Briefly reflecting on home assignment

Now it's over a month since we left Australia and officially we aren’t on home assignment anymore, so I want to put some brief thoughts down about how the year went. It’s not an uncommon question from people as we meet them again here. And depending on the context and time available, our replies vary in depth.

The street we called home for 12 months.

We had a good rest, ate good food, read a lot of books. We spent valuable time with family and friends and have so many precious memories.

It was a time of achieving some big audacious goals, particularly with our sons. And as we worked through achieving those goals there was a lot of work to actively seek God and trust him while we didn't know the outcomes of what we'd set out to achieve. I'm very thankful that we've been in a position to spend a year walking alongside our sons in their passport country as we all make this transition, and be paid to be there without changing who we work for. Not too many people who work outside their passport country could. (That's awkward writing...I hope you get my drift.)

It's the first time we've done home assignment without our kids being in school (in October I wrote about how this HA was different in several ways to any one we've done before). Our first HA, in 2004-2005 our eldest son was at school. It gave us much more freedom, but was also very weird not having that as a daily routine marker. In the past school terms is something that shaped when we did things, like visit our more distant family, so with so much choice, decision making was a little more difficult!

In February, almost six months ago, we entered the so called "empty nesting" years. That was not without challenge, but we also had a few "dry runs" earlier as we left our sons alone at home for weeks at a time. It was a significant achievement, given the rental situation in Australia right now, our income, the needs of our sons, and the specific dynamics in our family. In many ways doing this is counter cultural—many of our urban peers in Australia have their young adult children living with them well after high school. It is not counter cultural to most of our peers in the cross-cultural community, nor to those who live in rural areas of Australia (our family backgrounds). But these are supposed to be brief thoughts...I could probably write a whole blog post on this topic, so I'll move on.

We travelled a lot, I daren't even try to add up how many kilometres. Only two aeroplane trips (nearly four, but the trip to Melbourne just before we left didn't happen), but those were big flights: six hours to Perth on the other side of the continent. We drove, I think, ten different vehicles during the year, so an odometer reading won't help either. Long service leave (motorhome trip to Tasmania) was awesome, but if you've been reading my blog this year you've probably already read A LOT about that.

We had fewer churches to visit because various churches we used to have a relationship with either no longer exist, or no longer support us. It was a bit weird, but also nice, to not be in so many different churches (although long service leave took us away from our home church for an extended period). So overall we probably did less public speaking than we've done in the past. We did a couple of camps this time, as guest missionaries, which was fun, and exhausting.

It was good to be in Australia for many reasons, but no, it isn’t 100% home anymore. We missed Japan, although not with the intensity that we missed Australia in our first years in Japan. You might be interested to know that we ate relatively little Japanese food when we were in Australia.

We’re continuing to learn that home is the people. It’s where there are people we love and that is in both Australia and Japan. On both sides of the ocean we've had people "welcome us home". That statement is just too shallow to do this subject justice in any way.

It was good to step away from the intensity of our jobs here in Japan, we now come back to them with slightly different, and hopefully better, perspectives.

Just a few thoughts. It's good, in many ways, to be back in Japan. But it also feels like we've gone through the whole transition into "empty nesting" a second time! However, that's for another blog post.

It's been a month since we moved in

Moving day, four weeks ago!

It's hard to believe that it's been a month since we moved into this apartment, but the calendar doesn't lie. This is a simple, photo-heavy blog post with some before and after photos from the last couple of weeks.

It took a while to refine our new
household rubbish sorting system.
We have no outside storage, so it's all here.

This is how it looks today. We're pretty pleased. Two little plastic trays for paper and bottles/cans under the microwave. On the floor is a tiny "dirty" rubbish bin and plastic recyclables. We’ve also got

some extra (non-rubbish) storage in that little cupboard near the floor.

This was 10 days ago. We got rid of almost all our boxes: 
to a fellow missionary who’ll be moving in a few months
and in the “paper” recycling last week.

Looking tidy now!

More boxes.

All gone. Only thing left in this picture to deal with

is hiding behind the plant: wall pictures to hang.

