Fifteen years ago, my husband Peter and I did something really adventurous. We took our eight-month-old baby with us to live in Japan. We had several suitcases of clothes, a portable baby bed, and a diaper bag. I had a job – the same one I thought I had left for good two years earlier – and all three of us had a one-year Japanese visa. Although Peter and I had both lived in Japan before and were familiar with the culture and language, we had no place to live and only a vague idea what it would be like to bring up a child there. On the plane, I anxiously browsed through my English-Japanese dictionary: I’d studied the language for over ten years, but didn’t know how to say things like diaper rash, colic and whooping cough.

   When we got off the plane that January day, Peter and I hadn’t slept more than five consecutive hours in over two weeks.  Naïve as it sounds, I remember thinking, ‘Well, now we’re over the hardest part.’ Somehow, we thought that a thirteen-hour flight with a fractious eight-month-old who would not fall asleep until ten minutes before the plane was due to land was as tough as it was going to get. In retrospect, if we’d known how hard it would be, I’m not sure we’d have had the courage to make the move. In a way, our taking our baby to Japan was a lot like having a baby in the first place: we had no idea how hard it would be, so we just upped and did it.

   For the first two months, we stayed with long-suffering friends who were fortunate enough to be renting a house that was palatial by Japanese standards in that it had four bedrooms. Every morning, our friends would reassure us that they had not heard our baby crying the night before, and we would pray that they were telling the truth. I worked full-time during the week and went house-hunting on the weekends while Peter stayed home with Hannah.  We were so desperate to find a place of our own and leave our friends in peace that I sometimes even went house-hunting after work. All three of us suffered from jet lag for an inordinately long period of time.

   I remember that period now as a long series of sleepless nights and busy days, diapers to change and bottles to warm. I caught one cold after another, picking them up on the packed trains I spent two and a half hours on every day. Inevitably, I passed these colds on to Peter and Hannah. Every day began early, in the grim, bitter cold of 5:30 a.m., and finished late, with laundry to fold, a baby to placate, and a discussion of what we would do if we could not find a place to live. Since Peter did not speak enough Japanese to be able to go house-hunting on his own, finding a place for us to live was up to me. I am a strong person, but I have never been able to cultivate a stiff upper lip, and I whined and moaned endlessly.  There were times I felt as though I were in some private hell, on a never-ending tour of what felt like every estate agent on the Kanto plain.

   For various complicated reasons, no one wanted us as tenants. This was partly because we were foreign and partly because we had a young baby, but mainly because my company, though respected and influential, did not offer prospective landlords a rental guarantee. Most Japanese companies who employ foreign workers offer this, but since my company only employed a tiny non-Japanese staff, they had never managed to adopt this useful custom.  I would get so dispirited going into smoke-filled office after smoke-filled office and repeating the same tired litany:  I’m looking for a house or a large apartment to rent; no it isn’t just for myself, I have a family.  

   It was generally the same every time. I would walk into the estate agent’s office and the agent – usually a man – would half rise from his chair, a look of great irritation, astonishment, or disgust on his face. I would then put on my most reasonable, dependable, congenial face and launch straight into Japanese, in order to reassure him: ‘I’m looking for a place that is big enough for three people….’  Usually this opening would achieve the desired result and the agent, would realize that I could communicate after a fashion and thus be interested in doing business with me. But there were enough times that it did not work – when the man would look down at his papers and ignore me, or wave me away imperiously, or say to me quite rudely ‘No foreigners.’ And even if that happened only one time out of fifteen, it felt like too often.

  Some agents got so used to me coming in to see them that they would simply hand me the large book they kept with the particulars of properties up for rent and let me browse through it on my own.  This was very useful because I could then save myself a lot of headaches by finding out straight away whether foreigners were welcome to apply. Although most of the ‘need not applies’ were for people with pets, I was amazed at the out-and-out racism and sexism one encountered in these books – things they could never have gotten away with in America. ‘No Chinese,’ some brazenly stipulated.  Or ‘Asians accepted, but no Caucasians or black people.’  ‘People employed in the pub trade need not apply,’ read several. ‘No single women,’ was common, too, but ‘No single men’ was even more common. Some were intriguingly specific:  ‘Koreans and Philippinos need not apply. Chinese or Europeans accepted if married to Japanese.’ Some were Euro-centric ‘British or Germans okay, no Americans.’ And some were just as obnoxiously pro-American: 'Americans okay, no Asians.'  All of them made me downright homesick for political correctness and the American Civil Liberties Union.

