When your past connects you to your present

On Friday morning, I woke up to this gorgeous view from my window in Owase. I can’t believe my grandmother grew up in this magical place.

I roamed the premises and did some meditation before our delicious breakfast.

After breakfast, uncle Kiyoshi came to pick us up at the hotel. We headed to the Kumano Kodo cultural center. Apparently, this was the area where Shintoism and Buddhism began to merge hundreds of years ago. There are hundreds of shrines and sacred areas, and a number are UNESCO world heritage sites.

The cultural center was beautiful, made in old Japanese style. We met Noboru, the son of my grandmother’s younger sister (Sueka), as well as Hirosi, the grandson of my grandmother’s eldest sister (Kiyoe), both of whom were incredibly kind.

At a conference room in the cultural center, they whipped out a far more elaborate family tree and old pictures, and told us what they knew about my grandmother as we asked all our questions.

They told us that Katchan was extremely ambitious. She had done some nurse training in Owase, and saved up enough money to get herself to Tokyo, to attend a nursing school, where she eventually graduated at the top of her class. She and her sisters were always striving to improve themselves, despite having come from a small village. My grandmother was extremely headstrong and passionate. Once she had a goal, no one was going to get in her way. The power of genetics, I thought to myself.

Reviewing the family tree together at the conference room of the  Kumano Kodo cultural center 

Our first time seeing this photo. Katchan looks beautiful & fierce. 

Surprisingly, although she was never one to care about money, Katchan was very enterprising. She apparently found a way to sell Japanese medical supplies into Taiwan. Although her parents were fairly well off, as property owners, Katchan’s eldest brother seemed to have a gambling problem and squandered away the family’s wealth after her parents passed away. This is a dark cloud over the family’s history and none of the relatives wanted to speak about it.

When we asked about our granduncle Syuouti, our relatives simply responded: we don’t know what he was up to. Japanese people rarely speak ill of others openly – especially in that generation. It wasn’t until we told them cousin Yasunori had already given us the backdrop that Kiyoshi, the eldest of the bunch, confirmed what had happened with an OK hand signal and a meager smile.

Nancy, since the moment we got here, has been obsessed about a childhood tale she had been told about one of my grandmother’s brothers eating the flesh of a dead man during WWII, when he was fighting for the Japanese army in Manchuria and had run out of food. She has asked every single relative since we arrived, and peppered the uncles and cousins with questions. No one had any idea what she was talking about, and looked at her like she was a bit crazy. Good thing Japanese people are so polite.

Hiorisi & Noboru

However, the story of how my grandparents met and fell in love remains nebulous.

One thing that was reiterated in this meeting (that is a huge inconsistency from the story I know from my Taiwanese side): every Japanese relative believes my grandparents met in Japan, not Taiwan, when my grandfather was doing medical training. And they are quite adamant about this fact. It actually makes much more sense than my grandparents having met in Taiwan.

But it begs the question: why did my Katchan misrepresent this to her offspring? After meeting these relatives, I now better understand how fiercely private the Japanese are – especially with anything negative. But what secrets were so shameful that she would only be able to reveal them upon her deathbed?

I suspect it may have something to do with the discrimination faced in those days when people from the colonizing country, Japan, married people from Taiwan. I’m sure it also has something to do with Katchan being headstrong, passionate and progressive beyond her time. But I doubt the answer is straightforward.

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After the family conference meeting, we had a delicious sushi lunch. At the end, Noboru bid us farewell and thanked us for all the help my grandmother had provided his to family – once she moved to Taiwan, she often sent money home, I suspect especially when the family was going through financial troubles. His gratitude was very touching.

After lunch, Kiyoshi took us  for a hike in an area called the Magose-toge Pass, including the a beautiful Stone Paved Path. The cutest little Shiba Inu accompanied us.

We returned home to the hotel that evening to a wonderful seafood BBQ. The food here has been absolutely incredible, and eating in this picturesque setting made it even more memorable.

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The next day, Kiyoshi and Tomi took us to a nearby area called Kumano Kodo in the Kii mountain range to do more hiking (by total coincidence, there was an article on the front page of the NYT today about this area)! It’s an undiscovered, yet breathtakingly beautiful place, with cypress trees, bamboo forests, streams and waterfalls running through the path.

