The week’s been long, but it’s been equally exciting. I’ve had so many new and meaningful experiences in the past seven days, and the fact that I’ve been able to do so much in so little time has been a great privilege.
My week started with Sunday’s movie night, where we watched Miyazaki’s movie Grave of the Fireflies, which depicts the life of Seita and his little sister Setsuko during the WWII fire-bombings of Japan. The depiction of everyday life in the midst of war, the battle between carrying on and giving up, and the way that war finally wins out in the end: Miyazaki is a master at putting his audience in the shoes of his characters. By the end, I was – quite frankly – emotionally devastated. Watching joy fall into desperation, bright spirit into lethargic hunger, and strength into weakness connected me to the tragedy that Japan’s citizens underwent during WWII.
These emotions carried over into Tuesday, when we visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Of all the places that we’ve visited – and probably will visit – I think it’s the most important. Not only was the layout of the museum admiringly well thought-out, but the content was raw and striking. Seeing the paintings, poems, and journals by people trying desperately to express their suffering was as close to a first-person perspective as I (hopefully) will ever have of their situation. Furthermore, the articles of clothing, folded cranes, and photographs all put faces and physical objects to people that before had just been theoretical. The overarching narrative of reaching peace and de-nuclearizing the world was that much more powerful because of these unadulterated representations.
On Monday I was able to visit an old family friend who’s in Hiroshima researching the effect that nuclear radiation has on cancer in humans. We talked about the Hiroshima bombing, the ethical uncertainties surrounding the history of Hiroshima radiation testing, and the peace memorial itself. It was fulfilling to me to be able to discuss the topics we’ve covered in class with someone who is not at all related to this program. Not only does it help me delve into and deepen my own understanding, but hearing an outsider’s thoughts about topics I’ve been studying helps me see different perspectives and approaches that I wouldn’t have gotten from students and professors who have all been learning in the same environment as me. It’s also been interesting talking to Japanese people about what I’ve been learning. I’m always unsure whether or not something we’ve discussed in class will be something a Japanese person certainly knows about – as a Japanese person – or if it’s something they won’t ever have thought about before. I especially am uncertain with Japanese history and tradition. For this reason it was really insightful to go to Kamakura with a Japanese friend on Saturday. Kamakura, a coastal city about an hour from Tokyo, is a hub for Japanese and foreign tourists alike. It’s a place known for its shirasu cuisine – dishes piled high with tiny whitefish – as well as its Kyoto-like scenery of Buddhas, shrines and temples, and bamboo. I visited a total of five shrines and temples during my short time there (I was told later that the reason for all the shrines is that, before Tokyo, Japan’s capital was actually in Kamakura). Going to these places with a Japanese person was interesting, because I was able to watch the ways that she engaged with them – which traditions she partook in, how serious she took them, and so on and so forth. I found out that she didn’t know the difference between shrines and temples, and also that she had no idea what any of the ones we went to specialized in. Furthermore, while she didn’t do the purification ceremony (she told me only about half of all people did), she eagerly gave five-yen offerings at every place we visited and, when she got her fortune, took it somewhat seriously. She didn’t know about a lot of the things I’d learned in class about temples and shrines, nor did she partake in many of the ceremonies that we have discussed; learning this made me realize even more that studying in a classroom only reveals so much. The way that classroom knowledge actually connects to an individual’s everyday life can only be known by leaving the classroom and experiencing that daily living.
The more I’m in Japan, the more I experience what this daily living is and the more I understand where what we’re learning directly connects with the lives of Japanese individuals and where it is better connected to an idea of “Japan” as a general concept of nation, history, tradition, and identity. Consuming Japanese experiences that Japanese individuals also consume – going to shrines and temples, watching a sumo tournament, eating traditional Japanese food – has been helping me delve deeper into the content of this course and understand the ways that it is expressed in the real world.
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