J-Boys Read online

  “The snow piles up everywhere—the fields, the mountains—and everything turns completely white,” he said. “It gets as high as a grown-up is tall, and we ski around on it and play every day. Have the two of you ever skied before?”

  Paddy fields: Flooded areas of land used for growing rice. Rice paddies are found all over Asia. So numerous are they in Japan that 田, the original Japanese character for “field,” comes from a drawing of a rice paddy.

  Kazuo and Yasuo shook their heads.

  Listening to Takashi, Kazuo had wondered how Father could have left this gorgeous place and gone to Tokyo, which was crammed with people, buildings, and noise.

  Then again, Uncle Yoshio’s stories about his construction work were filled with thrills for Kazuo and Yasuo. He told them about how there was lots of water underground in the city. When workers constructed a building, they often pumped out enough water to fill dozens of swimming pools! And when construction crews were digging deep with cranes, they sometimes found people’s dwellings from thousands of years ago.

  The work at the construction sites stopped for New Year’s vacation on December 28, and Uncle Yoshio always went back to his village to spend the New Year’s holiday with his family. It had become a tradition for him to stop by Kazuo’s house on the night of his departure. And the menu for dinner was always the same: sukiyaki.

  “We’ll keep the house clean,” Kazuo promised as Mother headed out the front door.

  “Hey, do you think Uncle Yoshio will bring us New Year’s money?” Yasuo asked Kazuo.

  “Maybe,” Kazuo muttered as he carried his breakfast dishes to the kitchen. It wasn’t that he didn’t look forward to receiving New Year’s money from Uncle Yoshio. He just felt that being open about it like Yasuo was childish.

  A Tokyo highway under construction in the mid-’60s.

  “Oi, Yasuo, I’ll do your dishes,” Kazuo called to his brother, who remained seated at the kotatsu. “So bring them here.”

  That afternoon their mother came home just after twelve, and their father came home at a little past three. Perhaps because of the upcoming six-day holiday, their expressions were milder than usual.

  “Otohsan, why don’t you take Kazuo and Yasuo to the bathhouse before your brother gets here?” Mother called from the kitchen, where she was starting to prepare dinner.

  Father was in the living room playing thumb sumo with Kazuo and Yasuo. Today meant the end of their lazy days of freedom. But they had not seen much of Father for the past month while he worked overtime, and now they were having fun.

  “All right, boys, we’re off to the bathhouse,” Father announced. Kazuo and Yasuo jumped to their feet.

  With their towels and soap in their basins, Kazuo, Yasuo, and Father walked down the main street of the shopping area. A children’s song, “Just a Few More Nights Till New Year’s,” blared from speakers. The shopping area was crowded with people stocking up on food for their New Year’s celebrations. When Kazuo, Yasuo, and Father reached the center of the district, Yasuo’s friend Nobuo, who was skewering chicken for yakitori at the back of his parents’ butcher shop, noticed Kazuo and called out to him.

  Yakitori: Skewers of chicken and vegetables grilled and dipped or covered in sauce. Workers enjoy eating yakitori when meeting friends after work.

  “Heading to the bathhouse early today, huh?”

  Like his mother, who was frying croquettes and ground pork cakes at the front of the store, and his father, who was carving slabs of meat with a huge cleaver, Nobuo was wearing a white work smock over his clothes. Next to him, helping him slide pieces of chicken onto skewers, was Nobuo’s older brother, Haruo.

  “Yeah, Otohsan came home early,” Yasuo said before Kazuo could respond.

  “Kids shouldn’t cut into other people’s conversations,” Kazuo said, giving Yasuo a poke in the face, then turned back to Nobuo. “Our uncle’s coming tonight. We have orders to bathe before he gets here.”

  Nobuo winked. “So that’s why your mom stopped by for sukiyaki beef a little while ago ?”

  “Guess so. You’re helping the folks today?”

  Nobuo nodded. “I’m working hard, that’s for sure.”

  Nobuo’s father looked up. “You’re only doing this because I gave you a good talking-to, and because you want your New Year’s money!” He flared his nostrils, looking exactly like his son, and Nobuo snickered.

