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Thursday, June 21, 2012

Wtf blogger is almost unrecognizable - and I've only been away, what, five months!?

So what has happened since then ... well, I'm back in America. Not quite to my parents' house yet, but en route seeing relatives in California. And America is ... pretty much the same. Not much changes in a year, after all. But then again, a lot of things do. Maybe it'll be more apparent when I go back to school. People say I'm gonna feel "out of the loop" when I see my friends again. Um, well, it's not like I was never IN the loop. But five years from now - I'm pretty sure one "gap" year won't seem like such a big deal. Life is transient. I hope people change, places change - god, I hope I can change (for the better, of course).

You get ups and downs when you're abroad, but my biggest down this time around was probably the very beginning, when I knew nobody. It helped that it wasn't my first time in Japan. But two summers ago, I remember feeling smothered and REALLY wanting to get out of the country. Then I traveled for a couple weeks and fell in love with it again. But this past year, while I traveled a lot, I started growing attached to Japan because of the PEOPLE. Ironically, one of the reasons I stopped blogging here was because it was a lot harder to write about people. My last post was simply on places in Kyushu (still my favorite place in Japan <3). But actually, the people really do make the places.

I remember my last interview with my sensei - she asked me what I had learned the most this year. Yeah, my Japanese had improved. I had traveled a lot, both within and outside Japan. I learned a lot more about living in a foreign country and theoretically should have become more independent (although my roommate still nagged at me a lot for not cleaning regularly). But I answered, "After all, isn't it about human relationships?" I get the feeling that 人間関係 is one of those overused cliches in Japanese society ... but whatever way you say it, that marked my year for me. My sensei misinterpreted and asked me if I had gotten close to a lot of people at the IUC. Don't get me wrong. I had fond memories of mingling with everyone at IUC and made quite a few close friends. But thankfully, my life was not just limited to that gray office building in downtown Yokohama - I really pushed myself to get to know people from all aspects of my life in Japan - not just my language program, but also my church, my dance group, my fellow Tohoshinki fans, other random people I would meet, etc. This was pretty much the first year I wasn't so closely branded as a "Radcliff Middle" student, "North Hardin" student, and - the ever inescapable - "Yale" student. It was really refreshing to befriend people who were from different schools or already working.

And so the big conclusion is... I committed myself to studying abroad for a year just to learn that. There were times when I thought a year abroad should have amounted to something more - like researching  and brainstorming for a senior thesis, doing an internship, etc. But now that I look back, I wouldn't have it any other way. After all, that’s why I came to Japan this time around - to have real relationships abroad. I read over my summer Japan blog from 2010, and I can feel myself venting so much frustration back then - I really believed I couldn’t have anything but fake relationships in Japan because of the overpoliteness, the indirectness. But I think I just absorbed these stereotypes and justified my unhappiness in Japan at that time. This year, while I didn’t become friends with everyone I met, I do feel pretty stupid for the generalizations about Japanese culture I wrote two years ago.

I don't want to turn this into some sort of world peace agenda, but honestly, people are the same everywhere. Countries and cultures are different, but everyone laughs and cries. I hope future Light fellows (as well as anyone else who goes abroad), wherever they are, will be able to laugh and cry along with the people there.
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Sunday, February 5, 2012

Decisions

(Written January 7, 2012)

Well, halfway through. And I guess it’s about time for some serious reflection. But I’m about to kill my Light blog – no new posts since September 21, 2011, and I don’t think I’m gonna start up again anytime soon. On top of that, I feel like that this year is so much different than a summer in a new country – you’re amazed by all these new things, you take lots of pics, you talk about your weekend excursions – but this year has been more about people than places. And you can’t blog about people the way you can about places. I feel like some things are just best not shared with random Google searches. Not to say that I’m no longer reflecting on those experiences – my memories in Japan are being preserved through long emails to friends back home, a plethora of photos, and personal journaling, among other things. But blogging, perhaps, is no longer doing what I originally intended to do.

Nonetheless, I’m about to go back on what I’ve said by blogging about a place that’s left me such an impression that I want to preserve something of it here.

