This page is all about the homestay I did from February to August, 1997, while staying in Japan. This was by far the best experience of my many adventures in Japan, and I was very fortunate to get placed with such an awesome family. I recall talking to several other foreign students at the International Center the weeks before I moved into the homestay, and almost every story I heard from them was full of horrific details of completely dysfunctional families, drunken homestay fathers, crazy homestay mothers, hosts who only wanted money or English practice, and plenty of other really horrible incidents that would have convinced many students to abandon the whole homestay idea altogether. Despite being a bit nervous about whether or not my family was going to be normal, I anxiously moved out of the International House at the end of January and into my homestay. I had only met them once, and that was minus the father who was at work the day I visited. They gave me my own room, made sure I was very comfortable, and did their best to accommodate me in every way. Communication was a bit of a problem at first, as they spoke no English and I had studied Japanese less than four months at that point. They put up with my blunders and listened patiently as I tried to explain things in a rather roundabout way, either not knowing the exact words I wanted to say or not knowing how to use them properly. I still remember the first week I was there: it was winter, so after dinner each night, where I gladly partook in my fair share of beer drinking with my homestay father, we would all go into the living room and get under the kotatsu, a kind of low table that has a heater underneath and a blanket around the edges. Most Japanese have these in their homes in the colder months of the year, and it's a shame that these things haven't caught on in other countries. So that first week I would sit around the kotatsu with my homestay family every night and we would chat, watch TV, drink tea, and just get to know each other. This is one of my fondest memories of my stay in Japan.

Before I tell you any more about my adventures with my homestay family, let me introduce them to you (all numerical ratings in their profiles range from 1 to 10):

Otousan Name: Meiji Sohtsuka
Family Position: Hard-working Father
Age: 50+
Occupation: Japan Tobacco (JT) Mechanic
Birthplace: Fukuoka, Japan
Hobbies: Working, company parties, taking care of family
Health: 6
Strength: 7
Wisdom: 9
Mana: 3
Special Power: Making oyakodon
Weapon of Choice: TV Remote
Tolerance to Magic Potions (Alcohol): High

Like many Japanese fathers, my homestay father worked a lot, so I didn't get to spend too much time with him. In the time I did spend with him, however, I found him to be a rather interesting guy. He grew up and has lived his entire life in Fukuoka, and was a child when the nearby city of Nagasaki was bombed during World War II. He works for the main tobacco company in Japan, Japan Tobacco (more commonly known as JT). He is one of the mechanics who assembles all the machines that produce the cigarettes and box them, and is also responsible for fixing them when they break. He was nice enough to take me to work with him one day and show me around the factory he works at, and I got to see a lot of cigarettes being made. He showed me the various machines he assembled and how they work, and showed me the room where they actually process the raw tobacco, which was done completely by computerized forklifts and machines. It was absolutely incredible! Besides this little adventure together, however, we didn't get to spend too much time bonding, so I didn't get to know him as well as the rest of the family. I can say that he was very easy to get along with, and he occasionally made me some great oyakodon, one of my favorite Japanese dishes, to eat on the weekends when I got hungry between meals. Overall, he did a fine job as my homestay father.



Name: Keiko Sohtsuka
Family Position: Loving Mother
Age: ???
Occupation: Housewife
Birthplace: Sasaguri, Japan
Hobbies: Knitting, crochet, baking bread
Health: 8
Strength: 7
Wisdom: 8
Mana: 10
Special Power: Baking delicious bread
Weapon of Choice: Clothes hanger
Tolerance to Magic Potions (Alcohol): Low

