Submitted to Carleton's study abroad office

Evaluate the quality of instruction.

The teachers on this program were top-notch. The instruction alone made it equivalent to a Carleton trimester. The additional surprises, such as twice-daily meditation, pilgrimage, and hands-on monastic experience, made it worth the money as well. It's a firsthand encounter with Buddhism that could not possibly be duplicated on one's own.

Describe the most academically or intellectually challenging aspect of the program.

On the research period we were literally left to our own devices for a month and asked to figure out how to do research within the country. (The professors gave us ample preparation for this.) It was an amazing experience which introduced me to a sort of research I've never done before but I'd be glad to do again.

Describe your living arrangement. Would you recommend some other arrangement based on your experience? How did you get to know local people in the community?

We lived and slept in the sanctuary of an active Shin Buddhist temple. Most students did not know Japanese so we were mainly set up to meet English-speaking students at the local university-- many of my classmates hit it off well. I personally became acquainted with the temple's other residents.

What could you have done to better prepare yourself? What was your most satisfying outcome?

We were given a pamphlet before the program began with a list of books we might read. I should have done more of these readings because the ones I did were vastly enlightening and gave me great things to be on the lookout for in Japan.

I was most satisfied with gaining a complete knowledge of Buddhist history and philosophy.

Add other comments, narratives, or advice you have for other students interested in your program.

Get used to the director because you're not getting a new one.

Set up homestays. The director and his wife are friends with many Japanese families who will welcome you into their homes with open arms.

Don't be afraid to take a risk, and don't be stupid enough to ignore the goodwill of your Japanese hosts.

Learn the language.

Go for it.

Going home

The last three days of the Antioch Buddhist Studies program would be spent getting some rest, drinking plenty of fluids, and finishing my paper... so I thought. In fact, my classmates had decided, not without cause, that it was party time. They built a fort out of mattresses in my bedroom sometime around 1AM on the first night; I lay awake wondering what I had done to deserve this. I spent a short second day mostly packing, and after I got into bed, my classmates decided to play Pictionary. One of them, bless his heart, soon realized I was trying to sleep. I could have chased them out myself, but I didn't have the energy. My final paper was delayed two days, although I was satisfied when I turned it in. What I really cared about, though, was getting back to Massachusetts and enjoying some quality naptime alone.

But how difficult that is when you're 15,000 kilometers away!

I switched out my seat on the plane so I'd be a dozen rows away from the other students on the program. The girl who sat down next to me was a professional model who was working in Osaka. She described her Japan experience as something out of Lost in Translation. I emphasized deeply, since that's what Tokyo was like for me, but I told her I wished she had gone to Kyoto! If there's one thing I learned from this trip, it's that Kyoto is the best city in Japan.

My seatmate soon fell asleep, but I was barely able to close my eyes due to nonstop coughing. I ended up watching all three in-flight movies, which were: Wall-E, a boring religious flick called (Character's Name) Is Here, and the excellent Son of Rambow. Finally I got off the plane and promptly threw up.

I awarded myself a mental badge of courage for surviving the dizzying descent without grossing out the girl next to me, but my next problem was getting to my hotel, and then to a hospital. My stomach was still threatening me very badly and I needed to lie down, not go through customs. What I ended up doing was waiting until everyone else had finished, then rushing almost non-stop through security, to the baggage, and out the door to the hotel buses without even saying goodbye to anyone. Then I collapsed on the concrete and waited for my bus to come. Three of my classmates found me there-- they apparently had just met Richard Baker, the infamous deposed abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, in the airport completely by coincidence. And apparently Richard Baker was a huge asshole. Before I could really explain what had happened my bus arrived and I braved the bumpy ride to the hotel.

I passed out in my room and woke up five hours later. My parents called and confirmed that there was basically one option: go to the hospital, get meds, and attempt to proceed with going home the next day. I took a taxi to the emergency room, waited two hours (I saw crying children come and go, and sat through two hour-long episodes of The Biggest Loser on TV--who writes this stuff?), and was diagnosed with sinusitis. There was no pharmacy at the hospital (?!) but the nurse on duty offered to get me a cab. It turned out the cab was driven by an angry New York emigrant with an accent like the Tappet Brothers on Car Talk, who took me to three separate pharmacies before I could get my medication. He had no idea where my hotel was, and neither did I, but luckily there was some guy sitting on his ass in the cab office browsing Wikipedia--"this dope just learned what a platypus is", the driver grunted at me, as the CB radio rattled off exciting facts about platypus anatomy. This man looked up the hotel on Google, and after ten minutes of intense sleuthing he had the address. The driver then interrogated me severely over whether the address was right ("Whaddaya MEAN, 'PROBABLY'?!") and I was back in the hotel by midnight.

