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Pictures of smiling children can erase any gloom you might feel almost any time, especially if the photos are of kids you know.

Among photos displayed with those of my great-grandchildren and my former Bandelier Elementary School fourth grade pen pals, is one of Koutarou, a 6-year-old boy from Fukuoka, Japan. I met him a couple of years ago and consider him to be part of my family.

This relationship goes back to before he was born. I first knew his mother, Nahoko, when she came as a foreign exchange student to Valley High School in 1992 and lived with my sister-in-law, Joan, for a year.

After Nahoko returned home, Joan was invited to visit the family. Then, in November 1997, I was privileged to live in her home when I traveled with 49 Albuquerque Sister City delegates to Sasebo, on the island of Kyushu, to celebrate the Okunchi Festival and the 30-year Albuquerque/Sasebo Sister City bond. We celebrated this event, with the 20 New Mexico entertainers we brought with us, with Hispanic dances and songs, Acoma Pueblo dances, western cowboy music and a mariachi band.

Koutarou's material grandparents, Tsunehisa Ishibashi, and his wife, Takako, were my wonderful hosts on this trip. This visit seemed so much more intimate than my previous visits, because I felt that I already knew the family through Nahoko. By then, Nahoko was no longer there, because she had married and moved to Fukuoka with her physician husband.

I have always felt honored to sleep on a futon in the same room that bears a Buddhist or Shinto shrine, and this household was no different from other Japanese homes I had visited in the past. Fruit placed on the shrine is similar to the food offering we Pueblos make to the Great Spirit in our religion, so that was familiar to me.

Very different, though, was the bathtub — almost square, and deep enough for water to reach the chin for a nice soak before bedtime. It was a smaller version of the public steam pools we later enjoyed at the Grand Hotel in lovely Hiroshima. The heated toilet seat in this home was a real wonder. A disk on the right arm of the seat had pushbuttons for this bathroom fixture to perform various functions. One was to have two tubes appear from under the rim as bidet washers. The tiny sink over the tank had a faucet to wash your hands before the water flushed the bowl, thereby saving water. In Japan, toilets are not usually in the same room as the bathtubs.

In this home, we sat on soft, fluffy cushions on the floor at a low table to eat delicious fish, rice, vegetables and fruit. Breakfast was at a Western-style table with chairs, and it was bacon, eggs, toast and coffee.

While in Sasebo, a friend of the Ishibashis, Yuko Tominaga, invited several of us visitors to a luncheon at Gin Sushi, a sushi bar he owned. Sashimi and sushi, delicately and beautifully prepared by artistic chefs, added to the grand dining that day. But before departing, our generous host gave us presents to take home. My gift, a three-strand pearl necklace interspersed with gold and garnet beads, is a real beauty that I wear with pride and joy on special occasions and think of this kind, gracious man, who died in November 1999.

So remarkable are the memories of my trips to Japan that they are brought about just by looking at the cute face of Koutarou. I hope he will have memories of his visit to Albuquerque with his mother and grandmother on their way to Disney World in Orlando, Fla. I took them to the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center for lunch and, to our delight, watched him mimic the dance steps of the Zuni Pueblo dancers. When his grandmother writes me of his recent activities, it pretty much correlates with what my 5-year-old great grandson is doing here.

As diverse as children are from one another, we want to raise all of them in as safe and joyful an environment as possible.