Letter from Boston The Evolution of '1426' By MASAKO YAMADA	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
アパート'1426'の移り変わり 雅子さんの暮らすアパートは、もともと友人のアレックスが、4年前に男友達3人と住み始めた場所でした。1年後、雅子さんが入居し、以来、毎年一人ずつ住人が入れ替わっています。そして先日、アレックスが引っ越し、当初の住人はいなくなりました。今週は、雅子さんが長年親しんできた共同生活の場への思いをつづります。

An acquaintance of mine used to work as a guide on a famous ship in Boston called the USS Constitution. The ship is now a big tourist attraction.

The ship is supposedly very old, but there is a catch different parts of the ship have been replaced over the years, so that now, only a tiny fraction of the materials are from the original ship. It brings to mind the philosophical question: Is a house made of toothpicks still the same house if one replaces all the toothpicks one at a time?

I'm no philosopher, but I would say that the new house of toothpicks is the same as the old house of toothpicks, since there are so many things about an object that are essential other than the exact materials.

The reason I bring this up is because I realize that the inhabitants living in my apartment - my friends and I call the apartment "1426" since that's the address - have been changing one by one every year and this fall, the members have changed completely.

My friend Alex moved into the apartment four years ago with three of his friends. The institution commonly known as 1426 was then an all-male institution and I visited the place a couple of times when the guys threw parties.

The following year, one of the inhabitants moved back to Germany and I moved in. We simply renewed the original lease. We also continued to throw parties.

This sort of exchange has continued every year since, and now, four years after Alex and his three friends moved in, the last guy from that troupe, Alex, has moved out.

The lease my current roommates and I have signed for the coming year is still an extension of the one the four guys originally signed, even though none of them remain.

Landlords can only raise the rent a certain percentage a year when the same lease is being extended. Therefore, we pay less than the people who live in the other units in the building. The point is that we never let the lease die off. There were always a couple people from the previous year to pass the lease on to the next generation.

It's not just the lease that has been passed on. There are many traditions that have remained from four years ago. For instance, the kitchen is where we usually hang out, not the living room. We don't have a set cleaning schedule, but we play things by ear and volunteer to clean whenever something seems dirty.

Whenever there is somebody in the shower, others don't go inside the bathroom (in many apartments, the rule is that other people can use the toilet and sink when somebody is in the shower). There has always been the unsaid agreement that people can smoke in the apartment as long as they open a window. In a way, these are arbitrary rules, but they've worked for us so far.

The question is whether they will continue to live on. Now, three women and one man live in 1426, not four men. We are four nonsmokers, rather than three smokers and one nonsmoker. I think we areall a bit tired of throwing the kind of large parties that 1426 has thrown from time to time over the past four years.

On the other hand, I still feel the same kind of open friendliness that I felt when I first visited, and then joined, 1426. It is often neces sary for graduate students to share apartments with one, two or even three roommates in order to >make ends meet and I have heard stories of students who have been in constant conflict with their roommates - or, on the opposite side of the spectrum, have not had any contact with them at all.

It's not uncommon for people to conduct many interviews to determine whether they can be roommates with a particular person, and it's not uncommon for a candidate to be rejected. We've never had to resort to that kind of measure.Fortunately, we've always been able to find new roommates immediately, and even though we've never really outlined our rules, they've adjusted to the timbre of 1426 quite easily.

I would like to live in 1426 until I get my Ph.D. and get a job that will allow me to afford a larger place. Even then, I think I will miss some of the nice features that this kind of communal living provides.

Shukan ST: Sept. 15, 2000

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