The End

Yesterday I rode my bike past gleaming green rice fields on my way to Yamazaki Junior High School for the last time. I tried to review my goodbye speech in my head on the way there but it was too long to remember most of it. It didn't really matter: speeches in Japan are usually read. And my five-minute speech was all in Japanese.

I cried a lot during and after my goodbye ceremony. Even if I weren't a person who cried easily, it would be hard to withstand the emotional pressure that is embedded in the very structure of a Japanese goodbye ceremony: the principal gave a speech commending me on all my hard work and commenting on how well-loved I was by all the students and teachers. Then, four of my favorite students gave short speeches and presented me with gifts from the school. It was boiling hot in the gym, so the moisture on my face could have been mistaken for sweat were it not for the accompanying red eyes and sniffling nose. After I gave my own goodbye speech, the oendan--cheer squad--sent me off with a farewell cheer in traditional Japanese style, followed by the Japanese tradition of tossing me in the air. And then it was really time to say goodbye. The students and teachers of Yamazaki Chu Gakkko formed two lines and I walked between them, shaking hands with everyone. Several of the students even gave me hugs.

It's nice to be sent off feeling like I was personally appreciated. But I can't help wondering if I was really an effective teacher: several times during my goodbye ceremony, it was stated that I spoke Japanese well; but never was it mentioned that I taught English well. The school gave me a book of thank you letters from all the students--almost every single one written entirely in Japanese. Suddenly I start to worry that I was so concerned with having good relationships with the students that I never really did much to encourage them to improve their English language skills.

But that basically aligns with something I realized a long time ago about this job: these kids will learn or not learn English regardless of whether they have an AET there to help them. The Japanese teachers of English have more than sufficient knowledge to help junior high school students acquire the foreign language skills they need to enter high school. My job was not only to assist the Japanese teachers with actual English instruction, but to serve as a cultural model and make the mission of learning English more relevant to Japanese students.

I did that. Or at least I think I did.

So, in the end, I guess I'm satisfied; which is all that I could ever ask for.

From the Yamabeguchi Bus Stop

Leaving day. Shigemi drove me up into the mountains so I could see a spectacular view of the town from above. Rice paddies were stacked like a giant staircase up the hillside. It’s hard to imagine the effort that must go into growing food up there on such steep terrain, and the enormous amount of work that went into leveling these “steps” out in the first place, hundreds of years ago.

On the way up the mountain, I saw a house of similar age and architecture to the one I’ve been staying in the last five nights, only the one I spotted had a straw, rather than a tin, roof (Shigemi told me on the day I arrived that the tin roof had been installed about twenty-five years ago). There is a different kind of life going on here, one that I don’t usually get to witness in the booming metropolis (or so it now seems) of Moka.

The amazake that I spent eleven hours making yesterday turned a bit sour, which means that the temperature dropped below 50°C while it was cooking. I don’t mind the sourness so much – in fact I rather like it – but I know it’s not the way it’s supposed to taste, and so I feel a bit bad that the family is now stuck with the rest of the batch.

I’m waiting at the bus stop now. The bus should be here in about ten minutes. It feels like I just got here, and yet the time before I arrived (i.e. Nagasaki) seems so long ago.

Wonder-full.

Now, at last, I understand the reason for the existence of quarter tones. I will never be able to relive this moment. A realization that’s been plaguing me all day: I am in Japan, and in four months and two days, I will not be.

This is real Japan, with a realness that I’ve been utterly missing out on for the last year and a half: the click-pop of the strings of the sanshin as I warm my legs beneath the blanket of the charcoal-heated kotatsu. I am living in a world that I never could have dreamed existed in even the most imaginative years of my childhood.

Japan. It has tortured and changed me. I have loved and hated it in almost equal measure. What will I be, exactly four months from now, when I say goodnight to my last day on this island for who knows how long? Perhaps I will never come back. I am prepared for that. But, oh! I will miss this country so much!

Today was Good Friday. It was also the last full day of my homestay on a Japanese farm, organized through the network of the WWOOF program. Through email, I got in touch with Shigemi, the woman of the house, and we agreed that I would come stay with her, her 86-year-old mother, and her two teenage children for a certain period of time, during which I would work on her farm in exchange for room, board, and a chance to learn a little bit of what she has to teach (which is a lot).

