Living in Japan: From A to Z (From Attanburo to Zuzuben)

Our welcome to Japan by Fulbright staff proved to be so helpful and kind that we could not foresee it would be outdone by our reception at Sendai. Professor Ichiro Hori, who had been a visiting professor at the Divinity School in Chicago, repaid us many times over for the hospitality he had enjoyed in Chicago. Professor and Mrs. Hori, who had no children, practically adopted us as their own family.

Professor Hori let me use a desk in his university office; Mrs. Hori arranged for us to rent the house of a Tohoku University agriculture professor who had a year grant to research alfalfa at Penn State.

Our house in northern Sendai was a modest frame structure surrounded by a high fence. From the entry way, wood floors led to the toilet; behind it were a separate bath and a small kitchen. From the entryway to the right were wood floors to a sitting room with a small coal-fired potbelly stove. To the left and right of this room were “Japanese” style rooms with straw mats, where shoes were not worn. At night, we removed futon from large storage closets and spread them on the straw mats to use these “Japanese” rooms for sleeping.

Especially for my wife, used to American houses with their modern kitchens and bathrooms, these two areas of the home left much to be desired. Unlike the sitting posture for a Western stool, to use the (non-flushing) Japanese style toilet, you had to squat down to a fixture on the floor. Below this fixture was a holding tank, which was emptied once a month from an external opening.

The house had neither central heat nor hot water. The bath had a wooden tub (an ofuro), which locals called an attanburo, because it used attan for fuel. Attan is “brown coal,” that needs a few thousand more years before turning into “black coal.” It contains a lot of moisture, and is hard to get burning. A metal chimney ran up through the wooden ofuro. To light the fire and heat water required hard work and finesse. First you had to remove the grate from the bottom of the chimney and take out ashes from the previous fire. Then, after replacing the grate in the bottom of the chimney, you had to carefully load paper and kindling wood into the top opening, before adding attan. Packed too tightly, the attan would not ignite, and everything had to be removed and the process started over. Once it caught fire, the updraft created a blazing flame, the chimney spewing out a dark cloud of acrid smoke that blanketed the neighborhood.

We learned the Japanese mode of bathing, never using any soap inside the ofuro. Disrobing before entering the bath, we used a bucket to splash water over us, lathered up, then used more buckets of water to rinse away all soap. Then came the real treat, climbing into the ofuro for a relaxing soak in the hot water. Our year-old son loved this routine. When finished with our bath, we put a wooden cover over the tub, to keep the water warm for washing clothes the next day.

Describing the toilet and bath required much explanation; the spartan kitchen can be summed up quickly: two gas burners, a cold water tap, and a tiny refrigerator. In the middle of winter, water froze in the kitchen. We managed well, with a little improvising. Much of the time I cooked fish or chicken outside on a charcoal-burning hibachi. Most housewives made daily trips to the market for small purchases from small shops selling different items—fish, chicken, tofu, green vegetables, fruit, and soy sauce. The ag professor left his bicycle for me to use. In good weather I biked the four miles to the university. On rainy or snowy days I took a bus or street car.

Our $300 monthly stipend from Fulbright was adequate, because at that time the exchange rate was 360 yen to the dollar. We could take 500 yen to the market, buy a day’s worth of meals and have some change left over. Imported goods like American cereal were prohibitive in price, about 500 yen for one box. We found a great alternative in a traveling peddler who had a cart with a charcoal hibachi that heated a steel hemisphere. He put a small cup of rice in the steel globe, sealed it, and used a handle to rotate it over the fire. When he opened it, “bang” the rice came out “puffed.” The Japanese say “pon” for “pop” or “bang.” The local name for him was “ponya,” the bang man. The explosion of his puffed food announced his presence in the neighborhood. We took several cups of rice and paid a small fee for his service.

I also liked puffed wheat, and found a neighborhood shop that sold wheat. The clerk asked me what I was going to do with it. I told her we would have it puffed. She said no, this was for chickens. We had a vigorous discussion, and finally I said I would get some chickens. She reluctantly sold me wheat, and we had puffed wheat the next time the ponya made his rounds.

We made good friends, especially with a next-door widow and her teenage son and daughter. They had never seen popcorn popped. We had many good evenings eating popcorn and playing cards. Our largest room had a kotatsu, a sunken square about the size of a card table and twelve inches deep. We placed a ceramic hibachi with burning charcoal in the hibachi in the center of the square hole, put a raised frame over it, topped with a table and a quilt. We sat around the kotatsu, sticking our feet into the hole, pulling the quilt over our laps. That made for warm friendship, indeed.

One convenience we sorely missed—a telephone. It shocked us to learn that installing a phone would cost $600, two of our monthly stipend payments from Fulbright. We went without a phone, sometimes relying on a neighbor who had a phone; they had a son our boy’s age, so they often played together. In the three years we lived in Japan we had two more sons, but not once did we make an international call. We sent telegrams to announce these births.

This blog promised to go from A to Z, attanburo to zuzuben. At Chicago and Columbia, I had learned standard Japanese, what is spoken in Tokyo. In northeast Japan, the local dialect is called zuzuben. In this form of Japanese, the pronunciation of many sounds become reduced to “zu.” Japanese has long and short vowels, especially for “so” and “su.” Both long and short so and su became transformed into “zu.” Also, the sounds of “sh” and “j” slid into a “z.” At first, I could barely understand local speech in Sendai. The locals understood my standard Tokyo pronunciation, but I had trouble comprehending them.

The miracle of language is the ability of children to quickly pick up a language. Within a few months our son, at a year and a half, could translate for my wife. We had few appliances, and Mrs. Hori insisted we have a household “helper,” who quickly became a part of our family, and spoke Japanese to our son.

Two historical footnotes are in order. For Japanese readers, it is important to point out that the living conditions described here from the early 1960s do not give a picture of the much improved situation of Japan at the present time. For American readers, it is good to acknowledge that the household amenities we take for granted in the United States today are rather recent developments. My book about American life during World War II in the 1940s, when I lived “At Grandma’s House,” provides a picture of what life then was like—no central heat and hot water only on weekends. I carried coal for a large cast-iron kitchen range and pot belly stoves. My wife grew up in a home with an outhouse, and her family moved to a house with indoor plumbing only when she was in high school. 1960s Japan and 1940s America had a lot in common.

Many memories come to mind from our living in Japan, other than attanburo and zuzuben, too many to recount here. The important point is we had a great experience, waiting to hear the sound of the ponya coming to our neighborhood, and inviting neighbors in to sit with our feet in the kotatsu eating popcorn.