Weekend Homestay Experience

“Do you prefer Ninjitsu museum or pottery museum?” Ah, the choices of a young man staying with a Japanese family for the weekend come down to espionage or art. The first thing that comes to his mind is that his mother would choose the pottery, but then again, are there really museums about Ninjas? Maybe that would be fun, and maybe he can learn something about the mysterious figures that so many young boys dress as during Halloween. What is it about males and their attraction to swords, secret identities, throwing stars, and hidden passages? Oh well, I will try not to look too deeply into my reason for choosing the ninjas over the bowls and vases, he thinks.
The Satake family and the young man drive back to their house for some lunch before the expedition to the museum. They do their best find out what are his interests. His responses are in the form of likes and dislikes. “Ryouri ga suki desu.” (I like cooking.) “Hiking ga suki desu.” (I like hiking.) His Japanese is very limited, so he often substitutes English words for the Japanese he does not know. They soon drive up to a rather large house, for Japan anyways, to find a sweet old woman and a small dog to greet them at the door.
They ate a dish with fried noodles and vegetables, called yaki soba, and drank beer for lunch. Each time his glass reached the half-full level it was quickly refilled, which soon made him feel a bit tipsy. Afterwards, they all got in the BMW, and took off for the ninja adventure. The rain started coming down in torrents during the drive, and he tried to translate a colloquial phrase into Japanese. “Neko to inu ga furimasu ne,” (It’s raining cats and dogs.) he said while thinking how funny he was. The statement issued blank looks from all of the other occupants. His explanation took a good twenty minutes resulting in short contrived laughs. He thought, Maybe I should keep to slapstick.
The Ninjitsu museum was actually the historical site of an old Ninja estate, and certainly was old. He was not sure whether the cobwebs had been cleaned since the place was in full operation. Everyone did their best to act like they were enjoying themselves, but between the rain and the unexciting museum it was a bit of a struggle. The throwing stars did provide a little fun in competition, but that lasted about five minutes. They, then, plodded their way through rushing muddy water back to the car, reaching it with thankfulness. On the drive back to the house, both he and their son, Nori, fell quickly asleep, only to wake on their arrival.
“Kairu-san, darutsu o shimashyouka?” (Should we play darts?) asked Masao after they all changed out of their sopping attire. Wait, did I hear him correctly? I don’t remember writing that I liked darts in my application, Kyle thinks to himself. He says that he would love to play, and that playing darts is one of his favorite activities. They had a board one the wall in the family room, and he soon took them for a ride on the Kyle train of dart trouncing as he has been playing since he was eight years, taught by dart-loving alcoholics. Surprisingly, they loved his boisterous and competitive attitude that surfaced when the game started, and it loosened everyone up enough to laugh freely.
By the end of the game they were hungry, and decided to go out to a local restaurant. When they asked him what he wanted to eat he said that he wanted to eat food that he had never tried before. Reiko-san, as generous as a mother could be, simply read off the menu asking if he had eaten each item. She ordered everything that he had not eaten previously. They had many dishes that night, but ones that stuck in his mind were dobi mushi—a soup with the very delicious matsutake mushrooms--, a mochi soup that is usually eaten during the new year (mochi is glutinous rice that has been pounded), and the freshest sashimi that can be in existence without eating a live fish. The fish’s spine and head were literally still flopping on the plate. He knows many people who would have gagged and refused to eat it, but decided that he should suck it up, and think of it as a cultural experience. The texture was the main difference that he noticed between fresh and super fresh fish. The super fresh is initially soft, but when teeth sink into its meat there is a soft snap of the still vital muscular tissue as it is broken. The older fish is generally mushier in nature, and does not produce that satisfying sound when bitten.
During dinner conversation they asked what he studied in school. He told them that he was interested in elderly healthcare, and specialized in elderly massage. Masao got very excited with this news, and asked if Kyle would give obaachan a massage. Later that evening he gave her a massage, which aroused everyone’s interest in receiving massage. The next morning was filled with giving the other three members of the family massages, and by the end he was a bit tired. But that was not the end for they had more plans to take him to Biwako, the largest lake in Japan.
Biwako makes up forty percent of the total area of Shiga prefecture, and is the main attraction for tourism to Shiga. It provides potable water for Kyoto and Osaka as well as the cities and towns of Shiga. Good thing for those pamphlets the home-stay people gave me otherwise I wouldn’t know a thing, he thinks. They only visited a small section of the lake, so he was not able to get a view of its immensity, but he new it was big from the maps. Before returning to the house for dinner, they went to a lakeside temple called Ukimidoji. It first built about one thousand years before in honor of the Buddha, Amida. The temple was actually built on pillars over the water, and was destroyed in the 1937 typhoon. It was rumored that Basho, the famous haiku poet, visited the temple, and there were a few of his haiku carved into stones along the shore.
To make for a grand finale, Reiko-san cooked suki yaki—a beef and vegetable stew—with omi gyu niku, which is a special beef that is marbled with fat from feeding the cow sake, special grains, and massaging its muscles. To eat it he first had to crack a raw egg into his bowl, scramble it, and dip the beef and vegetables into the yellow goo, then slurp-up the bite with a satisfying noise. It was actually delicious, but he had to forget all of the warnings he heard during his childhood about not eating raw egg.
On the train ride back to Kyoto he thought about his experience, and realized that he had a culturally new experience. He never would have had a chance to visit those places or try those strange foods, had he not gone to that home-stay. And hey, he got to play darts.