You will find short stories on this site. Most are autobiographical. Some are fiction.

KITSIKO

This story is about events that interrupted the life of a friend when he and his Japanese wife sought to carry on the traditions of a Japanese household while living in a small Oregon community. I have taken liberty to embellish this story where facts were unknown.

The Story

Jeremy Henson had been fascinated by Japan from the time he was a boy watching samurai movies. As he grew into his teens, he was drawn to books about Japanese culture. In College, Jeremy majored in East Asian studies and became fluent in the Japanese language. Upon Graduation, in 1986, he gave his meager belongings to friends and scraped together enough money to buy a one-way ticket to Japan. In Tokyo, he found an advertisement seeking an English teacher at a boy’s middle school in a small town named Yoshimi. Jeremy recognized the Japanese word, yoshimi, which means beautiful. He applied for the job and was granted an interview. The train line, out of intensely urbanized Tokyo, ran through increasingly agrarian landscapes. As the train passed traditional Japanese houses, he found himself repeatedly whispering the word, “yoshimi”.

The interview went well, and he was offered the job. The position seemed to be ideal. He accepted and rented a traditional Japanese house, taking up his new life, adopting all aspects of Japanese culture. Among the many things about Japan that he found especially engaging were the varieties of bamboo and the many uses of it in landscapes.

He had been there less than a year when he met Miko, a teacher at the Yoshimi girls’ school. It was not long before Miko and Jeremy were dating. Within a year, they were married. As Jeremy had been fascinated with Japanese life, Miko was drawn to life in the United States. They decided that after one more year of teaching in Yoshimi, they would move to the U.S.

They wanted to be on the West Coast. More particularly, to live in a rural area where Jeremy could have a bamboo nursery. They chose the Willamette Valley of Oregon because of its moderate home prices and the temperate climate, which was ideal for bamboo. Miko had a friend who had emigrated to Portland, so at the end of their second year of teaching, they shipped their possessions to Portland, where they rented an apartment in which to live while searching for a farmhouse with enough land for a bamboo nursery.

They found a house on three acres near the small town of Albany. They were able to qualify for a mortgage and bought it. They immediately began to modify the house to make it more suitable for their Japanese lifestyle. They enclosed the front porch to become a genkan, where one would remove shoes and coats before stepping up into the house. The kitchen was re-arranged to resemble kitchens in Japan. The biggest task was the modification of the bathroom to accommodate the traditional Japanese two-stage bath, where one washes and rinses before stepping into the deep, Japanese soaking tub.

Miko was able to find a waitress job in Albany’s only Japanese restaurant. Jeremy pursued his dream by reshaping their three acres into a Japanese-style nursery for which he acquired several exotic species of bamboo. He advertised in the local garden shops and the local newspaper as the “Bamboo Boy” providing, planting, and maintaining bamboo landscapes. He was also called upon to remove unwanted or overgrown stands of bamboo, a process by which he acquired more species for his nursery. His income supplemented Miko’s earnings.

Life was good. Miko became pregnant and delivered a healthy baby girl. They named her Kitsiko. After a brief maternity leave, Miko went back to work in the restaurant where she was now the chef. They needed her salary to maintain their simple lifestyle and to pay the mortgage. Jeremy became Kitsiko’s surrogate mother while Miko was at work. He carried her in a baby pack while working in his nursery. At home, they lived as if they were still in Japan. Every aspect of their life in the house and garden was according to Japanese tradition. Japanese was spoken in their home. Kitsiko learned to speak and read Japanese before she learned English in school. Their Japanese traditional life included bathing, which is a sequential affair. First, the man of the house prepares the tub and takes his bath. If the family has small children, it is his job to bathe them at the same time. It is important that small children bathe with an adult, as there is the danger of scalding or drowning in the Japanese soaking tubs. After Dad and the kids are done, it is the mother’s turn to take her bath alone so she can enjoy a quiet soak while her husband puts the kids to bed.

Two years after Kitsiko was born, Miko delivered their second baby, also a girl. They named her Kaiko. As before, Miko returned to her job at the restaurant, while Jeremy attended to the welfare of their children. Their toddler, Kitsiko, “helped” her dad in his bamboo nursery, while her baby sister was carried on her father’s back just as she had been.

Their Japanese life at home and American-style life in the community co-existed beautifully.

Four years later, when Kitsiko started Kindergarten, she became friends with several of her classmates. One of her new friends invited Kitsiko to her birthday party. At the party, the girls were sitting in a group talking among themselves about whatever came to mind. The girls were fascinated by the differences in Kitsiko’s home life from their own. Among many unique customs she described was the Japanese bathing tradition. She told them how she and her sister bathed with their father, before her mom took her bath. The mother of the birthday girl overheard this conversation. Later, she pulled Kitsiko aside and asked if her father was naked when he bathed with her. Kitsiko replied, “Yes, he's bathing too.”

The birthday girl’s mother ruminated over what she perceived as child molestation. She eventually reported it to the police. The local office of Children’s Services was informed. They knew nothing of Japanese culture and found that a father bathing with his daughters constituted pedophilia. Jeremy was ordered to leave the house and have no contact with his girls. The small town newspaper was quick to cover every detail of the gossip. The word spread that the “Bamboo Boy” was a child molester. Jeremy’s landscape clients no longer sought his help with their gardens. Miko had to cut back her hours of work to take care of her girls. Jeremy had the additional expense of rent on an apartment, daycare, and attorney’s fees. Their income was barely enough to pay the mortgage and utilities. Miko brought leftover dishes home from the restaurant to feed herself and the girls. This situation was also difficult for six-year-old Kitsiko. In addition to the social isolation she felt at school, where other children were aware of her father’s “abuse”, Kitsiko assumed that all the family’s troubles were her fault. “This all happened,” she thought, “because I told the other girls about how we take baths.”

A year had passed before Jeremy’s case came to trial. The jury, of local citizens, did not accept the “story about Japanese bathing customs” and found Jeremy guilty of child abuse. His isolation from his children was mandated to be permanent. By this time, Japanese friends, whom they had met while in Portland, had become aware of their situation. They provided financial support. A sympathetic lawyer agreed to appeal Jeremy’s conviction without charging fees.

Upon appeal to a more open-minded state court, Jeremy’s conviction was overturned. Jeremy was finally able to return to his home and family. He had missed two formative years of his girls’ lives. The editor of the Albany Herald had been following the story and realizing his role in tearing this family apart. His paper covered the appeals case with sympathy for Jeremy’s situation.

Slowly the local community came to accept that there are other cultures and that the Japanese way of doing things could be different, and still be OK. Kitsiko’s friends forgot, or never knew, what adults had said about her dad. Their life in the two cultures eventually regained its previous state of harmony.