The kindly old man smiled and put down his tea cup. “So how many children do you have?” he asked Shizuko.
I felt the shock of this question like a fist in the gut. I didn’t know Shizuko very well, but I knew that she and her husband, though childless, desperately wanted children: she’d said as much. But if Shizuko was upset, no one could have told from her placid expression. “I’m afraid we haven’t been blessed with children.”
The old man’s eyebrows shot up. “Even though you’ve been married for eleven years!”
Shizuko shook her head. “No, it’s a real shame, isn’t it?”
I held my breath and watched the old man surreptitiously. Oddly enough, he didn’t look the least bit embarrassed or contrite over his gaffe. “Have you been to a doctor about it?” he wanted to know.
I cringed at this, but Shizuko looked perfectly blasé. “Oh yes. He says we’re both normal, though.” Shizuko took a sip of tea. There was nothing in her face that registered mild irritation, let alone the outrage I felt.
“You ought to try a doctor in Tokyo, a fertility specialist. Have some proper tests done.”
“Perhaps in time.”
The old man shook his head. “Or you could try one of those fertility shrines. My niece went to one and less than two years later she had a baby boy.”
Shizuko smiled. “Good for her! She must have been so pleased.”
“She was, she was. You and your husband should try it!”
Shizuko said that that was a very good idea.
When we left the old man’s house a few minutes later, I turned to Shizuko, aghast. “I can’t believe he said that to you!” I spluttered.
“Said what?” She looked genuinely surprised.
“All those things about having children – what you ought to do!”
Shizuko frowned. “But he was trying to help me. He was being kind.”
“But he was so nosy! What business of his is it whether you have kids or not?”
Shizuko still looked puzzled. “But I do want children.”
“So saying those things was potentially hurtful.”
“He was just being kind.” She patted my hand. “I’m over thirty, Mary. In Japan, if you’re married and over thirty, you’re supposed to have children. Everybody asks – it’s not rude.”
All I could do was shake my head. If I’d been Shizuko, I’d have been enraged. The way I saw it, the question he’d asked was a real powder keg. Do you have children? was bad enough, but How many children do you have? took it to an entirely different level of callousness in its blind presumption. If the person you asked did have children, of course, you were okay, but if she didn’t, it was almost certain to be a sore point. Suppose, like Shizuko, she wanted them but couldn’t have them: the question would remind her afresh and cause her pain. Suppose the woman didn’t want children: the question would irritate. Suppose the woman wanted them, but her husband didn't -- or vice versa: the question would be all the more hurtful.
But Shizuko could not agree with me. Neither did most of the other people I asked about this later. “He was definitely being kind,” the majority said. “In Japan, you get married so you can have children – it’s the same all over Asia.” Only a few career women agreed with me that this question was potentially obnoxious to childless women.
Sometimes I found it so hard to understand the Japanese way of thinking.
I had my first baby not long after I got married, so I was spared this question, but when my eldest was about two, people began to ask me when I was going to have my next one. “Better not leave it too long,” the check out lady in the supermarket cautioned. My daughter’s nursery school teacher was even more blunt. “This would be a good time for you to start the next one,” she said flatly, pointing to my belly just in case I didn’t catch her drift. “Children who don’t have any brothers or sisters are so lonely,” the lady down the road warned me. “And sometimes they’re just plain spoiled!”
My reproductive life, it seemed, was everybody’s business.
In the successive years I spent in Japan, I reserved the How many children do you have? question for people who obviously had children. I cringed to hear people using this as a conversational starter with strangers and I heard it a lot. I heard it so often that one day it finally slipped out of my mouth. I was talking to Inoue-san, a kind, motherly woman in her middle fifties. We were standing in the locker room of a health club and without even thinking, the question just popped out. Inoue-san smiled and touched my hand. “You know, Mary, I had one child, a little boy. He died in an accident; he was almost a year old.”
To this day, I cannot get over my carelessness in asking this question. Or my phenomenally bad luck, asking Inoue-san, of all people. I was so horrified by what I’d done that I burst into tears. Inoue-san was terribly concerned: she tried to cheer me up. I was so mortified that she felt the need to cheer me up that I could hardly stand myself. In fact, I'd only done what I'd heard everyone around me do for the past decade and a half, but what a time to do it.
Not only did Inoue-san forgive me, she didn’t even seem to feel I’d done anything wrong. She continued to be my good friend over the next few years. Every time we met, she looked happy to see me.
Truly, the Japanese way of thinking can take some getting used to.
