We are waiting for that final piece to finish Jim Henson's book, Pee Up a Tree: A Mental Health Memoir, so that we can send it off to the printers. As a respected practitioner in his field, Jin has several fellows who are recognized for their work and who have offered to contribute to his book. We have saved a spot for the first one to respond. Now we play the waiting game as his friends read his book to see how they wish to respond.
In the meantime there is time here at my desk to re-visit an old friend and fond memories. I have begun the process of scanning and touching up my first book on my family's sojourn in Japan. The book Gaijin! Gaijin! which came out in 1985 went through two editions. The first was typeset on a Brother proportional space disk typewriter that used carbon ribbons. The page design program was Microsoft Word that could feed proportional spaced lines to it and recognized the font.
Unfortunately, for the preceding seven years my English had taken a beating with verbalizing in "Communication English" in Japan, both while we lived there and especially for the following three years while I criss-crossed the Pacific ocean with stained glass for my friends in the Nagasaki area.
The stained glass business came to an abrupt halt following a tumble from our roof when the ladder went out from under me, During that long convalescence, the Japanese journals came out and two books were born: Gaijin! Gaijin! and MoIchi Do; Once More.
Back to the "Communication English". The reviews on the first edition of Gaijin! Gaijin! came back with some interesting feedback. Words like "judicious editing" were among the kindest. People loved the story, but some were appalled at the "Communication English". With some help I re-edited Gaijin! for the second edition, re-typset it and re-issued it. I sold it mostly by telephone to the Japanese bookstores in the United States and by attending language related workshops and by visiting libraries.
All three books are still out there and occasionally I still get a note about one or the other. They are still being traded on the used book market. I have begun the scanning and am editing I scan. I hope to have all three books ready again soon.
It is interesting to see what we were doing 33 years ago as I read about our experience. My children are now at the same age, just a couple of years older, than we were when we took them to Japan. They both have children who are the same age as they were when we went. I look at them and wonder how they would do under the same circumstances.
Knowing what we do now, would we do it? Wow, probably not. We were so naive. I just read the fourth chapter about the boat ride from Okinawa to Kagoshima. We did that rather than fly, which most people would have done. As I read the pages, the images come back as clearly as if we were still walking among the tatami mats on the boat. We were on that boat August 16, 1977, when we heard on the boat p.a. that Elvis was dead.
On the boat we met a priest who had lived in Japan for many years. He asked us what we were doing. Lora and I told him. He shook his head in pity and he said, "good thing you don't have children." I told him, "Well, we have two children." His pity turned to anger. We had not landed on the main Islands of Japan and he was planting the seeds of immense doubt about what we had gotten ourselves and our 9 year old daughter and 12 year old son into.
No comments:
Post a Comment