I’d hoped to get this area of my office sorted before Christmas, but my
 amazing husband sorted it just after 
I last included this photo in a blog post!

Doesn’t it look great? And if anyone local
wants some metal cricket wickets…

Our new slow cooker arrived last week too.
We sold our large one last year and have bought 
this, which is more appropriate for two people.
I cooked 700g of pork in this last night and it was
so tender!

School started for the students today too, so hopefully we’ll get into more of a daily/weekly routine (and start remembering what day of the week it is again). It’s been over a year since we had the routine of David working at school, so it is a bit of an adjustment, but good. David’s been struggling to get over a cold, which to me shows this transition hasn’t been nothing. It’s taken a toll and we have to take time to recover, but that’s hard to remember some days.

Flashback to some transition craziness in Australia

Looking back at my blog post at the end of June and I’m amazed—there was so much going on. It's probably no wonder we've hit a bit of a wall today with energy, after two very busy months with so many decisions and transition.

One thing I mentioned in the above linked blog post was uncertainty about cars. Here’s how it turned out:

Our car, that we bought second-hand in August last year, cost us quite a bit in repairs over the year. It really didn't turn out to be a great purchase. As we looked towards transferring ownership to our eldest son, we decided to fix a ding that was caused during a hit-and-run incident while David was supervising a learner driver. This took several weeks at the end of June and early July to fix at the insurance company's preferred provider.

Thankfully we'd purchased a second car a few weeks previously, with the intention of our middle son taking ownership of it after he got his licence. We were able to use that car while our main car was getting fixed.

The day we moved all our stuff out of the house (which was a huge day without complications) was the same day our first car was available for collection and it turned into logistics challenge and a race against time as we tried to organise two drivers to be at the panelbeater shop before they shut. That also turned out to be the day we handed our second car over to our middle son.

Our eldest son was moving to Townsville (17 hrs drive north) only a few days after we left Australia and needed our larger car to carry all his stuff, so we planned to transfer ownership of our first car to him. So, a few days after we got it back from the panel beaters—and only four days before we were due to fly out of the country—we borrowed a car from the people we were staying with and put our first car into a different "shop" to get a road worthy certificate (an essential step in such a transfer). We already knew that there was an oil leak, due nearly wrecking the engine during our journey north a few weeks earlier, when our oil completely ran out one morning. We just weren't completely sure where or how expensive it would be to fix. Turned out that it would be an expensive fix and one that we (and our son) didn't have time for, so we retrieved our car.

On our last night in Australia we handed the keys to the car that was still in our name over to our eldest son and left him to deal with the mess, while advising him to sell it on our behalf as soon as he could once he got to Townsville.

His car was an older Corolla sedan that was in pretty good shape and actually passed its roadworthy pretty easily. He transferred ownership to his youngest brother who is due to do his licence test later this year.

Are you confused yet? This was just one of the things going on in the midst of us changing countries, for example, at the time I was still recovering from dental surgery. It's probably no surprise that we're weary today.

David started work a week ago and I've been gradually getting back into things. The heat and humidity is quite draining, even though we have good air conditioning. Our apartment is close to being completely set up and we're so thankful for that (and that we could move in so quickly after arriving). But we've made so many decisions and dealt with so much change these last couple of months. Transition is tiring. I'm glad we're on the other side. It's easy—because we've done this so many times and we've moved back to the same neighbourhood in a country we're familiar with—to race onwards and forget to take rest and be kind to ourselves. So it's good to take a moment to remember the craziness that was happening in those last few weeks in Australia!

Bending and flexing into our Japanese home

We’ve been watching quite a bit of the Olympics between other things. We watched both the men’s and women’s pole vaulting and they were amazing competitions for different reasons. The flexibility and balance of these athletes as they fly through the air is amazing. I feel like fitting oneself into a new living space in Japan also means a lot of flexibility and balance, though certainly not while flying through the air, although sometimes I have to admit that it does feel a little bit like we’ve lost all contact with solid ground.