  “Our Kazuo and Yasuo haven’t lifted a finger at home since the winter vacation started,” Kazuo’s father spoke up. “All they do is stare at the TV. They could learn a lot from your Nobuo.” He put his hands on Kazuo’s and Yasuo’s heads and wagged them back and forth.

  “Our boys only help every now and then,” Nobuo’s mother said, pausing as she turned a croquette. “What I wish is that they would study harder, like Kazuo-chan and Yasuo-chan.”

  “I guess the grass is always greener on the other side,” Kazuo’s father remarked.

  The three adults laughed, and then exchanged formal, year-end greetings.

  Later Kazuo, Yasuo, and Father returned from the bathhouse to find a portable burner and iron pot set out on the kotatsu. The hands of the clock showed it was past five.

  “No sign of Yoshio yet?” Father asked Mother. Uncle Yoshio always arrived before five.

  “No,” Mother said. She stopped chopping the vegetables for sukiyaki and looked at Father with a worried expression.

  “He’s probably running late because they had a lot of work to do before New Year’s,” he told her. “Before we worry about that, why don’t you go to the bathhouse. I can handle the rest of this.”

  “You’re right. I’ll be back.”

  Their mother left, and their father took over preparing the sukiyaki ingredients. He chopped onions, chrysanthemum greens, shiitake mushrooms, and tofu, piling them on plates, which Kazuo then carried to the living room. Yasuo took five sukiyaki bowls from the cupboard and set them out on the kotatsu.

  “Do you know why there are so many vegetables in suki­yaki?” Father asked Kazuo and Yasuo, after they had laid everything out.

  “Because if we only eat meat, it costs a lot of money?” Yasuo answered immediately.

  Father laughed heartily. “Well, that’s true. But that’s not all there is to it. Kazuo, do you know?”

  “Um . . . for balanced nutrition?” Kazuo answered.

  Father looked impressed. “Since when did you get to be such a smarty pants?”

  Kazuo listened to his father explain to Yasuo how the vitamin C from vegetables helped people to stay healthy. Father knew things, just like a schoolteacher knew things, and sometimes he could explain math or science lessons even better than Mr. Honda. When Father had finished the chores in the kitchen, they resumed their rounds of thumb sumo. The three of them howled with laughter.

  Finally, after their mother returned from the bathhouse, Uncle Yoshio arrived, carrying a bag stuffed with gifts for his family back home.

  Uncle Yoshio always put everyone in a cheerful mood when he came to visit, telling jokes and fooling around. But today he heaved a sigh as he sank down at the kotatsu. “I’m sorry to be late,” he murmured.

  “What happened?” Father asked worriedly.

  “A fellow named Toshi from upcountry in Aomori broke his leg. Getting him into the hospital and calling his people took all afternoon.” Uncle Yoshio sighed again.

  Aomori: A rural prefecture in northeastern Japan, or Tohoku. Heavy snow historically led workers to warmer cities in winter to do seasonal labor.

  “Will Mr. Toshi be all right?” asked Kazuo’s mother. She paused while lighting the burner to make the sukiyaki.

  “The doctor says the bone should heal in a month, so everything will be fine. But it’ll be at least March before poor old Toshi can work again.” Uncle Yoshio shook his head and stared into the steam that rose from the sukiyaki pot. “And by then it’ll be time to go home and get back in the fields. Basically, it means no income for him for the rest of the winter.”
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br />   “Can’t he get any compensation?” Father poured some beer into Uncle’s glass.

  “No. We’re all just seasonal labor.”

  Seasonal labor: During the 1960s and later, when Japan was growing rapidly, some 200,000 to nearly 350,000 rural workers, among them people like Uncle Yoshio, migrated to cities each winter to find work. It was a hard life: families were separated, villages suffered, and workers were exposed to dangerous conditions (the incident involving Mr. Toshi shows some of the hazards of this work). The workers increasingly came from remote regions such as Tohoku, including Aomori and Yamagata prefectures.

  Uncle Yoshio sighed again and brought his glass to his mouth. “Here it is almost New Year’s, and I come in with all this heavy talk. Sorry about that.”

