개학 - School's beginning!

Winter break is finally over. It's been a long two months, and I'm restless to get back to teaching! I wouldn't say I'm ready for 개학 (gaehak, the start of classes), though, since I've left a lot of my curriculum planning undone. Yeah, I really tried to make the most of my vacation this year, and that meant that I traveled and hung out with friends a ton but left all my work for the last minute. But as a last hurrah before I buckle down and hit the road running tomorrow morning, let us recap!

December 2013: I stayed at school during the week of Christmas, even though I'm contractually allowed to take off earlier, because I wanted to watch my students perform at their school festival. I baked a ton and then went to Seoul to visit friends, which always means eating a ton of food. Year-end festivities were put on hold so that I could finish my grad school apps.

January 2014: I reconnected with my homestay family, began a linguistics research project that took me to Jeju Island, then passed through Busan on my way to Japan for a five-day trip around Kyushu with my friend Erik! I took the hydrofoil ferry from Busan to Fukuoka, visited the Atomic Bomb Museum in Nagasaki, saw a volcano, dipped in a natural hot spring, and ate a lot of amazing food. After ten days at home, I was off again to backpack through Thailand and Laos for two weeks.

February 2014: After visiting the protest sites in Bangkok and riding elephants in Chiang Mai, I crossed the northern border of Thailand into Laos and cruised down the Mekong while enjoying the amazing views of a virtually untouched landscape. I spent one night in a rural Lao village, then traipsed around Luang Prabang and Vang Vieng, exploring waterfalls and caves. In two weeks, I made a dozen new friends and decided that backpacking is the best way to travel when you're young. Lastly, I came back full circle to Bangkok via Vientiane and flew back to Korea, just in time for my school's second graduation ceremony. One week of writing for Changwonderful, biking with Changwon Bike Party, and blogging as much as I could passed by too quickly, and then I found myself on a plane bound for Pyongyang. North Korea was weird and unforgettable, and you'll hear all about it soon.

I've been back in South Korea for a little over a week. I got a new haircut, went to a pizza party with friends in Seoul, baked banana bread and Nutella muffins, tried out a ton of cafes and restaurants in Changwon, visited Tongyeong on a whim, volunteered with North Korean defectors, and went to my first ever K-pop concert: K.Will in Busan!

Okay, it's too late. I can't write anymore. Here are photos of my winter break!

Graduation day; new haircut; Tongyeong mural village; Cafe Olympic in Nagasaki; brunch in Changwon; hanging out in Seoul; hanging out in Bangkok; Changwon Bike Party; hanging out in Pyongyang; elephant ride in Chiang Mai; canoe ride in Laos; K.Will concert; chilling in Vang Vieng; chilling in Luang Prabang; and 친구들~

Some of the things I've made and/or eaten: Nutella banana walnut muffins, honey toast at Ogada, Japanese hambagu steak in Changwon, homemade pancakes, citron tea at Cafe Hau, orange French toast at Flying Pan Blue, Sulbing, more Sulbing, raw horsemeat (basashi) in Nagasaki, and peanut butter jalapeno burger at Sharky's in Busan!

Happy March! I saw cherry blossoms in bloom today in Tongyeong. Spring is coming! And goodnight.

Seijin no Hi (成人の日)

Young women wearing kimono for Coming-of-Age Day.

My last half-day in Japan happened to be a national holiday called Seijin no Hi (成人の日), or Coming-of-Age Day. The age of majority in Japan is 20 years, so on the second Monday of every January, every Japanese boy or girl who has turned or will turn 20 that year goes back to their hometown for a traditional ceremony and reunions with family and friends. During the ceremony, called seijin-shiki, they are conferred the rights and responsibilities of adult men and women.

I tried not to look like a stalker when I took this...

I realized that something special was going on that morning when I noticed some women walking around town dressed in dazzlingly beautiful furisode (a type of kimono), white furs around their shoulders and hair done up with flowers and beads.

Erik explained that women wear traditional dress and often spend huge sums of money on their outfit, hair, and makeup. The young men can also wear male kimonos, but the recent trend is for them to don trendy Western-style suits, sometimes in bright colors. However, for a male to wear a kimono sometimes flags him as an outmoded "country bumpkin" of sorts. This of course depends on the city and the culture.

I was impressed with the idea of going back to one's hometown just for this one special day. Not everyone does, of course, but in smaller towns it's a great chance to see high school friends again, and in larger towns it might seem like a big party. In fact, I was overwhelmed when I arrived in Fukuoka to take the ferry back to Korea. Fukuoka is Japan's sixth largest city, with a population of near 1.5 million, and it seemed like all of Fukuoka's twenty-year-olds had gathered at one convention center. The convention center was coincidentally located right next to the ferry terminal, so my bus ran into tons of traffic in the early afternoon. In fact, my bus, and many others that I saw, was full of young men in suits and young women in kimonos. After they got off, a full-to-bursting bus was left with just a Korean family and me. I took many photos of the enormous crowd from the bus, but after it turned the corner for the ferry building, I lost sight of them...

