Conversations With My Childhood Self: A Japanese Girl’s Life
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About this ebook
Would you like to go back in time and talk to your childhood self ?
What events would you discuss? What would you say?
This is the true story of Terri Yamaguchi, a Japanese girl growing up in a poor family during the 1970s and '80s. Each childhood episode is then followed by fictional discussions between the girl and her adult self, talking about the painful events of that day.
The adult enters a meditational state in order to contact the girl while she is dreaming, and by using her adult perspective and spiritual beliefs, is able to console, encourage, and provide explanations for her childhood self in an effort to help her through painful times.
This not only creates a healing effect for the girl, but the healing of the child also transcends time, reaching into the future to simultaneously heal the adult.
***Excerpt***
“Let's say you had two lives to choose from. One is a life where people make you feel bad, and you have to then either 'fix' them or put up with feeling bad. And 'fixing' someone means you have a discussion, or an argument, or a fight to convince, coerce, or cause them to change. But these people will not stay 'fixed'. They'll eventually do the same thing again and you'll have to fix them all over again. And this goes on for maybe 80 years. How does that sound?”
“Sounds like hell. What's the other life I have to choose from?”
“The other life is one where people still make you feel bad, but to make sure that doesn't happen again, you only ever have to 'fix' one person. And that one person is infinitely cooperative. They will agree with everything you think, and be willing to do whatever you decide, and they will always like you, no matter what. And each time you fix that one person, it will make it less likely that you will need to fix them in the future. So, how does that life sound?”
“Sounds like heaven. And it sounds ridiculously easier than the other life.”
************
Daniel Hanrahan
Daniel Hanrahan. Born and living in Sydney, Australia. Web Site Designer, Japanese Translator, and now Author. Teruyo (Terri) Hanrahan. Born 1966, in Nagasaki, Japan. Background in computer & IT related work, and now Author. Living in Sydney, Australia.
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Conversations With My Childhood Self - Daniel Hanrahan
Conversations With My Childhood Self
A Japanese Girl’s Life
Daniel Hanrahan & Teruyo Hanrahan
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2013 Daniel Hanrahan & Teruyo Hanrahan
Smashwords Edition, License Notes.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.
Table of Contents
Story Outline
Introduction to the Family
Banana in the Beauty Parlor
Toilet Training was Parent Training
Mum's Beating, Heard From Under the Covers
Mum Leaving Home (Without Me)
I'll Catch Poverty if I Hold Your Hand!
Picking Up Drunk Father, Aged 5
School Bag was an Old Wooden Paint Box
The 'Evil' Lady Teacher
The Same Life as My Mother? (Girls Don't Need to Study)
Mum Always an Underdog, Dad Always in Underwear
American Top 40
Religion, Church, and Mind Control
Imagining John Lennon
Joined in Matrimony by Split Personality
About Terri
* * * *
Me (left) aged eight, with parents and brothers
* * * *
Story Outline
This is the true story of Terri Yamaguchi, a Japanese girl growing up in a poor family during the 1970s and ‘80s. Each childhood episode is followed by fictional discussions between the girl and her adult self, talking about the painful events of that day.
After a description of each childhood episode concludes, the adult self from 2012 communicates via meditation with the girl, who is sleeping and in a dream state. By using her adult perspective, along with spiritual and metaphysical beliefs, Terri is able to console, encourage, and provide explanations for her childhood self in an effort to help her through difficult times.
This not only creates a healing effect for the girl in the past, but the healing of the child transcends time and simultaneously heals the adult.
* * * *
1
Introduction to the Family
My name is Teruyo Hanrahan (née Yamaguchi), or Terri for short. I was born in 1966, the eldest daughter in a family of five children (two girls and three boys), with the youngest girl being born fourteen years after me. We lived in the town of Kurokami in Sasebo, about two hours drive from the city of Nagasaki, and also the location of a U.S. naval base set up after the Second World War. Although the population of Sasebo is large, the physical size in area is equivalent to that of a town in Western countries. And being located at the bottom edge of the Japanese mainland, I always had the sense of being in a somewhat isolated corner of the world, almost as if I was living in a country town.