I almost didn’t come. Standing in front of the ticket machine at the train station, I nearly decided that it all sounded too difficult and I was feeling too homesick and depressed lately, and I just wanted to go home. I had a bit of an emotional breakdown. I called Josiah and told him I was having second thoughts. He encouraged me and, in the end, I went ahead and bought that train ticket. And, wow. I am so glad I did. I learned things I never expected, like how to prepare takoyaki (bits of octopus fried in batter and rolled into spheres about the size of golf balls) and that, if your house is cold enough, you don’t have to refrigerate perishable food but can just leave it out on the kitchen table for days at a time (the house was definitely cold enough). The entire experience was a little bit miserable. But it was also a little bit life changing.

Just a little.

Shigemi finished practicing the sanshin and put it back in its case. When I said, “Maybe this is my only chance to ever hear this instrument played," she replied, “No! When you go to Okinawa you will find that they have one in every house.”

When I go to Okinawa? Yes, I suppose I do want to go. “Yes,” said Shigemi, “you have to go.” It seems that every word of conversation that passes from Shigemi to me is a bit awkward, but it's also laden with wisdom. I nodded. "Okay," I said.

After five days, I’ve just about come to like being here. But five days was enough. Or, maybe, it was more than enough. Maybe it was everything.

Guilt

It's 3:15 on a Friday afternoon—still one-and-a-half hours until it's time for me to leave school—and I have nothing to do. My plan was to watch the kids do sports practice after school, but today is PTA observation day, and the schedule is all funky. So I'm sitting at my desk, studying Japanese.

Suddenly my principal is standing over me and saying, "Go home now." I'm taken aback and cannot help but reply, "Really?" He said the same thing yesterday, because there was a teachers' meeting (they usually dismiss me early when there's a teachers' meeting after school, on account of the obvious fact that I won't be able to understand or participate in most of what's being said). And he let me go early on Wednesday, too, because it was about to start raining. I'm paid on salary, so it's no money out of my pocket; I can't help but feel as though three days in a row is getting to be a bit scandalous.

As I pack up my things and clear my desk for the day, I am plagued by an overbearing sensation of guilt. "I should have tried harder to pretend to be busy," I scold myself, "How embarrassing to be sent home early while all the Japanese teachers have to stay for another three hours or more!"

I'm in the locker room putting on my snow pants (I ride my bike and it's still really cold out) when it suddenly occurs to me: "Wait a minute...I'm an American! I don't have to feel guilty about leaving work early when my boss tells me it's okay. There are things in this world that are more important to me than my job. Lots of things. It's a beautiful day outside, and I've been given the chance to get out and enjoy a little bit of it. Why on earth should I beat myself up over it?"

I am not Japanese.

Sometimes I forget.

To mask, or not to mask?

Another kid at my school was out with the flu today. In the morning report, I heard them remarking to one another that it was because he was so bad at remembering to wear a mask. Everyone agrees on this: a gauze mask is the most effective way to guard oneself against the flu virus. As I listen in on this conversation, my expression is neutral, but my heart scoffs with all the scoffiness I can muster. I like to consider myself above all this foolery with masks.

Then I hear my name. I hate it when they do this: talk about me while I'm sitting right there, and then nobody bothers to explain to me why I'm being talked about. But, this time, I've got enough context to decipher the gist of what they're saying.

Basically, I'm the only person at my school who isn't wearing a mask at all times. I tried it for a while, just to keep others happy, but the truth about masks is: they're nasty. They're itchy and they make breathing difficult, so, at least in my case, that means that I'm constantly adjusting them. With my hands. So the germs on my hands are easily passing to my face--to my mouth and nose and eyes and all those places that I'm usually very careful to not touch while I'm trying to avoid getting sick.

But if everyone in Japan is obsessed with wearing surgical masks to stay healthy during cold and flu season, then there must be some evidence demonstrating their effectiveness, right? In all my perusing of the internets, I was unable to find a single article or study affirming that these types of masks do much of anything to keep a healthy person from getting sick. An article in the New York Times cites research presented at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in San Francisco. Researchers concluded:

Surgical masks are designed to trap respiratory secretions (including bacteria and viruses) expelled by the wearer and prevent disease transmission to others. Surgical masks are not designed to prevent inhalation of airborne particles.

I wish there were a means for me to present this argument to the teachers who eye me and my uncovered face suspiciously as I pass them in the halls every day.

