Y halo thar
Blah. I'll try to write in English or at least in Russian + English from now on. Again. For the 9757239284 time =_="
I always let myself post in Russian eventually, and from there, I gradually stop writing in English at all. I hate that. how do i increased willpower?
I can't say this summer was very productive, it wasn't bad, but it could've been better. I don't know, I was in an apathetic mood and didn't really want to do anything. It's all summer's fault. I'm a geek but a human being too. Deep down in my heart, I probably wanted to, you know, have a summer like normal people do, go to beach, hang out somewhere, stuff like that. But I didn't. I could go to beach at least once, but didn't. I just ignored my desires, like I always do. I suppress them, and never let them out. I guess, beacause of this inner clash, I wasn't able to use the free time I had to the fullest. Kinda stupid.
Next week is the last week of summer.
I found a job (FINALLY), and this Monday will be my first day. I'm really happy about it because it's an IT job, and more than that, I'll be a C/C++ programmer. That's right, a fscking C/C++ programmer. Just how awesome is that? xD I still can't believe it. I love C and C++ :3
I think I deserve it. I learned C by myself, 90% of all the code I've ever written is in C, and I love programming, since it's a creative job, and I love to create, to invent.
The day before yesterday, I went to my insitute, TSI, and transfered to the evening group. That means that I will work from 10:00 till 18:00 and then study from 18:00 to 22:00. Haha, that'll be fun xDD
Anyway, I haven't been programming much lately, but I wrote two small programs x) I like writing small programs, because it usually takes 1-2 days to finish them, so I don't loose my interest in them.
http://s010.info.tm/files/byte_stats.c
This program recursively crawls through directories you give her, and computes the grand total statistics of bytes in the files it met in those directories and subdirectories.
So tonight, I scanned the whole 80 Gigabyte (10 Gigabytes free ATM) hard drive of my home server (I'll remind you, it's a Pentium 100 Mhz, 32 MB RAM box, which runs OpenBSD). The program took ~11 hours to run. Here's the top ten. The columns from left to right are as follows: place, the character which represents this byte if it is printable or a dot if not, hexadecimal code of the byte, second counter (which counts how many times the first counter overflows), counter.
001: . (0x00) 0 2220014964
002: ÿ (0xff) 0 687490842
003: . (0x20) 0 487680280
004: . (0x01) 0 466844922
005: . (0x80) 0 362340537
006: 0 (0x30) 0 340576533
007: . (0x08) 0 340388464
008: . (0x02) 0 339690095
009: . (0x04) 0 336293423
010: . (0x0c) 0 320621545
As you can see, the undisputable winner is... the byte with a value of zero. Null. Emptiness. 2 Gigabytes of it.
This probably means that modern file formats (especially executable images) are not very efficient. If they were, the spread between various bytes would probably be smaller.
http://s010.info.tm/files/wml_page.c
This is a CGI program, which generates a file and directory listing of the current directory in the WML markup-language, that is in the form that mobile phone WAP browsers understand (actually, it's like this: the phone asks operator's gateway to fetch a WAP page, gateway fetches it, parses and turns it into a binary file, which is sent to your mobile phone and then interpreted on it).
You see, I have a very cheap and shitty mobile phone, it's slow, low on memory, has a weak browser and only supports MDIP 1.0 Java programs.
I wrote this prog for two reasons: 1) so I could read from my mobile phone in public transport with comfort; 2) so I could easily download files (like wallpapers with Namie :3) to my phone.
Before that, to read something, I had to use Opera Mini. Not only does it load for extremly long, it's a lot slower when browsing, compared to the built-in WAP browser, and it takes a hell lot of time to for example go to http://lib.ru/, find the appropriate section (science fiction ;), find the author you want and finally, find the story you want to read. And each click on a link takes ~15-20 seconds to load. This is unaccatable to a person with an ADHD, like me, who is used to receiving results RITE HEER, RITE NAO, like with Google.
I also made a simple shell script (http://s010.info.tm/wap/splitfile.sh) which splits a .txt file into several files, 5 KB each, and puts them into a separate directory. Seems like my phone can't handle .txt files that are bigger than 5 KB.
The WAP page is located here: http://s010.info.tm/wap/.
This is how it looks on my phone:
Btw, I computed that I read in Russian with an approximate speed of 500 chars/minute. In English - it's two-three times slower D:
Oh, and I also accidentally took a photo of my current wallpaper, accidentally uploaded it to Imageshack and accidentally posted it here:
I finally read the link that brackdiamon gave me: http://www.amuro-namie.com/forum/index.php?topic=1090.0.
A guy with a nickname of Federerexpress posted some chapters of the book "Yakusoku" translated to English. This book was written by Emiko Taira, Namie Amuro's mother, soon before her death, and was published in 1998. The book tells how Emiko raised her children, tells about their family, their life. But the book's main focus is Namie.