And that was my final impression of Japan! I was fortunate to catch a glimpse of Seijin no Hi before I left. I'm not aware of any similar ceremony in Korea, and I certainly did not take part in anything so official or culturally significant when I turned 18 or 21. I'm 23 now (25 according to the Korean method of counting age... 아이구...), and I do feel like an adult, although there's still a lot left for me to learn about independence. Being in my early twenties is about striking the right balance between taking charge of my own life and honoring my parents and upbringing. There isn't really any moment, any one day, that one can point to and say, "I grew up that day." It's a never-ending process.

I took this from the bus. Tons of adults-to-be gathered at a convention center in Fukuoka for their seijin-shiki. I spy some guys in kimonos! And mullets...

Kumamoto (熊本)

Kumamoto Castle. The young lady in the kimono is dressed up for Coming-of-Age Day.

Kumamoto wasn't always called Kumamoto. Those of you who know your kanji/hanja/hanzi might wonder if this city really is the origin of Japan's bears. Actually, its ancient name was 隈本, also read as Kumamoto, but the first character means "corner" or "shadow/shade", not "bear". The origin of shadows? Nah, it's really just a place name, probably kind of a boring one, too, because in 1607 someone thought it would be clever to change the first character to its homophone (熊, which means "bear"), and the new moniker stuck.

That someone, I believe, was Katō Kiyomasa, a daimyo (feudal lord) who ruled in Kyushu in the late 16th and early 17th century. Kiyomasa is an important figure in Kumamoto history; he is also quite the antagonist in Korean history. As a senior commander of the army, Kiyomasa led invasions of Korea during the Joseon Dynasty and captured Seoul, Busan, and Ulsan, among other cities, though the conquest was unsuccessful in the end. He was also an enemy of the Japanese Christians in his domain and brutally persecuted them not long before Christianity was banned outright.

On the other hand, Kiyomasa is responsible for expanding and completing Kumamoto Castle (begun in 1467), which is the main landmark of the city and one of the most gorgeous buildings I've ever seen. The castle keep you see today is actually a reconstruction, since the fortress was besieged during a rebellion in 1877, and the castle was burned to the ground.

Erik and me at Kumamoto-jō.

Erik and Kiyomasa of the tall hat

Walking the grounds of Kumamoto Castle, I noticed several archetypically Japanese things: koi in the river, a woman dressed in a kimono for Coming of Age Day, men in costume as ninja and soldiers for tourists' photos, beautiful artwork on sliding wooden doors inside the museum, a traditional tea ceremony room... It got me thinking about Japanese culture and its portrayal as a monolithic entity to Western eyes.

Google "Japanese culture" and you get a pretty uniform set of images: geisha, sumo wrestlers, Buddha, Shinto shrines, sushi, cherry blossoms, and more geisha. Maybe throw a little Hello Kitty and martial arts in there. (Do the same for "American culture" and you'll see a lot of flags, fast food, and bland diversity-themed stock photos.)

I wondered aloud to Erik if the historical periods in which geisha, sumo wrestlers, ninja, and samurai all came into existence were chronologically close to each other at all. These human icons are, of course, all unique and representative of Japan, but I think we should find it strange to see them juxtaposed, as we would pause at the sight of ninja prowling around a castle in 2014 on the hunt for tourists with fancy digital cameras. Remember Katy Perry's infamous yellowface performance at the American Music Awards last year? "Look at how much she loves and appreciates Japanese culture," they said. "She's dressed as a geisha. There are cherry blossoms falling from the ceiling. Her backup is doing a Chinese fan dance. Ooh, taiko drums!" All of those elements of Japanese (and Chinese) culture appropriated and smashed together to appeal to a Western audience.

Let's turn the tables: I want to see G-Dragon perform his latest hip-hop number on a stage accompanied by Asian cowboys, breakdancers with uh... braided hair extensions, and women dressed like Lady Liberty. GD's a great dancer: he can show off the Charleston, the Dougie, the New York Hustle, and eight beats of perfectly-synchronized tutting with his crew, finishing it off with a square dance as maple leaves and Wal-Mart coupons rain down from the ceiling. "Look at how much he loves and appreciates American culture!"

Erik's apple pie a la mode!

Anyway, cultures collide in odd ways. Erik's favorite dessert in Japan is not mochi or roll cakes but a new McDonald's menu item called "A la mode". It's literally a McD apple pie in a cup, topped with McD soft serve and chocolate sauce. You can obviously make this yourself at any McDonald's, but in Japan it's actually on the menu.

Back to Kumamoto, then. On my second evening in the city, we met up with a friend of Erik's and ate dinner at a great all-you-can-eat shabu shabu place, vowing to consume more than our money's worth!

