingly large.  From a distance, filtered through the lens of online news sources, it's sometimes hard to recognize my country. Have we always been this environmentally indifferent?  Tolerated such poor education in so many of our public schools? Screamed this loudly about our gun rights? Been so excessively loud in general?  Or has the distance just made the indifference and the screaming and the noise seem more acute?  Also, shoes in the house?  Why do we stubbornly adhere to such a filthy habit?

But it's time for us to go back.  It's time for my daughter to learn how to be an American.  Time for her to learn that to thank someone, Americans look the person in the eye instead of bowing towards the ground.  That to gain and extend trust, Americans extend a confident handshake.  That to become an American, one need only to possess the desire (although I suppose some would also argue for legal entry) to do so.  That a person may personally have the freedom to be a bigot and judge by skin color and cultural background and sexual orientation (I advocate none of those things), but our governments, businesses, and schools do not have such a freedom.  These are good things that my daughter needs to learn and I am proud that she is a citizen of a such a country.

As we close the last page of the book, Three Years In Japan, we have already started to open the first page of our First Year On The East Coast book.  Every military family has a stack of such books.  These are rich, difficult, fascinating tales, and everyone's books are different.  Yet, somehow we are all writing the same story, wherever in the world we might be.  In leaving Japan, we have friends that are leaving our book's pages.  In moving to the East Coast, we have old friends that are rejoining our story. We say a reluctant "good-bye" and then a "good to see you, again," practically in the same breath. And so the military moving cycle continues.

We will always be grateful that our stack of books included Japan.


Disclaimer:  I do my best to make sure all my information is accurate.  However, details may change or I may just be flat-out wrong.  Please let me know if something needs a correction.  Thank-you!

A Day For Girls!

If you're in Japan right now, swing through your nearest department store!  Displays for Hinamatsuri- literally translated as Dolls' Festival and more commonly known in English as Girls' Day- are everywhere.  Celebrated on March 3, the displays that pop up in February are one of the first signs of impending spring.  Pink!  Cherry and plum blossoms!  Elaborate doll displays!  Even grocery stores get in on the fun and sell special treats and snacks.  

Traditionally, families with a daughter in the house set up a beautiful doll display, like the one pictured below.  The prince and princess preside over the top level, with courtiers, attendants, and court accessories gracing the descending steps in order of importance.  Doll sets at our local department store include anywhere from just a prince and princess, to three or four steps of lesser dolls.  The prices are eye-popping, starting from the equivalent of a few hundred dollars to several thousand!  Of course, the larger the doll set, the harder to find space in a tiny Japanese apartment.  Several Japanese friends have admitted to not having the space to justify such a purchase, and mark the day with a very tiny display, instead.

Wanting to get on the Girls' Day fun, but not wanting to burn the cash on a display that would cost more than all of our Christmas decorations put together, I found this little fabric Hinamatsuri set at the mall chain store, Oribe.  Oribe sells traditional Japanese dishes, chopsticks, tea utensils, kimono-patterned bento boxes, and seasonal decorations.  Oribe's adorable Girls' Day display drew us in, and Little TF and I both decided that the adorable bunny prince and princess sitting on little plum blossom thrones needed to come home with us!

As a lover of all things pink, Little TF declared the pink bunny princess to be a personification of...herself.  She then declared the bunny prince to be me.  "But I can't be the red bunny!  That's the prince," I protested. "No, Mama, that's not a prince, that's the red princess (duh)."  Upon reflection, I realized that since there are no girls making an appearance on the boys' holiday in May, it's not really fair of the boys to muscle in on Girls' Day.  Two princesses it is, then!


If you set out a Hinamatsuri display for your daughter, tradition dictates that you pack it up at the end of the day on March third.  Otherwise, a no-longer-quite-so-horrifying superstitious belief predicts that your daughter will get married late.  


Disclaimer:  I do my best to make sure all my information is accurate.  However, details may change or I may just be flat-out wrong.  Please let me know if something needs a correction.  Thank-you!

Tea Time in Ginza

With our time in Japan coming to an alarmingly fast end (sad face), Monday was the time for our lovely Spouse Club to say good-bye to me and several other ladies.  Many of our former members have chosen to have their farewells at more local restaurants and karaoke bars, but my fellow farewell-ees and I decided that a trip to Tokyo sounded much more fabulous! 

While karaoke bars definitely have a time and a place, we were in search of something a bit more...classy.  And what could be more classy than one of the most sophisticated hotels in Tokyo's classiest district- Ginza?  Enjoying the Peninsula's high tea sounded like just the thing!

Scones and sweets

Our menu was as follows:

The Peninsula Classic Afternoon Tea Set

2:30 pm to 5:00 pm

Selection of Savories

Fried Turkey Wrap Roll with Cocktail Sauce

Corned Beef, Sauerkraut and Watercress on Wheat Toast with Mustard Sauce

Salmon Rillettes with Multigrain Crouton

Apple Purée with Anis, Fresh Cheese and Sliced Almond

Selection of Sweets

Cheese Cake Chocolate Tart Strawberry Short Cake Matcha Cake

Scones (plain and raisin)

Choice of tea

The Peninsula Tokyo Blend Tea

The Peninsula Tokyo Afternoon Tea

The Peninsula Tokyo Breakfast Tea

Assam, Darjeeling, Earl Grey, Muscat, Jasmine Peppermint, Chamomile, 
Lemon Verbena, Rosehip & Hibiscus Relax Therapy, Counseling

I enjoyed the Lemon Verbena and Peppermint, other friends enjoyed the Rosehip & Hibiscus and Afternoon Blend, and one particularly brave lady decided to give Counseling a try.  She couldn't stop talking about how great it was, and how everyone should try Counseling at some point in their lives.  Several of us also sampled the Muscat, which had a fantastic grape smell and horribly bitter taste.  I do not recommend the Muscat.

As we chatted and sipped and snacked, a live piano/bass duet serenaded us from a balcony, and the lights of the Peninsula's magnificent lobby chandelier twinkled above our heads.  What a delightful way to say good-bye to some lovely ladies, and to Ginza.  Sayonara...for now!



Afternoon Tea at the Peninsula is 3,600 yen per person.  Reservations are recommended, and can be made by calling The Lobby at (81-3) 6270 2731.  Dress code: Smart Casual.  Sandals, shorts, and tank tops are not allowed.


Disclaimer:  I do my best to make sure all my information is accurate.  However, details may change or I may just be flat-out wrong.  Please let me know if something needs a correction.  Thank-you!