Namie's childhood wasn't very simple. When she was 4, Emiko divorced, and left her husband's house with her 3 children. At first, they lived in a basement, then, after some time, moved to a small apartment, which was still, like a tin can. Amuro's mother worked on two jobs and would come home at around 02:00 in the morning. They always were short on money.
I was raised in similar conditions, my parents divorced when I was 5, I think. During the nineties, we had a hard time. Mom worked all day long, but still, we were barely able to make ends meet. Thank God everything's fine now, and I can say that I live very good.
Here are some excerpts from the translation, Federerexpress's notes are in (round brackets), mine are (in italics):
When I think about it, when I divorced about 20 years ago and had 3 children to look after, nothing was going right, and I was lamenting day after day: ‘why do all these bad things have to accumulate?’ No matter how hard I worked, living would not become easier, and there were times when I thought ‘if only I didn’t have children…’ and I even thought about suicide.
During that time, the one thing that I depended on was fortune telling. It wasn’t as if I was turning to God only in times of trouble, I was simply filled with anxiety about my future, and wanted to something to lean on.
I had fortune tellers in town do things like read my palm, and strangely the results were all the same: ‘You are suffering right now but during your final years you will definitely get better. From your mid 40s to 50s, you will have good things happen to you.’ I had 5 fortune tellers read my future, and all 5 of them said that.
If that is the case, all I can do is believe. No, I did not tell my children about this, but I made this fortune telling my strength to live on. I thought ‘right now I may be suffering but things will get better later… I have to be patient until then’.
* * *
(In 1997, when Namie was 20 years old and was in her popularity's prime, she announced to everyone's shock that she is getting married to SAM, a guy from a band TRF, who were under 'avex trax' label too.)
Once in Tokyo my first priority was to teach Namie how to cook, which was her biggest weakness that she would definitely need to master from now on. However, once I entered her home I was shocked. Namie had bought many books on cooking, and had been studying very hard all by herself, and trying her best to make homemade meals for SAM.
Namie immediately started asking me for advice: ‘How long should I boil these for?’ ‘How strong should the flame be?’... From my perspective, it still looked like ‘mamagoto’ (a young child playing- pretending to be a mother by doing things like cooking and cleaning), but I felt a new kind of deep emotion, thinking ‘THAT Namie (the girl who had nothing feminine about her when she was a child) is standing in the kitchen, cooking…’
And more than anything, it felt as though she finally became my child again when I was teaching her how to cook in the kitchen. When she was working for the show business world all the time, it felt like she wasn’t my child, even though she is.
And now, I can naturally have mother-daughter conversations with her, just like the time when we were living in Okinawa. I cried tears of joy because it felt as though Namie was my child once more.
* * *
(Namie didn't have a wedding ceremony, she only completed the so called "nyuuseki" - entry into the family register.)
Perhaps she is satisfied with a simple marriage. It seems like SAM thinks the same way. Namie was able to attend my eldest daughter’s wedding during her busy schedule, and surprisingly she was not very excited. Her impression was not ‘how beautiful…!’ but ‘that kimono looks so heavy… it must be tiring’ In this way, the first thing she thought about how troublesome it must be rather than anything else. As you can see, I think she does not have any interest in weddings.
* * *
Then again, I was not able to take Namie to my workplace. Namie’s only impression of me is someone who ‘works hard all day and all night’. She did not complain about it one bit, but I’m sure she would’ve felt the loneliness of having a mother who would only return home at midnight. I think it’s because she’s experienced something like this, that she has a strong will not to let the same thing happen to her own child.
* * *
My eldest daughter has 3 children right now, but all of their clothes are hand-me-downs (from Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary: a piece of clothing which someone has given to a younger relative or friend because they no longer want it).
Because Namie has been observing her elder sister's children doing this, she has said 'I'll just have the hand-me-downs from her place. All the nappies and baby clothes,'.
Actually my eldest daughter's first child is wearing things like a T-shirt that Namie used to wear, so it seems that my children do not need to have money spent on them at all.
* * *
The birth of Namie
Namie was born on the 20th of September, 1977. It was an easy delivery and everything went as expected. She was a big baby weighing in at 3980g. It’s often said: ‘give birth to a small child and raise her big’, but Namie was the complete opposite. Her siblings were small but Namie was different. However, she was healthy at the time so I didn’t need to worry about it at all.
I named her straight away, too. A little before her birth, in July or August, I became engrossed in a TV soap opera. I think it was a special program on NHK (an educational channel), where Reiko Ohara played the protagonist, and her character’s partner was played by Toshio Kurosawa. The story was about a heroine called ‘Namie’ who was played by Reiko Ohara, and she would be the victim of bullying and go through difficult times, yet live strong. The general plot was very similar to ‘Oshin’ (famous soap opera).