This winter, I went down south to Kyushu and Okinawa – and while most people gasp with jealousy when I mention Okinawa, it wasn’t those balmy tropical islands – but Nagasaki – as the place that left the most powerful impression. I never go to museums when I travel, but in Japan, I apparently make an exception for atomic bomb museums. I went to the one in Hiroshima last year, and that had been pretty moving. Nagasaki was even more so. The images are sometimes disturbing, but how else do you understand the horrific power of an atomic bomb? Nonetheless, the image that stuck in my mind the most weren’t the child corpses or the half-burned faces. It was a photograph of a boy, with a baby slung on his back. 

Quoted from the photographer Joseph O'Donnell: "I came in from Sasebo to Nagasaki and looked around from a hill. Men walking with white masks caught my attention. The men were working besides a big hole of about 60cm deep.  They were putting the corpses pilled up on a wagon into the hole with burning lime
. Then I saw a boy of around ten years old walking toward them. 

He has his little brother baby strapped on his back. In those days, it was quite common in Japan to see young boys carrying their little brother or sister on their back while playing at the field.
  But this boy wasnt here to play. He had a very important duty to come to this crematory. 
You can see it on his face. And he was bare feet. 

The boy came to the edge of the crematory. His face is stiff and eyes bracing for an ordeal. The baby on his back looks deep asleep and head bent backward.  The boy stood there for five or ten minutes. Then the men with the white masks came towards him and started to untie his strap. At this moment, I realized that this baby brother he was carrying was dead. 
The men gently held the babys arms and legs and slowly put him into the hole where the hot stones are laid.  I could hear the steaming sound of the babys flesh burning. Then a gleaming red flare danced up in the air. The bright red color like the sunset was reflecting on the yet tender boys cheek as he stood there straight and still.  That moment, I realized that the boy was biting his lip and it was bleeding. He was biting hard as he gazed his little brother in flames. 
When the flames had calmed down, the boy turned on his heels and left the place silently." 

I tried to take a picture of it, but it’s not that great quality:


Also, at least 13,000 Koreans were exposed to the bomb (a lot of them conscripted during the war). There was also a memorial for the Koreans who died in the Hiroshima bombing in the other site as well. I don’t know too much about Korean history, but has there ever been another event where that many Korean people died in seconds?

I was also interested in Nagasaki because of its remnants of Kakure Christians – Japanese Christians who went into hiding because of persecution during the Tokugawa shogunate. Missionary work by the Catholic church during the sixteenth century was actually progressing quite a bit in Japan up until Tokugawa, but the ensuing persecution was brutal. Christians were forced to apostatize by stepping on the image of Christ, or else, crucified in the same manner as Christ. Nonetheless, hidden Christianity continued for two hundred plus years until Kakure Christians emerged during the Meiji period – but through the hundred of years that they had stayed hidden, their religion had mixed so many elements of Buddhism and Shintoism that the Catholic Church considered it blasphemy: images of the Virgin Mary that bear a striking resemblance to the Buddhist Kannon bodhissatva, for one:


Whether they are truly Christian or not, I find their mix of religions interesting – as well as the story of martyrs and persecution also moving.

And now I throw in my travel tips to highly recommend the SUNQ Pass if you ever travel around Kyushu – 10000 yen for 3 days of bus travel covering almost any bus on the island; not just intercity buses, but also local city buses, ferries, etc. In addition to Nagasaki, I also stopped by Fukuoka, Kumamoto, Kagoshima, and Beppu (the onsen are AWESOME!) – all great cities worthy of travel. Ah, Kyushu, if I could live anywhere in Japan, I think it would be here. I think Tokyo is still my favorite city … but something about the palm trees and the laid-back atmosphere of this island wants to convince me otherwise.

(Written February 5, 2012)

Well, I guess that’s a pause for now … lots of things to look forward in the rest of my time here – running the Tokyo marathon, Tohoshinki concert (hehe), jumping leaps and bounds in my Japanese (hopefully), and most importantly, building relationships with the friends I’ve been lucky to have here. Looking back on what I wrote I month ago – well, I don’t know if I’ll truly “kill” this blog or not, but it will no longer be an obligation for me to update every two weeks since I’ve opted to do the report option instead for the Light fellowship. It has truly been a year where I’m learning that the people make the places.


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