We’re Pregnant and I Can’t Speak Japanese. William Hay

bombing of the B-29s almost a decade earlier. My father was a thirsty customer on leave from his duties as a Regimental Policeman stationed in Japan via a stint in Korea.

      With his commitment to active duty behind him and the Korean conflict settled to some extent, my father was ordered to return to home. Again, he left for Australia with another promise from lady to join him once he was settled, but this time it was from his wife. Practically a year after they were married in Japan, my mother arrived in Sydney. It was 1955, prosperous times for Australians and the start of a new life for both of them. They would grow old, just the two of them, through long, hot, southern hemisphere summers and eventually die of sun cancer, especially my father with his pasty Scots complexion.

      But suddenly my mother started to feel sick.

      Every morning, she woke up feeling nauseous and the sight of certain food turned her stomach. My father drew the only possible conclusion: my mother was dying of exposure to radiation. His reasoning was that on 6 August 1945, my mother was standing across a relatively narrow stretch of the Japan Inland Sea when the Enola Gay dropped its nuclear payload on Hiroshima. Eleven years later, on a cold but cloudless winter’s morning in Sydney, the doctor pronounced my mother wasn’t dying, but pregnant with my sister. My father went numb. He was supposed to be sterile, and had been able to explain his childless marriage by simply saying: war injury. Others would respectfully change the topic of conversation; the guy’s a war hero.

      My God, Doc,I can’t afford to have a kid! he blurted out.

      Somehow, it wasn’t quite the reaction the doctor expected from a man who thought he couldn’t have children, but now knew he could. This was post-war, baby boom Australia; everyone wanted to have kids.

      Three years later, my father had a legitimate reason not to be able to afford any more children. He had just scraped together the deposit for a home in a new subdivision and was shackled to a 20-year mortgage which bit large chunks out of his paltry army wage. But, before he could make a fool of himself again in front of the very same doctor, he was informed my mother definitely didn’t have radiation sickness and was most definitely pregnant again, with me.

      Prodigal son

      The year was 1972. It was time, as the Whitlam Labor Government successfully campaigned, for Australia to get out of the Vietnam War and to give equal pay and rights to women in the workplace and society. It was time to make universities and education free for all Australians so that the size of our intelligence and not our parents’ wallets allowed us to go as far as we wished with our education. It was time to give land rights to indigenous Australians after generations of ignorance and arrogance towards their entitlements, as well as introduce a universal health care system, which was fair and equitable to all Australians. It was time to embrace the future by relearning that water froze at zero degrees and boiled at 100 degrees Celsius instead of 32 and 212 degrees Fahrenheit, and it was time to stop doing our sums with paper and pencil and to start using a pocket calculator.

      It was my time.

      I was twelve years old in my last year of primary school. I was the School Captain, captain of the rugby league and cricket teams, President of the School Council and captain of my sporting house, Macquarie. I was destined to achieve greatness as a leader of the community or as a captain of industry. I would enter Hurlstone Agricultural High School, a selective boys’ school across the train line from where I lived and exploit the potential locked inside my pre-pubescent mind and body. Academically, I would be accepted to all of the universities in the country and on the sporting field I would play in the school’s First XV Rugby Team and go onto national representative honours.

      I just had to cruise through my last year in primary school, as I wasn’t required to sit the entrance examination to Hurlstone, and voila. Each year, a certain number of places were allocated to our school, because we were in the same town and loosely connected. It fluctuated from year to year, but seldom was it was lower than four. I always finished the year in either first or second place in the class, so the thought of not going to Hurlstone had never entered my or my parents’ heads. It was my destiny. My mother had already altered my Hurlstone school blazer, which had been handed down from a family friend whose son was in his fourth year. Then for the first time ever only two places were offered to the Year 6 boys at our school.

      I placed third.

      I never again reached those lofty heights as I did as a twelve-year-old. High school was a blur of long hair, rock and roll, and trying to impress girls at my co-educational school instead of the examiners of the Higher School Certificate Examinations, who would determine my academic future. Then there was the fog of dropping out of colleges and universities; three in a matter of three years. Somehow, I thought I should be an accountant to honour a line my father had said about becoming an accountant, because accountants always got work. He failed to mention how boring accounting classes could be.

      I never became an accountant or anything closely resembling a professional person. I just worked jobs, which were low on salary and satisfaction. At twenty-six, I finally completed a degree in communication, which was a relatively new discipline at the time, and should have pursued a career in the media or as a public servant with the Department of Communications in Canberra. Instead, I ended up teaching communication at technical colleges to apprentice tradespeople and trainee office workers, students who needed to develop their communication skills, but couldn’t see its worth over typing or bricklaying practicals.

      In one of my stints with the Labour Market Programs Department, which re-trained long-term unemployed people, I stumbled across a job advertisement for me rather the students I was trying to place with local panel beating shops. The advertisement asked if I had a passport, a degree, and a yearning to spend a year teaching English in Japan. It wasn’t necessarily a yearning, but the idea of working abroad sounded interesting, so I bought a plane ticket.

      That was in another century, a fading memory, a time when Prince sang about how he wanted to party in 1999 like it was the end of the world. The changing of millenniums wasn’t such a big deal for me. My computer, like all computers around the world, wasn’t affected by the Year 2000 Bug, and the new millennium party wasn’t so different than any other New Year’s Eve party. At 12.05am, it started to wind down and people wanted to go home. That, too, is fading from my memory as I pass my own milestone, a decade of living on and off in Japan, but only admit to being here eight because I don’t speak Japanese. Somehow, not being able to speak the language after eight years; sounds better than ten years.

      It’s crazy in more ways than you can imagine. Half of my genetic composition says I should speak Japanese. This is the homeland of my mother who taught my sister and me to count and write to ten in Japanese on one rainy morning during the school holidays. Half of my B.A. in Communication also says I should speak Japanese. My minor in Japanese forced me to learn most of the grammatical patterns and enough kanji compounds (Japanese characters) to read a Japanese newspaper. It might have taken me two days to complete reading the front page story with a kanji dictionary, but I was somewhat literate in Japanese. Then there was my year of Japanese lessons in Tokyo with a real life Japanese sensei, who immersed me in the language. My wife is Japanese. I live in Japan and I am in contact with the language almost every minute of my waking hours.

      I should speak Japanese, but somehow I squandered all the advantages and opportunities I had to pick up the language, by being lazy, unmotivated, dispassionate, and not smart enough to realize my life could be much easier speaking the language of the country which I chose for my residency. Most of what I learned on those aborted attempts is forgotten.

      Maybe, I never really flourished as a Japanese speaker because of this cock-eyed notion of pride. In English, I am a competent speaker with a well developed vocabulary. But, in Japanese, even with my years of attending classes and with my barely passing grades, I have never progressed beyond sounding like someone who had been dropped on their head at birth and stopped developing intellectually beyond that of a six-year-old. It is difficult to sound stupid all the time. Or maybe, I am as my mother once said to me when she called after I had been in Japan for a few years. She asked if I could speak Japanese and when my answer was no, she fired back, You’re stupid! Coming from a lady who had none