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Hi!!! How have you been? Have you been taking your vitamins? Sleeping 8 hours a night? Eating breakfast?? Doing your homework??? I hope you're all doing well! Don't be fooled by the lack of blog posts -- I'm still alive* and enjoying myself in Japan. :D

For the past month and a half, I've been all over the place. I went to Kyoto, Himeji, Oita, Hiroshima, Ehime, Okinawa, and Nara with my family, and then to South Korea with my friend, Chris. After that came another round of essays for medical school applications, and then the final exam for the medical English class. The time has flown by so fast that sometimes it seems like there's hardly been time to think, let alone write blog entries. Things never get boring, though, and hopefully life will stay that way. :D Anyway, on to my (very disjointed) impressions of the last few weeks...

My family came to Japan in the end of June, and in the middle of their trip, we all went to the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima. Even though it was my third time at the museum, it was still quite intense. Inside are a variety of exhibits about the atom bomb victims: a lunch box full of charred food that a junior high school girl never got to eat because she was incinerated by the heat from the bomb, a drawing of a husband peering helplessly through the ruins of his burning house at his wife who is stuck inside, a picture of a man so badly burnt that his face, back and legs are completely covered with blisters/charred skin(??). Really awful stuff.

In South Korea a few weeks later, Chris and I went to another museum where I saw more of the same. This museum was about the prisons that the imperialist Japanese army ran while it occupied Korea from the early 1900's until World War II. I had known that the Japanese army committed war crimes in Korea and China, but the museum was still pretty shocking. There were lots of really graphic displays showing how Koreans who protested against the occupation government were thrown into jail and tortured in all sorts of despicable ways. What struck me the most was that the tortured Koreans in the pictures looked just as awful as the a-bomb victims in Hiroshima. There's really not much difference between a back covered with blisters and a back covered with long gashes from a whip. Different means of violence, but the same horrible result, at least on the level of the individual victims.

All of these awful, awful pictures were, of course, depressing and left me thinking some pretty dark thoughts. How can human beings do such horrible things to each other? But throughout the rest of the trip, people did so many kind and good things for my family and me that it was difficult for me to be pessimistic for long. While this blog is not exactly the best place to make any big claims about the goodness of human nature, I have found lots of reasons to be optimistic. Here they are in no particular order:

-- Chris's friend Jin, who let us stay in her apartment even though I had never met her before. She was a fabulous host and showed Chris and me all around Seoul in between studying for her midterms and working at her part-time job.

-- the Korean guy sitting next to me on the plane back to Korea, who realized that I couldn't eat my sandwich because there were nuts inside and kindly offered me his yogurt. :)

-- my friends in Kyoto. My folks came to Kyoto on a Friday night, but my ferry arrived there much earlier that morning. I thought I would call up some of my friends in Kyoto to see if they could meet, but figured that it might not work out since they have classes on Fridays. Surprisingly enough, they all managed to reschedule somehow or other and took me out to lunch, dinner, and fireworks. One of my friends had a test in Osaka in the morning and her part-time job in Kobe in the afternoon, but still took the forty-five minute train ride out to Kyoto to meet up with us for an hour or so before running back to Kobe. Talk about going out of your way!

-- all of the Japanese relatives. In Oita, my dad's aunt Toshiko reserved our hotel for us, took us around in taxis to the best restaurants she could find, and fed us until I thought I was going to burst. :)


Our relatives in Okinawa were equally hospitable. My dad's aunt rented the biggest van I have ever seen, and her son, Dai, chauffeured us all over the island for the whole weekend.

(They also covered us with a tiny umbrella to make sure we didn't get sun burnt.)

-- the people of my town. Four of my lady students invited us over to one of their houses for lunch. They had mentioned that they would prepare some sort of light lunch, but I should have known better. When we got to the house, we found an absolutely gigantic spread of salad, okonomiyaki (a Japanese style pancake kind of thing), sausages, rice balls, cake, Japanese sweets, and several other dishes. It was delicious, but certainly not a light lunch.


That night, the softball men had a welcome party for my family. They started by driving us out to the first baseman's sake factory for a tour, and even enlisted an interpreter to come along and help explain things. After the sake factory, they ushered us over to the local shrine where more softball men and the Shinto priest/piano player were waiting to receive us. At the shrine, they had arranged for a shakuhachi (Japanese flute) and koto (Japanese stringed instrument) concert:


and a performance of shishimai, a traditional dragon dance:


We watched the show from the seats of honor, well-supplied with tea and mosquito repellent.


Then we set off to a restaurant for dinner. At the door of the restaurant, the softball men gave all of us happi (traditional Japanese summer jackets) and had us participate in a traditional welcome party ceremony where you break the top of a sake keg with big wooden hammers.


Dinner was huge and delicious, (in hindsight, I guess I shouldn't have scheduled lunch with my students and the softball team's party on the same day, because we were all quite full) and in the middle, all sorts of little surprises kept popping up. At one point, the shakuhachi player gave Steven his very own shakuhachi to take back to America. A little bit later, several softball men stood up to make speeches about how happy they were to have us in their town, and then requested that each of us get up and make a speech of our own. And in the middle of the speeches, the mayor of my town entered the restaurant and presented all of us with towels as a gift from the City of Toon. I felt like a diplomat or a movie star or something. It was all pretty great.


-- my family, who came all the way to Japan to see me! I had such a good time seeing you again!!

It's hard to recreate the last few weeks in a blog post, but the general feeling of goodwill and hospitality that I encountered everywhere I went was just incredible. Sometimes, back at work, I have these moments where I remember a funny moment with all the great people I hung out with during the trip and find myself smiling. Ikuko thinks I'm crazy, smiling for no particular reason in front of my computer screen, but I think I'm probably just happy. :)



* Still alive, but covered with mosquito bites. I think a small family of mosquitoes has taken up residence in my apartment.... (>_<);;