We followed it up with a night of arcade games. It's been years since I've set foot in an arcade, so I hardly recognized any of the games. A lot of them looked glitzy and super high-tech, including a newfangled rhythm game called "MaiMai" that resembles a giant washing machine. Timed to music, players must tap buttons around a circular screen as colored rings reach them. It looks and feels silly at first, but once you get warmed up and choose a harder skill level, suddenly it becomes really fun. And addicting. I was sad that Dance Dance Revolution was nowhere to be found, but MaiMai more than made up for it. There was also an amazing air hockey game called "Big Bang Smash!" that unloads dozens of tiny pucks onto the court for a minute of pucking madness. It was awesome.

Big Bang Smash! Air hockey on  a sugar high!

What else is there in Kumamoto? I can't forget Kumamon (not the Digimon), Kumamoto's friendly bear mascot! Thanks to Kiyomasa, this city is able to market its namesake with Kumamon toys, Kumamon t-shirts, and Kumamon's smiling visage on everything from cookies to face towels. I don't have any great photos of or with him, even though he is everywhere in Kumamoto, but I did get a face towel... Another mascot is the adorable puppy you see below. I can't remember its name, though, or what exactly he represents. Kawaii-dom, if nothing else.

강아지 (kangaji)! こいぬ (koinu)!

And... I'll sign off with some shots of our beautiful hostel, the "Dyeing and Hostel Nakashimaya". It's part traditional dye store and part traditional inn. Its cozy rooms have tatami mats for sleeping instead of beds and trunks with heavy locks instead of lockers. The lounge area has tons of manga, stunning decor, ancient maps, and modern computers. Every inch of the hostel is exquisite and charming, every figurine placed so that everywhere you look you're reminded that you're in Japan. Even the stairwells were decorated. Again, I wonder how well all the pieces fit together chronologically... is it classy or kitschy? Well, I trust the hostel owners' taste. It was too bad we only spent one night here, but it was enough to leave a solid impression. I highly recommend it.

That's a kid's samurai costume!

Gorgeous paper art.

Oh, and here's a video of some of the arcade games. We're a long way past the days of DDR...

Volcanic Activity (Kurokawa Onsen, Mt. Aso, and more)

A baby Japanese wild boar, or inoshishi! Seen sniffing and pissing by the roadside in Kurokawa.

Let's fast-forward through my first evening in Kumamoto. The most exciting thing was that I ate basashi, or raw horse meat, and it was a real workout for my mandibles. Also, our hostel was jaw-droppingly gorgeous, but I will get to that later.

On Sunday morning, Erik got us a rental car and we drove northeast out of the city toward Mt. Aso (阿蘇山). Mt. Aso is Japan's largest active volcano; it sits in the middle of a caldera that remains from several eruptions of an unimaginably large supervolcano that occurred hundreds of thousands of years ago. This caldera is no mere crater; it's so large that two towns fit comfortably inside of it (including the eponymous town of Aso). If you removed the central cone itself, the Aso caldera could comfortably fit the city of Philadelphia within its steep mountainous walls.

We took the scenic route up the sides of the caldera walls to get a view of the northern valley. As we came up on Skyline Road and Milk Road, the valley opened up beneath us. It was a bit hazy, but still quite a sight. Looking out toward Mt. Aso in the distance, it only hits you how enormous the ancient supervolcano must have been when you realize that there's another valley on the other side of the present volcano, and that both of them used to be "underground" before it exploded.

Kurokawa, the Black River. There are pipes and hot springs on both banks, as well as decorative lights for some festival.

New Year decorations

Then, we drove down into the valley itself, where a few years ago there was very severe flooding. The land here is mostly used for farming, since the volcanic soil is so rich. This means that the produce here is supposedly very good, as is the dairy from local cows. Volcanic activity also means onsen, or hot springs!

We made a pit stop at Kurokawa, which is famous for its many hot springs. Kurokawa means "Black River", and although the river that flows through the sleepy tourist town isn't black, a lot of the wood used to construct the buildings, as well as the ash in the soil, is indeed black, and it gives the place a very rustic feel.

Erik and I had dozens of hot springs to choose from and eventually chose one that was farther away from the main town. It was an outdoor spring, quite isolated and peaceful. Aah... A dip in hot sulphurous water with the sound of a river rushing by? So relaxing I could have fallen asleep in it, and while meditating a bit, almost did.

Relaxed and reinvigorated, we lunched at a famous local tofu restaurant and then took off for the volcano itself (but not before buying souvenirs, watching people make traditional mochi (rice cakes, known as 떡 in Korean), and spotting a baby wild boar!

Mochi-making

We finally reached the active volcano, located in the center of the caldera, and my jaw dropped when I saw plumes of white smoke (or steam?) issuing from the far-off crater. It's been a very long time since I've seen anything like that.

