My Host Mother

My host mother's name is Suzuki Tomoko. We live in her two story house in Machida, near tsukimino station. Machida is a town outside of Tokyo, but it connects with the Tokyo train lines, so you could call it a suburb of Tokyo. She was a piano teacher for 25 years. The room that was used for teaching has three yamaha pianos and is now rented out to another piano teacher to be used for lessons. Recently she has joined a number of chorus groups in the Tokyo area. Her range is from an alto to a mezzo soprano. One of her choirs has a concert in February and she will be traveling to Germany this summer to participate in an invitation-only international chorus competition. She uses her piano room for practice when her friends come for their old japanese women chrus group.

Suzuki-san was born in China during World War II. When she was three, the war ended, and her father smuggled her onto a ship bound for Hayate (a port town in Kyushu) in a sack. The voyage lasted for a month. I asked her if she remembers anything about it, and she said that she remembers not having any food and seeing people dying.

Later, she married a man from Tokyo and they had three children. Her husband is now deceased. All of the pictures of him in the house show him with the same expression, quiet eyes and a drawn face with edges of his mouth upturned, like a serious man laughing at his own joke.Suzuki-san also has two sisters and a brother, of which I have only met her sister that lives in Tokyo, Hiromi. Hiromi is an artist and much of the artwork in the house is hers, surreal paintings of flowers. Her children are now grown and moved out of the house. The oldest son is a muscian (I went to one of his shows) and he is married to a woman that gets easily drunk. They have no children. Her oldest daughter is married and has two children, and Kai, 7, male, and Maki, 4. The boy is interested in animals and sports and sometimes we throw a ball around. The girl enjoys drawing and watching films, and she recently gave me one of her crayon drawings. I'm not really sure what I'm looking at. Her youngest son is unmarried, and he often comes to house and spends the night. He sleeps about as late as I do. One morning he spent time teaching me various Japanese sayings. He is a civil engineer, and travels a lot because of his job. He enjoys talking about the places he has gone and explaining what he did there. He gets drunk after drinking only one beer. When he is drunk, he plays the piano and tells jokes.

Suzuki-san is a great cook. My favorite dishes of hers are her curry and, even though it's not really a dish, toasted sandwiches. I recently asked her to teach me how to cook, and so far we have made ground beef and the aforementioned curry. She has also begun asking me to peel fruit, mostly for practice, but also because we both love fruit. Even though I have class at one thirty in the afternoon, from the beginning of my stay here, she has made me get up at nine for breakfast. Despite my history of over-sleeping and being hard to wake up, with a little help in the beginning, I have been able to keep up this schedule. Under this regiment, I have not been late or missed a class once.

She loves old movies especially Charlie Chaplin. I bought "the great dictator," and after watching it together once, she showed to her family when they came over for dinner, and then a third time by herself. I signed up for a movie rental membership and we have started watching movies together. She says she doesn't like weird movies or frightening movies, but I got her to watch "One flew over the cuckoos nest," and she really enjoyed it. We had a couple discussions about what the movie was trying to say and the motivations for the characters. She even printed out a Japanese review for the film she found online and made me translate it. She often gives me little assignments to do in order to improve my Japanese. Once, she made me translate a story in her English learning book into Japanese before I went to bed, despite the fact that it was almost midnight.

Suzuki-san is out-going, strong willed, and likes to talk. She is funny and appreciates making jokes. She is stubborn at times, but occasionally my own stubbornness wins out. She very much has Japanese sensibilities, but even so, does not really get upset if I miss the last train or am late to breakfast as long as I keep her informed and talk things out with her. I enjoy staying here with her.