Jake’s Japan

Wow,  I haven’t updated this blog in ages.  I have a good excuse, though:  fatherhood!  Yes, right now my little 3-week-old is dead asleep next to her equally tired mother on the futon in the next room, fattening up little by  little, and getting cuter every day.  It’s been a hectic month or so, and juggling work, a very pregnant wife, then childbirth and a newborn daughter has taken up most of my time.  Peaceful moments like this visit from time to time, though, so I should be able to get this blog up and running again.

No amount of words can ever do justice to what it feels like to be the father of a beautiful little boy or girl.  Many people keep asking me “what it’s like”, but really, there’s nothing I can say in response to that.  It’s… everything, if that makes any sense.  One interesting feeling continues to wash over me each time I rest my gaze on my daughter, though, and that is this inexplicable sense that my entire life up had always, unbeknown to me, been leading up to this point.  Also, all my favorite music that I have listened to all my life seems to take on some new, indescribable, deeper meaning when I listen to it while holding my daughter in my arms.  Beyond that, I am utterly incapable of accurately describing the feeling, so I’ll stop there.

Things have been tough, too, though.  Our daughter actually cries surprisingly little, and only wakes up twice at night for feeding, so things haven’t been tough in that regard.  The bureaucracy involved in international marriages and the children born therefrom is what is frustrating.  To make a long story (rant) short, my wife and I kept our own names upon getting married, but it turns out that Japanese law dictates our daughter will take on my wife’s last name, not mine, by default.  The way around this is for my wife to legally change her name to mine at family court, which she is off to do tomorrow, but it highlights the incredibly discriminatory nature of the Japanese koseki system (the system of family registry).  The most joyful event thus far in my life thus unfortunately run parallel to the worst experience I have had so far in Japan, and this may prove to be the last straw; the idea of moving back to the US has sprung up in me again, stronger than ever.  We’ll see how things pan out.

In the meantime, my wife now has the pleasure of changing her legal name, and then changing her name on every single official form, from cell phone contracts to bank accounts to credit cards to passports.  The upside is that her going out to do all that stuff gives me an excuse to take time off work and hang out with my daughter.  Right now, there’s not much else I’d rather be doing.