There’s something odd about changing houses in Japan, it’s different to moving in Australia. I don’t know if Japanese people find this, or if it’s exclusive to foreigners (I suspect it’s somewhat universal, simply because of the multiple things you can buy to help…keep reading and I’ll show you some). You could say it’s related to small houses, but even places that are larger have their “oddities.” It seems you need creativity to make them into efficient spaces to live. Things that we take for granted in many Australian home aren’t always present, like rails to hold towels.

Last year one of our colleagues wrote a little about this aspect of life in Japan on her blog: https://memoirsofamissionarymom.blogspot.com/2023/08/trash-and-treasures.html?m=1

I love floor plans, it helps me (better than a video tour) to get a vision of how an apartment or house is laid out. Below is my English version of our house plan. I traced it from the Japanese one we have and added how we’re using spaces. So I'll put it here for you to refer to as I talk about various spaces (with photos).

We don’t really have a name for the area to the left of the word "dining". It has bookshelves in it, but no chairs, so not a library. Maybe it’s best called a multifunctional living area, as it could be an extension of the lounge or the dining area when we have guests. It’s the area we have recently stored boxes yet to be emptied, large rubbish (a disassembled desk), wall pictures yet to be hung, and empty boxes waiting to go to new homes or be thrown away. We also assembled our new furniture there yesterday.

For perspective, the lounge room, as depicted here, is 2.5 x 3.5 m. The toilet is cosy. I can touch both walls with my elbows while sitting on the pedestal. I can also easily, with my hands, touch the door and the back wall while standing.

The kitchen is very small, mostly just a sink, a stove top, and a narrow bench between the two that is 64 cm deep and 34 wide, with cupboards under it all and very high small cupboards above the sink. So we’ve had to get creative. This bookshelf has been our temporary pantry and place to hold plates and plastics. Yesterday we had three pieces of new furniture arrive, but the bookshelf is still holding plastics and some food, plus the bread maker.

This is our new plate cupboard (left of it is entrance to bathroom, right is the door out to the entrance and my office, furtherest door to right is our bedroom). We’re very pleased with how the cupboard fits here and what we've been able to put in it. It needed to be narrow to fit into this space. We threw our old one out last year, we’d had it 20 years and it definitely wasn’t new when we got it. It would not have fitted into this space. This piece of furniture came flat-packed (from Nitori, a Japanese furniture store) and took us about 90 minutes to build.

Another piece of new furniture that we built yesterday: a stand to hold the microwave/convection oven. It’s also got our tea/coffee corner, and spices and herbs on top, plus rubbish bins at the bottom. 

I’ve mentioned once or twice that the city expects a fair amount of rubbish sorting required of us, which of course means multiple bins. This is still a temporary area that we’ll need to figure out how to organise better, probably buying at least one more receptacle that will fit better into this space. 

Here is the kitchen sink. It’s typically large, extending almost to the right end of the cabinet. We purchased a small shelf that rests on the end of the sink so we could balance the drying rack on it. There is no plug; we wash up the water-saving Australian way (not continuous running water like Japanese people do), so we use a small washing up bowl. The curtain is a work in progress. I want to cut it down the centre so we can more easily open it to get more light into this area, I'll have to find the sewing machine to do that... We have a curtain because the hot summer sun pours in there in the morning (which will be nice in winter, if the angle is right, but isn’t nice in this current heat).

This is the three-burner stove top. What’s notable here is that we’ve added a small plastic-coated wire net in the corner (cost about AU$3) to hang utensils on as well as a more hooks on a rail that’s held up by suction caps. These save space on the bench and in drawers and make frequently used utensils easily accessible.

Here’s the whole kitchen (minus the plate cupboard and bookshelf). It’s a bit narrow, but seems to work. It’s very exciting to have this third piece of new furniture next to the fridge that gives us more bench (counter) and drawer space. It’s too high for me to comfortably use to prepare food, but will be useful for temporarily holding appliances like the bread maker, slow cooker, mixer, etc, as well as for helping keep the bench next to the stove clear so that can be used for preparation space.

The rice cooker can be used insitu here (Japanese furniture bonus!). But the mixer below it and the small food processor squished behind the mixer will need to be lifted out when needed. Two of these drawers are key pantry storage.

There are several areas that are still messy. We have lots of collapsed boxes and other not urgent things that have yet to find a home.