I'm left with a bit of a moral dilemma. Is it better to stand my ground as a person who doesn't come from a culture where it's normal to wear a gauze mask in public when you're trying to keep from getting sick? I mean, not only are they incredibly uncomfortable, but there's no scientific evidence that they're actually helpful! However, I am living in their country, and if wearing a mask makes them feel better about me, should I just bury my pride and go along with it?

When it doesn't go against my moral principles, I always do my best to be culturally sensitive and to not offend the people around me with my flamboyant gaijin ways. Eventually, I suppose I'll just have to cave and go along with it.

Who turned off the warm?

It's the fourth of November and suddenly we're in the throes of winter. There was ice on the roof and on the ground this morning. Still, I mounted my bicycle and made my late start to work, with fleece-lined gloves and wool socks that, despite their earnest efforts, could not keep my fingers and toes from going numb by the time I reached school.

Naturally, the school nurse has made an announcement that the best way to guard against swine flu contagion is to make sure every corner of the building is well ventilated. So, despite the bitingly frigid air, every window in every classroom and hallway must be open at all times. Of course, the school nurse issues such an edict while she gets to spend most of her day moving cosily between her office and a warm spot behind her desk in the teachers' room. But I'm not one who deserves to complain. These days it seems, with my classes being canceled left and right, I spend the overwhelming amount of my time at work in the teachers' room, shuffling nervously through the drawers of my desk as I rack my brain for something to do. Such is the life of a foreign English teacher in Japan.

I'd love to write more, but my fingers are so numb from the cold that it took me, like, ten minutes just to write this sentence. Good night, everyone. And sleep warmly.

The last of the Moh-kans

On Thursday evening I received the startling news that the city of Moka's teacher-exchange program with its sister city in Glendora will come officially to an end after the expiration of my contract in July, 2010. In keeping with Japanese etiquette, I refrained from making any major announcements of the news until after our official meeting with the board of education on Friday afternoon. I made mention of it only to one of my English teachers, at a moment when I had a chance to pull her aside and tell her privately. Naturally, I prefaced everything with: "This is still a bit of a secret, so please don't tell anyone until next week!" After little more than thirteen months since my arrival in this country, I marvel sometimes at just how Japanese I can be.

The city of Moka made the decision to end the current AET exchange program on the grounds of increasing financial difficulties. In light of the struggling economy, it makes more sense for the local board of education to spend a great deal less money by hiring AETs through a private agency. There are currently three AETs from this agency already working at junior high schools in Moka. They make considerably smaller salaries and live in much smaller apartments than we sister-city AETs do, all the while doing essentially the same job. In consideration of the present tightness of the education budget, it certainly seems that these funds could be put to more practical use. Many of these things have been starkly apparent since my first month in Moka. Honestly, the BOE's decision to outsource all their AETs did not come as much of a surprise. The real surprise, in fact, was that they didn't do it a year ago.

So what's in store for the five remaining sister-city AETs as we face what are, unequivocally, our last months living in the quiet, rice-paddy encircled, slightly xenophobic, but generally pleasant little city of Moka? That's not a question that is easily answered. Joe is looking into teaching with the JET Program, Doug, Yves, and Josiah have all mentioned interest in working in another country, and me? I guess it's time for me to start thinking more seriously about graduate school.

In the meeting where we were given official notice that our contracts would not be renewed next summer, our supervisor told us, "This is your last time to do everything, so make it your best." I'm not sure exactly how this advice will play out in my decisions over the next nine months, but I hope that I will approach my job and life in Japan with a positive outlook, cherish each experience, and not miss out on any opportunities.

Ain't got nobody and monkey sat in my miso cucumbers.

Yesterday was the last day of school before summer vacation. This doesn't mean that a new school year will start up again in September; in Japan, the school year runs from April to March. But it does mean that I have now been in Japan for eleven months and have successfully (at least in some sense) experienced every stage of the junior high school year.

I've been pondering and attempting to come up with a word that concisely summarizes my first year in Japan. If it were a Japanese word, I would definitely have to go with sumimasen, a phrase which can very conveniently be adapted to mean either "Thank you," "Excuse me," or, "I'm sorry," depending on the situation. But as far as English descriptors go, I'll have to settle with four:

Lonely. Restrained. Introspective. Revolutionary.

As I think my blog has faithfully reflected, being a foreign English teacher in Moka, Japan has been difficult. At work, there's a lot of feeling like I have to hold back and conform to social expectations, and both at work and at home, my friend pool is a bit spare. Though I don't necessarily miss America, per se, I have come to appreciate just how friendly and outgoing Americans are in comparison to some other cultures. I don't know how I'd get through it all if it weren't for Skype and the little people who appear in a small video chat box on my computer screen from time to time.