I am not really the kind of person who becomes absorbed in soap operas, but I became hooked on this one and was deeply moved. And so before the baby would be born, I had decided: ‘if it’s a girl, I will name her Namie’. I believed that if I gave her this name, she would endure any sort of hardship and suffering…
When I told Namie of how I came up with her name, she scolded me and said ‘You didn’t give it a serious thought at all, did you,’ but in the end, it might’ve been good that I gave her that name. This is because I thought once she would enter show business, they would give her a stage name, but her manager said ‘This is a good name. It’s well balanced and easy to say’, and it became her stage name just as it is.
* * *
By the way... Namie's dark skin is kind of like a trademark, but actually, her brother and sister have fair skin. I also have the charasteristics of being 'half (European)' and have white skin. Namie is the only one who had dark skin.
When she was young, Namie was worried about the darkness of her skin and questioned at times: "why do I have different colour skin to (my) brother and sister?" Then, my eldest son would tease her and say things like: "'You're a black person's kid"...
The moment Namie was born, I thought she looked like my mother; that is, her grandmother, but as she grew I started to think: "she doesn't look like any of us". At our place we all call Namie a 'mutation'. (ROFL.)
* * *
Separating as if we were fleeing at night
(This chapter describes Namie's childhood so I'm posting it fully.)
Divorce is the spouses' problem. However, for a child, losing the father is a big deal, and they have to worry about their life from then on. When I made up my decision to divorce, there was still a worry in the back of my mind. Namie was only 4 so that was okay, but my eldest daughter and son were old enough to understand what ‘divorce’ meant. I kept confirming with them:
‘If I separate with dad, you won’t be able to enjoy the luxurious life you’re having at the moment, and I won’t be able to ask you what you want me to buy, or what you want to eat. Is that all right?'
If either of my siblings objected against it, I may not have been able to divorce. However, my eldest son replied with conviction: ‘That’s fine. Let’s just get out of here’. It seemed like my eldest daughter had the same opinion. Since that was the case, the earlier we acted, the better. It wasn’t a divorce after negotiation- we left home as if we were fleeing. On Saturday afternoon, I waited for my kids to come home from school and then got on a taxi and left home, without taking any household belongings, except our own clothes. However, thinking it would be problematic for the children not to have a study desk, we carried out just 2 small desks. I also rented a room in advance. I thought it would be unfair for the children to change schools just because of moving houses, so I rented a basement from a photographer whom I knew, which was in the same school area. It was about a 10-minute drive by car, and the rate was 5000 yen (approx $50US). It was a windowless 6 jyou (unit of measurement for size of rooms in Japan... I am told that one jyou is approximately 3 by 6 feet or 90cm by 180cm) room that was like a cellar. Even if it was this horrible, leaving home and separating was the first thing we had to do.
It was May. In Okinawa, it was already hot as if it were summer. Since we left home without being able to take all the things we wanted, the thing that gave us the most problems was not having a fridge. In order to store things that melt or rot like butter and milk, a bowl with ice that I bought acted as a fridge. For baths we could go to public baths (public bath??!! yes, this is a traditional Japanese thing), and the laundry could be done by hand, but as for a television, even though I didn’t need it, I thought that the children would want to watch some programs, so a friend of mine talked to a electrical dealer in the neighbourhood for me, and rather than buying, we rented a black and white television for 2000 yen a month.
My eldest son and daughter would go to school from our emergency house, Namie would go to the day care centre, and I had to search for a night job. There was a snack bar opening near the place where we were living, and they were recruiting hostesses, and it was good fortune that they employed me immediately.
Our life in the cellar-like room ended after about a month. I won the raffle (or something similar…), which I had applied for at the multi-unit apartment managed by the municipality ever since I had begun thinking about the divorce (OK…basically they’re apartments owned by the local government that can be rented for cheap. But since they’re popular you have to send in a letter possibly with family details, reasons for wanting to live there etc. and they will select the ‘winners’, randomly or not I am not sure) Maybe they felt sorry for us because we were a fatherless family, but we won on our second try.
Sekiryou (not sure if I read it correctly...but it's a name) apartment, Section 30, room 303.
It was there where we began our life as a fatherless family. It was 4000 yen a day for a 4 ½ jyou kitchen, a 4 ½ jyou and 3 jyou room, and a shower. When moving in, it cost us about 12000 yen for the ‘thank you’ fee (what on earth?? Apparently a ‘thanks for letting us move in’ fee), and 3 months worth of security deposits (I think you get this money back if you don’t cause any damage to the room), but this money was lent to me by the owner of the snack bar, and a couple whom I knew from a long time ago, who owned a rice cracker shop, became my guarantor.
Even though it was much better than the cellar room, it was too cramped for a fatherless family of 4. I made the 3 jyou room the children’s room and put the desks in there, and the 4 jyou room was the living room and bedroom.
