In Japan, children often call their grandmother and grandfather Baba and Jiji respectively. It is what I called my grandparents when I first learned how to speak and is what I still call them twenty years later. For most of my life, I grew up slightly fearing my Baba and Jiji because of the inevitable cultural gap that developed when I left Tokyo at the age of 4 for the United States, where I’ve been living ever since.
When I was younger, there was a common episode in my household that involved my mother chasing me around the house so that she could force me to talk on the phone with Baba and Jiji, partnered with the dreaded phrase: “Try and talk in Japanese.”
I tried; and I often cried afterwards, mostly out of frustration at my own incompetence, especially that searing heat of humiliation when I had to eventually switch to English. But looking back on it, now I want to cry for a different reason. I want to cry because of the long, awkward silences and my own lack of effort and interest in the conversation. I was so caught up in being ashamed of my inability to speak and understand Japanese fluently that I never once seemed to realize that my grandparents did not care whether I could speak their language or not. They just wanted to talk to me, in any way that they could.
Family vacations involved similar episodes; my siblings and I could never relax in Japan like we could with our American grandparents. We tensed up whenever we were addressed to in Japanese. We spent our days gallivanting around Tokyo until we returned to our grandparents’ house and took their hot meals and warm beds for granted. My younger self never quite understood why Baba and Jiji rarely showered us with kisses or bestowed us with gifts like my American grandparents did, and it added to my discomfort with my Japanese heritage.
As I’ve grown older, however, the past has become more and more nostalgic to me, particularly my life in Tokyo before I left for America. The more I reflected on my life there, the more I realized just how much Baba and Jiji have done for me.
Baba and Jiji were the first ones to see me when I was born, and they were the ones who watched me when my parents couldn’t be there. Baba is the one who taught me how to draw, the one who sat me on her lap so I could play the piano with her, and the one who took me to the park to play because I had no friends. Jiji is the one who took me on his morning strolls and bought me ice cream afterwards because I was hot, and the one who taught me how to pray at shrine properly. They are the ones who sent me handmade birthday cards and overcame their fear of flying to see my family in America, and they are the ones who were waiting for me when I arrived at the Narita Airport this past August to start my year as an exchange student at Waseda.
They are also the ones who patiently listen to me as I speak in totally butchered Japanese, and who go to all the trouble of looking one word up in their Japanese-English dictionary whenever I don’t understand something. Twenty years later means they’re twenty years older, but that doesn’t stop them from putting their own schedules and hardships aside just to make sure I’m okay.
In Japanese, there is no proper equivalent to the phrase “I love you,” and it is something that has always bothered me. If you can’t say, “I love you,” how can you prove it to someone? Well, there is no amount of kisses or gifts or “I love you”s that can match Baba and Jiji’s unconditional love for me. They have taught me more than anyone else that love can be expressed in numerous ways, and it is silly to try to compare these expressions of love with one another. Love doesn’t have a language. I know my Jiji loves me when he pulls out an entire futon while I’m lying on the living room floor, because he believes the bare floor is too cold; and I know my Baba loves me when she still reaches for my hand on the subway, as if I’m still the little girl born in Tokyo.
I returned to Japan because I wanted to come home. But Japan has never entirely felt like home, not when I was raised in another country for the last sixteen years of my life. What really gives me a sense of home is not Japan itself, but the two smiling faces who greeted me into this world twenty years ago and at the airport one month ago. Without Baba and Jiji, I don’t think I could have ever considered Japan to be a home in the first place. They are my home.
So love may not need a language, but I’ll say it here anyways: Baba, Jiji, I love you. Hopefully this year in Japan is more than enough to make up for lost time.
Love,
Christine
Photos by Christine Inzer