   Even if the agent was polite and helpful and our foreignness was not an issue, however, there was no getting around that lack of an employer’s guarantee. None of the nicer places would accept a foreign tenant without that guarantee, so a foreign family of three really had no chance at all -- especially when one of those three was a ten-month-old baby. In retrospect, that was probably a good thing. It was probably better that the house we finally ended up with was a dilapidated, battered-up old place with a rusty corrugated tin fence around one side and a leaky little lean-to for the washing machine with a gravel floor and plastic roof. We didn’t have to worry that our baby would poke her fingers into the brand-new rice-paper screens (they had holes in them already), or that she would mark up the wooden floors (well pocked with holes and stained with cigarette burns).  The walls were a mess of crumbling plaster, the fusuma sliding doors were probably older than we were, and the glass windows rattled threateningly in their frames in even the tiniest breeze.  

   I remember seeing an ad in one of the magazines I used to read when I was pregnant. It showed a well-dressed, well-groomed young mother in smart business suit, on her way somewhere with both baby and portable baby bed. The baby was balanced on one hip, and she was carrying the bed on the other side, like it weighed no more than a sack of oranges. She was smiling and looked like she’d had enough sleep for the past five years. In short, she had it all. Somehow, in my naïve and pre-enlightened state, this is what I pictured I might look like when I knew we would be coming back to Japan so that I could pursue my pre-marriage career. I, too, would ‘have it all.’ Gradually during those first few miserable months, I came to realize that ‘having it all’ was a pretty ambiguous term. I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me before that there could be more than one interpretation.  

   It was not that I regretted becoming a mother. Sure, my waist had thickened, I never managed to talk to my husband for more than ten consecutive minutes in any one day, my nerves were shot, and I was seriously sleep deprived. But I was also head over heels in love with my baby and I knew that having her was worth anything. What I did not want was the full-time job, the responsibility of finding us a place to live, and the role of family spokesperson.

   Peter was having problems of his own. He too was delighted with parenthood, but being a house husband, for him, was definitely not enough. I realized just how un-fulfilled he was in his new role when I came home from work one day and found him enthusing over a new brand of fruit jelly. ‘It’s kiwi fruit flavored!’ he exclaimed, a little manically. ‘New on the market, too – it wasn’t there yesterday!’ All I could do was stare at him, dumbfounded. This man had a master’s degree from a prestigious university. He had trained teachers and published articles in scholarly journals. Not only did he know what phonotactics and nonparametric statistics meant, he could bore your socks off about them for hours on end. I could hardly understand parts of his dissertation and yet here he was raving to me about kiwi-flavoured fruit jellies. Throughout my pregnancy I had vowed that one of us would stay home and look after our baby, that we weren’t having a baby just so we could leave her with a stranger to care for. I had to work – our visas depended upon my job. And yet here was my poor husband who clearly needed a life of his own. There was no doubt that he could find a job if he looked for one, but who would look after our baby? Something had to give.

   On the way to the station every morning, I passed the Midori Nursery School. At 7:30 in the morning it was always bustling with parents and children, people getting off bicycles and mopeds, out of cars, toting sleeping babies in prams, pouches and baby-carriers and leading toddlers by the hand. One day, Peter and I got up the courage to stop by and ask how one went about enrolling one’s offspring.

   ‘I can’t do this,’ I told him on our way there, baby in arms. ‘She’ll miss us.’ This was really no more than wishful thinking on my part; Hannah was never the sort of baby who minded being left with others. In fact, on the rare occasions when we had hired a babysitter, we always noticed how happy Hannah was to see the back of us.  Still, I hated to think of her being away from us all day when she was barely ten months old.

   The nursery school was a noisy, busy place, filled with mothers and fathers dropping off their children, from tiny infants to boisterous six-year-olds. We found the head teacher and mentioned that we were interested in enrolling our baby. Clearly Hannah was not too young: we saw several parents dropping off babies who looked like they had only just learned to sit upright.

    The head teacher, a bespectacled woman in her early sixties, looked at us skeptically. ‘There aren’t any other foreign children here,’ she said. My husband and I smiled. ‘I don’t think she’ll notice,’ I told her. 'She’s actually a very sociable baby.’  The head teacher pursed her lips and frowned. ‘None of us speak English, you know.’ Again, I smiled. ‘Neither does Hannah.’  The head teacher looked down at Hannah, who had been studying her closely as we talked. ‘How old is she?’ she asked. ‘Ten months.’  ‘Well, let’s see if she’ll come to me. You can’t expect her to, you know; a lot of babies this age kick up the greatest fuss when their parents try to get them to go to strangers –’  And the head teacher held her arms out to Hannah.

    Hannah immediately lurched out of my husband’s arms in her eagerness to make the head teacher’s acquaintance. The head teacher exclaimed in surprise as Hannah almost sprang into her arms and smiled up at her engagingly. And all of a sudden the head teacher’s glasses were off her face and in Hannah’s sticky little hands. ‘Oh!’ exclaimed the teacher, trying to get her glasses back. ‘You’re right. She really is a sociable baby!’  My husband and I breathed a sigh of relief. Now he could finally look for a job. And the Midori Nursery School had just acquired their first Caucasian pupil.