My fifteen-year-old son E likes cats. Since keeping him engaged is one of my priorities and challenges on this trip, and twenty-year-old C is generally up for anything, we do a lot of cat stuff in Japan.

Which isn’t hard, because Japan has a national obsession with felines.

In our first week, we visit a cat temple, a rescue cat café, and a cat museum. Later we stay in a guesthouse with three resident felines that seem to run the place. Small ceramic maneki-nekos—beckoning cats, also known as lucky cats—crowd the shelves of souvenir shops and dwell behind registers at convenience stores. Most are made of white ceramic with red inner ears and a red collar, their right front paw raised in greeting, though some are gold, black, or red. The arms on the larger ones are sometimes mechanized, the raised paw perpetually bobbing up and down. There are even cat islands here—eleven of them— where untold numbers of cats roam free.

Travel, ParentingTanya ShafferDecember 21, 2023travel, Japan, parentingComment

Japan Journals 2: A Night in Asakusa

Tokyo’s Asakusa neighborhood is hopping, and unlike Takeshita Street (which I wrote about in Japan Journals 1), the crowd of humans enjoying its alleys, restaurants, and covered outdoor market appears to contain more locals than tourists.

Here I encounter dogs for the first time in Japan. Small dogs, well-groomed, on-leash, many wearing glowing neon collars, trot obediently alongside their owners. They pass each other with nary a bark or a yank. My incorrigibly exuberant pups would probably get me arrested here.

D is meeting with colleagues tonight, and E has gone off in search of more clothes. Within the first 48 hours in Tokyo, fifteen-year-old E has absorbed the Metro system, and with the help of Google Maps and Google Translate he’s off to peruse a giant mall. Though well-versed in the city buses of Ann Arbor, Michigan, this is his first time traversing a foreign metropolis on his own. Fortun,ately Tokyo is not only the most populous city in the world, but also the safest. Although E maintains a perfect deadpan at all times, I sense his elation. Or perhaps I’m just projecting onto him the sense of wild liberation that comes to me, even now, when I find myself alone in the great wide world, ditching the expectations of ordinary life and following my senses the way a gull or a squirrel or an off-leash dog might, answerable to no one, if only for a week, or a day, or even an hour.

Travel, ParentingTanya ShafferDecember 5, 2023travel, Japan, parentingComment

Japan Journals 1: Tokyo

This is the first of a series of posts about a 3 ½-week trip I took to Japan this summer with my wasband* and two sons, ages 15 and 19.

*a husband to whom one is married but amicably separated

The wasband and I are big on international travel. In my pre-child existence, my travels were deeply intertwined with my writing. I wrote plays based on travels in Central America and India and a memoir of a year spent volunteering and traveling in West Africa. I also lived in Europe for a few years as a child. I believe that exploring other cultures builds flexibility, humility, and the understanding that just about every aspect of human life can be approached in a variety of ways. Because of this, I love to take my boys out of the country when possible. It’s also immensely fun.

TravelTanya ShafferSeptember 20, 2023Japan, travel Comments

Get Lost

Get lost, you say
to an unwanted caller.
I dare you to

say it to me.

Exile me to a place

where I'm drawn
out of self's cage
into ochre and rust,
spices, exhaust,
blaring horns, thrumming

strings, blazing

color so pure

tears rise
like dust
to my eyes.

Poetry, TravelTanya ShafferJuly 11, 2022travel, poetry, mexicoComment

A Place Where All is Forgiven

Earlier this month I traveled to Iceland with a group of differently wired teens from my son D’s school. Iceland is an extraordinary place: traversing its starkly magnificent terrain, you have a vivid sense that you’re standing on planetary crust, its transformations unfolding before your eyes. D’s school—I’ll call it A3—is an extraordinary place too.

A3 is described as a school for kids who learn differently, but in reality it’s not just about learning differently, but about thinking differently, acting differently, being differently. Or just being different. Some of the students are on the autism spectrum, some have attention challenges, some have sensory issues or social anxiety or gender dysphoria or learning disabilities of various types. Some have no diagnosable condition but are there because it’s the first place they’ve found where they feel comfortable and welcome.

After the Giddy Plunge

How to describe the beauty and challenge of that day? How high and steep the dune, how fine and bright the sand? How the ocean—no, Lake Michigan (ha, I wrote ocean!)— spread out below us, an impossibly pure colorscape, gradations of aqua, turquoise, teal leading out to a deep true cobalt?

We were at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, in the Northwest corner of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. We were traversing the Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive when we stopped at #9, the Lake Michigan Overlook.

At first I tried to stop D and E from rolling down the nearly vertical dune, fearing they’d lose control, plummet over the edge and disappear. They started rolling anyway, tentatively at first, stopping and starting, looking back. I glanced uncertainly at my husband—I’ll call him H—and he, ever the cautious one, shook his head. I called, half-heartedly, Boys, come back. They ignored me, of course, and I discussed with nearby adults whether it was safe to go down. A couple with toddlers shook their heads and left. But then a man with two young kids, maybe 7 or 8 years old, appeared on the horizon as if by magic.

Landscape of the Heart

I was born and raised in Kansas, and though I haven’t lived there in more than thirty years, its stretches of wheat and corn are within me still. That’s the thing about where you’re from. Even if, like me, you’re born to Jews and immigrants, who are no more of that place than an olive tree or an arctic fox, you are of that place simply by growing up there. Somehow the soil of the place, the shape of it, takes root inside you and never lets go.

Off-Leash Writing