A preschool Laura Croft
Our daughter’s preschool held a Father’s Day event this weekend, so we all got up earlier than usual (for a Saturday morning) in order to be there at 8:45 a.m. in time for the festivities.
I wasn’t really surprised to be the only gaijin father attending, but I was surprised to see how much older most of the other fathers were. I’m rapidly approaching the end of my 20s, but most of the fathers I saw were at least 10 years older, if not more. Do Japanese men really wait that long before having children? Interestingly, many of the mothers who were there were all roughly my wife’s age. That would seem to imply a not-so-slight age gap among married couples.
Our daughter seems to be something of a celebrity at the school. She’s one of a small number of “half-” children, I gather. I resist using the Japanese term (”haafu," a loose transliteration of the English word “half") because I’ve always thought is sounds discriminatory, as if she’s only half a person or something. I prefer the term nibai, which means “double”, to emphasize the dual nature of the upbringing we try to provide for her. (I first saw the term nibai used this way in this interview with Elina Moriya, a Finnish-Japanese photographer.) Anyway, everyone knows her. We were even surprised when, later that weekend, we were walking to a park in our neighborhood when some older kids called her by name. They were not kids who go to her preschool, so we have no idea how they knew her.
I gave my wife a digital camera that I borrowed from work, but forgot to mention that I only had two memory cards, both only 8MB each. She was really disappointed to find out that an 8MB card doesn’t hold much digital video. She kept trying to take videos of us, but could only record for a few seconds before running out of memory.
We did manage to get a few nice pictures, though. Here is the celebrity girl herself, doing what she does best: Taking a break. That is not to suggest that she’s not active, though! Some of what she does on the playground makes Laura Croft look like a couch potato.
