Sunday, Feb. 20, 2005

WEEK 3

Upstairs, Mum desperately rifles for small stashes of cash; downstairs, debtor Dad takes his ease.

No buyer, but the family starts packing to move. It's a trying tiring time, and it's sometimes just better to sleep.

In the clearout, Mum finds her primary school graduation certificate: while Snoopy helps out the younger daughter.

With the family nameplate removed from the house, Mum symbolically takes off her wedding ring.

A buyer has paid a deposit for the old house, and in their new apartment the family joins together to thank their ancestors.

Relief is in the air, and the younger daughter does karaoke, while Mum finds papers showing an old ulcer op was really for cancer.

Dad (surprise, surprise) takes his ease in front of the television, but Mum decides to put her wedding ring back on anyhow.

Mum, younger daughter and Snoopy take it easy, after Mum counted more of their housebuyer's cash.

With their debt crisis resolved, the world seems a sunnier place as life gets back to normal and Mum heads to the shops.

One fine day in the middle of the night, the head of the Tonomura household in Kobe informed his wife and two grown-up daughters that he was in debt to the tune of more than 10 million yen.

Shock! Horror!

There was nothing in their coffers even remotely approaching that amount.

And to compound the crisis, pater familias absolutely refused to explain why.

No choice.

First, scrabble around for all those notes carefully conserved here and there in drawers and high in cupboards.

Then bite the bullet and realize that the only way out is to sell the family home and go rental. It was nothing short of a family jishin -- but it was an earthquake that elder daughter and photographer (and Japan Times reader) Hideka was on hand to document with her camera.

The result is a vivid insight into the kind of human drama being played out day-in, day-out, all around . . . but for the most part unrecorded.

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