Oshikawa-san

I met Oshikawa Ken, my Japanese "dad," in 1991. Most gaijin who say they have a Japanese "family" usually mean their homestay family. I met my Japanese family at Canon.

Oshikawa-san was a middle-manager in the Internal Training Division, and pretty much every Canon employee knew him because he trained every new hire that came through the door. Oshikawa-san was short, chubby, balding, and wore coke-bottle glasses that made his eyes seem huge. He was a former kamikaze pilot (more on that in another post), Tokyo beat-cop, and most importantly, a Canon employee for more than 30 years. Canon recognized his special place at the company by keeping him on for 2 years beyond the mandatory retirement age of 63 and by appointing him manager of the Musashi-Nitta Dormitory. In true Canon fashion, he met his wife Chisako there. Oshikawa-san was a larger-than-life presence at Canon -- everyone's favorite uncle, who was always in the middle of whatever fun was going on.

According to my orientation at Harvard before leaving for Japan, one of my most important duties would be to give a proper self-introduction (jiko-shokai) on my first day. I arrived in Japan on a Friday and worked very hard over the weekend on my jiko-shokai, laboring intensively with a Japanese-English dictionary and my still-limited Japanese.

Like other points from the orientation, I misunderstood the point of the jiko-shokai as well. It needed only to be a brief introduction that told my new colleagues who I was and where I was from, but I treated the 30-odd assembled employees of the Internal Communications Division and the Internal Training Division to my whole life story to date. As I droned on, I could see some of the blue-uniformed women stifling yawns, and I tried to speed things up. But Oshikawa-san later told me that he had been touched by the obvious effort that I had made to make a speech in Japanese, and he liked me right away because of it. (I also later learned that at least one long, boring speech was an essential part of every Japanese gathering.)

One evening, there were plans for everyone in our office to go out after work. The closing chime rang at 5:15 pm, and while the younger workers didn't budge, Oshikawa-san and some of the other middle managers (the mado-giwa-zoku, or "ones who sit near the window") gathered in the corner meeting area and produced several bottles of beer from a small fridge.

Oshikawa-san suddenly bellowed across the room: Jonasan! Kotchi ni koi yo! Nome, nome! ("Jonathan, come over here! Drink, drink!) He waived at me with his palm facing me and his hand motioning towards the floor -- the Japanese way of waving someone over, which looks to an American as if they are waiving you away. I had intended to keep on working until it was time to leave like everyone around me, but because Oshikawa-san had never spoken to me before and was a manager, I figured I'd better go over. He sat me down and poured me some beer, and I drank with the older guys until 6:30, when it was time for the whole group to leave for the restaurant.

From there, a great friendship was born. When Oshikawa-san found out that, instead of returning to the US after my internship was over, I would be starting another job in Japan, he insisted that I come live at the Musashi-Nitta dorm. I initially turned him down, having arranged for a year-long homestay, but when the homestay became unbearable within a month, I contacted him and he immediately arranged everything with the powers that be at Canon. I was given one of the empty rooms across the hall from his family's apartment, where I lived until he retired from managing the dormitory a year later. Once or twice a month, both while I lived in the dormitory and afterwards, the Oshikawas invited me to dinner at their house. Shortly before I left Japan after three years, Oshikawa-san paid me the intense honor of telling me, Jonasan, omae wa uchi no musuko da yo ("Jonathan, you're our son").

Oshikawa-san died in 2002, a month after learning he had cancer. The family did not tell me until after the funeral because I was having a difficult time in Boston then and they did not want to trouble me. (So Japanese!) They knew I would have hopped on a plane right away had I known he was sick.

Oshikawa-san would have been happy to know that I married a Japanese woman and still return to Japan often. We are still close with the Oshikawa family, talk frequently with my "big sister" Keiko, and see them whenever we can. Keiko and her mother attended our wedding in Kyoto. I've visited Oshikawa-san's grave and helped wash it, and I always greet him at the family shrine whenever I visit the Oshikawas' apartment in Kawasaki. I only wish that he could have lived long enough to see his American "granddaughter," Emma, but I am sure he knows all about her.