Tokyo "Marianne's Coming of Age" Book - Marianne L'Heureux

My brother Jan and I arrived in Tokyo, the year the Tokyo Olympics took place in the summer. Mother, my stepfather Peter, and youngest brother Danny were already living in Tokyo having moved first to Hong Kong from Manila, and then to Tokyo. They met Jan and me at the Haneda Airport Arrival terminal. Jan and I had been travelling for two days and were tired.

My stepfather Peter was working in a joint business venture with a Japanese Senpaku-Shipping. They were building a new cargo ship in Osaka, Japan. Peter had a company chauffeured car; we all piled into the car, our two suitcases in the trunk, and drove to the one-bedroom apartment on Omotesando Avenue in the heart of Tokyo. Within walking distance of the apartment building was Meiji Shrine and a children’s toy store. Aoyama-dori was just a walk up from Omotesando.

The apartment was on the third floor, and an elevator took us up to our new home. It was a small apartment; Mother had hung a clothesline up with some bed sheets to separate the living room from the bedroom. My stepfather Peter, Mother and Danny slept in the bedroom; Jan and I slept in the living room area on futons, a Japanese mattress that was rolled up into a sofa in the daytime. There was a small, enclosed patio. A mynah bird was out there in a cage; another cage held a rooster, and a cute Scottish Terrier puppy slept on a bed of newspapers out on the patio, too. There was a small storage unit next to the entryway of the apartment; Jan and I put our suitcases in there and we also stored the    

futons we slept on at night in there, too.

When Peter, Mother and Danny moved to Tokyo from Hong Kong, the apartment was suitable; however, with Jan and I staying there too there was no room to move. The rooster on the patio crowed at all hours of the day and night, the mynah bird had not yet learned to mimic words, and our Scottish terrier puppy whimpered a lot out on the patio. We fed the mynah bird bananas, the rooster from a sack of grain, and rice with some grated fish on top to the puppy.

When Peter left in the mornings to go to his office in a hotel room at the Imperial Hotel in downtown Tokyo, Jan and I walked around the neighborhood and stayed out of Mother’s way. I learned that my stepbrother Peter Jr. would be arriving in three or four weeks from Hong Kong to live with us as well; he had been living with his mother Eleanor in Hong Kong after he left Manila. They were having big problems in Hong Kong.

Walking around Omotesando I noted that the girl students I saw wore the same uniforms: a dark blue sailor outfit called a “sera fuku” ('sailor outfit'). Ear piercings are against Japanese school dress code, along with jewelry and painted nails. Makeup is also prohibited, and hair is cut to shoulder length, no hair dye or styling. Girls walked together in pairs linking their arms.

The photos I see today of Japanese teenage girls must be taken after they are out of school for the afternoon and dressed up however, they wanted, including hair color they could wash out at night. The same for the boys, I imagine. The boys in Japan wear a black or navy-blue uniform called a “gakuran.” The uniform consists of a navy-blue cotton shirt and a long-sleeved suit jacket with a stand-up collar that buttons up and down; the buttons are specific to the school emblem. Classic black pants complete the uniform.

When I enrolled at the Sacred Heart International School (ISSH), I wore a uniform too: a dark blue jumper and jacket with a white shirt and blue knee-high socks. After a couple of years, the uniform was switched to a green plaid skirt and jacket with green knee-high socks. Makeup, jewelry and nail polish was also prohibited.

In preparation for the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo there was construction work around the clock at the Yoyogi Olympic stadium and close to our apartment. I avoided the construction site by walking to Meiji Shrine, passing through a massive tori gate into the Meiji Jingu Forest. Built in 1920, the shrine covers 170 acres (69 hectares); there are over a hundred thousand trees in the forest donated by prefectures all over Japan, and beautiful gardens. All the wood in the building of the shrine came from the Kiso Mountains and Taiwan. Right in the middle of the biggest city in the world was a small paradise. My favorite garden at Meiji Shrine was a field of irises.

