Our Famiry...plus one

Last month, we disguised ourselves as a nice family with good manners and welcomed a Japanese middle-school student into our home for a week. Her name is Hikari and she is 15 years old. She had had 3 years of English in school, and, though we were impressed with her language skills, it was still quite difficult to communicate at times. But she was very sweet and we loved having her with us. (Side note: Please don't think I'm terrible for using the Japanese-accent way of spelling "family" in the title of this post. We find it very endearing and are sure we Americans make similar mistakes when trying to learn sounds in Japanese.)

We had prepared the kids for her visit by teaching them a bit about Japanese culture (what little we knew), but mostly focusing on the basics--manners. We are lacking in this category (again, see the post's title). They were excited for her visit and peppered us with questions on the drive over to the hotel where we would pick her up. We waited somewhat patiently for the bus to arrive, holding our little sign that we had made to welcome her.

When she finally arrived, we said our short greetings and hopped back in the car to drive home--just a few miles away.

Silence.

Never in the history of ever have my boys been so quiet in the car. I would have basked in that noiseless heaven if I hadn't been racking my brains for something to say to our guest. Anything. What else can I think of? She didn't understand the first few attempts I made. And why wouldn't that light ever change? We were never going to get home but be stuck in that awkward silence forever.

Okay. Yes, we did make it home. The boys couldn't stop staring and kept glancing sideways at us to see if we were staring too. She brought us a nice bunch of gifts to thank us for hosting her. Among these were an origami book and a box of origami paper. For a few weeks there, we were all addicted to origami. Evidence below.

There were, I think, 17 students in her group, each staying with a different host family, so as to ensure they used their Engrish skills. As a thank you to the host families, they held a "Japan Night" for us and fed us pizza and cookies and showed us some of their talents and culture. We had a blast! Our student was an excellent pianist (loves Jazz and also plays the sax) and so she and another student performed an awesome duet. The students also taught the American children a game that seems to be the Japanese equivalent of Red Light Green Light. As you can see in the photo below, Japanese teen-age fashion is as unique as American teen-age fashion.

Our cover (as a nice famiry with good manners) was blown very soon after Hikari's arrival by the many bodily noises my children made. For years, we have heard that burping is polite in Japanese culture, but I heard recently that the Japanese don't know how that particular rumor about them got started. In which case, we were extremely rude. Daniel produced a symphony of noises while Hikari was with us.

Speaking of manners...on the last night of Hikari's visit, she said she wanted to make some Japanese Miso soup for us. When it was ready, Stephanie was already seated at the table, hungry for dinner, so we let her get started on it while we called the boys to dinner. We all sat down and prepared for the blessing on the food, at which point, Stephanie stood up on her chair and loudly announced, "I DON'T like this SOUP!" Luckily, Hikari found it as funny as the rest of us did (Stephanie is a toddler, after all). The soup was actually quite delicious, but Daniel slowed down his intake when he found out that the green stuff was seaweed. And my intake slowed a bit when the communication barrier prevented us from learning the identity of some pale spongy rings floating in the soup.

Here is Hikari playing a duet in my living room, during the final evening of her stay.

And here she is with two friends who came over also. They were really nice kids. Again, that inexplicable fashion. Most of the shirts the kids wore had English words written in large letters. And they didn't always make sense to us. His shirt, for example, says, "PLAN AND FREEDOM DREAM." ??? Something seems to have gotten lost in translation there. Maybe it means--plan and dream freely? Anyway, the girl in the middle has a shirt that says, "Groove Joy". Our student, Hikari, is on the right.

We all really enjoyed having Hikari with us, but I think no one more than Daniel. One evening, when we had run out of things to say and things to do, I asked Hikari if she could think of anything she wanted to do. She asked if we had a Wii, which we do, so we did that. As we were getting started, Daniel began explaining how to do everything in very specific detail. When I could see it was slowing down our fun, I broke in to tell him that Nintendo is a Japanese company and she probably knew how to do it already. He was very skeptical of that until she whooped our tails at Mario Kart.

We were sad to see her go. Daniel cried when she left. He's so sweet. Luckily, her visit was closely followed by a very unexpected earthquake and then a hurricane, followed by the start of school and then 12-plus inches of rain in a few days, resulting in a day off school due to flooding. Never a dull moment.