Chapter 1 In the beginning…

Everyone told me I did not fit in. Everyone said I was too small, too thin, too Japanese, too gentle and too nice to fit in with the lads who made up my school companions. They were all rough, tough jocks who spent a lot of time getting dirty, talking dirty and ogling girls.

I suppose that I would have been better suited to live in Hawaii but here, in Detroit, there were not so many Asians around the suburb my family lived in. I had been born into a mixed race family but my Japanese father insisted that his children would have Japanese names. I am Miyoko Tachabana; sometimes I went by the tag ‘MaccAtach’.

I grew up in a very nice house on Old Hillside Lane and my father was a financial wizard at the Mazda factory in Flat Rock. My mother was very busy with my older brother, Jerry, and my sister, Aiko. I was the youngest but not the shortest, for a little while, at least. My sister was only a year older and I had just managed to outgrow her when I was six. The problem was that by the time I was nine, she was a good six inches taller than me. My brother was way older, being the son of my mother and her first husband, an American, and was built like a concrete bunker. He could carry me as if I was a soft toy, and often did before he left home. He had managed to get a football scholarship in another state.

My early schooling was less than happy but I made sure that I did well at all the subjects I took. I was good at languages as my father taught both of us Japanese; and I was also very good at gymnastics, being so wiry. I did try to build strength and body but only managed to get better muscles. I was bullied, as expected of my looks and my size, and the worst name I was called was ‘Twink-Chink’. This I hated as I was not Chinese but couldn’t figure out if I was upset by the ‘Twink’ part or not.

I had just finished my final exams for the final year of lower school when my father and mother got us all together to tell us that we were going to move house. He had been offered a good job as an industry liaison at the US Business Office, attached to the US Embassy in Osaka, Japan! My sister was not happy as she was ready to start her second year in High School and would be leaving all of her friends behind. I was happy to see the back of that crowd as they made my life a misery when she had them over to visit. They kept threatening to ‘make me over’ but I had made sure, recently, that I always had somewhere else to be when they visited.

That somewhere was usually the local hall where I was able to join a small crew doing break-dancing. With my size and agility I was able to pick up a lot of good moves and the crew were able to fit me into some more athletic ones which had me being thrown about. It was not anything that you could do in competition but went down well at the local dances. I was sad to be leaving the half a dozen guys who had become my best, well only, friends. We did a variation of the Toronto Style and I was the best with freezes, my gymnastic training giving me the balance and grace to keep a pose for longer than usual.

But things were not to continue and I was a little teary when I told the crew I was leaving the country. We had a final work-out and I was more than teary when I left in an ambulance with my arm in a sling. We were doing a particularly complicated routine and the two guys who were supposed to catch me forgot where they should be. They assured me that it was an accident but I was certain I heard laughter as the ambulance doors were closing.

Luckily; it was not a break but just a severe strain and I never saw the crew again. By the time we were ready to leave, the house sold and accommodation organised in Osaka, my arm was close to being mended. I had spent the weeks filling out forms for my new school to see if I was able to start in the second term, in August. It was decided that I just needed to read up on a few sections of the first term subjects and I would be good to slide in without losing a full year. My sister and I would both be attending the Osaka International School of Kwansei Gakuin and it would take us right through to exams for tertiary studies.

The flight to Japan was exciting as I had never been on a long-haul flight before and we flew Japan Air so we could brush up our language on the way. I found out that my sister had not been as studious as me and had to be coached a few times. No wonder she didn’t want to leave. She had put up a few tantrums in the last week and her friends had hugged her and looked daggers at the rest of us before they said goodbye. Our big brother had waved us off at the airport and I met his new wife for the first time. Actually, we all met her for the first time as he had not told anyone about his marriage. My mother almost threw a fit when he introduced her. I was not impressed, she looked like a vapid bimbo cheerleader but who was I to judge.

On the way I chatted to a number of other passengers because that was the sort of person I had decided I wanted to be. I would make the move work as a dark line drawn under the old me with a new story to be written. Actually, as we were travelling business class the other people were all very friendly and well spoken. The majority of those I spoke to were from Tokyo but I was given a number of business cards to look them up if I ever got to that city. One of them was quite marvellous; it was heavily embossed with the gentlemans’ name – Naozumi Yukiyoshi – in flowery script and, other than a phone number, it just had the Japanese word for ‘booking agent’. When I asked him what he booked he told me that he worked in all genres and had just been to America to organise a tour by one of our bands. We had a short chat about break-dancing, something he had only seen on the television.

When we landed in Tokyo it was all very busy and exciting. We had to go from the international terminal to the domestic to wait for our flight to Osaka. While we waited we had a Japanese meal which my father declared was bland and nothing like true cuisine of the country. My mother reminded him that this describes the airport food in any country in the world. I did find a magazine on J-Pop in the newsagent and spent much of my time reading until my sister said she wanted to have a look. We did look at it together and it was the closest I felt we had been for some time.

After our long trip, the flight to Osaka seemed hardly worth the jet-fuel. When we landed we claimed our luggage for the second time that day. This time, however, we left the airport in a taxi, heading for the hotel. Of course, the Embassy had not gone far and it seemed like we were heading for a huge cluster of skyscrapers. We were booked into the E-Hotel, not far from the Embassy so that my father could walk to work as he would be starting almost immediately. Our bigger luggage would be heading for an apartment near Mino City, closer to the school. He would then be taking the train to work.

Over the next few days, my mother and the two of us explored Osaka. It was a thrilling place to be, so vibrant and alive; a far cry from the decrepit desolation of much of Detroit. On the third day we went out to Mino City and picked up the keys to our new home. It was a pretty big apartment, as far as Japanese apartments go. It had three bedrooms and two bathrooms and a good open-plan living / dining / kitchen room. Our belongings were coming by air-freight so the main hold-up was customs clearance. With our measurements of the rooms in hand, we went back to the Mino City shops and ordered our chairs and table, beds and dressers and our new electrical appliances. We would need to go back to the apartment the next day to receive the deliveries and get things sorted out.

By the end of our first week we were settled into our new home. Aiko and I had been taken to our new school and shown where everything was. We would be starting in another week and I was looking forward to it, hoping that I could begin this phase of my life as the new me. Aiko, now away from the influence of her old friends, had become much more ‘normal’ towards me and we were able to chat without resorting to abuse. In the old days I had been a lesser person in her eyes but was now almost an equal, but younger, partner. The school did not have a uniform but was very clear that all clothing had to be acceptable and the girls were not allowed to look ‘trashy’. The boys could not wear tee shirts with unacceptable slogans on them and everyone had to be kind, polite and friendly – in a crowded country it would not work with any other way.

Our first day was a shock to the senses. All of the American and European students wore exactly what you would expect then to wear in their home country. The Japanese students, however, were a mixture of smart, then all the way to what I thought was Halloween costume. I asked a guy next to me in my first class and was told that it was the Kawaii look that had been the craze for a number of years. The clothing was a riot of colours, patterns, layering, ribbons and bows and the girls’ outfits were even more so. Aiko was immediately captivated and was drawn to the big group of girls in her year that were as bright as the sun and more colourful than the brightest rainbow. At the lunch time I could see her with them and her dull outfit made her look as if she was a spot moving around over the sun surface. I could see our parents would be shelling out some serious cash over the next few weeks. It was lucky we had disposed of all our oldest stuff before we left!

Marianne G 2021