Day 12 of 30-Day Writing Challenge
I refused to have a TV in my room in college. I have never been a TV fan. So I had to sit down closing my eyes for a minute or so until one scene came back to my mind. Yeah, the Brady Bunch!
In the 70’s in Japan, American TV series, dubbed in Japanese, were popular among us kids. Bewitched, Columbo, McCloud… I used to watch them all. The brady Bunch, above all, was my favorite.
I can’t recall any of the episodes now, but I can still vividly remember the opening scene. The three-by-three grid of nine faces of the family; the mother and the three daughters, the father and the three sons, and that housekeeper.
First of all, the setting that the both parents were divorced was so foreign to an eight-year-old me. Maybe because divorce was not so common yet in Japan then. I thought it was cool.
Second, I couldn’t get over how huge their house was. Their kitchen was as large as the entire first floor of our house. I had never seen a cooking oven before. In Japan those days, a two-burner cooktop was a norm. I wondered what that big box could do. And last but not least, the fact that they had a housekeeper!
For the Americans, the series must have depicted a typical middleclass family. For me, and I bet for most of the kids my age in Japan those days, everything the Brady family had looked so glamorous. Their house seemed like a castle for me.
The program was aired in Japan from for a year between the summer of 1970 and 1971. I was in the third and the fourth grade.
In my sophomore year in high school, I applied for the AFS exchange program, to live with an American host family for the senior year. In my essay I was supposed to write why I decided to apply for the program. I don’t think I was that honest, but for sure one of my top motivations was to see such a huge kitchen and the oven with my own eyes.