Tracking down Japanese Host Family

Whenever my brother called at a time when the rest of the UK is still sleeping, there are only two possibilities - (1) something is terribly wrong or (2) he's forgotten the UK time. This time something went terribly wrong. He called to announce that a large earthquake has struck Japan, my immediate reaction was to wake up and turn on the TV. If it was as serious as he described -that SOME CITIES IN JAPAN HAVE COLLAPSED- it would be BREAKING NEWS in BBC. And it was.

When I saw the news, my thoughts went out to the people I knew when I was studying in Japan; Niigata in particular.

Most of the people I know from Japan were accounted for in Facebook except for one - the Nakata family. The Nakata family was my host family when I was studying in Niigata. Mrs Nakata, the host mother whom I occasionally contact treated me like her son when I was there. So when the earthquake struck, my thought was with her and the family.

For the past three days, I have been trawling through my email address book to look for her contact numbers. Usually, I prefer to email her since my Japanese vocabulary has deteriorated from the heydays of speaking it "amature-ish" fluently to a level now Japanese people would shun and rather speak to me in English. Unfortunately, emails to her multiple accounts were bounced and calls went unanswered.

"We're sorry, there's a disruption to the destination you are calling. Please try again later."

At the very least, the random messages acted as suppressant to the nerves. A slight hope that things might be better than I imagined. At least there was the possibility that the mobile network has screwed up at the point of time.

On Saturday I checked with Owen's wife, Akiko whose family is in Chiba. She confirmed she too was facing the same problem and that the lines to Japan were severely disrupted at the time. Slight relieve.

Not to be beaten down, I arrived work half an hour earlier this morning to try again. I avoided the evening rush hour in Japan hoping the lines would be less busy. Still no luck.

Nakata family's bungalow and adjoining hair salon

Somehow I work better in panic mode. I remembered she has a hair salon in Shibata. So I put in the keywords and Googled them. I remember another Japanese host family telling me that my host mother's hair salon was one of the most popular in Shibata. Surely her contact details had to be in the WORLD WIDE WEB! In the world of technology, no one can be good (or bad) without the INTERNET knowing. So I Googled for her name and hair salon. There were 154564561789494945648956465156156103 results spewed out. Worst of all, the first 10 pages were hair salons in Niigata rather than Shibata. Shibata is in the Niigata Prefecture just like Cambridge is in the East of England. Imagine the returned results of hair salons were from the whole of East of England!

To make matters worse, all results were in Japanese.

Trawling through the WORLD WIDE WEB was definitely worse than finding a needle in a haystack. At least you know the boundary of the haystack and with a little more time, you will find the needle. What is the boundary of the WORLD WIDE WEB?

20minutes into mouse-scrolling and Ctrl+F-ing and cutting and pasting the kanji characters finally got me somewhere. A series of familiar characters jumped out of one particular Google results page. A phone number also corresponded with Shibata's area code - 0254- As if God was helping, I spotted a rather familiar series of characters and kanjis for Shibata.

Now that I found a contact number, I was hesitant to call.

"It's expensive to call Japan. What if it isn't connected to the right person?"
"What if someone picks up and can't understand my Japanese?"
"What if it's the right person but crying to tell me her family members were all missing?"

Of course these came and went in a flash. I didn't even bother pausing for a second thought. I tried the number nevertheless.

I pressed the number slowly, one by one, then paused for it to get through. Then the call was connected. On the other side of the line was a familiar voice. I introduced myself. An indifferent tone then turned into a joyous voice. It was Mrs Nakata.