Japan, My One Time Home

日本は美しい国になります。それは、人々は彼女の最も美しい宝物です。祝福を、それらに強さを、尊厳、愛と援助彼らはこの危機に直面するように彼らが必要とする。

One of the best years of life was one of the hardest too: the year I spent teaching English in a rural fishing villiage in Japan. Right after I graduated college, I was offered a job by the Japanese government to assist Japanese teachers of English in their classrooms. My job was to facilitate communication skills as well as cultural exchange. When I arrived in Japan, I knew exactly six Japanese words. My first month was also typhoon season and I was greeted with a 4.1 earthquake a week into my new life. I didn’t think I could make it a year, so I calculated exactly how long I would need to work to reimburse the government for my airfare.

And then, I fell in love and stayed.

Not with a man, but with men, women and children. My village: 福浦、西海町. Nishiumi-cho has road which circles its peninsula. The center of the peninsula is a rugged mountain with hissing harmless snakes and wild monkeys. The road hugged the cliff and was so small in some parts that only one car could pass. If someone was driving in the opposite direction, one driver had to back up until there was a spot to pull over. Early in the morning large trucks carrying live fish bound for sushi resturants would cause quite the traffic jam as they sloshed ocean water all over the road.

I will not attempt to summarize my year in a short blog post. Let me just take you to my last moments in my town. It was about 7 pm, time to board the overnight bus that would take me to Osaka for my flight home. My closest friends, fellow teachers and a few students came to see me off. When I looked into their faces, I could not board the bus. Our language was always limited, so much communication was said through our faces. At that moment, we were all teary eyed with smiles of love and warm wishes. Something in my heart couldn’t leave those connections. My foot turned to lead and would not raise. It was almost a scene. But a scene would be bad form in Japan so finally I mustered the strength to lift my foot and begin my journey to a place that for all but this one glorious year of my life, I considered home.