And yet, for all their difficulty, I can state confidently that my time and experiences in Japan have been meaningful, uplifting, and have led me towards positive introspection and change. As a teacher, I see that I've grown considerably in my approach to ESL instruction and in my interactions with Japanese junior high schoolers. And the challenges and the loneliness of this place teach me daily to rely on God and to see her even in the places where the concept of a loving and omniscient God is never even given the slightest acknowledgment. Revolutionary.

---

Yesterday evening I also had the unique opportunity to patronize a certain dining establishment which has, since its opening, attained a certain level of small fame. It's just your average little whole-in-the-wall izakaya, aside from the small detail that two of the waiters on staff are...monkeys. Yep, that's right: I went to a monkey bar. The monkeys wore weird little uniforms, brought us hot towels to wipe our hands, and poured our beer. I must admit, the whole thing made me a bit uncomfortable, both for sanitary reasons (my appetite wasn't exactly piqued when I walked in the front door and the whole place smelled exactly like a pet shop) and out of concern for the general wellbeing of the animals themselves. The highlight of the evening was certainly when the younger monkey suddenly lost control and began to jump all over our table, turning over dishes and planting a foot right in the middle of the lovely platter of miso cucumbers that I had been attempting to savor. At the end of the evening, the monkeys were made to put on a show for us, attaining such feats as jumping rope, riding on rocking horses, performing traditional Japanese folk dances, and even playing basketball.

I have absolutely no interest in ever going back to this place, but at least I got some cool pictures.

Only in Japan.

It's just June, I guess.

Tonight I sat out on my porch for an hour and a half watching the rain.

June has been a long and difficult month. It is a month of no public holidays. The weeks rush by, but the weekends go past so quickly it seems like they never even happened. The weather, nearly every day, is overcast and humid. I started taking Japanese classes on the eighteenth but I my heart hasn’t really been in it. It doesn’t help that I began writing a novel on the fifteenth and it currently takes up nearly every minute of my spare time. But my heart hasn’t really been in writing, either.

The truth is, I miss my friends and family like crazy. Lately, it seems like the absence of these loved ones from my life is a real and physical emptiness in my own body. I wonder: What the hell was I thinking, moving to Japan to teach English? Am I really going to stay here for another year? How? Why?

But, I swear, there’s something about the rain here in Japan that’s different from any rain I’ve ever seen before. It’s like I can feel it under my skin, even when I’m not actually out in it. And the lighting as the sun sank, invisibly, behind the horizon but turned the whole cloudy sky a pale orange in doing so: my heart almost couldn’t take it. I would have sat out there longer except that, around seven thirty when it got dark enough that I couldn’t see the rain anymore anyway, I figured I had better eat something before it got too late and affected my sleep pattern.

Elementary school tomorrow. And a field trip to Tokyo with my second-year students on Tuesday. And then it will be July. Just a little bit longer. God give me the strength.

You know you're really a teacher when...

You get to laminate stuff.

Two years to the day and feelin' the Oxford blues

As of yesterday, it's been two years since I completed my undergraduate university education. And it's two years since I arrived back in the U.S. after spending a semester – my last semester – abroad in Oxford, U.K. Two years ago at this time, I was filled with a deep sense of longing and remorse for the loss of a part of my life that I couldn't help wondering if I'd taken for granted. My months in Oxford had been the best months of my life and I knew it. I wondered – and very much doubted – if life could ever be that good again. My ubiquitous post-college life loomed uncertainly before me and I had no idea what on earth I was supposed to do with myself.

As of today, I've been in Japan for longer than I was in the U.K. Let me tell you, Moka is no Oxford. There's no surging intellectual aura about the city that pervades every aspect of daily life. There's no dimly lit pub, within a two-minute walk of my grungy flat, where I can splurge on a pint of Old Speckled Hen and watch the bartenders banter with the regular patrons through an impenetrable haze of cigarette smoke. And I'm different, too: I'm no longer the poetically penniless university student, blissful in my poverty and relative detachment from the drudgery of the economic machine.

