We first arrived in Sydney on 6 August 1968. My father had already arrived a few months before us. He was posted in Sydney as a company representative for a Japanese trading company.
He picked us up at the airport and deposited us at the Savoy Hotel in Double Bay (a ritzy Eastern Sydney suburb), leaving my mum, Kei, with a $20 bill to buy something for dinner. Kei remembers thinking the $20 looked suspiciously like play money, but my father reassured her that it was worth about 8000 yen. (The AUD-Yen exchange rate was about 400 yen to the dollar in 1968.)
Armed with ‘play money,’ Kei took us (I was 7, my sister 9), to Double Bay Woolworths, which was across the road from (the once very swank) The Cosmopolitan cafe. She bought half a pound of rice for 9 cents. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard this story, but even after 50 years, I love that she was so thoroughly shocked to discover a roll of toilet paper cost 11 cents, while half a pound of rice was 9 cents. (Paper was/is incredibly cheap in Japan, and rice has always been expensive, thanks in part to Japan’s agricultural co-operative).
On the way home, my sister and I begged mum to let us stop for some tea at the Eurochic Cosmopolitan. But Kei had no idea how much a cup of tea would cost (after all, toilet paper cost 11 cents!). So we went back to the Savoy where she cooked up some rice and grilled the dried fish a friend had given her at the airport before our departure (they must’ve thought there’d be no himono or dried fish in Australia, so true). The fish was great I remember, and so was the ‘foreign’ rice. We were lucky that we didn’t get evicted from the Savoy for the stench Kei inflicted on the other residents while grilling the fish. Perhaps we copped a few rude stares the following morning. Luckily, I was too young to notice.
Already in the first few hours after arriving in Sydney, the pattern of our lives in Australia for the next 50 years was set. Kei would be in constant search of good food to feed us; we’d always be hankering for something we thought might be more exotic, only to find that mum knew best; our food would stigmatise us; and finally, my dad was always conspicuous by his absence.
Today is 6 August 2018. It was too cold to go out to celebrate our 50th anniversary. So we decided that when the weather is warmer, we’ll go to the Cosmopolitan for a cup of tea. Here’s hoping $20 will be enough…maybe not.
by Masako Fukui, Copyright Kei’s Kitchen