We were very poor, which also added to the sense of isolation, and lived in a government subsidised block of apartments. (I was shocked later in life to hear my supervisor at the bank where I worked describe our apartment blocks as the slums of Kurokami
. I didn’t know it was seen as that bad). These apartments are nothing like the apartments you would imagine in western countries. It’s more accurate to call it a ‘room’, because that’s all it was. One room with a separate small kitchen, toilet and bath (actually, up until I was five years old we didn’t even have a bath), a small veranda, and a small area for shoes at the entrance.
The one room where we spent all our time, and all slept together on the floor, was about 3x10 metres (10x33 feet), plus a sliding door cupboard at one end where the futons (thin Japanese mattresses) were placed during the day. This 3x10 metre space was then made even smaller by a couple of chests of drawers along the wall, a TV at one end, and a small table. Being Japanese, we all lived on the floor, so there were no chairs or sofas, etc. The kitchen was only big enough for two people to be in at once, and my mother would often keep pots of food on the floor. Basically once you had entered the apartment, no further movement was possible except to sit down on the floor. However, this is where I spent the first twenty-three years of my life.
The reason we were poor was twofold. Almost everyone in Japan was destitute after the war until about the late 1950s. But on the other hand, my parents were both hairdressers and this was not an occupation that benefitted from the huge economic expansion in Japan during the 1960s and ‘70s. In addition to this, my father was the type of barber who would try to force his own personal hair style preference on people, whereas most barber shop customers stubbornly seem to want their hair to look the way they personally would like it to look. (It’s also possible that my father only knew how to do one hair style - a basic military short back and sides.) So naturally there weren’t many customers to provide much of an income, and on top of that my mother had to stop working after my younger brother was born. In those days there was no such thing as child-minding, and they couldn’t have afforded it even if there was.
* * * *
I was quiet and shy, very obedient and would never talk-back. Questioning what I was told was a concept I didn’t even think of. This was largely typical of Japanese society, it being very vertically oriented and punishing of individualistic behaviour (fortunately this has changed a lot in the last twenty years). But I had a fear of disobeying that was even stronger than just the cultural norm.
From the time I became aware of it, I always wished we weren’t poor, and often found it embarrassing. Things that would be unthinkable for a normal family are unavoidable when you are poor. Even when I had the measles, taking time off work was unimaginable for my mother, and so I was taken to school where I sat in my regular seat, wrapped up in a blanket, not with a high fever but with a high dose of embarrassment. For poor working people, school is often necessary simply as a child-minding service more than as a place for receiving an education.
As is typical with Japanese families, no tender emotions were expressed, but as this was normal across the society it was never missed. I mainly just wanted to get along with everyone, and simply wanted people to be fair and kind. If they could have just managed to do that simple thing, I would have had no problems.
My mother was also completely obedient, and if I am to be honest, I’d have to say she was not very intelligent or educated. Not that that was her fault, of course. She was a product of the times she was brought up in. Being born in 1935, her early youth was spent in wartime Japan, and then her childhood came to an end during the economic desert of the post-war years. Perhaps symbolic of her destiny to have a life controlled by others, is the fact that her official birthday is not her real one. Her parents failed to register the birth within the time limit, and the registry office said it was now too late, so her official birth date was simply ‘shifted’ to a more convenient one for the paperwork.
She did manage to acquire one skill of her own choosing though, and that was hairdressing. She even managed to open her own hairdresser shop in Nagasaki, and do quite well with it. Unfortunately, this didn’t impress her mother who was almost having a nervous breakdown about the fact that her daughter was thirty years old and still unmarried. If Mum had been born in a different time and place, maybe she could have ignored her own mother’s plight, but in Japan at that time obedience was paramount, and so she bowed to the pressure of fulfilling her duty as a daughter rather than following her own dream.
