My Japanese Father - Part I

I am not certain why, but I continually see faces in the crowds of Tokyo that remind me of friends and people I know.  I only find this amusing because the faces triggering the memories are Japanese and those I am being reminded of are not.  One of the strongest resemblances I have come across is in the various adverts for ANA's new premium class seat posted all over Tokyo.  The Japanese actor in the advert resembles my father to such a degree that I find it slightly unsettling.

My father was most definitely not Japanese.  He did have black hair and served in the Pacific during WWII but that is about as much in common as he has with the Japanese.  At 6'3" he was wiry, strong and stern.  Short on words and and sparse on emotion, he had hands that facilitated a lifetime of hard work due to their large size and extraordinary strength.  At his funeral, looking into the casket, I couldn't help but focus on his hands folded across his abdomen.  I wished that I had photographed them because they were so indicative of who he was.

I remember when I was 18, my body had finally begun to show signs of the physical abuse I had been subjecting it to on a regular basis.  I had been training in martial arts, boxing, running, cycling and participating in various fitness routines since I was 12.  I was far more barbaric looking than my friends in part because of my ridiculously long hair but regardless, it is safe to say I thought I was pretty tough.

I suppose there is a time in every boy's life when he looks at his aging father and thinks, "I could take the old man" and I had come to this point.  I should note that my father was rather advanced in age when I was born.  By the time I was 18, he was 61.  You will be hard pressed to find an 18 year old who doesn't have the hubris to think he can whip his 61 year old father.

And so it was that the summer of my 18th year I found myself trying to remove the battery from my 1971 Opel GT that was in need of constant repair.  Known as the poor man's corvette, it had a similar pointed nose in which the battery rested.  To remove it you needed to reach awkwardly into the nose and try to remove the battery through a narrow gap between the frame and engine compartment.

My father watched me fumble at this task for several minutes.  Each time I would get the battery up to the small exit gap, I would get my hands caught in the space and end up crushing a finger or cutting the back of my hand on the sharp steel frame, both outcomes causing me to drop the battery back into place and my father to bite his tongue.  It wasn't just this pathetic effort on my part that frustrated my father, but also my ineptitude with car repair in general.  Basic car repair was something that he considered to be a fundamental skill every man should possess.  Both my father and my brother enjoyed, or at least were proficient at, repairing the various unreliable cars that passed through our lives.* [See the list below.]  I, on the other hand, despised their unreliable nature and wanted nothing to do with their repair and simply longed for the day when I could afford a reliable mode of transportation.

And so it was, his patience exhausted, my father pushed me aside to end my futile struggle with the battery.  I didn't quite know how he was going to be able to maneuver the battery out considering the size of his hands in comparison to mine but he soon made it clear.  He grabbed a pair of pliers from the tool box and reached in the car nose and clamped the pliers around one of the battery nodes.  Then with one hand, he lifted the battery by applying enough pressure on the pliers to keep them clamped on the battery node.  If this does not sound like an amazing feat of strength, I challenge anyone to try to lift a car battery with and outstretched arm let alone to do so by clamping a pair of regular pliers, not channel locks, on the node and then doing so.  The hand strength and the shoulder strength required are very impressive.  At 61 years of age he easily had twice the strength I did as an 18 year old gym rat.  After watching this stunt, I remember thinking that I probably couldn't take him just yet.