When we sleep, it is like a war. It’s 4 ½ jyou so we can somehow lay down 3 futons (Japanese bedding) but even that is tough, and because there are 4 of us sharing 3 futons, we are in a situation where we can’t even move around in our sleep.
It’s next to the kitchen so when we sleep, we position ourselves in order of who sleeps first- with the first person on the very end.
I come home from my night shift at around 2 o’clock in the morning. The children will be already sleeping. Normally Namie is the one who sleeps first and is at the very end, next is my eldest daughter, then my eldest son.
I can only lie down next to my eldest son- the side closest to me, but he is deep in his sleep and has tossed and turned, leaving me with barely any room. Normally I would sleep with half of my body in the kitchen area. Even though it was like this, we were never gloomy. Our family was bright. When we wanted to laugh we could do so together, and when we wanted to cry, we could do so together. It felt like we were able to live like a real family again.
During the day I was a carer at a daycare centre, and at night I was a hostess at a snack bar. I was frantic trying to raise my children, taking on completely opposite jobs day and night. I saved money little by little, and bought a tv, then a fridge, then a washing machine… It was after about 3 months that we were eventually able to have a human-like lifestyle. We resided in the apartment for 6 years, and my honest feeling is that it was tough.
Everyday was a repetition. I would wake up at 6 o’clock. I would prepare breakfast and wake up the children at 7 o’clock, let them eat, and leave for work at 7:30 to the daycare centre. During Namie’s nursery years I would take her out with me. However, I would take Namie to a different daycare centre. If we went to the same one, I would be worried about Namie, look at her all the time and treat her favourably to everyone else, and she would become spoilt.
For that reason, I would leave her at a daycare centre 20 minutes away, and then I would go to my own one for work.
I arrive at the day care centre when it’s past 8 o’clock. I then immediately phone home. It’s to check if my eldest son and daughter have gone to school. If they don’t answer the phone, it means they have left. On top of that, it’s to check if by any chance they have (accidentally) started a fire or something like that.
Namie’s day care centre is a city-approved one, and will only look after children until 5 o’clock in the afternoon. My one is a private day care centre and can look after childrenm until 7 o’clock, so with the permission of the principal, I go and pick up Namie when it nears 5 o’clock, and bring her back to my own daycare centre.
When my work at the day care centre ends at 7 o’clock, I take Namie and return home, and then it is time to prepare dinner. During this time the children take it in turns to have a bath. After dinner, I have my night job from 9pm. It is 2am when I return home. It is then that I can finally relax but if I take it too easy I will not be able to wake up the following day.
Not having anybody to greet you when you come home, and coming home into a dark room is a lonesome thing. The times when I am drunk, I would wake my children up and make them sit down, and mutter things at them. I was probably pouring out complaints. There were times when I would cry while speaking. There would even be times when I would lean against the wall while speaking and fall asleep…
The only time I can relax is on Sundays, and I spent most of the time sleeping. With this kind of lifestyle, I don’t have time to socialize with neighbours either. When I see the neighbourhood housewives gossiping, I thought ‘If I had time to do that I may as well sleep’. Because I didn’t meet up with the neighbours, I felt somewhat that they were looking at me coldly.
However, it wasn’t as if I was doing something wrong, so I didn’t hide anything, and just made sure not to do anything that would get them pointing their finger at me. In particular, no matter how sleepy I was, I made sure that I did the stairway cleaning that I was responsible for 2 times a month. It probably had something to do with the willpower coming from raising children all by myself.
* * *
During her primary school years, Namie was introverted. She was the kind of child who would hide behind me and become restless whenever somebody came into our house.
At school she was just a typical, shy child and did not stand out much at all. She had friends, but she would never do anything to stand out. She was the kind of child who, at the arts festival, would not assertively stand at the front and perform, but rather just played the role that was given to her as best she could. In other words, she was just an ordinary child.
* * *
For instance, in terms of clothing, she would mostly wear her sister’s hand-me-downs, and sometimes she would wear a mini skirt from the time when I was a student. So not only was she wearing her sister’s old clothing, but her mother’s, too… But Namie wore them without complaining about it one bit. It wouldn’t have been strange for her to act like a spoilt child sometimes, but not once did she ever say something like: ‘I want a skirt like this…’
Even though she has now become a celebrity, this outlook has basically not changed. She barely holds any interest in clothes or brands, and when she sometimes appeared on talk shows I could see her wearing her causal clothes, and it has not changed whatsoever. She does not spend money on clothes at all.
* * *
She’s that indifferent towards fashion. Sexiness was only secondary. Ease and comfort of wearing was her priority. That has not changed ever since she was a child. When I watch TV there are celebrities clad in things like Chanel from top to bottom, and I’m not saying it’s a good or bad thing, but to Namie, they are unnecessary and useless items.
