Excitement overwhelms me as I alight from the car with a womanly figure waiting for us at the beautiful house’s doorstep. This is the first time I see my aunt Emma as she has been staying in Japan after marrying her Japanese husband, Ken. However, no one would have expected this trip to be my family’s first intercultural conflict, with a kinship at stake!
Being superstitious, my mother loves to read the horoscope book and realizes that my aunt‘s bed must be positioned such that her head will face the north to attract prosperity. Without asking for permission, my mother shifts the bed out of kind intentions. After that, my family goes out to visit some tourist attraction areas till late night.
As we return joyously from the shopping and sightseeing, my mother and I notice my aunt alone in the living room crying. My mother approaches my aunt and asks her what has happened, but my aunt just keeps on weeping bitterly. Without a word, my mother furiously storms into my aunt’s room and confronts Ken. She demands that he apologizes to my aunt, without seeking for the cause of the misunderstanding beforehand. My mother’s bad temper and lousy emotional management have gotten the better of her. Soon, a heated argument emerges and things turn ugly for both families as profanities are exchanged. Weirdly, the argument sounds rather entertaining as Ken scolds in Japanese while my mother shouts in her dialect. Nonetheless, the trip ends prematurely in dismay and my aunt never contact us ever since.
It takes my mother months before she realizes what has triggered Ken’s madness. One day, my mother receives a letter from her sister Emma out of the blue. When she starts reading it, her face immediately turns red as tomato in embarrassment. My mother has learnt that the Japanese, in their customary acts, will lay dead bodies with the heads facing the north! Therefore, what my mother has done is a taboo and no wonder Ken is offended by my mother’s actions. It seems as though my mother is hoping early deaths for both my aunt Emma and her husband Ken.
Better late than never, my mother has admitted that this matter is her fault and decides to eradicate this bad blood between the two families. It takes years to resolve this bad conflict completely before we go back to my aunt’s place again. This time round, we have learnt about Japan’s dos and don’ts, while my mother has taken up anger management courses.
6 days ago
