Sometimes my mind takes a little excursion back to Japan, and rather than the places that I somewhat prosaically catalogued a few years ago in this blog, I recall the people. Today, for some reason, Miho popped into my head and I was flooded with recollections.
Miho was a middle-aged woman who lived with her parents not far from our place in Mukogaoka. She had decided to take English classes with us, though I'm not sure why. She worked for her brother in a curious new-age style shop in Takarasuka called the Healing Ankh.
It was a curiosity because of its location and its business practices. The shop, which sold CD's, polished stones and other new age paraphenalia, was on the fifth floor of an apartment building that was largely residential. It was my custom to ask students about their day to get them to locate their English in the real world. I always asked Miho how business was at the shop and she always replied with the same response. "We had no customers today." Now I knew that Miho was being paid a wage and that there would be a hefty rent too. So I couldn't figure out how the business stayed afloat. Perhaps neither could she.
Dismissing pet theories about yakuza shop-fronts and the like, it dawned on me that her brother had a regular job that paid the bills and subsidized his loss-making enterprise. When I last checked, the Healing Ankh had moved to a sensible street-front shop, a far better location. Though whether it had any customers - who knows?
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