We then had the opportunity to drive even closer, up to the base of the crater, but we didn't take the cable car to go inside. Seeing it up close was nice enough. Later in the afternoon, the overcast weather finally cleared, which made the smoke from the volcano look just like giant cumulous clouds against a blue sky. Inspired by the volcano, I got some "ash" ice cream ("soft cream" in Japanglish) which was speckled with black sesame and licked it into the shape of a crater.

Volcanoes certainly excite me, probably because I haven't seen very many active ones in my lifetime. I've seen a lava flow in Hawaii once, but that's all I can remember. South Korea only has two volcanoes, and they're both on islands far away from the main peninsula. So, the volcanoes (and really, the entire hilly landscape) were so unexpected and new for me. It didn't look or feel anything like what I expected from Japan. The hills didn't even feel like "Asian" hills -- to me, that means steep craggy rocks of mountains densely covered in pine forests (Korea) or a tropical jungle (China and Taiwan). As we drove through dry fields and then down the mountain, I felt like we could've been somewhere in the American Midwest.

I found out from Erik that Mt. Aso erupted the day after we'd been there! It wasn't serious, just black smoke instead of white, so I sort of wish it had happened while I'd been around... Maybe next time!

Mt. Aso continually belches out steam, which looked just like the clouds on this cloudy winter day.

Shirakawa Riverhead (Shirakawa Suigen)

On the southern side of Mt. Aso is Minamiaso, a small town also nestled inside the caldera through which runs a beautiful river called Shirakawa, the White River. This river comes from a freshwater spring that is said to produce 60 tons of water every minute.

Entrance is a buck, and visitors are allowed to drink and bottle as much water as they desire. I didn't drink any, but marveled at the water itself. It is the very defintion of pristine. You can see the loose stones at the bottom of the pool, gurgling as water and bubbles gush out from volcanic pressure, but the surface remains very calm. A rare type of underwater grass can only grow in water as clean as this.

The Shirakawa Riverhead was another peaceful, secluded place that I wanted to stay and meditate at. But there were other tourists, and it was getting late, so we left our final pit stop and drove back to Kumamoto.

Overall, the day trip was awesome, probably the highlight of my weekend in Japan. Between blasting K-pop from my phone, munching on convenience store snacks, and beholding some spectular sights, we had all the components of a great road trip and none of mishaps of a bad one. Erik was a trooper for driving, translating, and tour-guiding all day. It was a good thing that all of our activities involved engaging with nature and sort of getting away from the crowds. I was surprised and awed by a lot of what I saw that day, and it makes me want to get out of my polluted city more often to go off into the mountains. In fact, just the other day I took a hike around the Palyong Reservoir and found that the fountain at the base of the reservoir dam had frozen all of the rocks and trees around it. It was a cool find, yet another reason to get out of the house and appreciate the great outdoors.

Erik nabs some springwater; me at Shirakawa Suigen; the sparkling result of Erik's endeavor.

Glover Garden and Gunkanjima (軍艦島)

Heart-shaped charms at Glover Garden in Nagasaki.

I left the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum subdued and pensive, but there was still much to do on our itinerary, so I shelved my thoughts for later. Erik and I walked over to Nagasaki's Chinatown and munched on the Japanese version of gua bao, then headed up into the hills to tour Glover Garden, a cute little neighborhood of lavish Western-style houses built by merchants and businessmen in the late nineteenth century. The higher we went, the more magnificent the view of the harbor city became. At the top, I took a panorama photo with my cell phone; excuse the lazy stitching job and poor quality, but you can sort of get the idea.

All the hills have Nagasaki reminding me of San Francisco.

Christian martyrs' fountain in Glover Garden, Nagasaki.

The gardens themselves are nice enough to walk around, but what Erik and I noticed the most was the eerie lack of other tourists. Erik blamed the winter and the cold weather; in all other seasons, he said, these gardens were packed with people. This continued to be a theme on our travels. I chose a remarkably low-traffic time of the year to visit Kyushu!

The photo at left is of a fountain that was built to commemorate Christian martyrs in Japan. The history of Christianity in this country is very interesting. It was introduced by Francis Xavier, a Basque Jesuit missionary, when he landed in Kagoshima in 1549. Thanks to early missionary work, northern Kyushu is where "all the churches are" in Japan. But in the 17th century, Christianity was forced underground, and many believers were martyred. Japan opened up to the West again in 1853 at the start of the Meiji period, and in 1871, freedom of religion was restored in the country. Christian communities that had been in hiding for hundreds of years have been slowly growing ever since.

Glover House of Glover Garden in Nagasaki.

A model of the 1.2-meter sundae.

As evening approached, Erik and I met up with a friend of his from the area named Fumi, and we had dinner at an izakaya (居酒屋), which is essentially a pub, but the one we went to was very classy. We had a feast that included sashimi, tempura, delicious grilled meats of some sort, and Japanese beer.

