A Small Trip to Saitama

For a funeral, but still.

My grandmother is 86 years old. She lost her husband on 19 Mar 2007, and I didn't get to go back at that time because there were too few of us at work and too much to get done. A few days ago they found her unconscious, the victim of a stroke. Now with hemorrhaging and pneumonia, it will be an unwelcome miracle for her to regain consciousness, or even outlast January.

Am I sad? Not yet. When others near to me have died, it didn't usually hit me until the service. However, language barriers and the Pacific Ocean, along with the disowning of my mother from her family three decades ago, have not allowed me to develop a relationship that would warrant sadness.



My mother was predicted to be a boy. The Ishii family needed an heir, and the oracle predicted what my grandparents wanted to hear. After her birth, she wasn't treated very well by her parents. I've heard many sad stories of abuse, which only worsened after her younger brother died. They finally let up a little when another son was born, who has survived and now has a family of his own. By the time my mother was in her mid-20s, she had learned English, joined the LDS Church and eventually married a white man, my father. So she is legally disowned. This makes it nearly impossible for me to do my genealogy, since we no longer have access to public records. At times, I have a hard time finding affection for my Japanese family, yet I see my mother interact with them as if nothing had changed. She writes to and calls her older sister, and they remain good friends.



This isn't meant to be one of those flaming epitaphs, a black eulogy or anything like that. Despite how I have been programmed by attitudes and stories of my parents regarding my Japanese family, heck, I'm still made of my mom, who was made of them. And as difficult as they made life for her, I know that they cared for her. They have put us up and fed us whenever we visited, bought us gifts, sent us money on rare occasions. One year when I was on my mission, they sent me some New Year money (the New Year is bigger than Christmas in Japan), equivalent to about $500.

I am kind of sad. More sad for my mom and her upbringing, and because I know that she loves her family. This will be hard on her, I suppose. But not really hard on me. Though it is a shame that race and religion and intolerance have made it so that I don't even weep over my own grandmother.




So no, I don't get to visit any mission friends or members or sight-see in Tokyo. I won't be able to eat deliciously oily floor ramen with Cheeth. I'll be in Saitama for maybe two days tops. But that's okay. I'm going over to remember a woman who worked blue-collar labor her entire life and has earned my respect for at least that. She could run circles around most of us today, so far as manual labor is concerned. From rice paddies to silk worms to laundry lines, and then later to real estate, she busted her hump (she had a hump from bending over in the rice paddies for decades).

I'll be in the property due east of the Parkside Heights

I'll stop typing now. Not sure what else to say here.