And some more pics of Namie :3
(Namie appears on covers of magazines all the time, check out http://namienewsnetwork.blogspot.com/ for example ;)
I always let myself post in Russian eventually, and from there, I gradually stop writing in English at all. I hate that. how do i increased willpower?
I can't say this summer was very productive, it wasn't bad, but it could've been better. I don't know, I was in an apathetic mood and didn't really want to do anything. It's all summer's fault. I'm a geek but a human being too. Deep down in my heart, I probably wanted to, you know, have a summer like normal people do, go to beach, hang out somewhere, stuff like that. But I didn't. I could go to beach at least once, but didn't. I just ignored my desires, like I always do. I suppress them, and never let them out. I guess, beacause of this inner clash, I wasn't able to use the free time I had to the fullest. Kinda stupid.
Next week is the last week of summer.
I found a job (FINALLY), and this Monday will be my first day. I'm really happy about it because it's an IT job, and more than that, I'll be a C/C++ programmer. That's right, a fscking C/C++ programmer. Just how awesome is that? xD I still can't believe it. I love C and C++ :3
I think I deserve it. I learned C by myself, 90% of all the code I've ever written is in C, and I love programming, since it's a creative job, and I love to create, to invent.
The day before yesterday, I went to my insitute, TSI, and transfered to the evening group. That means that I will work from 10:00 till 18:00 and then study from 18:00 to 22:00. Haha, that'll be fun xDD
Anyway, I haven't been programming much lately, but I wrote two small programs x) I like writing small programs, because it usually takes 1-2 days to finish them, so I don't loose my interest in them.
http://s010.info.tm/files/byte_stats.c
This program recursively crawls through directories you give her, and computes the grand total statistics of bytes in the files it met in those directories and subdirectories.
So tonight, I scanned the whole 80 Gigabyte (10 Gigabytes free ATM) hard drive of my home server (I'll remind you, it's a Pentium 100 Mhz, 32 MB RAM box, which runs OpenBSD). The program took ~11 hours to run. Here's the top ten. The columns from left to right are as follows: place, the character which represents this byte if it is printable or a dot if not, hexadecimal code of the byte, second counter (which counts how many times the first counter overflows), counter.
001: . (0x00) 0 2220014964
002: ÿ (0xff) 0 687490842
003: . (0x20) 0 487680280
004: . (0x01) 0 466844922
005: . (0x80) 0 362340537
006: 0 (0x30) 0 340576533
007: . (0x08) 0 340388464
008: . (0x02) 0 339690095
009: . (0x04) 0 336293423
010: . (0x0c) 0 320621545
As you can see, the undisputable winner is... the byte with a value of zero. Null. Emptiness. 2 Gigabytes of it.
This probably means that modern file formats (especially executable images) are not very efficient. If they were, the spread between various bytes would probably be smaller.
http://s010.info.tm/files/wml_page.c
This is a CGI program, which generates a file and directory listing of the current directory in the WML markup-language, that is in the form that mobile phone WAP browsers understand (actually, it's like this: the phone asks operator's gateway to fetch a WAP page, gateway fetches it, parses and turns it into a binary file, which is sent to your mobile phone and then interpreted on it).
You see, I have a very cheap and shitty mobile phone, it's slow, low on memory, has a weak browser and only supports MDIP 1.0 Java programs.
I wrote this prog for two reasons: 1) so I could read from my mobile phone in public transport with comfort; 2) so I could easily download files (like wallpapers with Namie :3) to my phone.
Before that, to read something, I had to use Opera Mini. Not only does it load for extremly long, it's a lot slower when browsing, compared to the built-in WAP browser, and it takes a hell lot of time to for example go to http://lib.ru/, find the appropriate section (science fiction ;), find the author you want and finally, find the story you want to read. And each click on a link takes ~15-20 seconds to load. This is unaccatable to a person with an ADHD, like me, who is used to receiving results RITE HEER, RITE NAO, like with Google.
I also made a simple shell script (http://s010.info.tm/wap/splitfile.sh) which splits a .txt file into several files, 5 KB each, and puts them into a separate directory. Seems like my phone can't handle .txt files that are bigger than 5 KB.
The WAP page is located here: http://s010.info.tm/wap/.
This is how it looks on my phone:
Btw, I computed that I read in Russian with an approximate speed of 500 chars/minute. In English - it's two-three times slower D:
Oh, and I also accidentally took a photo of my current wallpaper, accidentally uploaded it to Imageshack and accidentally posted it here:
I finally read the link that brackdiamon gave me: http://www.amuro-namie.com/forum/index.php?topic=1090.0.
A guy with a nickname of Federerexpress posted some chapters of the book "Yakusoku" translated to English. This book was written by Emiko Taira, Namie Amuro's mother, soon before her death, and was published in 1998. The book tells how Emiko raised her children, tells about their family, their life. But the book's main focus is Namie.