For dessert, we went to a diner called Cafe Olympic, which is famous for... how else can I say it? American-sized portions of everything. You can get a steak as big as your head here. But for our dessert, we ordered a super-tall sundae. The largest ice cream sundae offered at the cafe is a ridiculous 1.2 meters tall. It's a glass as long as your arm filled with four or five different flavors, topped with several more cones and various other random items. I mean, ice cream is ice cream, but you really come here for the novelty of eating your way through a four-foot tower of deliciousness. Fumi said he wanted us to experience a "funny dessert", and sure enough, we had our laughs.

The next morning, Erik and I set out for Gunkanjima (軍艦島), or Battleship Island. Its actual name is Hashima, but when you see it you can easily understand why it was given the militaresque moniker. It took half an hour for our ferry to reach the island; it's not that far out to sea, and from it you can easily see the mainland's coast. From the mainland, though, I don't think it's possible to see this:

Gunkanjima, Battleship Island.

So, yeah, holy cow, what is that? Hashima was a coal mining facility operated by Mitsubishi from 1887 to 1974. The miners and their families lived on the rock itself, having expanded it over the years to become a nearly self-sustained community. At its peak, over five thousand people lived on the island of 0.025 square miles. When Japan began to shift toward petroleum instead of coal, Hashima was abandoned, and it has fallen into extreme disrepair in just forty years.

Ruins on an island in the middle of the sea.

The island used to have dozens of high-rise apartment buildings up to seven stories tall, as well as a large school, a shrine, a hospital, a saltwater swimming pool, and of course, a large mining facility and its offices. Many of these buildings have already crumbled into nothing, but our tour took us around a corner of the island to see what was left. As Erik translated our guides' words, I began to get the picture of a small but lively and tight-knit community that worked extremely hard to make their lives livable. They brought soil in from the mainland and carried it to their rooftops to make rooftop gardens. They faced rough waves from typhoons with nothing protecting them besides the concrete seawall. They made do with very little fresh water and limited electricity. Obviously, the men employed in the mine risked their lives every day to dig coal out from beneath the ocean. But after just a few generations, they left. And all that remains is concrete and brick rubble that the waves continue to erode.

A documentary was screened on the ferry on the way back; I was captivated by the "then and now" photos that were shown: a barbershop busy with customers then, a row of rusting barber chairs now; an alley filled with women and children then, an alley overgrown with weeds and vines now.

Gunkanjima was the inspiration for the island where Javier Bardem's psychopath villain in Skyfall gambles with James Bond for the life of Severine. I remember the scene quite clearly, but Silva's island is much larger and apparently more structurally sound than the real island; it's actually just an elaborate set. I doubt any film can be filmed here now, although, amazingly, you can Google Street View a tour of the island. Anyway, visiting Battleship Island was still a great experience; it definitely stirred a bit of the thirst for haikyo, or urban exploration, in me. I wonder what abandoned marvels I can find in Korea?

First glimpses of Battleship Island.

Remains of the brick wall of the mine office, and a recently constructed lighthouse up on the hill.

Erik and me on the boat by Gunkanjima. It was extremely cold.

After returning from the island and lunch, Erik and I chilled around the shopping area by Nagasaki Station, killed some time at an arcade, and then boarded a train for our next stop: Kumamoto!

Nagasaki (長崎)

On my second day in Japan, Erik and I took a train from Fukuoka to Nagasaki. It was the first of many train rides. That morning, I had a chocolate croissant for breakfast, also the first of many chocolate croissants. There is an extremely popular croissant shop in Fukuoka Station called Il Forgno del Mignon. The croissants are small, chewy, and cheap. I prefer my croissants flaky, but these were still good, and I could eat a dozen, maybe. Anyway, after we arrived in Nagasaki and had okonomiyaki for lunch, our first stop was the Nagasaki Peace Park and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum.

The peace park was filled with sculptures that symbolized peace, donated from countries around the world. I suspect that the one pictured to the right is actually Japan's own sculpture, since this was the one where offerings of flowers, water, paper cranes, and other artistic items had been left.

It was, fittingly, a calm and peaceful day. Erik remarked how strange it was that there were almost no other tourists; a very quiet Thursday afternoon. Fittingly, the only other tourists we saw were a group of deaf Japanese people.

The centerpiece of the park is the Peace Statue, a giant 10-meter sculpture of a deific male figure who holds one hand pointed up toward the heavens as a gesture of peace and the other pointed toward the site of the atomic bomb's hypocenter. Nearly seventy years ago, the hill on which this park now stands, and the entirety of the city around it, was turned to ash and rubble in the blink of an eye because of war. Today, this giant sits peaceful to remind us never to do such a thing again.