The Shinto shrine is in the middle of the forest and is dedicated to the spirits of Emperor Meiji (1867 – 1912) and the Empress Haruko Shoken. Emperor Meiji effected the Restoration of 1868 and restored the administrative power back to the Imperial government headed by the Emperor which had been in the hands of the Shoguns before. It takes an hour to walk around the Temple grounds and several hours to walk around some of the forest. I visited Meiji Shrine daily for several months while living in the apartment on Omotohsando. Meiji Shrine was my introduction to the Shinto religion and Japanese history. I saw the Shinto priests at the shrine wearing kariginu (long sleeved robes) over “sashinuki” balloon pants, and tall eboshi hats. Besides the priest I saw Mikos, shrine maidens/young priestesses, wearing red hakama (red divided, pleated trousers), white kosode-kimono tops, and white or red hair ribbons. In Shinto, the color white symbolizes purity. Visiting the Meiji Jingu Museum introduced me to Japanese art, Emperor Meiji’s treasures, and life at the Japanese Imperial Court. What a blessing and opportunity it was for me to learn about Japan, my new home.

After living in the apartment for about a month, my stepbrother Peter Jr. arrived from Hong Kong; we met him at Haneda airport. Peter Jr. was about fifteen years old, medium height with brown hair and wore glasses. He was not happy to see his father and did not speak to me at the airport arrival gate. When he saw the one-bedroom apartment we were living in on Omotosando, all hell broke loose. He asked how we were all going to fit into a one-bedroom apartment. I had asked myself this question too. My stepfather Peter already had an office at the Imperial Hotel and decided to rent a hotel room there for Peter Jr. and my brother Jan to live in. They lived at the Imperial Hotel in a hotel room, with room and maid service until my brother Jan graduated from high school and left Japan years later.

Peter purchased a condominium in Akasaka, not very far from Meiji Shrine, for Mother, Peter, Danny, and I to live in. It was 750 square feet (20m X 40m), the size of an average one-bedroom apartment in the United States. Mother made modifications to the floor plan so that there was an entry way; a small kitchen galley along one wall of the 6- foot- wide hallway; a western style tiled bathroom with a bathtub and sink; and a small bedroom without a door measuring 9 X 7 feet, which was the room my younger brother Danny and I shared. It had a single bed for me, and a bunk bed built over a chest of drawers for Danny. There was a small, combined living room area and dining area with a round table and some chairs; the master bedroom had a king-size bed, large closets and a door. Floor to ceiling glass with reinforced wire wrapped around the two sides of the apartment, and there was an L- shaped narrow concrete patio. The front door opened out into the hallway, instead of the door opening inwards like in the United States. The toilet and sink in the bathroom were lower to the ground than in the United States, the reason being the average Japanese person is shorter than Westerners, I was told.

The building was five stories tall, four being an unlucky number in Japan. There was a concierge on duty in a small office located in the building lobby. An elevator was in the lobby, and stairs led to the second floor. We had a spectacular view from the patio as our building was on top of a steep hill; we could see Akasaka Prince Palace. On the patio we had Scotty, our Scottish Terrier puppy, and the rooster in a cage; the mynah bird’s cage was in the entry way. The rooster disappeared one day; I wondered if my stepfather had taken him to a cock fight; he used to go to cock fights in Manila. The mynah bird lasted about two years but passed away during the winter from a cold draft that came under the front door. I tried to teach the mynah bird how to talk, but he would only talk in the middle of the night when everyone was asleep. As for Scotty, he became my loyal companion, and I will write about him in the following chapters.

Since the address system is chaotic in Japan, and residential and commercial buildings are a mishmash, I needed a handwritten map to find the apartment building. Buildings are numbered in the order that they are built, rather than where they are located. Most narrow small streets have no names. All of Tokyo is like this, and it is very difficult to find an address or one’s way around. In preparation for the Olympics many of the subway and train station signs were written in English; otherwise, one had to learn to read some basic Japanese signs.

The door to the roof top was left open in those days, and I spent some  time up there when I needed to avoid my stepfather. Being thousands of miles away from North America I saw spectacular sunsets from the rooftop and had a fantastic view of Tokyo. Although Akasaka was not far from the Pacific Ocean, perhaps a half hour on the subway to the famous Tsukiji fish market, I rarely went to the ocean when I lived in Tokyo. The long commute I had going back and forth to school from home was one reason, and staying close to home in the summer to babysit my younger brother was the other. I learned to love my  neighborhood and the charming side streets over the years, however.