A painting of the Kii mountains

The shrine we visited is called Nachisan Seiganto, and is the last of three shrines visited in the pilgrimage people did to this area hundreds of years ago, particularly in the Edo period (1603-1868). Japanese people believe you get spiritual powers after visiting all three shrines.

The first two shrines are dedicated to the past and the future – this particular shrine is dedicated to the present. We greeted the deities, made our wishes, and burned wood to purify our souls.

It was our last day in Owase. We had gotten a bit more information about Katchan, and a far greater understanding of how she grew up and her cultural influences on this trip.

However, her story remains a mystery.

But after our visit to the Shrine of the present, I began thinking: perhaps what brought us here was to unite us with our present, instead of further understanding the past. Perhaps it’s this exact moment in time where Katchan’s energy has been leading me.

So much of my curiosity has been centered around my grandmother’s history. But in many ways, it’s connected me to my present even more strongly. My recent trip to Taiwan was rooted in doing research about Katchan – something which brought me closer to my relatives, giving us a common purpose, despite a huge cultural gap. And it was Katchan’s story that led my sisters and I to this trip – the first trip just the three of us (+ Jon) have done together.

The present includes an amazing family I never knew I had – Kiyoshi , Yasunori, Noriko, Atsuko, and everyone else we’ve met in Japan have been the kindest people I could imagined. Uncle Kiyoshi generously spent three full days with us, and I have so much love for him as a result. Even Tomi and Daisuke, our translators, were wonderful and put a huge amount of work into preparing for our trip before we came. Everyone’s hospitality was magnanimous beyond anything I’ve ever experienced.

There is a saying in Japanese, ichi go, ichi e. It basically means: this is the first time I’m meeting you, and it may be the last. As a result of this mentality, Japanese people are truly the most amazing hosts. It reminds me that very experience with someone is special – every experience should be treated with love and care as if it were the last.  And it’s a shining example of how I want to treat others.

So often in life, were are revisiting the past or worrying about the future, instead of being in the present moment, appreciating everything we have now. And the now is pretty good when I take a moment to pause and think about it. My family and I are happy and in good health. I have the most incredible opportunities to see the world and meet amazing people – and truly surf the wave of life.

While I do understand more about myself knowing my grandmother’s past, ironically, perhaps the greatest gift of her past is reminding me to be in the present and to appreciate everything and everyone in my life now.

As I’m constantly reminded through meditation and surfing, everything in life is impermanent. Separated by an ocean for most of my life, my limited time with Katchan went by in a heartbeat. Life is incredibly short – our time in this world is so brief, it passes in just a blink.

Interestingly, so many of the people we met in Owase looked decades younger than they actually were. When we asked one woman how she was possibly 63, when she looked 43, she responded that she’s just a happy person. It reminded me of that fact that in our brief existence, happiness is a choice. So make sure to view the world through the lens of beauty, appreciation, love and optimism.

From what I know of Katchan, it’s certainly what she did, even during her most challenging moments. If there’s anything I inherited from her, I hope it was her passion for life, her fearlessness, and her compassion and love towards everyone around her.

Thank you, Katchan, for leading us here, watching over us during our days in Owase, and for your beautiful spirit. Your kindness and generosity are well remembered, and your soul flows through our family the way the streams flow through the forests of the Kii mountains.

Uncle Kyoshi and his family sending us off at the Owase Train station 

Touchdown in Tokyo & Owase

We landed in Tokyo on Wednesday. My cousin Yasunori, whom I didn’t know of until a few weeks ago, and his friend Julian, who acted as our translator, picked us up from the airport. Yasunori had rented a mini bus to transport all of us to dinner, including his wife and sisters. When we got there, they had made the cutest welcome to Japan sign for us!

After freshening up at our hotel in Shibuya, we all met at a restaurant in Ginza, where we were greeted by Yasunori’s wife, daughter, and his two sisters Noriko and Atsuko, as well as Noriko’s husband and Atusko’s daughter, Seiri.

They were the nicest people I could have ever imagined. They bought a cake to congratulate Joyce and Jon on their wedding, and showered all of us with gifts. Yasunori brought a bunch of old photo albums that we got to look through. It was so incredible to get to know this amazing group of people who are the family I never knew of.

