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I’m back in Japan.  It feels good to type that, as there was a terrible week or two when I wondered if I’d be able to come back this spring, and an even more terrible day when I didn’t know if there would be anything to come back to.  But after two postponements (I was originally supposed to come April 7th), I am here.  It’s good to be back.  And it’s wonderful to be with Trevor.

I arrived in Kodomari on Monday night, after a rather unbearable 35 hours of travel, and have mostly spent this week recovering and trying to sleep when it’s dark and stay awake when it’s light.  But I have been out a bit – to Eikaiwa Tuesday night, to the restaurant we often visit, to the elementary school.  I can’t say that I sense a tremendous change, an overwhelming sense of grief, but perhaps I haven’t been out enough or I’ve been too groggy to really notice.  Or maybe I’m just too happy to be with Trevor again.  But then, Kodomari and the eastern part of Aomori were untouched by the devastation.  It looks exactly the same as when I last left it.  The sun is shining and the birds are singing.  People here haven’t lost children, parents, spouses.  Their homes are intact, their village is intact.  On the opposite side of the prefecture, though, and in the ones directly below, it is a completely different story.  But even there, perhaps the sense of grief, of terror, wouldn’t be overwhelming either, at least not to the extent one from the Western world would expect.  The Japanese are famous for their brave faces, their stoic dispositions.  When things get bad, they try their best, they try to face the world with courage, a sentiment summed up in the oft-heard word “Ganbare.”

Though there is not an obvious atmosphere of tragedy and disaster here in Kodomari, there are little things that signal this is a different country from the one I left in November.  Flashing road signs say “Ganbare Tohoku,” (“Try Hard, Tohoku,” the area of Northern Japan hit by the earthquake/tsunami.)  Napkins in the restaurant say “Ganbare Nippon.”  Our friend’s cousin lost her husband.  (But his body was recovered, she gratefully added, as many families don’t even have that.) Toshiko, the owner of the restaurant, was very worried about her little granddaughter in the Tokyo area when the radiation levels in the tap water were too high for children.

And I suppose the way I look at Japan has changed.  When I woke up on March 11th and saw the news, saw that Aomori was hit with tsunamis, saw that there were massive tsunami warnings along both coasts of Japan, saw that a city two hours away from Kodomari on the same coast had definitely been hit, I didn’t know if Kodomari was still standing.  I didn’t know if the people I knew there were okay.  And I didn’t know if Trevor was okay.  So it is with new gratitude and appreciation that I look at Kodomari, at Japan.  It’s a country much more fragile than I thought.  It’s fragility makes it seem even more beautiful, as does the strength expressed by it’s people.  So much of it was gone in an instant, and, I’m sure like many people, I am all the more appreciative of what is standing.  Yesterday I went with Trevor to his first-grade class, and it was bittersweet to see their happy little faces: there are many empty desks this year in classrooms along the Northeastern coastline.

Tomorrow Trevor and I will be heading off to Kyoto for a week and we’re looking forward to it, not only because we had such a wonderful experience there last year, but because we hope by being tourists we will be doing a small part to help Japan recover.  For as much as I can complain and gripe about it, Japan is a beautiful, stunning country with people who did not deserve such tragedy.  I know I speak for not only myself but most Americans when I say “Ganbare Nippon.”

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