Sunday 3
This past Saturday I skyped my good friend Bryan. He’s living in Tokyo, working for a company there and about to get married to his longtime girlfriend. I was actually around him when he met her for the first time and I’m glad they’ve decided to finally get hitched. It was a great time, catching up with him, but also a bit somber as well. A lot had happened to both of us in the year and change that it’s been since we last had spoken. I had started and finished my hike; he was in Japan for the earthquake and tsunami. We talked a lot about that experience.
The tsunami really hit me hard, much harder than I would have expected it to beforehand. I know that when it happened I was still very much in the throes of reverse culture shock, an experience that even today I’m not sure I’ve completely finished with, and the disaster consumed my days following it. I couldn’t pull myself away from the television, whether it was NHK over the web or the brief stint where Time Warner added their Japanese news station for free. I was consumed by watching the tragedy unfold, the destruction of places that I had not only heard about but been to and loved. Places like Sendai and Miyako were some of the worst hit. Small fishing villages that I’m sure I’d driven through on my way to some place or other wiped off the map. And I was stuck at my parents’ house unable to do anything to help.
I exchanged emails with former coworkers and students, enough to know that everyone that I had known and worked with or taught were ok, but there were casualties among the foreign community, and I’m sure that I’d met one of the guys who were killed at some party or other. In order to try and do something to alleviate the suffering that I saw playing out in front of me I tried to arrange something to raise money for relief. At one point I even tried to put together a website dedicating my thru-hike to charity. That attempt fell through, both because of my inexperience as well as lack of time on my and my friend Chris’s part. But that emotional wave was still fresh with me when I started at Springer. I’m not sure how much it colored the attitudes and expectations that I had for the hike but it did irrevocably shape the journey.
Indeed, partway through the hike I had to face a choice, a “sadistic choice” as the villain in a comic-book movie might phrase it. There was a point where the Japanese government was willing to pay for ALTs from the affected areas to return to their prefectures for two weeks to help bring smiles back to the faces of their former-students. It was one of the hardest choices that I think I’ve made so far that I ended up continuing walking instead of getting off the trail and hopping on a plane. Even now, I’m not sure that I made the right call, but completing that new journey instead of retreading over an old one is something that I think was best for me.
All the same, though, Japan still calls to me. I’m not sure if I’ll ever end up living there again, or even working some place that will send me back on a regular basis, but that doesn’t stop me from hoping, or from working on my language proficiency whenever I can. I realized when I finally had the tools to begin studying again how much I had lost in that year away from it, and so I find myself slowly picking up the pieces again. So to talk with Bryan, a guy I’d met over there and who was living and even prospering gives me hope that one day I’ll be back, and, even more important, ready to take advantage of that new experience to the fullest.