Kusu JHS second-year students stage a sit-in at Hakata Station. Their demands: less math homework, more spontaneous appearances at school by Kiera Knightly (Orlando Bloom for the girls).
I've yet to actually meet another JET face-to-face who's gone on one of their school's second-year student trips (it's only the second-year students from junior and high school that get to go) so between the four paid days I'd be spending away from the official parameters of my job and the dozen or so messages I'd received expressing never ending envy/loathing from other ALTs I was feeling damn fine. That also meant though that there was nobody to whom I could turn to to find out what to expect. Reality finally snapped jarringly into place the Friday before we departed when Kusu JHS requested my presence at a meeting to discuss the final itinerary and I discovered everything was meticulously planned down even to exactly where every student and teacher would be sitting on each bus, train and taxi we would take. "Here we go," I thought, "the plodding, clinical, killjoy Japanese tendency to avoid even slight anxiety at the expense of spontaneity and adventure." I shit you not: the itinerary is 64-pages long plus supplementary seating charts and floor plans.
What'd I say? Monorail! What's it called? Monorail! I mean...Shinkansen. The students didn't get that one, but then again I'm no Lyle Lanley.
I had a weekend of hot springs, video games and yakitori to forget about Friday, but come Tuesday I got slapped in the face again with the tear jerking start time of 6:30 AM. Whatever, the following morning would see a waking time of 5:30 AM. Let me take the rest of this paragraph to rundown the schedule for the four day expedition. Tuesday morning we assemble at Kusu JHS's gym, file into buses and make for Fukuoka where we hop a bullet train (Shinkansen) to Hiroshima. There we tour the Peace Park, inspect the genbaku domu (A-bomb dome), leave a thousand origami cranes as modern tradition dictates, listen to a speech by one of the hibakusha (bomb survivor), visit the park museum and finally hop a small ferry across the Seto Inland Sea to Matsuyama and get hop on a much larger ferry bound for Kobe. Whew, first day only! That took way too much space so here's the compressed version for the remaining three days: Wednesday, Nara; Thursday, Kyoto; Friday, Osaka's Universal Studios theme park and an airplane home.
Picking up in Fukuoka, um, I rode a bullet train for the first time. I rode a fucking BULLET TRAIN! Sorry, I blame my parents and the trip to Sacramento's train museum at a tender age for my lingering adoration of them. The Shinkansen, as it's said in Japanese, truly is all that and a bag of chips though. The 700 series train we rode sat five abreast in seats reminiscent of airplane business-class and had at least fifteen cars, each of which were about as long as one of those articulating double MUNI buses. It was like being on a luxurious BART train that traveled 150 MPH, was on time and allowed beer and smoking.
No witty caption here.
After little more than an hour's jump through hyperspace we had arrived in Hiroshima. Being hardy past 10 AM the students remained bleary-eyed and I was remaining lucid only by the grace of these strange little energy drink jelly pouches for sale over here absolutely everywhere. I admit I like them and they do "work", at least for a while. Anyways, Hiroshima's Peace Park and the monuments erected and remaining to commemorate August 6, 1945 are just...wow... I've been to two other UNESCO World Heritage sites in my lifetime before this, Yosemite and Redwood National Forest, but unlike their ilk Hiroshima is unique in that it's the only site (that I've found perusing the list so far) that commemorates war and an astronomical loss of life. Gallipoli, Dresden, Gettysburg--none of them are UNESCO sites. I don't know, maybe they all deserve to be named World Heritage sites and maybe just none of them held the implications for mankind that Hiroshima does. Whatever the case, I am just happy to know that UNESCO shares the desire to make peace as much a part of our global heritage as much as it does for places of beauty.
The students actually had an assignment while in the park and I was just the man to help them along with it. Their task was to ask one foreign visitor to fill out a questionnaire concerning their opinions about the bombing and nuclear weapons in general. While everyone respondent expressed general horror about the bombing happening in the first place, when asked their opinions about the existence of such weapons the responses ran the gamut from full disarmament to people that wanted more to even people that wanted to return to a Cold War "MAD" scenario. Where I came in though was helping the shyest students approach the big scary white people. Weird as it may sound, in retrospect, this was the best part of the entire trip, because not only did I get to meet tons of people from France, NZ, Australia, etc., the activity forced the kids out of their comfy shells and revealed that we white devils can actually be agreeable folk on occasion and we bonded over that. I have a few clingers now (meaning students that basically stalk me) and three of the girls keep on stealing my hat and glasses, but it's easier to talk to and teach them now.
Students from around the world come to the Peace Park to hang one thousand origami cranes in these clear-walled bins that protect them from the elements. Next, a picture of the eternal flame housing and the genbaku domu in the background.
*Sigh*
There's no way I'm going to wrap this up in just one post seeing how long-winded I am. And I have so much more to say, so I'm going to wrap this here and pick it up tomorrow night. Stay tuned!
--Matt
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