I particularly enjoyed seeing two shrines on either side of the Peace Statue that were filled with thousands of paper cranes in all colors of the rainbow. When I was in ninth grade, Mrs. Johnson taught us John Hersey's Hiroshima and the story of Sadako and the thousand paper cranes. Ever since then, I have entertained the small habit of folding any scrap of paper I have no other use for into a paper crane. My desk will be littered with them by the year's end. I don't know if I've yet folded one thousand, but I'll get there eventually. In the meantime, seeing tens of thousands of cranes at the park (and many more later at the museum) was a nice reminder that tens of thousands of people around the world have been inspired in the same way.

Thousands of cranes at the Nagasaki Peace Park. The Japanese reads "Freedom Nagasaki, we are all one/together".

We then proceeded to visit the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. It is a well-crafted museum with one main exhibit that chronicles the event of the bombing from a comprehensive historical perspective. It begins with a time of events preceding and during the Second World War, explains the mechanics of the bomb and spares no expense depicting its horrific and far-reaching effects, then concludes with a "looking-forward" exhibit that focuses on (seemingly floundering) efforts to curtail the use of weapons of mass destruction internationally ever since the end of the war. I was grounded by the displays: remnants of clothing, photos of charred corpses, twisted steel, bones of a hand fused to a rock, a child's lunchbox with the rice inside reduced to soot. The personal testimonies were also heartbreaking. One that caught my eye was the account of a Korean man present during the attack.

I was surprised to learn that Japanese were not the only victims of the bombings. There were over ten thousand Koreans living in Nagasaki at the time, as well as thousands of Chinese laborers, Taiwanese students, and other foreigners (no Americans, though). According to the account of one Li Ki-Sang, the Korean victims of the bomb were discriminated against by the Japanese, as they were refused medical attention and had no way to get help or return home. He says,

"... There was a sudden, brilliant flash of light. I thought I was about to die. But before I had a chance to throw myself onto the tracks I lost consciousness... [When I later awoke in a primary school-turned-hospital,] I heard cries in Korean coming from the neighboring classroom. When I went into that room I found 50 or 60 of my fellow Koreans lying naked and burned like lumps of flesh and groaning in pain. Then when I shouted, 'What's the matter with all of you?' in Korean, they crawled toward me crying and begging for help. It seems that they were young men brought from Korea by force to work in Japan. They could not speak Japanese. They had been exposed to the atomic bomb explosion while engaged in construction work outside the arms factory... The more I heard from them the more a feeling of anger over the situation and affection for my countrymen welled up inside me."

I, for one, was most surprised that an account like this was even in the museum. (It was translated from Korean into Japanese and English, presumably, but the account itself was not given in Korean in the display.) But it, along with everything else, was an important and sobering reminder that acts of war and violence inevitably have much farther-reaching consequences than anyone can imagine at the time such fatal decisions are made. 11:02am, August 9th, 1945. A break in the clouds, a terrible decision, and generations of fallout.

The Peace Statue in Nagasaki (from behind).

Dazaifu Tenman-gū (太宰府天満宮) and Fukuoka

Entrance gate to the Dazaifu Tenman-gū with a "Happy New Year" message on the banner.

As soon as I arrived in Fukuoka, I had about six hours to kill by myself before meeting up with my friend Erik. He suggested that I go just outside of the city to Dazaifu, where a famous Shinto shrine and some temples are located. Though the directions he gave me were meticulous, I can't deny that I was a bit nervous about journeying all by myself from the port terminal to a mountain town an hour away. Fortunately, I encountered no mishaps as I took one bus and two trains and found myself walking up a cute street lined with souvenir shops and bustling with tourists toward the shrine.

The first thing I did was get something to eat; a long line had formed outside one of the many food shops. I realized that they were all selling essentially the same thing: rice cakes made with ume, or Japanese plum (梅, and 매실 in Korean). But I got into the longest line, because if there's one thing I know about street food, it's that long lines means a worthwhile wait.

Me in front of the main shrine at Dazaifu Tenman-gū.

I then walked the grounds of the shrine itself and marveled at its beauty. Dazaifu Tenman-gū is a shrine dedicated to the worship of Tenjin (天神), a kami (spirit or, in this case, deified human) in Shintoism who represents scholarship. Most pilgrims to this shrine come to pray for success in passing important exams; I briefly considered buying a token as good luck for getting into grad school, but the blatant commercialism of the entire enterprise turned me off a bit. Still, I enjoyed walking around and taking photos of the beautiful details all around the shrine.

These talismans are for writing down your wish. It's the 26th year of the current emporer, and also the Year of the Horse on the East Asian zodiac!

Torii, sacred gates.

The grounds of the shrine are actually quite large. Besides the main shrine, there are smaller shrines and also a few Buddhist temples. I walked along a path I found near the back and followed it up a hill, passing some teahouses along the way. The gravel path led to a stone path lined with torii, the red gates that symbolize entrance into sacred ground (but in this case were built to bring prosperity, which is why you see so many of them in a row).

