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According to the Japanese, a pregnancy takes ten months, not the predictable nine cited by the rest of the known world. This is because the Japanese count lunar months instead of calendar months. So, today, at the Japanese nine months, my girlfriend Yoko visited her midwife and found out some pretty disturbing news. The ultrasound, or “echo” as it’s known by the Japs, revealed that the baby was the wrong way around. The midwife told her that she was going to have to do upside-down exercises, stick bizarre adhesive incense sticks to various pressure points on her legs, and have her belly tightly bound in a 10-odd-meter cloth called an iwata-obi for the rest of the pregnancy which, at the height of a particularly hot Tokyo summer, is pretty heavy.Thursday Sept 8th
We found out today that Yoko was also an upside down baby and that her parents turned a picture of a hen upside down to rectify the problem—which apparently did the trick. As stupid as this sounds and as un-superstitious as we are, we will spend the next couple of days upending everything in our apartment—books, furniture, posters and anything else that we physically can. One traditional belief states that Japanese women are not allowed to eat any seafood with claws such as crabs or lobsters, as it causes the child to become a thief. Yoko doesn’t rate this. Another belief is that pregnant women should clean their toilet daily for a healthy and good looking baby. Again, it’s totally ridiculous but imagine if we didn’t do it and happened to have an ugly kid! Let’s just say Yoko is cleaning the toilet daily.Thursday Sept 15th
It’s pretty difficult to afford everything associated with having a baby in Japan as there’s nothing like the Medicare system, only private insurance which doesn’t seem to cover anything that we actually need. Instead they pay the mother a “congratulations” fee after the baby is born. I feel like all I’ve been doing is working but I took today off so we started reading a book which detailed all the horrendous things that can happen to babies during pregnancy, from toxic-shock to dissolving fetuses. After hearing myriad number of horror stories from this tome everything starts to seem really ominous and I am basically reduced to a nervous, quivering mess.


Today I got an SMS from Yoko. It says “Baby’s upside-down has been fixed. Girl. I’ll buy princess blanket.” ANDREZ BERGEN Pictures of Cocao