The next day I woke up at 4:30AM to get on the early plane to... Long Beach, California. I do not know where exactly Long Beach is, nor will I ever know, insh'allah. In their infinite wisdom JetBlue had decided it would be cheaper to bus me over there and put me on that plane to Boston instead of taking me directly home. But everything else JetBlue did was very nice, and I especially appreciated the mood of the early morning flight to Long Beach. Ten minutes after boarding, the pilot walked into the cabin and told us that everyone was on board so they were going to take off early, and also there were plenty of empty seats so people could feel free to "scooch around" and take any seat they wanted.

"This is America," I thought, tears glistening in my eyes. "It's good to be home." (In Japan, they'd have to conform the seating and takeoff to the exact flight plans.) I later wrote JetBlue a letter thanking them for being everything that makes America great.

They also had thirty channels of satellite TV and a hundred channels of radio. Here is a picture of Long Beach Detention Center, where I took my prescribed codeine and passed out for several hours.



I watched in a state of drug-induced befuddlement as all the puppy-dog-bearing, wheely-suitcase-carrying vacationgoers lined up to get on the plane half an hour before boarding, were told to sit down and assured that everyone would get a seat on the plane, and then subsequently refused to sit down. This... this is a race to be the most important person, I concluded to myself.

I was asleep for much of the plane ride to Boston; I watched Keith Olbermann live for the remainder, and thanked the gods of satellite television. TSA confiscated my bag (they must have suspected the Buddhist anime I was bringing home was extremist literature), I found my parents, and at about 10PM we arrived back in Wellesley.

I was home.

Next: Tenri City; remainders; conclusion

Return to Kurume

My host family frankly sounded bored when I called them from Tokyo. I did not get a "so nice to hear from you" or an excited yell, "Hey it's Avery from three years ago!" They merely confirmed the date with me and hung up. I felt quite anxious. Was I really just wasting their time? Maybe my homestay of three years ago would be better off forgotten.

I arrived at the station an hour early, called them again, and sat tiredly on the sidewalk. Soon their car came up and my host dad Toshiki came bounding out with the most energetic expression I have ever seen on his face. I knew already I had made the right choice. Etsuko, the mom, reacted with glee when she heard me speaking Japanese. "Wait till Takashi-kun hears this!" she assured me all the way back to the apartment. "Your Japanese is so good!"

The landlord looked at us with confusion. "Here for another homestay?" she asked me in Japanese. She had remembered my face from three years before.

At their house Natsumi had invited over two of her girlfriends who were energetic otaku. They quizzed me about my favorite anime series and giggled over my knowledge of Japanese Internet memes. Meanwhile, my host parents had brought me two plates of taiyaki, a traditional pancake-like snack shaped like a fish. I had wanted taiyaki three years ago, due to an obscure anime reference, but they couldn't find it for me then. Clearly they wanted to make up for that now.



I had developed a fever in Mojikou, and I should have slept early but food and alcohol were pressed upon me--soon my Japanese became slurred and even though the guests had not left I declared I would soon collapse. The next day I was sick as a dog. I woke up with a bad cough and after taking the pictures above, a stomachache developed as well. Luckily my host parents were both doctors, but they could not diagnose me on the spot as I was a difficult case. (Four days later in an emergency room in California I would learn that I had sinusitis.) Instead, they gave me an antacid and we went off to see parts of Kurume that neither I nor they had ever been to before.

First we went to the famous Wax Trees of Kurume, which they had heard were nice this time of year... but they'd never been there before. It took a while to find, and when we got there Etsuko said "you know, these aren't all that great" and we drove right past. To be quite honest they were not as nice as the maple tree in a nearby front yard. But I was mainly relieved I did not have to do any walking as I was getting sicker.



We went to this enormous Kannon in the outskirts of Kurume. One of my classmates also went here and told me that the Hells in the bowels of the Kannon ($5 entry fee) were first-rate comedy gore and one of the highlights of his trip. Animatronic people getting disemboweled, etc. I asked to go home because I was feeling awful, so I didn't get to see these. The Kannon was quite big though.

We got home, my host sister departed, and I lay down to watch some biased Japanese television. Seriously, it was a whole show devoted to poking fun at Prime Minister Aso Taro. Apparently Japanese public opinion is strongly against him, but I was surprised to see a show like that on daytime broadcast TV, and not hidden away on a small cable channel. I guess I am used to the American style of downplaying and disguising criticism.

My host family's house, I had come to realize, was littered with souvenirs of my visit. I was on the screensaver of their laptop, a photo of me was on their bulletin board, and my candy jar of Boston Baked Beans remained on their table. I felt very gracious that even though I had done so little to impress them, they still demonstrated they cared for me in this way. Toshiki insisted on accompanying me to the shinkansen in Hakata, buying a ticket to go all the way to the platform.