I ended up on a hiking trail that wound through the hills and passed a very small theme park complete with a rollercoaster, a racing track, empty stalls, and very creepy carnival music playing despite there being almost no guests in the park. I almost wanted to stumble upon a Spirited Away-esque adventure.

The Kyushu National Museum was also located next to the shrine, but I wasn't feeling it, so I took the trains back to central Fukuoka, got very lost in the underground shopping malls, and finally met Erik at a Starbucks. He took me on a quick tour of the Things To Do in Fukuoka, including eating ramen at a yatai (which are very much like the ubiquitous Korean food carts, 포장마차, but apparently are only found in Fukuoka in Japan), being solicited (...) in Nakasu, and shopping at the Tokyu Hands department store, the Don Quijote everything-store, and the various chikagai (underground shopping centers). It was a long evening after a long day, and I was tired but happy when I finally went to sleep. And that was Day 1 in Japan!

Steaming, umami-licious ramen from a yatai. At this particular booth we made the acquaintance of a Japanese-American and her Taiwanese-American boyfriend who studied at Berkeley. Small world.

The Ferry to Fukuoka (and Back)

This is going to be a long, boring post about taking a high-speed ferry, the Kobee Beetle, across the East Sea/Sea of Japan from Busan to Fukuoka (and back). The rides themselves weren't very interesting, but I think sharing my experience would be helpful for anyone who wants to take the trip in the future. In the words of a friend, "I mean, Japan's right there. It'd be a shame not to visit while we're in Korea."

My ferry was to depart from Busan on Thursday morning. I had booked my ticket weeks in advance with help from my co-teacher through a travel agency called Joy Road (조이로드). They emailed me my confirmation number and detailed instructions (in Korean) on what to do when I got to the ferry terminal.

View of Busan from my window seat on the ferry; you can see the shopping centers of Nampodong and Busan Tower.

Busan --> Fukuoka
Take the subway line 1 (orange) to Jungang Station (중앙역), get out at exit 10, and walk across the street and through the large gate to the Busan Port International Passenger Terminal (부산국제여겍터미널). Go up to the second floor to the counter for Kobee/Miraejet (they appear to be the same company; both run the same high-speed ferries, as opposed to the slower "cruises"). Check-in ends about forty-five minutse prior to departure. For both trips, you must pay a "terminal tax" (which is BS, but there's no way around it) as well as a "fuel surcharge" for your ticket. The latter of these is actually part of your ticket price, only it changes periodically depending on the price of oil, so it's not calculated until you arrive. For me, the additional fees were about 23,000KRW.

After going through super-fast security and being stamped out of Korea, I boarded the boat! To my surprise, the interior was set up like an airplane cabin, with neat rows of seats and narrow aisles. The TV was showing Running Man before and after the safety instructional videos. There was supposed to be wifi, but it didn't work for me. It wasn't a boat you could walk around in, so I stayed in my seat and looked outside. The view of the coastline of Busan was nice, and then the view of the open water was a thrill, but due to high winds, the waters were rough; several times the boat ran straight into a wave and all I could see outside my window was the white spray of water. I didn't become completely seasick, but I found it more comfortable to close my eyes and drift off. The trip took 3 hours.

Upon arrival in Japan, immigration was an awkward affair. I hadn't put down the telephone number of my friend (an American who lives in Japan) with whom I'd be traveling, so the immigration officer tried to ask me what the number was, or why I didn't have it, or something. He didn't speak more than a few words of English, and I couldn't get anything across to him. The officer next to us was speaking fluently in Korean to another passenger, so I wondered if I should try Korean. But eventually the officer gave up and let me through. Customs was also awkward; the officer searched my bag very thoroughly while asking me extremely rehearsed questions (in English) about my travel plans and past experiences and if I was bringing any illegal drugs into the country.

And then I was in Japan! Hakata Port International Terminal. (The ancient city of Hakata (博多) was merged with Fukuoka (福岡) hundreds of years ago, but it is now the name of the ward where Fukuoka's port and train station are located.) You have to take a bus to get to the actual city: routes 11, 19, or 50 to Hakata train station. Fortunately, my friend had prepared very detailed instructions on how to take the buses (enter from the middle and grab a ticket; you can get change for a 1,000 yen note on any bus, pay the fare with exact change only, depending on the number on your ticket (from the port to Hakata Station is 220 yen)) and where to go from there.

The Kobee Beetle, high-speed ferry

Fukuoka --> Busan
After a wonderful weekend traveling around northern Kyushu, I found myself back in Fukuoka on Monday afternoon for the ferry ride back to Korea. From the new and beautiful Hakata train station, bus stop E, I took bus 88 to the Hakata Port International Terminal (博多港国際ターミナル), last stop on the line. (There was tons of traffic due to a large Seijin-shiki taking place nearby.)

