Old Photos

 Yesterday was very hot!

In the city, it was 37℃, even here it was 34℃, that's at the foot of a mountain. I always thought it was a lot cooler here, but just 3℃ different.

I'm so glad that we got a new air conditioner put in; it really helped yesterday and today. I'm now on my summer schedule, get chores done early, before 8 am and put lunch ready. It makes such a difference.

After getting chores done yesterday, I decided to tackle a couple of boxes that I have in my room. These were full of odds and ends that I threw in when we were moving. I keep saying that I would sort them out, but it was one of those jobs that was easy to put off!

The first box I pulled out was full of a strange mix of memorable things, tickets, leaflets of places I visited and receipts for bills paid. That one was easy to deal with.

The second box had me wondering. I came across a load of photos that I found in the outside storage area. These are photos that belonged to my mother-in-law. 

I had a look through some of them. I can guess who some of the people are, but there are a lot where I have no idea who's who. It's sad as there are no relatives on my husband's side of the family to ask.

It's also fascinating to see the way people lived. Some of the photos are from the 1960s, I can recognise my mother-in-law and my father-in-law from the photo that was in the tatami room. In Japan, after people pass away, their photo is displayed in the room where the Butsudan is, the Japanese family Buddhist altar. I call them the dead photos; I'm sure there's a special name for them.

This photo made me pause.

The child in front of the man is my brother-in-law. The baby is my husband, Hisao, and the man is my father-in-law. On the back, it says that this was taken at the New Year, so I think it must be 1962. Hisao was born in 1961. According to what is written on the back, my brother-in-law was four and Hisao 6 months old. Hisao told me that his father died when he was one year old. Maybe just a few months after this photo was taken, my father-in-law passed away. He looks happy in this photo; it's sad to think that his life ended just a few months later!

This is my mother-in-law, very 1960s style. There's no information on this photo. I wonder where she was going or doing.

This is another interesting one. From what I've been told and figured out, the house in the background was not built on this land. The family lived further up the road before the 1960s. The original house built on the land where we are now was built when my husband was a child. The two boys are my brother-in-law and Hisao; the old lady was Hisao's great-grandmother. 

I'm not sure who these ladies are or who the child is. I think the lady on the right is my mother-in-law. I love what they are wearing, very typical working clothes. I think they all worked in the fields.

This is a photo of the storage building being erected. There's another photo like this somewhere. 

These photos give a snapshot of a bygone era.

It's sad to think that there are no relatives on the Japanese side of my family to pass these on to or to ask questions of.

I'll have to find a way to curate these and all the other photos that I've found, make some kind of story of the family, a small history of the family. 

There are very few photos of my family from so far back. I think in the 1950s and 1960s, cameras were expensive and considered a luxury, not something to buy unless you had a bit of extra money, which I know my parents didn't have. I think it's great that my kids have these photos of their Japanese family to look at and talk about!

Now it's so easy to snap photos, plus we always have a camera handy on our phones. I know that I take 100s of photos every month. I'm glad that we can do that. When Mikey was a baby, I used to take 36 photos a month. I felt it was important to document as much as possible, and I would send a lot of photos to my Mom. I think part of that is the fact that I love history, especially the history of ordinary people. I know that understanding the history of a country, the wars, the development of the country, the kings, queens and leaders is important, but whenever I read that kind of history, I'm always wondering how did the common man live, what he did to make money, to provide for his family, what kind of house did they live in or what did they eat.

Does anyone else have interesting old photos?