Yasunori told us more about his father, Tooru, and his grandfather, who was my grandmother’s elder brother. Apparently, his grandfather ran a bath house in Nagoya, but didn’t seem to work much. Instead, he gambled away most of the family’s fortunes. As a result, his eldest son Tooru had to move to Tokyo to find work to support the rest of the family. I think part of this story may have also led to my grandmother leaving Owase for Tokyo to find work that could support the family.

According to Yasunori, his father’s sister youngest sister, Chikako, knows the truth about how my grandparents met. Chikako is my grandmother’s niece. She now lives in Nagoya, so we are going to try to meet with her on our way home from Owase. It seems there is a huge inconsistency in the versions of how my grandparents met and where they met.

The next day, we made our way to Owase bright and early, after a delicious Japanese breakfast at the hotel. Julian, the friend who translated for us last night, met us at Tokyo station to help us get our tickets. Japanese people are truly the most amazing hosts.

On the train, I was so excited when the snack cart arrived that I almost toppled over my sister Nancy. We stopped in Nagoya, where we got some delicious Bento boxes. The ride into Owase was beautiful – we were surrounded by the mountains and the ocean, with field of rice patties dotted around the mountainside.

We arrived in Owase in the afternoon and were greeted by my uncle Kiyoshi, and our translators, Tomi and Daisuke. Kyoshi is in the middle, and is the kindest man ever:

Our first stop was to the home my grandmother was born in, in 1910. The house is now different, but the wall separating it from the home next door remains the same.

We then walked around the town, which was pretty empty. Daisuke and Tomi explained that the population in the town was rapidly declining as all the young people moved to the cities. Owase was once a bustling port – even twenty years ago, the streets were full of shops and people. The streets now looked sadly empty, and barely any shops were open.

Following a stroll around town, we made our way to the Owase Seaside Hotel, an old Japanese style hotel which is absolutely incredible. This is the stunning view from our room:

We had an eight course home cooked dinner served directly in our room on the Tatami mats. Delicious!

Following which, Joyce and I soaked in the public baths and promptly passed out, in eager anticipation of the next day, where we would meet more relatives and try to learn everything they know about my grandmother.

 

 

Enroute to Japan!

After the last few weeks of planning and eager anticipation, I am now sitting in the JFK airport enroute to Tokyo, where I’ll me meeting my two sisters and my new brother in law! This is going to be the trip of a lifetime.

A few exciting things have happened since I last posted:

1) Kiyoshi, my grandmother’s 87 year old nephew, spent some time coming up with a family tree, so we could understand who is in my family (with the help of our translators Tomi and Daisuke, whom I have come to love). I never new I had so much family! After a night in Tokyo, we will be heading straight to Owase to meet Kiyoshi and Daisuke. Our first stop will be to the home my grandmother was born in.

Kiyoshi has put a call out to a bunch of our relatives, who will be meeting us on our second day in Owase. They all seem so kind and hospitable, and will even spend a day taking us to the nearby area of Ise to do sightseeing.

I can’t wait to see the area my grandmother grew up in. My aunt used to tell me stories of how she loved climbing the beautiful trees in that area, which is known for forestry, and swimming in the ocean in her youth.

I’m still figuring out where I can do a day of surfing in the Mie Prefecture – there are definitely some spots for surfing – and a trip would not be complete for me without getting a session in. I have a feeling I’m going to discover more about why I’m so drawn to surfing.

2) We made contact with more relatives, including Yasunori, who is the grandson of one of my grandmother’s brothers.  Yasunori and I have been exchanging emails over the last few weeks, and he will be picking us up at the airport, following which we will be having dinner with him and his three sisters.

According to Yasunori, my grandparents actually met in Japan while my grandfather was doing medical training, and not in Taiwan — which is inconsistent with the story we know from my grandmother. Not sure if something was lost in translation, but we’ll find out more when we meet him as we piece this puzzle together.

Also, it turns out Yasunori was on the Olympic Rowing Team in Atlanta and Syndey! How cool that I have such amazing talent in my family. And perhaps the penchant for water sports is genetic. Here is his beautiful family:

3)  Joyce got married!  My little sister Joyce got married last week. It was a beautiful wedding, and I am so happy for her and her husband Jon. The trip to Japan will be part of their honeymoon. Joyce knows how important this trip to me, and decided a while back that it was important enough for her and Jon to join, so she can help document the whole thing (Joyce has become an incredible documentary film maker).

