Welcome Home!

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 18

I set my alarm and got up early (by my weekend standards.) I was heading to visit Kiki and Walker in Osaka today! Kiki and Walker are my parents' friends. I mentioned them earlier. I spent the morning packing and frantically hoping I wasn't forgetting anything. Then I was off to the train station. I bought my ticket outside at the discount machine. Had I been smart, I would have bought my return as well, but I wasn't. Later, I would end up paying full price 50% more to come back.

As it was, getting to Osaka was simple. It was 1000 yen and I just got on the train at my local station and got off at Osaka. I even took the rapid, so it was only an hour. Honestly, it couldn't have been easier.

There was a man on the train looking at a magazine. From what I could tell, it was a normal magazine, but one of the advertisements had a woman, completely naked and fully displayed, down to the hair between her artfully spread legs. It's times like this that make me wish I could read Japanese just to know what that was advertising. As I recognized from my time in Ireland, America is very conservative about nudity. There were television commercials on TV with full back nudity or even bare breasts and no one batted an eye. In fact, a popular commercial for a morning radio show had a naked guy running around the city with strategically placed objects barely hiding his most intimate part.

Once in Osaka, I got off the train, walked, as instructed to the elevator, went down one floor and was met by Kiki, with open arms. I haven't seen Kiki or Walker since I was quite little. But she was certainly glad to see me. She handed me her ticket card so as we went through several other trains I could just swipe through. We traveled to south Osaka, where the family lives.

Osaka has been a mercantile post in Japan (dealing heavily with Korea and China) since the beginning of records and was even once briefly the capital of Japan. Osaka was almost bombed flat in World War II and is now filled with high-rise highways, pachinko parlors, and concrete-box buildings. Osaka has two city centers – Kira (north) which is home to the business and administrative areas and Minami (south) which has the entertainment and nightlife areas.

Kiki and Walker have two homes on their property: one is the modern home where the family lives, the other is the 70 year old home where Walker was born and his family built at the end of World War II. This house is currently empty and the grounds are overgrown, but while walking through them, you can still see the deliberately shaped trees and a small pond with koi.

The main house is quite big by Japanese standards. It had an upstairs, which I never saw. I was given my own room, an expansion they had recently built with tatami floors. Their son, Adam met me and their daughter, Mia, would show up later, but was currently out at a concert. Walker, Kiki and I talked with Adam sitting politely barely following the conversation. He would later complain that that evening alone he'd heard over a week's worth of English.

There's something welcoming about coming in and finding two pictures of oneself in the kitchen. My mother has NO pictures of me in the kitchen, for the record. The last time I saw Kiki and Walker, they gave me a Japanese scarf and I was playing with their daughter, Mia, at Disneyland. There were pictures of this trip up in the kitchen. I was happy to be able to tell Kiki that I still have that scarf.

Eventually, Kiki went to prepare dinner. She brushed off my offers to help and sent me to my room, closing my door behind me. I read some in my travel book about Osaka and took some short naps, as I had no idea how long it would be before dinner and I didn't want to be rude and sleep through it. I eventually did stretch out on the tatami and nap, though, as my neck hurt from the odd angle of sleeping against the wall.

I awoke to Kiki calling and bustled out to dinner. She had told me that she might ask my help shaping the ravioli (that's right, she made home-made ravioli for dinner!) but she hadn't. The four of us sat down to a delicious dinner of ravioli, a sweet potato salad and I don't recall what else.

Mia showed up toward the end of the meal. She had been playing guitar at a concert.

After dinner and a dessert of Belgian sweets, the kids wandered off and Kiki and Walker and I talked some more. At one point, we heard a slamming noise and a yell from upstairs. Kiki froze and brushed it off. It came again a few minutes later and she went to check. Turns out Adam had been killing a cockroach in his room. Kiki was so embaressed by his behavior, but it was all I could do not to say, “you've met my father, right?” Eventually, I went to go to bed, still exhausted.

Like my apartment, the bathroom and the toilet are in separate rooms in this house. I discussed it with Kiki, and she talked about the advantages in the morning of having them separate and how this way the toilet doesn't stink up the bathtub and sink and mirror and such. I can't argue against her points.

The futon had been laid out for me. It was thicker than my one back home. I asked Kiki what time she wanted me up – 9am – and promptly fell asleep.