This woman rocks! With the exception of my real mother, this has to be one of the best mothers a person could ever want. She got up every morning way before dawn with my homestay father to get him off to work okay. As soon as my homestay father left, she would start her daily chores: doing the laundry (which is a pain in the butt in Japan because everybody hangs their laundry out to dry), going to the grocery store (this is typically a daily chore in Japan), cooking, cleaning the house, and various other things to make our lives much easier. She would have breakfast ready for each one of us as we got up and headed off to work (or school in my case). Everyday at breakfast she would sit and talk with me as I ate, and we had some really fun conversations. In the evenings, dinner would almost always be ready to eat when we all got home, and she would make sure we were all served before she would sit down with us. During the day while we were all away, she would do an assortment of things in between her daily chores. Once a week or so, she would go to a friend's house who taught a class for the women of the neighborhood on how to make gourmet pan(this is the Japanese word for bread... you may notice it is the same word for bread used in Spanish and Portugese, which is where the Japanese borrowed the word from when the Portugese first introduced it to Japan several centuries ago). I don't think my homestay mother had been attending these classes very long when I began the homestay, but she must have been a fast learner because she made some of the best bread I have ever eaten. There were several different varieties; my favorites included the cream pan, the bacon spiral pan, and the egg and cheese pan. On the days she baked bread, I would walk in the door after school and the sweet smell of the bread would immediately engulf me. She would walk into the front room to greet me with a big grin on her face, knowing that I could smell the bread and would soon devour her entire day's labors. That made the job of baking the bread that much more enjoyable for her. Just before I left Japan, she jokingly told me that she would mail some pan to me after I returned home, but to this day I wouldn't be surprised to find a package waiting for me one morning with warm, fresh bread lovingly packed inside. That's just how wonderful this woman is to me.


Name: Hiroshi Sohtsuka
Family Position: Big Brother
Age: 27(?)
Occupation: University Office Worker
Birthplace: Fukuoka, Japan
Hobbies: Soccer, drinking, staying out late
Health: 7
Strength: 8
Wisdom: 7
Mana: 2
Special Power: staying out all night, every night
Weapon of Choice: Cigarette lighter
Tolerance to Magic Potions (Alcohol): High

Hiroshi is the reason I got to do this homestay. Everybody in the JTW program was assigned a homestay, each set up with a faculty or staff member at the university. Unfortunately, it took them a little longer to find someone who "matched my interests", as they told me. Finally they found a young man who worked the office of the engineering department and shared one common interest with me: soccer. So I met with the guy in the end of December, and we agreed to meet for lunch the next week. When we went to lunch, we discussed exactly what I wanted to do with the homestay. Most of the other people in the program weren't given a choice in this matter. They were almost all set up with a professor at the university who just had them over on weekends or a few times a month. Hiroshi explained to me there at lunch that his family was willing to have me move in with them, or I could just come over on the weekends. It took me all of two seconds to decide, and I told him I would love to move in with them. So the next week he took me home to meet the family, although the father was working that day. We sat around and drank tea while I struggled to let them know all about me in my limited Japanese. I left that day pretty sure I was doing the right thing by moving in with these guys, so two weeks later I made the big move. Anyway, Hiroshi was probably who I talked with the most at first, but soon after I moved in he stopped coming home before I went to bed. In fact, toward the end of my stay, I wouldn't see him for days or a week at a time. Also, despite the fact that we both loved soccer, I only got a chance to play with him once, when his recreational team, made up of several of his friends from work, had a game in the summer. Otherwise, I really didn't get to spend too much time with Hiroshi, which is a shame because he really was a pretty cool guy.



Name: Makiko Sohtsuka
Family Position: Little Sister (although older than me)
Age: 22
Occupation: Banker
Birthplace: Mars
Hobbies: Raising fish, computers, spending money, driving, etc.
Health: 9
Strength: 5
Wisdom: 5
Mana: 9
Special Power: Spending money on weird things
Weapon of Choice: Purse
Tolerance to Magic Potions (Alcohol): Surprisingly high!