I don't want to go back to Oxford. Or, what I mean is, even if I do want to go back to Oxford, I'm wise enough to know that I can't go back – at least not back to the Oxford I left two years ago. Even now, new laws have ensured that the air in the Radcliffe Arms won't be clouded with cigarette smoke (a change which, even now, the knowledge of which makes me a little sad). But, more importantly, I'm not an undergraduate. And I'm not poor. If I went back to Oxford today, I'd find myself suddenly able to afford to do all the things I wanted to do but couldn't the first time around. And I think that would make it certainly less magical.

I should have read Jude the Obscure. I'm sure I'd have better insights on this point if I had. But, for the moment, I'm still just trying to figure out what comes next. In a little over a month, I'll have to decide (or at least I flatter myself now with the assumption that I'll be asked to decide) whether I'm going to renew my contract for a second year of teaching in Moka. Why am I here? and Is this where I'm supposed to be? are questions I've been asking myself a lot lately. And I still haven't come up with answers. As of today, I've spent two years trying to figure out what it means to live as an adult. And that little effort is still giving me quite a bit of trouble.

Gratitude, etc.

Tonight, I'm not going to blog about my musings on the meaning of gratitude. I know that somewhere, on land mass much larger than the one upon which I currently reside, people are beginning to say hello to a day on which they will sit around a table, stuff themselves stupid with opulent amounts of food, and watch football or It's a Wonderful Life on TV. But, apart from a few Thanksgiving lessons that I've given at elementary schools over the past month, that has little to do with me right now.

Tonight, as I huddle in front of the cool glow of my MacBook screen and the hot air from my oil heater, I don't really have anything special to say about gratitude. But I do want to talk about creativity. And maybe gratitude ties into that a bit in the end. We'll see.

This evening I made stuff. For starters, I made some pumpkin pies (OK! You got me: you can take the girl out of America but you can't take the America out of the girl). They're sitting on my kitchen counter right now and the festive aroma they're sending my way is delightful. While the pies were cooking, I made some lanterns out of recycled glass jars and hung them in the kitchen. They look sort of pretty, dangling there.

There's something flooringly spectacular about the fact that human beings are creative beings. We've got something in us that no other creatures on Earth have got. God put it in there. Every creative act that we perform has the potential to be worship and all worship is creation. Pretty exciting.

I was reading a recent blog post by Ashely and it got me thinking further about how an important aspect of my job as an educator -- perhaps even the most important aspect, is my role in encouraging students to think for themselves and push themselves to be more than they realize they have the potential to be. This can be fairly tough at times because junior high school students -- particularly junior high school students in Japan -- don't like to stand out too much; and standing out is very often a direct byproduct of thinking for oneself.

The situation isn't helped much by the fact that language education in Japan, in general, emphasizes rote memorization and repeating lines from the text book over and over and over again until you finally reach the point where your brain implodes on itself from sheer boredom. It's no wonder that when I try to get my students to put together original sentences in English, using vocabulary they've already learned, they freak out. "What? You actually want my to think for myself? You mean I can't just copy a sentence out of my textbook? It's too hard!"

But we can't settle for mediocrity because the alternative is too hard. We need to push ourselves to achieve a potential beyond what we already know to be attainable and we need to encourage others to do the same.

So how can I respond to this responsibility? How do I encourage my students to live up to their potential when all most of them want to do is blend into the crowd and slide through classes by doing the minimum amount of work and praying that they teacher won't call on them and make them look stupid in front of their friends?

I've learned that the most important thing I can do is laugh with them. In class, I'm ridiculous. When I read passages out of the textbook for the students to repeat after me, I do so in absurd voices. I use excessive gestures, dance, sing, and basically leave class every day knowing that I've left a little bit of my dignity somewhere inside and that I'll never be able to get it back.

Does this work? I think so. Or at least sometimes it does. There are a few students who are so painfully shy, it's likely that nothing I do will ever make them feel comfortable speaking English in class. But there are others who realize, even if they mess up when forming sentences in English, they can't possibly make themselves look any more ridiculous than I've already made myself.

Perhaps my acting silly has nothing to do with English-learning, directly. But it does have to do with encouraging people and loving them and making them feel valuable and empowered to try their best. And, as I've come to learn, that's really what my job is, anyway. I'm grateful for such a job.

Furbies discovered alive and well in Indonesia!

Well, not really Furbies. But when I first glanced the image that went with the news headline on my Yahoo! mail page, I couldn't help but note the striking resemblance:

The little feller in the 2nd picture is a pygmy tarsier, a tiny primate long thought to be extinct, but recently spotted in the forests of Indonesia, eighty years since its last sighting by human eyes.