Namie's childhood wasn't very simple. When she was 4, Emiko divorced, and left her husband's house with her 3 children. At first, they lived in a basement, then, after some time, moved to a small apartment, which was still, like a tin can. Amuro's mother worked on two jobs and would come home at around 02:00 in the morning. They always were short on money.
I was raised in similar conditions, my parents divorced when I was 5, I think. During the nineties, we had a hard time. Mom worked all day long, but still, we were barely able to make ends meet. Thank God everything's fine now, and I can say that I live very good.
Here are some excerpts from the translation, Federerexpress's notes are in (round brackets), mine are (in italics):
When I think about it, when I divorced about 20 years ago and had 3 children to look after, nothing was going right, and I was lamenting day after day: ‘why do all these bad things have to accumulate?’ No matter how hard I worked, living would not become easier, and there were times when I thought ‘if only I didn’t have children…’ and I even thought about suicide.
During that time, the one thing that I depended on was fortune telling. It wasn’t as if I was turning to God only in times of trouble, I was simply filled with anxiety about my future, and wanted to something to lean on.
I had fortune tellers in town do things like read my palm, and strangely the results were all the same: ‘You are suffering right now but during your final years you will definitely get better. From your mid 40s to 50s, you will have good things happen to you.’ I had 5 fortune tellers read my future, and all 5 of them said that.
If that is the case, all I can do is believe. No, I did not tell my children about this, but I made this fortune telling my strength to live on. I thought ‘right now I may be suffering but things will get better later… I have to be patient until then’.
* * *
(In 1997, when Namie was 20 years old and was in her popularity's prime, she announced to everyone's shock that she is getting married to SAM, a guy from a band TRF, who were under 'avex trax' label too.)
Once in Tokyo my first priority was to teach Namie how to cook, which was her biggest weakness that she would definitely need to master from now on. However, once I entered her home I was shocked. Namie had bought many books on cooking, and had been studying very hard all by herself, and trying her best to make homemade meals for SAM.
Namie immediately started asking me for advice: ‘How long should I boil these for?’ ‘How strong should the flame be?’... From my perspective, it still looked like ‘mamagoto’ (a young child playing- pretending to be a mother by doing things like cooking and cleaning), but I felt a new kind of deep emotion, thinking ‘THAT Namie (the girl who had nothing feminine about her when she was a child) is standing in the kitchen, cooking…’
And more than anything, it felt as though she finally became my child again when I was teaching her how to cook in the kitchen. When she was working for the show business world all the time, it felt like she wasn’t my child, even though she is.
And now, I can naturally have mother-daughter conversations with her, just like the time when we were living in Okinawa. I cried tears of joy because it felt as though Namie was my child once more.
* * *
(Namie didn't have a wedding ceremony, she only completed the so called "nyuuseki" - entry into the family register.)
Perhaps she is satisfied with a simple marriage. It seems like SAM thinks the same way. Namie was able to attend my eldest daughter’s wedding during her busy schedule, and surprisingly she was not very excited. Her impression was not ‘how beautiful…!’ but ‘that kimono looks so heavy… it must be tiring’ In this way, the first thing she thought about how troublesome it must be rather than anything else. As you can see, I think she does not have any interest in weddings.
* * *
Then again, I was not able to take Namie to my workplace. Namie’s only impression of me is someone who ‘works hard all day and all night’. She did not complain about it one bit, but I’m sure she would’ve felt the loneliness of having a mother who would only return home at midnight. I think it’s because she’s experienced something like this, that she has a strong will not to let the same thing happen to her own child.
* * *
My eldest daughter has 3 children right now, but all of their clothes are hand-me-downs (from Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary: a piece of clothing which someone has given to a younger relative or friend because they no longer want it).
Because Namie has been observing her elder sister's children doing this, she has said 'I'll just have the hand-me-downs from her place. All the nappies and baby clothes,'.
Actually my eldest daughter's first child is wearing things like a T-shirt that Namie used to wear, so it seems that my children do not need to have money spent on them at all.
* * *
The birth of Namie
Namie was born on the 20th of September, 1977. It was an easy delivery and everything went as expected. She was a big baby weighing in at 3980g. It’s often said: ‘give birth to a small child and raise her big’, but Namie was the complete opposite. Her siblings were small but Namie was different. However, she was healthy at the time so I didn’t need to worry about it at all.
I named her straight away, too. A little before her birth, in July or August, I became engrossed in a TV soap opera. I think it was a special program on NHK (an educational channel), where Reiko Ohara played the protagonist, and her character’s partner was played by Toshio Kurosawa. The story was about a heroine called ‘Namie’ who was played by Reiko Ohara, and she would be the victim of bullying and go through difficult times, yet live strong. The general plot was very similar to ‘Oshin’ (famous soap opera).
