14. Aftermath, Oyaji's Health and Moving Again.

I don't recall exactly when it happened but while I was on unemployment, things at home were rather tough for all of us and we got a phone call one evening that my wife's father was taken to the hospital.  He has some type of infection and things were pretty rough for him.  He was in the hospital for nearly one month and while he probably would have been alright, looking back at it now, the decision was made that we would move back into my wife's house and help take care of Oyaji.  He was in his late 60's and for everyone's peace of mind it would be better off having someone at home to take help take care of him.

You see Ba-chan was not the type of person who took care of others.  She was the farthest thing from what people might have as an image of a "typical" Japanese or Okinawan wife.  She did what she wanted to do, day in and day out.  She rarely cooked or did anything to take care of her husband or the house. So because he had been ill she did not want to have to do anything to take care of him.  I often wondered aloud to my wife how they managed to get married and stay together for so many years.  She agreed too and knew little about how they got together.

As I previously mentioned both of them lost previous spouses, both due to illness, and at the time a single mother here didnt stay single for very long.  I have heard some pretty strange tales of women who lost their husbands having a number of children by different fathers.  That is not a joke either.  But it was the "way" things were culturally in some parts of Okinawa.  It wasn't something openly talked about either, but people have a way of telling stories that with a bit of imagination the puzzle parts fit together.

Anyway, they both were from the same small village in northern Okinawa, where the family grave still exists today.  My wife's father was conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army when he was 15 or 16 and forced to go to Manchuria which is a part of modern day China.  He was eventually made a P.O.W. of the Soviet Union and nearly died of malaria during captivity.  He retold a number of stories later in life about his experiences to my daughter and listening to the horrors that he experienced made me understand more and more about the Okinawan people's desires for peace.

He came back from the war and was back with his first wife who died of illness around 1952 or so, and he was put into an arranged marriage with Ba-chan after her first husband died of illness too.  They both lost other siblings during the war as well.

They were an odd couple to say the least.

So we moved home.  I still had no work and my wife's brother at the time was living in a separate condo in another part of Okinawa and had no desire to move back in to take care of his Mom and Dad.  So since we were in a bind at the time, it was mutually beneficial that we move back.

Our daughter was going to start kindergarten and we enrolled her in the local kindergarten and elementary school.  Around this time as well my wife's brother decided to open a coffee company.  He had worked for a Japanese coffee distributor for a number of years and wanted to open his own business, so he started a small coffee sales and distributorship with the startup money coming from Oyaji.

Oyaji's health improved and while he was the figure head president of the company everyone in the family with the exception of Ba-chan got involved in helping to start the company up.  He ran the business out of a small coffee shop and my wife and I both assisted for a number of months with the running of the coffee shop and deliveries and sales of the company.  However this was not a stable income and with a new addition to "our" family soon to come I needed to find a more stable job.