Third graders at Handa Elementary in Koori-machi, Fukushima-ken, work together on their class’ flower garden.
Northern Japan was recently racked by three terrible disasters: a 9.0 offshore earthquake, a seventy-foot tsunami, and an overwhelmed nuclear power plant run amok. I lived and taught English in this area for two years, and in some ways, it is still my home.
I was accepted to the Japan Exchange and Training (JET) Programme in 2002 and was assigned to a small town in Fukushima prefecture (state) called Koori. Koori is about four hours north of Tokyo, one hour south of Sendai, and one hour west of the coast and the Daiichi Power Plant. The population is about 13,500 people, considered rural for such a populous country. I arrived in August and met the only other American in town, a recent college graduate from Chicago. He taught at the junior high, while my daily gig was fifth and sixth grades, with monthly visits to the first-through-fourth grades. I spoke about three words of Japanese, and my students spoke no words of English, but through a lot of smiles, creativity, encouragement, and patience, we made it work. At the end of two years, my second class of fifth grade students could string together a sentence like, “I want a sandwich and an apple,” and “The doctor works in the hospital.” Not bad, considering most Japanese districts don’t require English until middle school.
If you walked into Koori’s town hall, you’d see framed photos of an American disc brake factory, a window into its sister city, Elizabethtown, Kentucky. In many ways this part of Japan is like the American Midwest. It’s not glitzy or shiny, like Tokyo or Yokohama, and it doesn’t have the culturally significant historical sites, like the southern part of the island. Instead you’ll discover neat rice fields, fragrant apple orchards, beautiful mountains, small towns where people wave (well, bow) even if they don’t know you, and old-fashioned, salt-of-the-earth Japanese families.
As a guest, these families did everything they could to make me feel welcome. My neighbors, the Maguros, adopted me into their Japanese drumming group and presented me my own happi, or traditional festival outfit. The Tsunodas taught me calligraphy and how to make sushi. When they learned that I played guitar, two of my students’ dads asked me to sit in on “Country Roads” with them during an open mic. I sang karaoke with the teachers (it’s no exaggeration – the Japanese LOVE the Beatles). I often saw my students and their parents around town. When one of my first graders spotted me shopping at the local supermarket, his face lit up with a big “HELLO HILL-SENSEI!!!” Then he followed me around the aisles to see what an American eats. And the year I taught the American tradition of Halloween, I invited the entire 5th and 6th grades to trick or treat at my house (thought they didn’t quite get the idea – for every piece of candy I handed out, their parents gave me a gift in return. By the end of the night, my refrigerator was packed with bags of apples, heads of cabbage, balls of rice snacks, and six-packs of Asahi).
Coincidently, the March 11th earthquake hit the afternoon that my second class of fifth graders would have been graduating from high school. Koori, situated inland, was relatively lucky. According to the Japanese teachers whom I emailed, many people took shelter in the elementary school gym and no one was injured. The tremors damaged about a dozen houses. But Fukushima and Miyage prefectures were closest to the epicenter. The town of Namie, where my friend from Northeastern University taught for three years, is just an hour east and directly on the coast. It was one of the worst hit by the tsunami. More than nine hundred men, women and children are missing and presumed dead. This is the town where everyone turns out to celebrate and ring the temple bell on New Year’s Eve and then, all together, walks to the beach and watches the year’s first sun rise over the ocean.
Another teacher who has lived in Sendai for ten years recently wrote that, even though aftershocks still keep everyone on edge, and there is unimaginable loss and tragedy, people are leaving their doors open, checking in on each other, sharing their water when the pipes work intermittently, and telling stories by candle light when the electricity is out. As one old-timer put it, it’s like how Japan used to be.
In an era before passable roads, Japan was one of the first countries to provide relief to victims of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. And since March 11th, Americans have selflessly donated more than $50 million to the relief effort, and for this I personally thank you. Debt repaid? Not close. Two months later, Japan returned the favor by shipping relief supplies to tornado victims in Alabama (where I am currently volunteering as I write this). In a world where life is so fragile, it’s good to know that we have friends to look out for us, even an ocean apart.
BJ Hill grew up in Massachusetts, studied in Mexico, hitchhiked across Canada, graduated from Northeastern University in 2000, served in AmeriCorps, taught English in Japan, Afghanistan, and China, and volunteered in Haiti (in that order). In 2008 he accomplished a lifelong dream to walk across America, and is always on the lookout for stories of people pursuing their goals and making the world a better place. When he’s not writing, he works the computers for a non-profit agency in Worcester, Mass. Follow me at WalkAmerica2008.com: Bringing the voice of the people to our next president.
