the thoughts and experiences of Heather Meadows
About.com sent me a recipe today about Ohagi, sweet rice balls, and I suddenly very much wanted to eat one. Not only that, I wanted to be back in Japan.
The dream of living there hasn’t died–I pass a company on my way to work that is in the same industry as the company I wanted to work for, and every day I ponder trying to get my foot in the door there so I could make myself more attractive to the Japanese company–but as always I would be happy just to go back and visit.
Have you ever had a feeling come over you so suddenly that you had to stop what you were doing and just stare off into space so you could digest it?
My computer’s regional settings are on Japan, meaning that not only do I have the Input Method Editor (IME) sticking out over my system tray, but also the date displays in Japanese when I hover my mouse over the clock, like so:
If you can’t tell, that’s in the format 2004-year 10-month 23-date Saturday-day. Those year, month, date, and day things are “counters”…basically little suffixes that quantify what you’re talking about. I also have the time set to the 24 hour clock, because they use it in Japan a lot.
This has the effect of giving every day a Japanese connotation; when I hover over the system clock to check what day of the week it is, for example, I have to read it in kanji.
Today I was checking the date. I thought it was the 23rd, but I wanted to be sure so I could date a chat log appropriately. I hovered over and saw the 10月23日 and thought, “October in Japan.”
The thought totally stopped me. I lost track of what I was doing. My eyes roamed away from the monitor, unseeing, as I imagined a sea of tiny red maple leaves. How beautiful they must be. I’ve never seen them in person.
Then I was suddenly sad, because I can’t see them, I can’t go to Japan right now and look at the changing colors. I can’t go back to Miyajima and that exquisite ryokan, where the mama-san called Sean and me “handsome man” and “pretty girl” and wished us a “happy baby”, and walk the skinny road down the mountain to see how the lush, verdant forest looks in the fall.
It seemed like every morning we were throwing belongings into bags and charging off to the train station, wrestling too-big suitcases into the passenger cars and barely finding room for them in the overhead racks.
The first two weeks of my trip to Japan consisted of a tour of the country by rail that took us from the medium-sized port city of Sapporo, located in the cool northern island of Hokkaido, down to the pleasant backwater town of Yatsushiro in Kyushu. Along the way we stopped in Otaru and Hakodate in Hokkaido; and Aomori, Akita, Yamagata, Nikko, Tokyo, Nagoya, Takayama, Kyoto, Nara, Himeji, and Hiroshima in Honshu.
The last three weeks were spent in Yatsushiro and the surrounding areas, including Minamata, Mt. Aso National Park, and Kumamoto City. We spent a night in Fukuoka before returning to the states.
It felt like we jumped out of the plane running and never stopped till we hit the plane back home. It was exhausting, grueling, torturous.
It was the best time of my life.
Every day there was something new to see and explore, to learn about. I saw the thriving city of Hiroshima, which for some reason I’d expected to be nothing more than a wasteland. I saw the ancient burial mound of Prince Kanenaga, one of the most influential figures in fourteenth century Japan. I saw Tokyo’s tsukiji, the largest fish market in Japan. I climbed up and peered into an active volcano whose lava was a funky green color. I explored Nikko, home of the most authentic old-style buildings in all of Japan-and wholesale NBA jerseys coincidentally, a famous tourist site. I wandered through dozens of shrines and temples, including the Todaiji near Nara, home of the Daibutsu, a fifty-three foot bronze buddha which is housed in the largest existing wooden structure in the world.
I fed tame deer and took cable cars up to mountaintops. I explored a seven-story electronics shop in Tokyo that was only one of many such retailers in behandelen the Akihabara electronics district. I learned to write Japanese calligraphy with a brush. I shopped at several arcades, cheap jerseys “shopping streets” that consist of partially enclosed alleys that can extend for miles.
I ate soba, sukiyaki, ramen, sushi, jokes: sashimi, tempura, and curry, and discovered that unagidon, barbequed freshwater eel on rice, is my favorite dish in the world.
I immersed myself in Japanese pop music. I went bowling. I played video games. I watched NHK and wholesale jerseys the news and anime and dramas and comedies.
I rode a bicycle through a maze of machis, down the narrow ??????? passageways 6.20.01 between houses and out onto streets clogged with tiny cars.
It Here! was breathtaking. The whole country was breathtaking.
This essay was originally written in thanks to the Institute wholesale NFL jerseys of International Education, without whom this trip would not have been possible. This post, made for archival purposes in January of 2015, has been backdated to August 1, 2001, but I’m not sure about the actual date of writing.