The reappearance of the pygmy tarsier gives me hope. For eighty years, he sat mum in his little island jungle. Nobody knew where he was and after a while, I bet nobody really cared. But suddenly, just when we had given up on the chance of ever seeing him again, he waltzed right back into our lives. No questions asked: the pygmy tarsier is definitely here and (let's hope) here to stay.

So why does this give me hope? Well, in case you haven't noticed, I've been a bit out of sight for a while. I'm far away on my own little island, and sometimes I worry that the folks back home will forget about me. When I eventually decide I want to move back to the States, what will my homecoming be like? Will my friends and family be able to seamlessly welcome me back into their lives? Sometimes I worry that they won't. Sometimes I worry that, by choosing to move to Japan and away from most of my loved ones, I've lost something that I'll never be able to get back.

But then there's the case of the pygmy tarsier. And if a primate the size of a mouse can do it, shouldn't I be able to as well? I want to think so. But the more realistic side of my urges me to focus not on what I've lost, but rather on the insights and experiences I've already gained by living in this crazy country that I now like to call home.

Praise

For fat, thick drops of rain trickling down my scalp. For things that can be reused and thus become more beautiful. For children who say hello to you not to impress their friends or feel brave, but just because they want to say hello. Praise for autumn. Praise for earth. Praise for praise.

I am grateful today for beautiful things, and how their existence has a way of making the not-so-beautiful things around them look something closer to beautiful. Sometimes the beautiful things are artwork, sometimes cups of tea, sometimes dear friends. Regardless, they make life precious. Praise for precious life.

I have been in Japan for two-and-a-half months. Sometimes living here is horribly difficult. But tonight, at least, it is beautiful. I light some candles and listen to the rain tap dancing on my sun roof. Life becomes simple. Thank God for simple life.

No gaijin allowed

There are some days when the existence of the "Japanese only" pub around the corner really gets to me. I'm reminded repeatedly that, to the majority of the people I encounter in daily life, I'll always be a foreigner first, a person second. Whereas, on some days it's amusing to witness people's astonished reactions when I confirm that, yes, I can eat Japanese food; on other days it's simply exhausting. And the language barrier doesn't do much to improve the situation: some people laud my ability to speak even a few words in Japanese; others seem to hate me for not being fluent. To tell the truth, I sometimes can't decide which bothers me more.

Yesterday, during my lunch break, I went for a little walk. The weather was absolutely perfect and, in the mild autumn air, my mind was clear. I seldom observe Moka from on foot, since I tend to ride my bicycle everywhere. On the occasions when I do decide to walk, however, I notice things about the city that I don't normally take into consideration. Yesterday, as I strolled down the street from Yamazaki Junior High to buy some juice from a vending machine, it struck me for the first time that, for the majority of the teachers and students that I work with, I'm the only foreigner they'll see all day. Perhaps, if they go to the grocery store, they might observe a Brazilian or even a Peruvian, but other than that, I'm it. They'll learn English regardless of whether I'm at school: Shimowada and Ishikawa both have more than enough knowledge and teaching ability to satisfy the foreign language-learning needs of junior high schoolers. So much more important than my role as a teacher is my role as a cultural ambassador. By interacting with them on a daily basis, maybe I can show my students that, even though we look different and don't speak the same language, we are equally valuable human beings, and that our feelings, emotions, and deepest desires (acceptance, attention, affirmation, love) are basically the same. Maybe some of them won't ever become consciously aware of this concept. But maybe -- just maybe -- if any of them grow up to own a restaurant or other small business, they won't write "Japanese Only" on the front.

Today I reached a point in the third-year English text where I had to read a story out loud to the class about the bombing of Hiroshima. Standing in front of my students, reading a simple but painfully tragic story about the United States' atrocious act against Japanese civilians, I'm a confused jumble of emotions. As I read the sad description of a little girl and boy struggling to comfort each other as the sit beneath a tree slowly succumbing to a gruesome, painful death, my voice cracks a little and my eyes start to well up with tears. I feel an awkward urge to apologize to the class: to recognize the fact that, in this room, I am the sole representative of a people group who committed a horrible, contemptible act of violence against their people group. I want their forgiveness. And yet I know it's not the time and place and that an apology might not carry much weight when made by a person who wasn't even born until some forty years after the fact. Or maybe it would have value. Who knows? Regardless, I made no personal epilogue, simply read the questions for the corresponding true-false quiz, still a confusion of emotions, still desiring some form of absolution.