My trip to Japan

If any one event in my life has shaped who I have become, it would definitely be my trip to the far said of the world, my journey to Japan. Nothing before or after has had as profound an effect on my dreams and goals for myself. It was then and there that I decided that I would become a world traveler for the rest of my life, come hell or high water.

The trip itself was even of a special nature. I was 16, and the year was 2005. I had signed up for a 4H foreign exchange program. I was going to spend a summer with two host families in Japan. The first month was in Tokyo. I met my host family of three and they welcomed me into their tiny, but cozy apartment. My host brother, Hiroaki, went to school as their schools go year round, while I went to a intensive language school for exchange students at the same time. I had to learn how to navigate the subways and bus routes of the most populated city in the world. I didn’t do so without getting lost a few times; the people there are the most helpful and polite in the world though. I would go to restaurants and karaoke bars in the evening and then big historical sights on the weekends. I got a real taste of what it is like to be a Japanese teenager for the first month.

The second month I lived in a small farming community called Iida. The family, the Suganumas, was a huge family all living under one house. There were four daughters, one son, the parents, the two grandmothers, and one Great grandmother who was 101 years old. That family was quite rural and had a very traditional style house. There was even a small garden one would look for in a movie like The Last Samurai. My host brother took me to school with him for his last week of classes before the short break he’d get. I couldn’t keep up in any of the classes except his English class of course. I quickly became a small celebrity at Iida High. My host brother, Kento, even brought me to his school’s daily Karate team practice where I fell in love with the martial arts. We climbed mountains together, Kento and I, visited huge temples and even joined in a Shinto religious holiday parade by lifting a massive wooden god (with the help of about two dozen other men) and chanting as we walked through the town streets.

The last major event on the trip was the observance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki days. It was by far the most humbling feeling I’ve ever known. Reading about it in text books is nothing like seeing the memorial itself as an American surrounded by Japanese. My host grandmothers and especially the great grandmother were alive when the bombs really dropped. I think had it happened to any other nation I’m not sure if there would have been the same level of accepting and even should I say forgiveness to be an American in the house of people who lost family members and friends in those attacks.

After coming home, I already felt the need to travel again, to have a new experience like that again with new people and places. That is why I’ve chosen my major and minor of journalism and cultural anthropology. I want to explore the whole world, meet every people and then come back home and tell everyone about it through my writings, like I am right now. I believe that I’m already on this path. The question is, “Where shall the winds blow me next?”