We waited around, I lied down and got myself comfortable, and as the train pulled out he gave me a big grin and waved. When he got out of sight I started crying immediately.

Mojikou Retro

The wonderful manager at K's House Hiroshima let me know that I could save $50 by taking a bus to Japan's southern island Kyuushuu instead of the shinkansen bullet train. If I got on the bus at 3:30PM, I could get there by 6PM-- quite a deal. Unfortunately I was not going to the tourist destination Hakata but rather to a sprawling industrial park, which the Japanese government has worryingly dubbed (I am not making this up) "Northern Kyuushuu City", in order to interview Burmese monks living there. Lucky for me, the bus to Hakata stopped at Kokura, which I knew to be part of this urbo-Orwellian complex. I assumed the bus stop at "North Kokura Entrance" was somewhere in the vicinity of Kokura Station, providing easy access to my hostel. I thereby made an ass out of you, me, and the owner of the hostel when, at my 6PM check-in time and well after dark, I was dropped unceremoniously onto a side road overlooking a sea of rice fields as far as I could see.

Me and my 30 pounds of luggage hauled our sorry little butts down the dark highway to a bus station. Soon, a bus pulled up and drove me slowly through endless acres of sprawling chain restaurants and karaoke bars, with no Kokura Station in sight. As the minutes ticked by I leaned over another passenger and anxiously studied the bus map next to the ceiling.

"Hey, gaijin-san!" shouted the driver in curt Japanese. "Where are you going?"

"Kokura Station."

"I'm going there, so siddown!"

I would not recommend Northern Kyuushuu City to tourists.

Twenty stops and one hour later, the driver kicked me off at Kokura Station, a sprawling mass of monorails and skyways. I made a hasty and apologetic call to the hostelkeeper, who gave me directions to his part of Northern Kyuushuu City in such rapid Japanese that I simply couldn't handle it and had to deduce things myself inside the station.



When I got to Yahata Station, the hostelkeeper picked me up right outside, drove me up a steep hill to what was undoubtedly the most scenic part of the whole city, told me brightly (in Japanese) I was the only guest he'd had in several weeks, showed me my private room, and left at 9PM to get a much-delayed dinner. I turned on the heat, took a shower, and thought long and hard about how much of an improvement this was from Tokyo, then slept gratefully.

The next day I was served breakfast, then the hostelkeeper dropped me off at the station. The entire stay cost me $35. I rode the train to the last stop, Mojikou, which to my delight was barely Northern Kyuushuu City at all.

Mojikou, port of the city of Moji, was merged into Northern Kyuushuu City by the Japanese government in the 1960s. Around this time, perhaps, the little town realized it was no longer going to be able to sustain itself by its port alone. They were probably clued in by the immense bridge running into their hillside from Japan's main island, and the enormous factories being erected to the south which Mojikou was not receiving. It was therefore decided that Mojikou should become a tourist trap. The definite emphasis here is on "trap" because there was no preexisting attraction to Mojikou, except perhaps the World Peace Pagoda. Instead, they started preserving their old buildings from the Meiji period, such as the old post office and the old train station.



This sort of building, which you might call fairly typical in New England or a novelty in California, is the main attraction of Mojikou Retro. I think there are seven or eight of them. The town cannot really decide whether these buildings are meant to represent something cool about early modern Japan, or if they are meant to be a taste of Western architecture (as they were when they were built). Luckily, this lack of consistency is overshadowed, quite literally, by the construction of insanely inappropriate buildings in the name of revitalization.



You can see the "retro" building (the "old library", constructed 1994) on the bottom right if you squint. The building on the left is an office building that doubles as an observatory for tourists, so they can look at all the retro.



The wall on the far left reads "Welcome to Mojikou Retro". Scratching my head over that one. This is a strip mall for tourists which is right on the water. It has little to distinguish itself from a strip mall in, say, Los Angeles.

The nice bits of Mojikou include their local specialty, fried curry; the railway museum which was creatively built next to the real rail station and continues to attract otaku; the inexplicable one-room "exhibit hall" of old telephones; their genuinely pretty old temple; and the World Peace Pagoda.



I reached the Pagoda by hiking past some houses made out of corrugated metal and into the woods. The Pagoda is actually two buildings. The first is the literal pagoda you see here, which is a memorial to Japanese soldiers who fought in Burma. The second is a decrepit old monastery which continues to house three Burmese monks. One of the monks was pacing around when I came up the stairs and insisted that nobody spoke any English. When I asked him how the Pagoda came to be built, he referred me to the abbot U Khe Min Da, who turned out to speak perfect English. I found the abbot sitting in his room writing New Year's postcards.

