My Short-Lived Homestay

While I was at Canon, I convinced myself that I needed to do a year-long home stay in order to perfect my Japanese, picturing that I would find some welcoming family who would become my friends for life. One of my Canon colleagues volunteered to help find me a home stay, and did, in Itabashi-ku in northwestern Tokyo. I started the home stay in September 1991, after my internship at Canon ended, and I moved out of the Canon dorm that came with the internship.

When I arrived, it was not at all what I pictured. Instead of a welcoming family, who would take me in as their "adopted" American son for a year, what I got was a family that took in boarders to make some extra money. They had a college student, whom I don't remember ever talking to, and a five-year old, slightly retarded girl, who was attending a special school that was not available in her hometown.

The mother and older sister, who did not live there, but was at the house all the time, were both nutritionists, so my breakfast and dinner were always very healthy. As soon as I moved in, I began losing weight as a result of my healthier diet, which worried them very much because they thought I was not eating enough, but I was quite happy about this change in my appearance. The father was a coarse working stiff from Kyushu, with such a thick Kyushu accent that I was never able to understand what he was saying. Because I could never understand what he was saying, he thought I was stupid, and would use sign language to try to communicate with me, when all I wanted was for him to speak a little more slowly and more clearly.

The worst aspect of the home stay was that I had a 10:00 p.m. curfew. I am not sure whether eventually they would have given me a key once they got to know me, but they did not and I had to be home by 10:00 when they locked the front door. To make matters worse, where they lived in Itabashi-ku was near the very end of the Mita subway line, and it took me about 45 minutes to get home from central Tokyo, where I usually hung out with my friends, meaning that I had to leave the goings-on by 9:15 p.m. to get home on time. I found this quite insulting, given that I was an adult with a job and was used to keeping my own hours completely at college.

To make matters even worse, the Mita subway line, which traveled mostly through poorer parts of Tokyo, had not yet been updated and had subway cars without air-conditioning. Even in September, the subway was stiflingly hot, and I would arrive at work in the morning drenched in sweat.

After a few weeks of the home stay, I noticed that I was constantly sneezing and itchy-eyed. I finally realized I was having a bad allergic reaction to the family dog. I suffered horribly for a few weeks, but then realized that this was my face-saving ticket out of the home stay. I called my friend Kakurai-san at Canon and asked him if he would find out from Oshikawa-san whether the offer was still open for me to move into Oshikawa-san's dorm. He called me back almost immediately to tell me that it was. I moved out that weekend, closing one brief chapter of my life in Japan and opening a new one with the Oshikawa family.