Makiko was pretty much my best friend in Japan. In the beginning, things were a little awkward because we were the same age and suddenly living in the same house, but we quickly became pretty good buds. I definitely spent more time talking to Makiko than anybody else in the family, and maybe more than any of my other Japanese friends. Soon after I moved in, she got her drivers license and requested that I ride with her on the rare occasion her father lent her the car. I must say, I am lucky to be alive today after those near brushes with death. One of the first times I got in the car with her, we were leaving our neighborhood and she pulled right out in front of an oncoming car. The driver had to slam on his breaks and she panicked, stopping for a second because she didn't know what to do. I hollered "GO, GO!", and she got out of the way before the guy took off our rear end. I seriously considered walking home that evening, but I was worried she might do the same thing without me in the car. Parking was another problem at first, as the family car was quite big by Japanese standards. I had to get out and switch places with her several times to either park the car or back it out when we left. I gladly gave her some tips along the way, however, and she worked really hard not to kill us. After a few months, though still a little shaky, Makiko was driving smoothly around town and we would drive to the video store almost weekly to rent movies. Her parking improved greatly, and even if I offered to park for her she would refuse so she could practice. By the end of my stay, she was driving flawlessly, and I felt comfortable driving anywhere with her. This past summer when I visited, she was driving all over Fukuoka, even downtown, without any worries.

There was a lot more to this girl than just her driving (mis)adventures though. She helped me tremendously with my Japanese, and I hope someday I'll be able to do the same for her English. I am currently trying to find her a place to do a homestay here in the US, and if any of you would be interested in hosting her, by all means e-mail me at frijol@rice.edu. Makiko was also a lot of fun to hang out with. Like I said earlier, we rented a lot of movies together, almost all of which were American movies with subtitles. There were quite a few funny movies we watched where I would be on the floor laughing because something they said was so funny, and my homestay family would just stare at me like I was crazy. I can imagine this is because it's very hard to translate humor from one language to another, or sometimes more importantly, from one culture to another. There were also about three or four dramas I watched every week on TV with Makiko, which required her answering my questions every 30 seconds on what they said or what it meant or a hundred other things. She was very patient with me and after a while, as I began to become more accustomed to the shows and as my Japanese improved, I didn't have to ask as many questions, which made us both very happy. I also went places with Makiko, usually within Fukuoka. We went to Tenjin, Fukuoka's downtown area, several times together for shopping or leisure. Once I had two all-day passes for the JR trains left from a trip to Tokyo, and we used it to go to Nagasaki for the day. We had a lot of fun, and on the way home, she helped me read my newly acquired kureyon shinchan manga (Japanese comics), which has to rank up there with Calvin and Hobbes as one of the funniest comics I have ever read (though in a much different way). I also enjoyed accompanying Makiko to buy things, which was always an adventure considering the whimsical way she spends her money. Toward the end of my stay, she suddenly decided that she wanted to get a computer, despite the fact she knew nothing about them. I suggested she find a used computer to save money, since she really only needed a basic computer to start with. She had been saving up her money from work, however, and wanted to get a brand new computer, and one of the higher end models at that. So I agreed to help her pick one out, and she finally decided on a nice Sony Vaio model. It had way more features than even I would have used (which is the case with most new computers unfortunately), but she insisted it was the one she wanted. I helped her set it up and made her buy a few computer books at the book store, and when I went back this past summer she had actually read most of them and was able to use most of the features on the computer. I was really impressed. She told me recently in an e-mail that her boss at the bank has asked her over to help him learn how to use his computer. So I'm thinking the computer probably was a pretty good investment.

This past summer, however, she made one of her more whimsical purchases. She had this urge to buy some fish, which she felt would look nice in her room. So I went with her to the store to purchase a tank first, and of course she wanted one of the biggest, shnazziest ones they had. I eventually talked her into a medium size tank, and after buying the other necessary equipment we drove into Tenjin to find the actual fish. She picked out six shiny little fishies, and we headed home with her new pets. A week later, after I had already arrived in Taiwan, she e-mailed me to inform me that four of the fish had already died, and not too long after I heard that the other two were dead as well. I think she tried buying some more, but they all ended up dying after a few weeks. She soon abandoned the 'fish for pets' idea. She's had many other little whimsies like this, which usually are pretty innocent, harmless ideas, but sometimes I really wonder about this girl. Like her desire to get a motorcycle license and drive a big cruiser around town; I can't say I thought that was a very good idea, especially since she told me about this not long after she nearly got us killed driving a regular car. She is a very funny, amusing, and often brilliant girl, however, and she will always be one of the best friends I have in Japan.

