家族やおみやげ

I just recently got my host family assignments. My feeble kanji ability paired with the sparse nature of the list leave me a little confused. In the Naitou family, there's two parents, Yoshinao, age 49, and Naoko, age 48. Yoshinao is a middle school teacher, and after a long time spent looking up unknown kanji through their radical count I finally discovered the second word in his job title was the name of the school at which he teaches. Splitting the two kanji of 奥尻, they apparently mean "inner" and "butt" respectively, but together, it's just the name of the city Okushiri. He likes オ-ケストラ活動 ("orchestra activities"- does he play? does he listen? I don't really know) and 温泉 (hot springs). Naoko is a professional housewife who's into crafts and making cakes (I'm pretty sure that as an aspiring gourmet pastry chef myself, I will become best friends with her.)

The kids are a little harder. There's two 9 year old girls with the same birthday- I'm hoping they're fraternal twins and not identical. For as much as Americans complain about asian girls who "all look same", encountering a pair who actually do みんな同じそう would be tough. They have the same interest, the three character kanji of which (吹奏楽) the kanji radical look-up dictionary paired with jisho.org have not yet been able to translate. The best idea I have is that they both are instrumentalists (奏者) of some music (音楽) that involves blowing (吹く), although I have no idea how that's said as one coherent word.

The 13 year old son, though, kinda makes me nervous. His hobbies are listed merely as "disabled". The best I could translate from his school/work information is that he's under "protective care". He lives 別屋 (separately) away from the rest of the family. So does the dad. Is it a split family with the father and son living away from the mother and the girls? Or does the dad live elsewhere for work while the son lives in some sort of assisted care facility? I want to ask these things but I'm afraid delving into personal matters like this in the kind of crude half-japanese I could muster up for an email could only come off as rude in a hyper-polite society like Japan. And what kind of gifts are appropriate for this situation? I'm stumped.

Hopefully by the time I'm actually allowed to make contact with my host family (after the week of quarantine imposed by HIF so that we don't give the swine flu to Japan) I'll be moderately competent at the language to deal with these kinds of things (fingers crossed). Another point- how silly and ineffectual the quarantine is. We'll be staying in a hotel and attending classes and going out as otherwise scheduled, just not allowed to meet our host families. I understand the program needs to show they're doing something to appease the fears of the families, but for such a feeble attempt at quarantine we could still spread the infection to Japan just as readily. I get frustrated with the fear-mongering and paranoia created by the media. Remember bird flu? Did anyone actually acknowledge, "Hey, we freaked out completely in disproportion to the actual threat?" I don't think so. But anyway, that's an entirely separate rant. Staying in a hotel with the rest of HIFers should be fun, and a good way to ease into that whole "living in a foreign country" thing.