  “How is the job situation, by the way?” asked Father as he poured more beer into Uncle’s glass to top it off.

  “Last year there was a big construction rush because everyone was getting ready for the Olympics—putting up buildings and highways all over Tokyo. Now the Olympics are over so they’re not hiring like they were. At least Tokyo doesn’t have any snow, so a person can find some work. Back home in Yamagata, there’s nothing to do all winter but shovel snow.”

  Father nodded.

  “Hold on now,” Uncle said suddenly, looking at Kazuo and Yasuo.

  “I’ve been forgetting myself. Here, boys, this is for you.” He took two red New Year’s envelopes from his shirt pocket and handed them to the boys.

  “Wow, thanks!” Yasuo’s eyes lit up as he received his.

  Kazuo also expressed his thanks and put the small envelope in the pocket of his trousers.

  “We thank you for your kindness every year,” Mother said to Uncle Yoshio.

  “Here, these are for Koichi-kun, Sanae-chan, and Takashi-kun.” She took three envelopes from the chest of drawers and gave them to Uncle.

  He bowed his head slightly, and then accepted the gifts with polite words of thanks.

  “By the way, how is Takashi-kun?” Kazuo asked, remembering the cousin he had not seen in nearly two years.

  “Takashi seems to be all right. The last letter I got from home said he’s going to represent his school at a ski tournament in January.” For the first time that day, Uncle’s expression grew genuinely happy.

  “Koichi-kun will be off to high school next year, won’t he?” Mother asked, inquiring after Uncle’s eldest son.

  “That’s right. He’s studying hard, says he’s going to take the exams for the top high school in the prefecture,” Uncle responded proudly. “With that boy studying day and night, I’ve got to do my part and work just as hard.”

  A little later, just after nine, Uncle Yoshio stood up. He was getting ready to catch the overnight train to Yamagata from Ueno Station.

  Train: The entire archipelago of Japan is criss-crossed by train lines. Some are high-speed trains that link major cities; others are small and rickety wooden trains that journey deep into the mountains. In Kazuo’s time few Japanese had their own cars but got around exclusively on train, streetcar, and subway.

  “Tomorrow morning I’ll look out the window and the whole world will be white!” He put his shoes on at the front door.

  Father went to the station with Uncle to see him off.

  After the men left, Mother began to clear off the kotatsu. Kazuo and Yasuo reluctantly withdrew from the kotatsu’s warmth, laid out the bedding in their small room, and curled up under their blankets.

  “Hey, Niichan, how much New Year’s money did you get?” Yasuo asked, poking his head out from under the covers.

  “Five hundred yen,” Kazuo answered shortly.

  “Five hundred yen, huh? I got three hundred. Hey, what do you think you’re going to buy with yours? A plastic model, or some comics maybe?”

  “I haven’t decided yet. You’d better get to sleep or we’ll be in trouble.” Kazuo pulled his covers over his head. In previous years, his mind would have been racing just like Yasuo’s, thinking about what he would buy. But this year he kept thinking about how the gift had come from Uncle’s hard, physical labor for the sake of his family. It was money earned from work that could have given him a broken leg, just like Mr. Toshi.

  Kazuo turned over in his bedding. The only sound in the house was water running as their mother washed dishes. Father had not returned from the station yet.

  Kazuo closed his eyes and remembered Uncle talking about the snow he would see tomorrow morning. Snow took away people’s jobs in wintertime, and it was snow that his father had come to Tokyo to escape.

  Even so, Kazuo couldn’t help but hope that the snow his uncle saw in the morning would be glittering in the sunrise, its whiteness stretching as far as the eye could see.

  January

  Yasuo’s Big Mouth

  To Kazuo, there was nothing quite as boring as New Year’s. The adults created a formal atmosphere by wearing kimono for the first three days of the year, but it felt like there were a lot of limits on what children could do. Nobuo was off in the countryside in Shizuoka, where his parents came from, and most other families were either going out or receiving relatives who came to offer New Year’s greetings. That meant Mother had strictly forbidden going to other children’s houses or inviting any friends to their house to play.

