As he continued with his own narration, Kansas smiled a bit, "Slowly, I was able to decipher or glean much of the following from Ojii-san-even as my mind wandered back-and-forth across several continents recalling different conversations I had had . These were conversations and interviews I have held with many elders in various lands--dating to my first home-stay experience, which was in Alsatian France back in the 1980s."
"Wakarimashitaka?"
Ojii-san explained, "When I first went to China ... my ship ... landed at Shanghai ... but ... soon ... my troops moved ... in an isolated ... region in the ... mountains."
Kansas thought, " This moment was for me like one of those oft stated "déjÃvus": That is, I had been in this same situation before. I am sitting here nodding "Hai" or uh-huh to Ojii-san even to the parts of the narration in Japanese I don't understand very well. However, I understand or grasp straws and eventually understand that a connection across space-time and generations has been made."
"Years ago, in the first exchange program I was ever involved in, I had been placed on an isolated farm in the Alsace region of France in the foothills of the Jura mountains leading into Switzerland. It was the winter of 1983-1984. Normally, the family I was living with spoke French and German dialects amongst themselves. That is, they spoke primarily formal-German to me, though. However, prior to going to live and work on their farm, I myself had never studied either French nor German. As a matter of fact, in my high school days in my home state of Kansas, I had had no opportunity whatsoever to study any language but English--as foreign languages were not offered in many schools of that rural mid-western state's local school district, i.e. in Sterling, Kansas of the 1970s."
Kansas continued, "On this farm in rural France--as in rural Japan--I had had no access to regular language courses. However, on this Alsatian farm, my life seemed--and was--particularly isolated as there was not even a television in the family room in the early 1980s. Nevertheless, as several members of the French Alsatian Wenger family painstakingly attempted to teach me (and through a lot of stress and hard-work along with daily practice) while I lived and worked on that multilingual farm Wenger family farm, after some months I had slowly begun to communicate with the family in what I later came to understand was a dialect far from formal German."
"Particularly on one snowy winter night in those foothills of the Alps, I recall upon listening to a world-news broadcast from Switzerland on the ancient radio that I had asked in my stammering German, 'Tante Lydie --Aunt Lydie, the mother in the house--, why do you all living here in such a rural region in the mountains have any particular interest in what was happing in northern Africa and other remote regions from her experience?' Further, I wondered: 'More importantly, why would Tante Lydie Wenger's family be willing to invite foreigners, like myself, to live and work on their dairy farm as part of an international work exchange program. Was it simply to have cheap foreign labor or something more?'"
"Tante Lydie nodded in the direction of the farm we observed outside through the icy snow-covered front door-window. By the way, the shed across the way had been occupied by German soldiers most of WWII as our farm, Les Verreries was the southernmost point on the one-time Maginot Line. Tante Lydie explained slowly, 'Wir koennen es nicht mehr leisten, von dem Aussenwelt weiter nicht zu wissen.' That is, we can't afford it any longer to know too little about what is happening outside our borders."
Kansas added, "Such situations or experiences, like that afternoon trying to discuss the past with Ojii-san or that evening with Tante Lydie, always make me acutely aware of both my lack of vocabulary and skills in moving important cross-cultural discussions to a higher level, i.e. where I can fully participate in the exchange. I had wanted Tante Lydie to discuss more of her interests in the wider world. I had wanted to know if WWII had impacted her family as much as it had her husband, Onkel Fritz, who had been forced to learn only formal German in school during the Nazi-occupation of his home country: in Alsace of occupied France from 1940 to 1945."
"Wakarimashitaka?"
Kansas related, "Not two months earlier--after taking an all-night-train-ride south from Itoigawa to the Hiroshima region--, I had found myself in two similar situations. The first of these incidents took place in Miyajima Town across the waters-and only a stone's throw-- from the famous temple island of the same name: Miyajima. My plans on that long journey had been to visit Hiroshima and Miyajima over one long weekend. However, I ended up staying two days and later the second of two memorable encounters would be just up-river from the famous Bridge at Iwakuni."
"Upon my arrival in Hiroshima, I had feasted on an order of Hirohima-style yaki-soba, a local specialty, and then checked in exhausted at a local youth hostel. The very next morning I headed with all my belongings to Heiwakoen or the Hiroshima International Peace Park. As I got off the bus, the hauntingly famous Hiroshima dome arose in the distance. The city's world famous surviving nuclear bombing landmark, beckoned me at a relatively quiet hour of the day."
Kansas recalled, "Luckily, no hoards of Japanese high school students were yet being paraded through the grounds of the Peace Park at 8:15am, i.e. approximately the time of day when the U.S. Enola Gay had dropped its atomic device which soon exploded over that city. At first, I had a large area of the contemplative peace park practically to myself. I was impressed by how quiet or reflective, the place was as I crossed a bridge, which had been located at Ground Zero on August 6, 1945. I stopped on the bridge for at least a half hour and gazed at the dome's reflection in the water while basking in the glow of a sunny but relatively cool morning. Slowly, the pace of city-traffic began picking up as more and more residents of metropolitan Hiroshima made their way to their offices."
"After observing the growing tide of visitors-some meditating in the park, others just taking photographs--, I finally arrived at the museum in the park. The museum documents the explosion and the repercussions of the bomb in Hirsohima. Not only is the death, suffering, and cancer of survivors and victims documented there, but also observations are made on the way-of-life in war-time Japan, i.e. when its citizens, children and others were in forced-labor day-after-day. One exhibition in the Museum noted that many child-laborers were used in the war. Later, back-outside in the park, I came across a somber memorial to the children who had been abused by being forced to labor for industries in Japan during the last years of that horrible war."
Kansas continued, "The visit to the Peace Museum and Park left me somber and feeling very heavy, too. As I came out of the museum grounds around noon, I determined to do something more uplifting and headed out on the tram to Miyajima town. From Miyajima port, I quickly took a boat across to the gorgeous island and its many temples-an island which also beckons many of my own students, who are juniors in high school and who make their educational excursion south each autumn to both Hiroshima Peace Park and to Miyajima Temple."
As noted above, one of Kansas' hobbies is photography, so he subsequently spent most of that afternoon and early evening taking photos around the beautiful estuary, where Miyajima island is situated, as the tide was going out. Later, Kansas walked among the temples and shrines--and even hiked to the top of the mountain, which enabled nice views out into the rest of the archipelago. Around dusk, he hiked back down again to the boat harbor after most other tourists had left the isle for the mainland. This had left the island to its main residents-that is the famous tame deer of Miyajima. With stars overhead, Kansas took one of the last boats back towards Hiroshima. He then trudged up a hill to the Miyajima Youth Hostel and checked-in.
