A half a world away, he’s sitting in his office in Tokyo. I am laying on David’s couch in Albuquerque. It’s nearing the end of his workday and the middle of my night. We’re talking via Skype. I open up my Japanese-English dictionary to look up a Japanese word he’s used, then I continue to read from the dictionary at random, pronouncing words I think he’ll laugh at and ask, “How do you know? Dictionary?”

I laugh. Yes. “You have a Japanese dictionary?” he asks. Yes, of course. I have many.

I read a few more words, talking sleepily.

“Aman,” I read.

“Oh!” he says. “Oh, I love your voice. I love the way your voice sounds when you say this.”

The sound of my voice thrills him, but so too does the word. Aman is Japanese, stolen from the French, the word for lover.

Maybe I should explain a few things.

Changing Names Does Nothing For The Innocent

I call him My Mono (Spanish) or My Saru (Japanese), for monkey. I know that Monkey is sometimes an offensive term for a Japanese, but it’s not my idea to call him this. In fact it’s his idea. Of course, in the throes of an interracial relationship, I try to steer clear of racial remarks--unless I don’t. (One day I tease him about a photo he’s sent me. Taken about twenty years ago, he struggles to remember the names of the other people in the photo. “You don’t remember?” I ask. “Or you can’t tell because you all look alike?” He laughs.)

I call him My Saru because he sent me this picture with the note, “Can you see me? It is very small picture, you may not
see my face, but it's me.. not a monkey!”

My Mono, at the beach with his grandmother, sister, and mother.

A Childhood, Not Mine, In Pictures

I asked him for his baby pictures because I am keenly interested in his life. Part of my attraction to him is the incredible differences between us, not just in the lives we lead now, but the differences in our early lives.



Here is My Mono as a baby, holding a black case for a music stand. The music stand was the detritus of his father’s career as a music teacher.

It’s always interesting to ask about anyone’s family dynamic. Both of My Mono’s parents were teachers and when I ask, he tells me they met when they were teaching at the same school. They had two children, a daughter and son (in that order), and, at some point along the trajectory of their shared lives, the marriage fell apart.

I say the marriage fell apart, but that is an entirely culturally- and temporally-biased observation, an outsider’s opinion. Of course his parents never divorced. Though the divorce rate in Japan has climbed to 30%, that is a modern statistic (and an interesting one to look at--but at another time). My Mono’s parents were together for perhaps the bulk of fifty years--until My Mono’s father died seven years ago--so what I mean is that marriage fell apart but they stayed married.

Welcome to Japan.

Japan lags about forty (or more) years behind the curve when it comes to gender issues and that, of course, affects families. Japan is not a place where feminism has any significant hold whatsoever (which is one reason why a certain class of Western male has a great affinity for the place), but what this means for the family is significant. The gender roles in Japan are still overwhelmingly what we’d call traditional. Women work in the home and men work out of the home. And lest we become all misty eyed over the pretty picture this paints of Japanese families, let’s think about the problems this little scenario once caused in America.

If this is the norm, it’s doesn’t necessarily mean that women want to work in the home or that men want to work outside the home. In Japan, a woman over a certain age (about thirty) trying to find a job is a woman fighting a losing battle. Age discrimination thrives in Japan, and women over thirty are the ultimate losers. This means that a woman trapped in a marriage with an abusive man, a dismissive man, an adulterous man, or even just a man she doesn’t love, really is trapped. She won’t be able to get out in part because she won’t be able to support herself financially if she does leave. That trap? Well, that’s just part of what tradition can mean for women.

My Tokyo Boy


A run of pictures similar to the one above prompted me to ask, “When you were a child, did you own any pants?”

What’s that behind My Mono? That’s Tokyo, of course. That’s not Tokyo as I knew it, but Tokyo when it was a city where one could still find open spaces, open sky, fire-watch towers. That’s not Tokyo as I knew it, but Tokyo as it existed about thirteen years after American forces did their best to destroy the city. In the period between the end of World War II and when this picture was taken (about 1960 or 1961) the population of Tokyo would more than double, from three and a half million to almost ten million. Though Tokyo’s population has only grown by about 3 million in the last forty years (and will soon begin to drop, given the birth rate), the Tokyo I knew was a place that more than twelve million people call home.