This meant that basically her life now had only one path, and she would have little control over it. Find a husband, or if you didn’t find one you would be arranged with one; have children; do the housework; if you were poor also work outside the home; do what your husband wants you to do and what your children need you to do; and make sure if you have daughters that they are also eventually married off. So that’s what became of her life. From my point of view it seemed pretty miserable, and I often felt sorry for her. To her credit, she did keep at her dream as long as possible, eventually only quitting the hairdresser business after my younger brother was born. But after that, her only real solace was in her religion. This also required obedience, not to mention financial donations, but promised good things if you lived what it considered to be the ‘good life’.
Mum passed away in 2007, and in what she knew were to be her final months, obviously decided there was no need to be so subservient anymore, and became freely critical and demanding of those around her - which was a wonderful thing to finally see and hear.
My father, and again if I am to be honest, was basically an undesirable presence in my life, and in the house. He also was not intelligent, educated, or skilled, but frustratingly, despite those qualities, he was the un-elected, self-appointed boss. And he would get drunk every night. Also, though I don’t know if this has any relevance or not, his parents were cousins. (Scientists now say that the myths and risks of marrying a cousin have been grossly overstated, but I can’t help wondering...)
He was usually complaining, often angry, mostly unfair, basically irrational, occasionally threatening, sometimes embarrassing, constantly demanding, and always unpredictable when drinking. The drinking would usually begin every night from the time he sat down to dinner, and by the time the rest of us were ready to sleep he was at full intoxication. This was bad enough for us kids, but we could ignore him since we didn’t usually talk to him anyway. But my mother had to stay awake and pretend to listen to his conversation until he decided he was ready to sleep. It was her job to clear the table, but she couldn’t do that until he had finished using it. Plus the table occupied the space on the floor where my mother slept, so often while still sitting upright listening to her husband carrying on, her head would be continually drifting off to sleep. Many times my father, after he had finished his drunken grievances for the night, would wake her up saying, Hey wake up! Aren’t you going to clean and put away the table?
. (Speaking of that table, he once picked it up and threw it off the veranda for some reason).
In his defense, I would say that being poor would cause a lot of stress for the one who has the main responsibility to bring in an income. Of course different people would each handle this differently, but my father felt the pressure to constantly penny-pinch. Rather than buy normal bread, we used to only get a ten cent bag of bread crusts from the bakery. He even used to change the date on my brothers’ bus passes with a pen, rather than buy a new one. (The poor things must have been scared of getting ‘busted’ every time they climbed the bus steps.) When I was young he had a paper delivery job, but quit after seeing a ghost in the graveyard that his route used to go past. Given his tightness with money, it must have been quite a fright to cause him to give up that income. Later in life my father’s own brothers would accuse him of taking more than his fair share of their mother’s inheritance, and although I don’t know the truth of this, I can’t deny the possibility given his personality.
Speaking of which, he even took more than his fair share of my money too. One of his sayings was, My money is my money, and your money is my money
. A combination of his persistent nagging, and my inability to withstand it, led to me having to repay a $3000 loan from my father twice! Whether he had truly forgotten that I’d already repaid it, or he was pretending not to remember, I don’t know. But he wouldn’t believe me and wouldn’t let the matter drop, constantly reminding me at every opportunity. I eventually gave in and decided it was worth another $3000 just to get him to shut up.
However, if I had to list his good qualities I’d say he could sometimes express deep emotions, would be loyal as a friend, and liked Elvis Presley music. Much later in life, as often seems to happen with people like that, he became a lot milder, less volatile, less demanding, more agreeable etc. Probably the reason for this is that as their children start to leave and move far away from home, the loneliness that will constitute the rest of their life becomes apparent. The youngest child, my sister who was born in 1980, had a very different experience of my father than the rest of us. She was spoilt a little, and could get away with a superior tone when talking to him. She still often rolled her eyes at him, and usually found him embarrassing, but he wasn’t the object of fear that he was for me and my brother. And later in life he had a comical side - at least comical for people outside the family. My husband and children would laugh at his weird English phrases learnt at the U.S. naval base barber shop (two of which were "Okay