The Kobee/Miraejet counter is on the first floor. The fuel surcharge was 2,000 yen and the terminal tax was 500 yen, the latter payable via a small vending machine by the entrance (because Japan). I had to use my Korean with the clerk, and I really wonder if my American accent was stronger than her Japanese one.

A few funny comparisons between the Busan terminal and the Fukuoka one: at the latter, there was no security prior to boarding. I just showed my boarding pass and terminal ticket and then went to town at the duty-free shop before getting on the boat. At Busan, the security had been quick, but it was at least there. Also, photographs of the boat and pier were not allowed, but at Fukuoka, I snapped a shot of the Beetle. And upon entering Korea again, customs was almost a joke. I breezed through the line (there were 10 lines for Koreans and 1 for non-Koreans) and then walked through a security scanner with all layers of clothes on. It even beeped, but I was let through, and no one checked my bags. I think due to the heavy traffic of returning Korean vacationers, customs and immigration didn't give a hoot about who or what was coming through.

Oh, and thanks to great weather, the trip back to Korea was very comfortable. I took a three hour nap.

So that's that! If you're interested to know more about the ferries between Japan and Korea, leave a comment. Or just go with Google; there's a ton of good information out there.

Hard Work Pays Off

The CSHS-Yamaguchi Prefecture high schools mini-conference, held this afternoon, with my student SH speaking at the podium.

My two students, SH and SJ -- the ones with whom I worked for an unexpectedly long time last Friday -- presented their research in front of their peers, teachers, and a cohort of visiting Japanese high school students and faculty today! All in English, for which I am very, very proud of them.

Two other presentations were given by the Japanese students, whose English sounds strangely robotic. It was like a recording, really. I know that this is mostly due to my unfamiliarity with Japanese-accented English, but I'll be honest: one girl in particular sounded so much like an android that I had to stifle a laugh from way in the back. Their brief words of introduction in Korean were better than anything I could manage, though.

In any case, I think that the only people who really understood everything that was said for the duration of the hour-long mini-conference were myself and the two other English teachers at my school, unfortunately. Many students were nodding off, and our science teachers would prod and slap them to keep them awake. Hopefully they still learned a thing or two. Hooray for cultural and educational exchange!

In other news, I stayed at school until 8pm again today. I hope this isn't the start of a trend... but I know that for at least this week and next, I'll be grading hundreds of essays written by my first-years, which range from terrible to woah-did-he-really-write-this good. Wish me luck!

Meet-a-friend Monday

This evening I had the immense pleasure of seeing Erik-san, who is visiting Korea from our neighbor across the East Sea, Japan. Erik is an Assistant Language Teacher with the JET Program (very much like Fulbright, but based only in Japan), having fallen so much in love with his placement school and town that he has renewed twice. Now in his third year and completely conversant in Japanese (and dressed head-to-toe in Uniqlo), he is very much the model of how I'd like to see myself in, say, 2015.

Erik-san, looking confused at a Dunkin' Donuts... perhaps an awkward consequence of being in the same photo as a suggestive banana cream pastry and two radioactive-looking coffee cups. By the way, that green tea latte was good, but my current gassy state tells me I shouldn't have consumed it...

I haven't thought too much about what I will do when my grant year expires next July. I think renewing my contract for another year would be amazing, especially since I have been having a wonderful time so far and have some personal goals (i.e. learn Korean) that could require an extension of my stay in this country. However, I'm also thinking a bit further ahead at options back home (i.e. graduate school), and I believe a date with the GRE may be fast approaching.

Anyway, this was just one of the few things we caught up on... We also swung by Yongji Lake, one of the few interesting public sights in this city, experienced the terror of Changwon buses in the evening, had pizza and chatted about life in Japan, our shared Altaic languages, homestay life, and much more. When I think about it now, I think it's kind of unusual that we didn't really talk about Swarthmore at all. Usually, when Swatties meet up, all we want to do is talk about Swarthmore and other people in our rather insular community. But perhaps due to our having graduated and looking forward to what's next in life, our college connections simply never came up. Nevertheless, it was a pleasant evening. Thanks for visiting, Erik! 부산국제영화제 즐겁게 보내다!

Other highlights from a nice day: I got nine hours of sleep last night, and when I woke up I felt like I was on top of the world. If only that could happen every morning. Also, two students of mine are planning to take the AP Biology exam (like, whaaat?!). They've asked me to help them prepare for it! This strikes me as slightly insane; still, I agreed. Except it's been about five years since I took the exam. I don't know how much of a help I can be to them... ALSO! My cousin Irene got engaged today! When I found out -- via Facebook while at work, no surprise there -- my jaw literally dropped open, and I wanted to jump up and down. Congratulations to Irene and Dan! And lastly, I just had some great catch-up time on Skype with another friend from Swat. It was great. Great, as in, if you're a friend from home, this is my not-so-subtle way of telling you to set up a Skype date with yours truly!