The cupboard in my office is stacked full. Some of this is destined for the school bazaar later in the year, other things need more sorting and potentially tossing. Camping gear is in here too, and probably needs more downsizing. A goal: being able to close these cupboard doors before Christmas.

My office. It’s getting there. I had one Zoom meeting here this week. It still needs more finessing. I have a love-hate relationship with desks and chairs. I find it hard to get comfortable, so I hate getting new combinations and trying to make them work for my body size. A footrest is one thing I need to work on. The chair isn’t quite high enough for the desk, but is as high as it goes…so I’m not sure what to do (I’ve got a couple of thin cushions on the seat at present). Some of the stuff on the desk would be better elsewhere, but it’s there for now.

So yes, a lot of literal and figurative bending and flexing. A lot of problem solving on big and small scale. 

All of this is, of course, tiring. Transition is tiring. So I’m trying to be kind to myself and try to help David to be the same to himself. I’m ever so grateful for so many things, including this beautiful apartment, good sleep enabled by air conditioning, and that we work for an organisation that knows how exhausting international transitions are. I'm still feeling a bit shaky and temporary, though anticipate that that will dissipate as time goes on as it has in the past. 

I'm sure I would not enjoy pole vaulting, as fun as it is to watch. I'm not particularly fond of the bending and flexing needed for moving either, but it doesn't go on forever! We'll solve these small inconveniences one by one or we'll get accustomed to them and get on with living! Life here will soon seem more routine and stable again.

I'm also grateful for this verse that reminds me that no matter how messy and unstable my life seems, I have a solid foundation given to me by God:

He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand (Psalm 40: 2 NIV).

Update as we continue to settle

 Another week has past and what's happened? We're feeling more and more settled. Our apartment is feeling more homey and we really like it. On Saturday we opened up most of the boxes with books in them and put them on shelves. That's always a turning point for me in a new place. Things were starting to take shape and we were getting a better idea of what we still needed to find to make this place work smoothly.

The sunny side of the apartment (south side). This side faces the river/stream/waterway that
we regularly walk along. It's a block of four apartments and ours is the top right of this photo. If you look carefully you can see our laundry drying on our small balcony.

This is the north side. Our apartment is the top left here. The window on the left is my office.

Bookshelves populated. So fun to see old favourites there.

David leaving the apartment to go for a walk with me one evening.

Reality checks

On Sunday we went back to our old church and found that they had had to scramble to find a place to worship that morning. The electricity was off in the main sanctuary, so they moved to the room where the Sunday School normally meets. A Japanese worship service was a good reality check. In Australia we're frequently considered the experts on Japan, and especially people assume we're fluent in the language. Yet I come back here and it doesn't take long to show that, though we get by, my language, in particular, isn't superb. I understood very little of the sermon on Sunday (noting that that understanding a long monologue is one of the hardest language skills). Two days earlier, I also understood very little of the official language involved in buying a car or getting us registered at the city office (David managed better than me). But somehow we get by! It's so hard to explain to people who have never lived in a country with a difficult language like Japanese how we can feel at home here, but also not be completely fluent!

Monday

This day we rode again to a nearby shopping hub and went to a homeware store, electronics store, and a 100 yen shop. We bought a number of smaller things to help in the shower and kitchen. Best purchase was a new rice cooker (we threw our 23-year-old 10-cup one out last year). When we rode home at midday, the temperature was well above 35C and we were glad it was just a short ride home and that we could have a quiet afternoon.

Wednesday was a big day

We borrowed a car on Wednesday and did a number of jobs, this took all day and involved several hours of city driving. We drove back to the place that we're buying our new car and finished off some paperwork that we hadn't been able to do last week because we forgot to take our inkan (Japanese seal, which replaces signatures on official documents). We also found out we can't pick up our car until the end of August.

Then we drove another hour to an area we rarely visit in a car: Shinjuku. It's much more inner city than where we live. There we bought a second-hand desk off a guy I think is from Egypt. I found this in the same way I bought a few things in Australia: through Facebook Marketplace. It was a bit dodgy for a little bit, though, because he gave us a location that was over the road from his tiny apartment and said to "ring the bell" when we arrived. Alas the location was another block of apartments, none of which had his name on their mailboxes. Finally he answered my messages (I think he works late hours and was asleep) and came out to meet us.

