Today I heard the words I never thought I would hear from my son: “Dad, learning Japanese is fun!” That made my heart sing. And, he carried his hiragana worksheet to school without me asking!
And, the real show of progress is that he was able to write the word sushi without looking at the stroke sheets. I’m so excited to show him REAL sushi in Japan. And, it reminded me of a fun story when I was in Japan, about the best sushi I ever had.
I told them that when I lived in Japan, I was on a date with a Japanese woman. I was sitting there at a izakaya (pub restaurant, basically) and speaking in Japanese. Sitting next to me was an older man, with big bushy eyebrows, like huge caterpillars dancing around his eye sockets. After a long while, he finally spoke to me and was surprised that I spoke Japanese. Gradually the conversation shifted to him asking me:
“What is your favorite Japanese food?”
I told him sushi. The caterpillars almost leapt off his face. Sushi was complicated, because I was a college student and could almost never afford sushi. To this day I still love tamago (egg omelete) sushi, because it is the cheapest and I could eat a few without being embarassed and having to borrow from my college friends. So, I loved sushi, but could almost never afford it and went to the ramen shop instead.
When he found out I liked sushi, he said, “Ok, let’s go.” And we went to the nicest sushi restaurant I have ever been to. We had already eaten, so we only ate a few pieces of sushi. And, I recall at the end of the short meal, he pulled out four 10,000 YEN notes, which was about $500 at the time. It was REALLY good sushi.
So, Mr. Miyagi was wrong: I started with a date with a young flower and ended up on a date with an old prune.
As we kept working, I realized that we are now at the point where my son and I can start writing vulgar and cuss words. Now we can write kintama (golden testicles). It’s my duty as a dad living in Florida to tell my kids those kinds of things, because Ron DeSantis won’t be permitting that.
Norah was excited for the “ma” row because she read “mame” (beans) and shouted “Edamame! Does it mean green beans?” No, but it does mean bean, and now you can write it! She’s the one that discovered the ten-ten (two dots) that you add to a character, which means she can convert ta to da.