"I'm researching this pagoda," I told him. "I was wondering who it was who founded it."

The abbot did not even look up from his postcards. "He's dead now," he eventually responded. "Died long time ago."

I realized this was going to be a difficult conversation. The abbot did not volunteer any names. I had to wring out of him the surname Ichihara, a veteran of the Burmese front who "died long time ago". I did not find out the name of the Japanese Theravada convert who I heard played a role, but the abbot felt fit to inform me that he had been a mere scammer who had no interest in Buddhism.



I was eager to hear if there was any Japanese interest in Theravada Buddhism. "No," said the abbot, still working on his postcards. Did anyone come to the monastery with questions? "No." Have you communicated with the Japan Theravada Buddhist Association? "No."

Eventually, I got up to leave, at which point he offered me a cup of tea. I drank the tea alone, sitting at the desk where he had apparently kept the books for the monastery for the past 50 years. The desk was deeply stained and the edges were rusty, but like the rest of the monastery it had never been replaced. This was certainly a case of single-minded devotion to carrying out the Buddha's teachings. I was not sure why it was necessary to maintain this place in Japan, but I did not ask the abbot-- I am sure it is a question he had either asked himself many times or never thought about.

"Isn't Mojikou a pretty town?" I asked the Japanese volunteer.

"Oh, yes! Mojikou Retro," she said.

Next: Kurume

It's morning in Hiroshima

There are multiple technical issues going on right now that I won't get into. I'm also still recovering from sinusitis. Anyway, due to all of that the easiest post for me to write about right now is Hiroshima, which is out of chronological order: I am going to save Tenri City for last, or possibly insert it before the disastrous story of my return home. Sorry about that. Here's a photo of the A-Bomb Dome.

Hroshima is a bustling city where streetcars cut across intersections and salarymen walk to work. But in its center lies the reason most come to visit: the A-Bomb Dome, the only UNESCO World Heritage site chosen because it is a ruin, and the only one where its state of decay is carefully preserved. The Atomic Bomb Museum commemorates the destruction and suffering unleashed on this city to preempt any Soviet involvement in the Pacific front.

I had difficulty walking through the park without choking up and eventually I had to sit down. Three years ago in a Japanese middle school in Kurume I learned about the story of Sadako and the thousand paper cranes, but at the time I was more concerned with the bitterly sardonic way the school described the atomic bombs (they were introduced as "two visitors from America"). In Hiroshima, though, the monument simply tells the story: it does not layer on any extra meaning. You must do that yourself.

I sat on a park bench thinking to myself about the pain people inflict on others, and I summoned up the courage to ring the bell at the monument to Sadako only after a tour group of rowdy young students arrived and gave me an opportunity to look strong. I leaned over the few of them sitting around the monumentand gave the bell a big swing. I clapped my hands in prayer and bowed, then the laws of physics saw fit to slap the bell's chain in my face.

Hiroshima's Peace Park is a really powerful place. I have heard that Nagasaki is better in terms of architecture but where Hiroshima lacks in shock value it lets you fill in most of the details yourself. The museum is reknowned for its impartiality on the questions of right or wrong in World War II, admitting Japan's own war crimes before a deep discussion of the effects of the bomb. One of the exhibits in the museum was a burnt schoolboy's cap. I looked at the white cap then turned my head to the grammar school student standing next to me, still wearing a similar uniform. Anyone could be one of these victims, without any reason.

The park's fall colors were brilliant and some people were walking their dogs or playing with their kids. It was a normal day in the city, and nothing unpleasant was happening. The maple leaves found a strange juxtaposition in the ruined dome. Why, in the face of this overwhelming goodness, do people find reasons to do such horrible things to each other? Why can't we just leave our enemies alone? It seems like nobody can really explain this.

This photo is a lie. The one below is closer to the truth.

Before getting on the bus to Middle of Nowhere, Kyuushuu (there's a story for another day), I went to Miyajima. Others have told me of its virtues. For me, though, it was a hilarious tourist trap. The JR tour ferry thoughtfully included a loudspeaker which informed me in English of the exact width and height of the famous torii. I think this is a perhaps a sight best seen by ferry, because up close it is underwhelming. It was low tide, so it wasn't sitting in the water, but rather at the end of a beach filled with picture-taking tourists. While I did not enjoy the crowded sights, I did enjoy some "deer soft serve", vanilla ice cream covered with chocolate nougats that lent themselves to predictably hilarious simile.

My recommendation: just go to Nara instead. Actually, you should really just stick to the Kansai area in general. That is my favorite part of Japan.