Joyce has been my sidekick my whole life, and one of the things I love about her is that she makes the things that are important to me important to her. I’m super excited her and Jon are going to be on this trip, and due to a fear of missing out, we also convinced my older sister Nancy to join as well. Nancy is very scrappy and is good at getting things done, so she’s going to be a useful partner for us on this trip…assuming we all don’t drive each other crazy. This is the first sisters trip we’ve ever taken!

I can’t wait to see what the next 9 days holds, as I come to understand my grandmother’s history – and come to understand myself better through the process.

First contact

 

My grandmother and her brother before leaving Japan for Taiwan.

Following my trip to Taiwan in January, and the prologue I wrote to turn my 12 year dream of researching my grandmother’s history into something tangible, my sisters decided they would come with me to Owase this summer, the small seaside town that my grandmother grew up in in Southeast Japan, near Osaka. We’ll be heading there in June, right after my younger sister Joyce gets married! Yes, we’re all going on her honeymoon together.

We had no idea how we would get in touch with my grandmother’s relatives (she had 8 brothers and sisters) — my entire extended family was convinced this was an impossible feat. The three of us sisters believed otherwise. We got on a conference call a month ago to divvy us tasks: I would be in charge of finding a translator, Joyce was to speak to my mom about our relatives who might have any information, and Nancy was to find our cousin Casey who lives in Tokyo, to kidnap her to join our adventures.

I found us an amazing place to stay in called the Owase Seaside Hotel. Initially, it was all booked up, but by a stroke of luck, we managed to all get rooms there. It’s very much in the countryside of Japan, and the food there looks home cooked and delicious. Plus there’s a public bath (onsen). Exciting!

I set off to accomplish my task a few weeks ago. Back in March, I had attended a leadership retreat in Mexico. I met an amazing woman (Chris), one of the facilitators of the retreat, who does some work in Tokyo. Following the retreat, I called her up to ask if she could put me in touch with her translator. After some thinking, Chris decided it might be too costly to take someone from Tokyo to Owase, so she did a google search for translators in Owase. She stumbled across the blog of a women from CA teaching English in Owase. When she read the blog, she discovered this woman was her daughter’s freshman roommate at Berkeley. What a strange coincidence!

Chris contacted this woman, who is no longer in Owase, but put me in touch with someone she knows there who speaks English, Daisuke. Unfortunately, Diasuke would not be available on those dates, however, he put us in touch with another woman, Tomi, who is the only registered guide in that town. He also kindly offered to help us do some research before we arrive.

This is where it starts getting exciting.

My grandmother’s maiden name was Mi Yo Tanabe. Last week, Daisuke looked in the phone book to see if there were any Tanabes in Owase. He found one person. He went to this man’s home to see what he could find. It turns out this man, Kyoshi, is the son of one of my grandmother’s younger brother, and the last remaining Tanabe who lives in the town! He is 87 years old.  Daisuke showed him one of the pictures I had emailed:

Daisuke confirmed that the woman on the left was my grandmother, or his aunt. He told Daisuke that his grandfather’s name was Yoshihei (芳平) – he’s the old guy in the middle. His grandmother’s name was Tsumi, the older woman in the back  (つみ) . These are my great grandparents. Kiyshoi’s father’s (my grandmother’s brother) name is Shinya (眞也).  Kiyoshi has put out a call to all our remaining relatives that he has kept in touch with, and has gladly agreed to meet with us when we visit Owase in June.

Meanwhile, Tomi, the translator who will be helping us in June, also kindly decided she would help us with the research prior to our visit. She asked her uncle, who is 92 years old, and who still lives in Owase, if he knew any Tanabes. Tomi found out that her granduncle was married to a Tanabe, whom they believe was one of my grandmother’s sisters. Which means, we are technically related to Tomi!

Thanks Daisuke and Tomi’s generous help, I coudn’t believe we found in just a matter of days. That we had made contact with the last of my grandmother’s relatives in Owase. Or that we are related to Tomi by marriage, who may be able to help us get in touch with other relatives. Each part of this has been a serendipitous coincidence, with each contact providing another piece to the puzzle. I feel like Katchan is guiding us on this journey to unveil the truth.

Sadly, through our research, we discovered all of my grandmother’s siblings have now passed away.  If we had done this trip just a few years earlier, we would have been able to meet her last living brother, who died three years ago.

However, each of her siblings had children. Now begins the search to find them.