I am not really the kind of person who becomes absorbed in soap operas, but I became hooked on this one and was deeply moved. And so before the baby would be born, I had decided: ‘if it’s a girl, I will name her Namie’. I believed that if I gave her this name, she would endure any sort of hardship and suffering…
When I told Namie of how I came up with her name, she scolded me and said ‘You didn’t give it a serious thought at all, did you,’ but in the end, it might’ve been good that I gave her that name. This is because I thought once she would enter show business, they would give her a stage name, but her manager said ‘This is a good name. It’s well balanced and easy to say’, and it became her stage name just as it is.
* * *
By the way... Namie's dark skin is kind of like a trademark, but actually, her brother and sister have fair skin. I also have the charasteristics of being 'half (European)' and have white skin. Namie is the only one who had dark skin.
When she was young, Namie was worried about the darkness of her skin and questioned at times: "why do I have different colour skin to (my) brother and sister?" Then, my eldest son would tease her and say things like: "'You're a black person's kid"...
The moment Namie was born, I thought she looked like my mother; that is, her grandmother, but as she grew I started to think: "she doesn't look like any of us". At our place we all call Namie a 'mutation'. (ROFL.)
* * *
Separating as if we were fleeing at night
(This chapter describes Namie's childhood so I'm posting it fully.)
Divorce is the spouses' problem. However, for a child, losing the father is a big deal, and they have to worry about their life from then on. When I made up my decision to divorce, there was still a worry in the back of my mind. Namie was only 4 so that was okay, but my eldest daughter and son were old enough to understand what ‘divorce’ meant. I kept confirming with them:
‘If I separate with dad, you won’t be able to enjoy the luxurious life you’re having at the moment, and I won’t be able to ask you what you want me to buy, or what you want to eat. Is that all right?'
If either of my siblings objected against it, I may not have been able to divorce. However, my eldest son replied with conviction: ‘That’s fine. Let’s just get out of here’. It seemed like my eldest daughter had the same opinion. Since that was the case, the earlier we acted, the better. It wasn’t a divorce after negotiation- we left home as if we were fleeing. On Saturday afternoon, I waited for my kids to come home from school and then got on a taxi and left home, without taking any household belongings, except our own clothes. However, thinking it would be problematic for the children not to have a study desk, we carried out just 2 small desks. I also rented a room in advance. I thought it would be unfair for the children to change schools just because of moving houses, so I rented a basement from a photographer whom I knew, which was in the same school area. It was about a 10-minute drive by car, and the rate was 5000 yen (approx $50US). It was a windowless 6 jyou (unit of measurement for size of rooms in Japan... I am told that one jyou is approximately 3 by 6 feet or 90cm by 180cm) room that was like a cellar. Even if it was this horrible, leaving home and separating was the first thing we had to do.
It was May. In Okinawa, it was already hot as if it were summer. Since we left home without being able to take all the things we wanted, the thing that gave us the most problems was not having a fridge. In order to store things that melt or rot like butter and milk, a bowl with ice that I bought acted as a fridge. For baths we could go to public baths (public bath??!! yes, this is a traditional Japanese thing), and the laundry could be done by hand, but as for a television, even though I didn’t need it, I thought that the children would want to watch some programs, so a friend of mine talked to a electrical dealer in the neighbourhood for me, and rather than buying, we rented a black and white television for 2000 yen a month.
My eldest son and daughter would go to school from our emergency house, Namie would go to the day care centre, and I had to search for a night job. There was a snack bar opening near the place where we were living, and they were recruiting hostesses, and it was good fortune that they employed me immediately.
Our life in the cellar-like room ended after about a month. I won the raffle (or something similar…), which I had applied for at the multi-unit apartment managed by the municipality ever since I had begun thinking about the divorce (OK…basically they’re apartments owned by the local government that can be rented for cheap. But since they’re popular you have to send in a letter possibly with family details, reasons for wanting to live there etc. and they will select the ‘winners’, randomly or not I am not sure) Maybe they felt sorry for us because we were a fatherless family, but we won on our second try.
Sekiryou (not sure if I read it correctly...but it's a name) apartment, Section 30, room 303.
It was there where we began our life as a fatherless family. It was 4000 yen a day for a 4 ½ jyou kitchen, a 4 ½ jyou and 3 jyou room, and a shower. When moving in, it cost us about 12000 yen for the ‘thank you’ fee (what on earth?? Apparently a ‘thanks for letting us move in’ fee), and 3 months worth of security deposits (I think you get this money back if you don’t cause any damage to the room), but this money was lent to me by the owner of the snack bar, and a couple whom I knew from a long time ago, who owned a rice cracker shop, became my guarantor.
Even though it was much better than the cellar room, it was too cramped for a fatherless family of 4. I made the 3 jyou room the children’s room and put the desks in there, and the 4 jyou room was the living room and bedroom.
