Death of the Emperor

We were going through the obaachan's prefab place last weekend, seeing if there was anything to keep. You can see how small it is in the photo--basically two stacked six-mat rooms with a kitchen and bath. It will be the first place we have to tear down. There's really nothing to it, but it has steel beams, so they'll have to get that small back hoe in and just pull it over.

Just out the upstairs window was this scene of neighboring ruins. When we were getting the land registrations for the bordering properties in order to figure out our boundaries, we found out that this once belonged to Charles E. Tuttle, of Tuttle Publishing. Not much is left holding up the tile roof, though the garden, which is twice the size of our whole property, is in amazing shape. The local contractor told me that old man Tuttle left it to his maid and his gardener or driver (I can't remember which), but they don't like each other and can't agree on what to do with it. So they've built two tiny pre-fab houses in the most distant corners of the lot and let the sprawling old place disintegrate. It looks very much like it was built around the same time as my old place. You can tell by the stove pipe coming out of the roof that this was once the bath house.

We couldn't find anything of use in the obaachan's place other than the washing machine, which we can salvage with some cleanser and a new drain tube. In the bedroom upstairs there was a yellowed newspaper announcing the death of the Showa emperor wrapped in plastic, lying on the floor under this light.