Two worlds revealed during parental leave

On a weekday at midday, with the baby

At our house, we're currently using a nanny cart. Not a stroller, but a classic, literal nanny cart. When I lay our daughter Kokeko in it, I can see her face the whole time I'm walking.
A baby's face is truly mysterious. One moment it resembles a chick, the next it looks more like a chickpea in shape. Some days, her expression is octopus-like, but her form resembles takoyaki.

Rocked in the pram, her face glistens brightly, all thanks to the Vaseline I applied, just like the cover photo of Kirinji's classic album "3". On the way to the neighborhood park, it struck me: Will I ever walk while peering at someone's face like this again?

Kokeko is now three full months old.
Her nighttime sleep rhythm has finally settled in. Thanks to that, my wife and I now get an average of four hours of sleep every night. Breastfeeding issues are fading, and her weight is steadily increasing. My cooking is still clumsy, but I'm getting the hang of using potato starch. Yes, I've gained a little breathing room. After three months of paternity leave, the fun has overtaken the hardship – a "turnaround to profitability." This is where the real enjoyment begins.

"Weekday midday, taking a stroll with the child, a father pushing a stroller—you realize you don't see that very often," goes a song by YO-KING (※3). Exactly, this is what I want to do.

Rediscovering Life in This Town

Though small, our town gets crowded like a tourist spot on weekends. Savoring the empty town on weekdays is therefore a privilege of residents, and a privilege of parental leave.
During the day, I've started taking Kokeko out more often within a 20-minute walk from home. I use not just the stroller, but also the baby carrier (*4) quite often.

For example, is it possible to take a 3-month-old baby out for lunch at a restaurant? To cut to the chase, it was possible.
An Italian restaurant with terrace seating, a cafe that didn't bat an eye when we entered with the baby carrier, a set-menu restaurant that had a dedicated tatami room for babies from the start... While it helps that this area has many eateries, if you look carefully, you can find various places that welcome infants. Inspired by Yoshida Sensha's parenting manga (※5), we even went to a conveyor-belt sushi restaurant (※6) using the baby carrier.
The "Favorite Local Restaurants Map" that my wife and I had almost fully mapped out in our heads is now being rewritten in this new context.

Plus, walking through the shopping district during the day with Kokeko, all sorts of people strike up conversations. Running into familiar faces like the cafe staff at the supermarket. The chef at our favorite restaurant, the owner of the liquor store we frequent, regulars from a bar we used to go to, the baker we recently met, and even strangers (mostly women). For Koke-ko, it must be like, "Wow, so many characters," but everyone smiles and peeks at her face, even though she didn't ask them to.

Honestly, I think this town is pretty inconvenient for strollers and baby carriages. There are a lot of hills, yet accessibility isn't great. When I approach stairs with the stroller, it reminds me of the movie The Untouchables. Shops are crammed together on narrow streets, and it's full of noise. It's definitely not the kind of place you'd find on those "best towns for raising kids" rankings in magazines. In fact, it might even end up on a worst-ranking list. Above all, there's a huge waiting list for daycare spots.

And yet. What is this town? Surprisingly, it feels quite baby-friendly. At least for now.
There are so many things here I want Kokeko to see, smells and sounds I want her to experience. It makes me realize again how important it is for parents to love where they live when considering a child-rearing environment – just as crucial as accessibility or educational resources.
Even though it's a place I'm used to living in, I'm caught up in the feeling of "living anew" through Kokeko.

Dads are still a minority

I started thinking about checking out the childcare community space (hereafter, "the space") run by the ward office. I had this hope that maybe, just maybe, I could make some dad friends. The kind of friends you could share the subtleties of childcare with over a beer in the daytime.

Incidentally, these Spaces are places where infants, toddlers, and their parents can freely interact—essentially hangout spots. There are about 20 locations within the ward, ranging from ordinary houses to corners of schools to areas within parks. I discovered several within walking distance from home.

I decided to go here alone with Koke-ko on a weekday. If I went with the whole family, I'd probably just end up talking to my wife the whole time. That wouldn't be conducive to making dad friends. I asked my wife to stay home and rest. It would help her catch up on sleep.

The first space we visited was part of an old church building, and the staff welcomed us warmly. There were five or six parent-child pairs there, but...
No fathers. Not a single one. Based on what I usually see around town, I figured even on a weekday there might be one or two dads. Well, I was wrong.

What is this feeling of being an outsider? But I couldn't just stand there confused. Communication is my livelihood, after all. Besides, compared to that memory from high school when I went to an optional ski trip and ended up sharing a room with just the rugby team and myself (※9), this wasn't even close to being an outsider situation. I tried to encourage myself... but I didn't even need to, because the moms approached me first.

We started with "Where do you live?" and drifted into random chatter: typical parenting anecdotes, baby's age and development milestones, info on restaurants we'd managed to visit with the baby (how useful that is, as mentioned earlier), and the struggle to find childcare.
When I said, "I'm on paternity leave," they were stunned, saying things like, "So men actually take paternity leave?" It was a bit surprising, but I guess even in Tokyo (*10), the normality of fathers taking paternity leave is still only at this level. But I hadn't realized it was this low.

After that day, I visited several spaces and became acquainted with some mothers. Ah, so this is how mom friends start, I see. But there's not the slightest hint of dad friends forming.

I don't need dad friends

So, I decided to target weekends instead. Many spaces hold parent-child events on weekends. First, I took Kokeko to a "udon noodle pounding" event. As usual, I had my wife stay home and rest.

Weekends are busy, as expected. There were about 20 adults. Oh, there they are. Fathers—about five besides me (though all paired with their wives).
I tried talking to the other dads right away, but... well. It's surprisingly hard to get into topics interesting enough to be good drinking conversation. It never really gets to the kind of specific, real-life topics I write about in this series or the kind of detailed, relatable stuff I talk about with the moms. It tends to stay at a lower resolution, like "Man, nighttime crying is rough, huh?" and then it's "Alright, cheers!" That same thing happened at another event I went to later.