Well, now that I've introduced the fam to you, I guess I should mention a few of the things we did together. First of all, they took me out to really nice restaurants and bought me all the food I could possibly eat numerous times. They spent so much money on these meals, and they refused to let me reimburse them. Everything they did for me was a treat, and never once would they accept my money for the things we did. In fact, I was supposed to pay ¥30,000 a month (about US$300) for my expenses, which is what the university had worked out with them, but when the end of the first month came and I approached my homestay brother with the money, he told me they felt it was only necessary I pay ¥10,000 per month. I was shocked! That wasn't enough to cover all the food I was eating for breakfast and dinner, much less the rest of the money they were spending on me. I was also using one of their rooms, which is certainly worth a lot of money in Japan. I knew they were allowing me to stay there out of the kindness of their hearts, not because they wanted anything from me. I tried to give back as much as I could and I definitely did my best to keep them entertained with my offbeat sense of humor, but I will always be indebted to these people for what they did for me. They were wonderful.

There were two things in particular I remember them doing for me that stood out above the rest. The first was on my birthday. The people in my JTW program, who made it a point to have a party for each person in the group on their birthday, forgot about my birthday. I was a little down about it, but when I got home that night and walked into the kitchen, my homestay family was there waiting for me. They had prepared a special meal and invited two of my Japanese friends over to eat with us. Then they brought out the cake, which they had ordered the day before. They opened up the box it was in, and on top in thin green icing it said "Happy Birthday Gay". Evidently, the lady making the cake misunderstood the order and thought my name was spelled with a G and not a J. Oh well, it was the thought that counted. That turned out to be a great birthday, and I owe it all to them.

The second showing of their kindness that really stands out in my mind was when they took me to Nagasaki and a nearby Dutch village with money they received from the university. I'm not exactly sure how much money they received, because I wasn't supposed to know about it evidently. I do know it was over US$1,000, and they were furnished the money by the university to help pay for my expenses since they were the only family that allowed one of the students to move in permanently with them. Anyway, the money was to (partially) reimburse them for all the expenses the university knew I must have incurred while living with this family, but they felt really bad keeping the money. So they decided they would spend it by taking me on vacation somewhere outside Fukuoka for a weekend. At first I was shocked they weren't going to keep the money for themselves, and I told Makiko that I really thought they should stick the money in their bank account. She politely explained to me that hell would freeze over before that happened, so I gave in and agreed to go with. After a bit of deliberation over dinner one night, we all decided to go to Nagasaki and 'Haus ten bas' (it's basically a big amusement park disguised as a traditional Dutch village left over from the old days when the Dutch actually traded heavily in that area... I'm not sure how it's spelled, but I did my best to spell it out phonetically). My homestay father borrowed a minivan from his friend at work that could hold all of us, since we planned to drive the 200 or so miles to Nagasaki. We checked out Nagasaki the first day and then drove up to Haus ten bas that night, where we watched several 'shows' and walked around the small lake behind our hotel. The next day we bought all-day passes for the various attractions and Makiko, Hiroshi, and I went around on our own. It was a pretty neat place, although way too overpriced. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the Nagasaki trip and see all the pictures I took, check out my Nagasaki pictures. It was a wonderful trip, and I hope I get a chance to go with them again on another trip, just as long as I can treat them next time.

This homestay is one of the best things that has ever happened to me, and I owe this family so much for all they did for me. I must say I was very lucky to get such a wonderful family, but I would still suggest a homestay if possible to anyone living or studying abroad in Japan. It's a great way to gain insight into the everyday lives of Japanese, greatly enhance your spoken Japanese, meet a second family (and I can assure you that this family will always be my 'second family'), and extend your experiences in Japan beyond the classroom and the kinship of fellow foreigners.