  Kimono: Traditional Japanese garment worn by women, men, and children. Kimono are in the shape of a T and reach nearly to the floor. They have big collars and long, wide sleeves. Kimono don’t use buttons. Instead they wrap across the front, the left side over the right. An obi (sash) wraps several times around the body and is tied in the back. When wearing a kimono you also put on split-toe socks and traditional footwear: either wooden or straw sandals. Kimono are usually worn by women, but rarely on a daily basis. Men may wear kimono at formal ceremonies. Young girls and unmarried women usually have very colorful kimono with bright designs.

  From New Year’s Eve through the third of January, the streets of Tokyo grew very quiet, as if all the people had disappeared.

  Gone were the sounds of car engines running and tires squealing on the main roads, and of people’s footsteps ceaselessly coming and going. Bells from far-off temples that were usually drowned out by noise suddenly became possible to hear, and the sky looked amazingly clean because nearly all of the factories were on holiday.

  On January 1, Kazuo’s family ate a late breakfast of rice-dumpling soup and New Year’s dishes. Then they exchanged greetings with other people in company housing, and paid their first visit of the year to a nearby shrine. On January 2, after Grandmother came over to spend some time and give New Year’s money to Kazuo and Yasuo, they did their first calligraphy of the year. People said your writing would improve if you practiced calligraphy on January 2. But Kazuo had been doing it every year since he started grade school, and he couldn’t see that his writing had improved even a little.

  Calligraphy: Traditional method of writing Japanese using a brush. There are several different ways of writing words and sounds: Chinese characters, or kanji; two phonetic scripts, hiragana and katakana, for writing syllables; and letters of the English alphabet. Numbers are usually written as 1, 2, 3, etc. Japanese schoolchildren know hundreds of kanji by the time they finish elementary school, and they learn them by writing them over and over. These days, many grown-ups are forgetting how to hand-write kanji (many of which have more than ten strokes) because the computer does it for them.

  On January 3, there was absolutely nothing to do. Fortunately, some coworkers of Father’s came over to toast the New Year, so Yasuo and Kazuo got to go to the empty lot to fly kites. There was hardly any wind, but some older kids were there, too. They were flying kites that had special New Year’s expressions written on them.

  Kazuo told Yasuo to hold their kite while he ran off with the string in his hand. He was trying to get the kite into the air by running to create an artificial wind. But when he slowed down even a little bit, the kite simply dropped to the ground, as if not in the mood.r />
  The boys tried the same strategy several times, but the kite showed no sign of staying up. And since it was made out of bamboo sticks and traditional paper, the edges tore every time it hit the ground. Soon it began to get dirty with mud. The boys finally gave up on kite flying and walked through the West Ito shopping area, where every store seemed to have closed its doors. There was not a soul to be seen in the street either.

  “Oniichan, how come our kite wouldn’t go in the air?” Yasuo asked grumpily. He was holding the kite, which by now was badly torn with its bamboo frame poking out.

  “Because there’s no wind, Yasuo.”

  “But those middle school kids got their kites up in the air. I wonder if we’re just bad at it. Maybe we need an expensive kite, not a cheap old ten-yen kite.”

  “Yasuo, would you pipe down?” Kazuo said irritably. “Before we got there, they probably had a better wind than we did.”

  “We should’ve had Otohsan help us,” Yasuo muttered.

  Kazuo scowled. “You really can’t shut your big mouth, can you? Anyway, Otohsan’s busy today, so there’s no way he can help.” He stuffed his hands in his trouser pockets and continued walking through the quiet shopping area.

  When they got to Takahashi Meats, Kazuo glanced at the floor above the butcher shop. He wondered if Nobuo’s family had come back from their visit to the country. But just as in the rest of the shopping area, there was no sign of any life, not even of Nobuo’s older brother Haruo singing “Ee-tsu bina hahdo deizu naito.”

  “Oh, hey, Niichan,” Yasuo spoke up. “I wonder what we’ll have for dinner tonight.” He sniffed and rubbed his nose.

  Right then, Kazuo felt that he couldn’t take any more of Yasuo’s chatter. That was because he knew exactly what Yasuo was trying to say. They were both sick of rice-dumpling soup and New Year’s dishes.