When we sleep, it is like a war. It’s 4 ½ jyou so we can somehow lay down 3 futons (Japanese bedding) but even that is tough, and because there are 4 of us sharing 3 futons, we are in a situation where we can’t even move around in our sleep.
It’s next to the kitchen so when we sleep, we position ourselves in order of who sleeps first- with the first person on the very end.
I come home from my night shift at around 2 o’clock in the morning. The children will be already sleeping. Normally Namie is the one who sleeps first and is at the very end, next is my eldest daughter, then my eldest son.
I can only lie down next to my eldest son- the side closest to me, but he is deep in his sleep and has tossed and turned, leaving me with barely any room. Normally I would sleep with half of my body in the kitchen area. Even though it was like this, we were never gloomy. Our family was bright. When we wanted to laugh we could do so together, and when we wanted to cry, we could do so together. It felt like we were able to live like a real family again.
During the day I was a carer at a daycare centre, and at night I was a hostess at a snack bar. I was frantic trying to raise my children, taking on completely opposite jobs day and night. I saved money little by little, and bought a tv, then a fridge, then a washing machine… It was after about 3 months that we were eventually able to have a human-like lifestyle. We resided in the apartment for 6 years, and my honest feeling is that it was tough.
Everyday was a repetition. I would wake up at 6 o’clock. I would prepare breakfast and wake up the children at 7 o’clock, let them eat, and leave for work at 7:30 to the daycare centre. During Namie’s nursery years I would take her out with me. However, I would take Namie to a different daycare centre. If we went to the same one, I would be worried about Namie, look at her all the time and treat her favourably to everyone else, and she would become spoilt.
For that reason, I would leave her at a daycare centre 20 minutes away, and then I would go to my own one for work.
I arrive at the day care centre when it’s past 8 o’clock. I then immediately phone home. It’s to check if my eldest son and daughter have gone to school. If they don’t answer the phone, it means they have left. On top of that, it’s to check if by any chance they have (accidentally) started a fire or something like that.
Namie’s day care centre is a city-approved one, and will only look after children until 5 o’clock in the afternoon. My one is a private day care centre and can look after childrenm until 7 o’clock, so with the permission of the principal, I go and pick up Namie when it nears 5 o’clock, and bring her back to my own daycare centre.
When my work at the day care centre ends at 7 o’clock, I take Namie and return home, and then it is time to prepare dinner. During this time the children take it in turns to have a bath. After dinner, I have my night job from 9pm. It is 2am when I return home. It is then that I can finally relax but if I take it too easy I will not be able to wake up the following day.
Not having anybody to greet you when you come home, and coming home into a dark room is a lonesome thing. The times when I am drunk, I would wake my children up and make them sit down, and mutter things at them. I was probably pouring out complaints. There were times when I would cry while speaking. There would even be times when I would lean against the wall while speaking and fall asleep…
The only time I can relax is on Sundays, and I spent most of the time sleeping. With this kind of lifestyle, I don’t have time to socialize with neighbours either. When I see the neighbourhood housewives gossiping, I thought ‘If I had time to do that I may as well sleep’. Because I didn’t meet up with the neighbours, I felt somewhat that they were looking at me coldly.
However, it wasn’t as if I was doing something wrong, so I didn’t hide anything, and just made sure not to do anything that would get them pointing their finger at me. In particular, no matter how sleepy I was, I made sure that I did the stairway cleaning that I was responsible for 2 times a month. It probably had something to do with the willpower coming from raising children all by myself.
* * *
During her primary school years, Namie was introverted. She was the kind of child who would hide behind me and become restless whenever somebody came into our house.
At school she was just a typical, shy child and did not stand out much at all. She had friends, but she would never do anything to stand out. She was the kind of child who, at the arts festival, would not assertively stand at the front and perform, but rather just played the role that was given to her as best she could. In other words, she was just an ordinary child.
* * *
For instance, in terms of clothing, she would mostly wear her sister’s hand-me-downs, and sometimes she would wear a mini skirt from the time when I was a student. So not only was she wearing her sister’s old clothing, but her mother’s, too… But Namie wore them without complaining about it one bit. It wouldn’t have been strange for her to act like a spoilt child sometimes, but not once did she ever say something like: ‘I want a skirt like this…’
Even though she has now become a celebrity, this outlook has basically not changed. She barely holds any interest in clothes or brands, and when she sometimes appeared on talk shows I could see her wearing her causal clothes, and it has not changed whatsoever. She does not spend money on clothes at all.
* * *
She’s that indifferent towards fashion. Sexiness was only secondary. Ease and comfort of wearing was her priority. That has not changed ever since she was a child. When I watch TV there are celebrities clad in things like Chanel from top to bottom, and I’m not saying it’s a good or bad thing, but to Namie, they are unnecessary and useless items.
And some more pics of Namie :3
(Namie appears on covers of magazines all the time, check out http://namienewsnetwork.blogspot.com/ for example ;)