 

Prologue

Growing up, my sisters and I called my Japanese grandmother “Katchan,” which is the Japanese word for mother. This is how my parents, aunts and uncles all regarded her. Before I knew the meaning of the word, I thought it was her name.

Katchan was a timeless beauty, with deep set eyes, high cheek bones, and porcelain skin. Her beauty was known everywhere she went. Yet she was an incredibly humble and kind woman, perhaps unaware of how striking she was.

I didn’t get to spend much time with Katchan; my parents immigrated to the US when I was 4 years old and we came back to Taiwan every 3 to 4 years at most.  What I do remember is that she was simultaneously a traditional Japanese woman, and also someone who was extremely liberal for her generation. Once, when she came to visit us in California, she accompanied me to the mall. I was a teenager, and wanted to buy a backless summer dress. Katchan didn’t blink and bought me the dress, which my parents later made me return because it was inappropriate by their conservative standards.

The stories I heard about the type of mother she was corroborated this perception. Katchan would rarely tell her children what they should or shouldn’t do. Instead, she would always support them in their pursuits. These are very unusual qualities for an Asian parent – especially one of that era. My father, who is the youngest child, told me that he and his friends would always play Mah Jong at our house – both because Katchan made the best food, and because she was the only mother who allowed it.

When my father decided to move us to America, she never uttered a word of opposition nor tried to convince him otherwise, as most parents might do if their child were to move halfway around the world. This was even more surprising given she had a particularly soft spot for my father, as he was the baby of the family. Later, my maternal grandmother would tell us how Katchan wept with sorrow only after seeing my father and our family off at the airport. It was unusual for anyone to see her cry.

All of this summarizes the kind of person she was – a deeply beautiful spirit. Someone who could hold her profound grief and pain inside, as to not inconvenience others. Someone who never spoke ill words about anyone, no matter how poorly they treated her. Someone who was fiercely strong, who had the courage to make life changing decisions that defied all norms – and never look back, regardless of the outcomes.

One of my older cousins, who grew up in Taiwan, told me that Katchan’s best advice to her as a teenager was to always look forward at the path ahead, rather than holding on to the past. I imagine this wisdom was learned the hard way.

What fascinated me most about Katchan were the stories my eldest aunt would tell me. As a child, I would listen in wonder as my aunt told me about growing up as a half Japanese, half Taiwanese child during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan before World War II, and after the mainland Chinese Kuo Ming Tang party took over the country in 1949.

My eldest Aunt on the left, and Katchan next to her

We would inevitably come to the question of how Katchan had come to Taiwan in the first place. It was very unusual that a young woman who had just finished nursing school in Japan would come to Taiwan on her own (it’s unclear how she found her way to nursing school, given her parents didn’t believe in educating women), and even more unusual that she would marry a Taiwanese man – without telling her parents. In those days, the Japanese were considered of much higher status than the Taiwanese. Inter-cultural marriages were taboo, unless a Japanese person were marrying into money. While my grandfather was a renowned doctor in the hospital my grandmother worked in, he was not a rich man by any standards, making it even more puzzling. Furthermore, the whole family took Katchan’s last name, Tanabe, instead of my grandfather’s during the years Japan occupied Taiwan.

The older I get and the more I’ve come to understand this story, the more bizarre it all seems. And the more I want to understand what drove Katchan to leave her life in Japan behind, and to make the subsequent decisions she did, which seem so out of the ordinary. Each of these decisions has led to me being here today. I’d love to say that Katchan ended up fulfilling her dreams and living happily ever after, but the truth is, she endured a deep and quiet suffering for many years. She experienced extreme abuse from the person she had left everything for, and yet never once uttered a negative word about my grandfather.  Despite her strength, at some point, she must have felt life was no longer in her control — for there were dark years where she considered ending it all. Given how courageous, resilient and independent she was, the circumstances must have been dire.

What’s even more interesting is the fact that my aunt would often ask Katchan, “why did you come to Taiwan?” To which Katchan, who was fiercely private, would respond: “I’ll tell you before I die.”

Katchan suffered from a stroke in 1993, when she was 83 years old. She lost a lot of her memory, her mobility, and her ability to speak. She remained in this state for the next 10 years, before she passed away at home in Kaohsiung, Taiwan in 2004.

To this day, the answer to this question remains unknown.