Well, of course!
In a lively, boisterous setting, no one is in the mood for such detailed conversations. To begin with, it was unrealistic to expect to build real rapport with them over just a few weekends.

And belatedly, right here, I finally realized.
Oh, wait—I didn't actually want dad friends after all.
I did mention "dad friends" partly for the sake of this column, but at the very least, I don't feel like I need them right now. After all, I already have a comrade-in-arms at home to share the ups and downs of parenting with. As for fellow dads living in the same town, I can just find them naturally as things unfold.

What I truly realized this time is that the kind of parenting stuff you just want to ramble about aimlessly doesn't get talked about at special weekend events. They belong to the mundane, prosaic moments of weekdays – the "everyday" moments. Those vague joys, emptiness, tenderness, and confusion that are hard to put into words alone? Most of those subtle feelings are born in the "everyday" and are finally shared with someone in the "everyday."

There were two worlds in parenting

It seems many dads appear in the "special occasion" world. Meanwhile, many moms remain entrenched in the "everyday" world. There's a significant temperature difference between these two worlds, and I sometimes felt this might isolate both dads and moms (when a wife says her husband doesn't understand her, the husband is also isolated).

Working in this field feels like perpetually preparing for a cultural festival, where thoughts naturally gravitate toward the "special occasions." There's a tendency to encourage escaping boring routines or seeking more excitement in daily life. Pursuing this "celebration of special occasions," I personally realized I might have (unintentionally) looked down on the "ordinary" moments.

Once, I wrote the copy "Two-sevenths of life is the weekend" for a leisure product (*11). But for a baby, it wasn't like that—it was "seven-sevenths weekdays."

Parenting means standing on the side of those weekdays.

When someone says "Parenting is busy," they're not talking about the hectic pace of packed events. Paradoxically, they're describing the frustration of endlessly repeating routines to the point of boredom. It's not quite the same as romanticizing every moment as precious. In reality, the more accustomed you become, the more time passes without becoming memorable stories or Instagram-worthy moments. That's precisely why the "golden moments" I wrote about in Part 2 of this series feel so dazzling.

The endless "K". The looping routine. First, we must accept it with a poker face.
As you repeat the same things, you can see that today is just a little bit better (or earlier) than yesterday, this week a little bit better than last week. Because babies never stop growing. This, yes, isn't a loop, but a spiral.

I feel like these past three months were about grasping my own family in this spiral shape. Without "being there on weekdays," I wouldn't have reached this understanding.
Weekend events are like grains of spice that add a sharp kick at various points along the spiral—and they're necessary too. Rather than my wife and I dividing up the "special occasions" and "everyday life," it would be good if we could both handle both together.
I thought I understood all this intellectually, but I really didn't.

Today, I'll take Kokeko for a stroll in the stroller. I'm the real "Baby Driver" (※13)! I tell Kokeko, but all I get back is a "Huh?" Someday, I'll take her to Ueno and introduce her to her peer, Shan Shan (※14).

Next time, I plan to write about the childcare search.

※1
Chickpeas are legumes used as food. They feature prominently in Spanish, Indian, and Mexican cuisine. They pair well with cumin seeds and are delicious in curries. Their cute shape even resembles a baby's head.

※2
Kirinji, a brother band formed by Takaki and Yasuyuki Horigome in 1996 (now continued by the elder brother as KIRINJI). The jacket photo for their third album "3" features a portrait of the brothers, with their shiny skin making a huge impact.

※3
YO-KING (the solo project of Yoichi Kuramochi of Magokoro Brothers) song "Baby Cartrip." Included on the 2004 album "A Journey of Music and Humor."

※4
Though called a "baby carrier," it doesn't really feel like a "strap." It gives more of an impression of a vest or protector, with a sense of "putting on" or "equipping" it.

※5
"Manga Parent," an essay manga by Yoshida Sensha depicting his own childcare experiences. Serialized in "Big Comic Original" from 2011 to 2017. The tankōbon (paperback) series consists of 5 volumes.

※6
Though it's called a conveyor belt sushi restaurant, it doesn't have the traditional rotating lane. Instead, you order via tablet, and the plates come to you on a rail.

※7
Brian De Palma's 1987 film "The Untouchables." The scene where a baby carriage tumbles down stairs during a gunfight is memorable. This staging is said to reference the 1925 Soviet film "Battleship Potemkin" (directed by Sergei Eisenstein).

※8
One of Tokyo's 23 wards. An administrative division. The term "town" used in the text refers to a more localized area within this ward.

※9
Eighteen years later, at a classmate's wedding, he reunited with his old rugby squad and spent time together in a relaxed manner unimaginable during their high school days. Growing up has its perks.

※10
According to the "2016 Tokyo Metropolitan Government Survey on Gender Equality in Employment Participation," the rate of male employees taking childcare leave in Tokyo was 7.2%. While higher than the national average for that year (3.16%, as announced by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare), it remains relatively low.

※11
It was scrapped and never released.

※12
Refers to photos looking particularly good on the photo-sharing SNS "Instagram." Essentially, it means "it looks picture-perfect."

※13
"Baby Driver" is a 2017 film directed by Edgar Wright. It features the protagonist named "Baby," a common trope in pop songs throughout history.

※14
Shanshan (Xiangxiang) is a cub of the Giant Panda genus in the Ursidae family of Carnivora. She was born in June 2017 at Ueno Zoo in Tokyo. She is the same age as the author's daughter, making them "same-age peers." Similarly, the daughter of actor George Clooney is also the same age.