Sushi and Genealogy

After Hakone Sekisho, Masao-san and Mitsuko-san took us to their house, where we met their daughter, Hiroko-san and her one year old boy.  He was so cute and kept bringing me legos.

My great-grandparents: Masako and Yoshitaka

We spent the evening getting to know one another and going over our genealogy to see how exactly we are related.  My grandpa has really gotten into genealogy over the last decade, and made a pretty extensive genealogy chart going back to my great great grandparents on his side.  He sent the copies to everyone still alive on the chart.  For my BYU graduation present, he made me a keepsake book with all the family history which had accumulated throughout the years (including photos).  It is a treasured book.

So, the story goes as this: my great grandfather, Yoshitaka, came to the United States when he was a young man.  My great grandmother, Masako, was raised by Yoshitaka's parents, and when she was old enough, she moved to the U.S. and married Yoshitaka.  Yoshitaka's brother, also came to the U.S., but his daughter, Haru, stayed in Japan to be raised by her grandparents.  Haru had four children, Masao-san and Kiyoshi-san among them.

We went out to sushi for dinner.  For some reason, I couldn't seem to navigate the chopsticks.  Up until that point I had had no issues with chopsticks, but for dinner, my food kept slipping out.  As if that wasn't embarrassing enough, I had an allergic reaction to something I ate--I think it was the wasabi.  The conveyor belt sushi we ate with the cousins on Saturday didn't have wasabi on it, but the sushi that night did.  I had eaten some shrimp, but with my inadequate chopstick use, the wasabi side went straight in and my throat itched and felt swollen.  My lip also started to swell.  I rinsed out my mouth with some water and my throat stopped swelling, but my lip stayed swollen for a couple more hours.  It was very alarming.  I have never had an allergic reaction and I tried to do my best to continue on.  However, I didn't eat any more.  I think it was the straight concentration of wasabi on the shrimp rather than the shrimp itself because I had had that exact type of shrimp on numerous occasions (even just a few days earlier) and never shown the slightest reaction.  I'm not a fan of really spicy food, so I avoid it when I can.  The wasabi was the only difference.

Granted, I had eaten the wasabi ice cream earlier that day, but it was tempered so much with the sweet that it didn't have an effect.  Overall, it was just weird.  Really weird and really scary.  Needless to say, I didn't eat any more sushi, and certainly avoided wasabi for the remainder of my time in Japan.

I took some fun pictures of the landscape as we drove to our cousins' house.

I thought that it was very ironic that the emergency road is closed if there is a major earthquake

Talk about distracted driving--their GPS system functions not only as a map and radio, but also as TV, along with a bunch of stations and everything

Hiroko-san and her boy

Emily's in heaven with the kitty

Our beds for the night.  The room is actually very cleverly done.  I should have taken a picture of the whole room.  The "walls" slide together and apart to make the room open and flowing from one room to the next, or closed for it's own separate room.  The floor in that room was completely tatami matting.