After that we drove back closer to home to a big second hand store. There we found an IKEA armchair for half the price we would have bought it new, but didn't find the printer we wanted. 

Our second last stop was at Nitori, our favourite Japanese furniture store. It has an open plan, so much better than IKEA. And the furniture is designed for small Japanese homes, so you're much more likely to find stuff that's the right size. There we bought a carpet and curtains for our washitsu (Japanese style room with delicate woven flooring called tatami), this room is our lounge room and it's easier to take care of the flooring if it's covered. We also bought three pieces of furniture for the kitchen. I'm planning to write about that next week after the furniture has been delivered, so I can show you. Japanese kitchens initially appear impossible to Australians, who are used to lots of bench (counter) space, and quite a lot of cupboards, but these problems can often be solved with problem solving and the purchase of a few small and larger items.

Our last stop was to drop the car back to its owners and ride home. It had been a long, hot, exhausting day and my physical condition slipped back a little, but with rest in the cool and some food, I recovered and slept really well and long that night.

Lounge room is taking shape. TV is out of sight on the right and still needs something solid to sit on.

My new desk. We'll add a small bookshelf where those boxes are next week.

Recovery days

Both Tuesday and Thursday I spent mostly at home. Some of that was just resting in the cool, but also writing a prayer letter and doing more home-set up. Yesterday we also pulled the furniture out of the lounge and put the carpet in (more like a door-to-door rug) as well as David's new chair. We also rearranged the office and installed my new desk (which I really like). I keep reminding myself that we've had a big month and that slow days and recovery time is important, especially with the energy sapping heat and humidity this time of the year in Tokyo. Although, having good air conditioning at home has meant that we've been able to achieve more in a shorter space of time than we otherwise would have. 

Snickerdoodles and my microwave-
convection oven (on a temporary table)

Early in the week I also had a go at using the oven part of my microwave convection oven. I've rarely used that because in our previous house I had a really top notch oven. I made a fairly good batch of Snickerdoodles and was satisfied that I could live with this new method of baking. Though it looks a lot smaller, actually I could still bake 24 biscuits at one time (previous oven I could do 30), so it isn't too big a change, although it does take a lot longer to get up to the set temperature. Being able to bake is another of my turning points in adjusting to a new place, so being able to achieve this goal so soon after we arrived felt great.

Complexity

Settling after a big move like this takes time, even though we've moved back to our old neighbourhood. We're thankful that we've had time to make the adjustment. Jumping between countries is weird. It's like jumping between two different parts of our lives. 

Here we have a lot of history, a lot more of our lives have been lived here as adults than in Australia. This morning we rode to the police station to change the address on our drivers licences (wish it was like Australia where you do it online!). The station is across the road from where our youngest son was treated for concussion a couple of years ago. Part of the route we rode is a route I've often ridden on my way to and from my big park adventures. Our visit to Nitori brought up memories of the first time we visited this store when we were in our first month in the country in 2000/1. Our apartment has many more bits and pieces of our last 23 years than our lives in Australia do. 

But it's okay. I'm reading a biography of Naomi Osaka at present. I'm surprised by how parts of her story resonate with me. She's grown up and lives "between" cultures, as do many high level athletes. She's black, and Haitian, and Japanese, and American. I'm clearly a white Australian, but I'm also someone who's lived a long time in Japan and had a lot of interaction with the expat community here, and have been changed forever by these things. I'm gradually learning to embrace all of this complexity. 

We run our monthly news/prayer letter past our adult sons before we send it out, because it includes news about their lives. This week one of them called me out on some of what I'd written. Apparently "home" was a notion that was confusing things. It's a concept that is more complex for some people than others and certainly even more so in the midst of transition.

But to conclude this blog post, I want to reassure you that we are feeling quite at home here: in Japan and in our new abode. Each day is feeling more normal as micro and macro routines weave their way into our days. Work will add another layer to that in this coming week, but we're looking forward to being settled enough at home that we can turn our focus more outward.