Thursday, March 15, 2007

Japan! The ancestral homeland!

I'd been thinking about Japan every since I started planning my trip. I knew I had to come here since Japan is part of my heritage and no one in my family has ever been here before. I've been here less than a week but already I've done so much.


It's been a blast so far. I've been staying with Dave, the University friend I bumped into in Ayutthaya, Thailand. I was able to find his house easily from the international ferry to Izuhara. It was his birthday when I arrived so we went out with some of his friends and had an amazing meal, complete with raw horse sashimi, fried rice balls, deep fried cheese wantons, eel, and of course, edamame. It wasn`t the first meal I`d had in Japan (the first being rice balls bought at the supermarket) but it was definitely the best first real meal.


The next day I visited Dave's school and with the help of a translator talked about Vanuatu, showed them some vatu and some photos of my house and land diving. Talking about my situation in an environment like a Japanese class room made it seem more ludicrous than it really was. While the students and teacher were gasping as I described how I had to draw water from a rain-water well I found myself thinking "Did that really happen so recently? Did I really live through a category 5 cyclone in a house made of wild cane?". Luckily I had the photos to prove it. Everyone said "Ooooh" and "Ahhhhh" as I described the living conditions, the food I ate and how we made kava.


The following day I went to Evelyne's school to help her teach her elementary kids their ABC's. Everyone was so surprised when I told them I was American but my last name was "Okamura". I went through the story of how Dad is Japanese and Mom is American, I can get through most of it in Japanese so that's always fun to see the kids understand me. It was fun to be in front of a class again, especially since I was singing a different ABC's song and calling out letters for a children's game. Part of During lunch I sat at a table with the other kids on seat about 6 inches off the ground and tried to answer their questions in Japanese as best I could. Most of the started with "What's your favorite . . ." and Evelyn was able to help a bit. After lunch the kids completely lost any inhibition or reservations they had towards me. They were telling me their names, hanging on me and having a great time with a Japanese to English electronic dictionary Evelyn had brought. They kept typing in their names and then pointing to themselves. One little girl typed in her name, showed it to me in the dictionary and then pointed to herself. But she had put her name in incorrectly and the dictionary showed the translation as "pillow talk" instead. It took us a while to figure out what had happened, but I thought the whole thing was hilarious. I suppose it would make for a funnier story if the little girl rally had wanted me to say sweet nothings to her. With the full schedules the JET teachers have over here I can tell in my short time that the kids make it all worth it. And none of them ran screaming away because they thought I was going to stick them with needles. And the rest of the day people called me Okamura-sensei which I thought was really cool.








When I haven't been at a school a motherly woman named Toyota-san has been driving me around Tsushima and showing me all the interesting things here. This woman is amazing, something of a local saint here. I swear if she doesn't get into heaven there is no God. We've seen the Tsushima horses (only found on Tsushima), the Tsushima deer (only found on Tsushima) and the Tsushima leopard cat (also only found on Tsushima). She also pointed out the cherry blossom trees (Sakura) which are only juuuuuuust starting to bloom in certain places. I hear that April is the time when cherry blossoms really come out. From what I've seen to far it must be simply amazing. My last night in Tsushima she took Dave and I out to dinner where we got some amazing soup and an entire fried eel filet (!) , and after dropping me off at his place Toyota-san gave me money to eat lunch the following day and made me promise to come back to Tsushima sometime. I haven't come across this kind of hospitality in a long time and makes leaving this island that much harder.

My plans for the next part of Japan are simple: get to Fukuoka and meet Dave and his friends so we can hit up the Costco there. Simple plans are good, because there are lesst things to go wrong.

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