Parallel World

Goodness how the time flies! With a blink of an eye, now we are approaching Thanksgiving Holidays!

Since the last update, the world has become a very different place; credit crunch arrived in gusto with no short-term ending in sight, and Obama is the President-elect. Privately, my traveling intensified toward the end of the year, and for the past few months, my life has been all work, no play.

Somewhere in this world, however, there are places where the time seems to have stopped, and I would like to write about such place in this entry.

When I was 10, our family moved to Fukuoka, and we spent 4 years there until we moved to Yokohama. For whatever reasons, my father decided to place my sister and I into a Catholic girl school, a school known to educate girls from the upper crust of Fukuoka society from kindergarten to high school. I don't know what got into my father's head, as we are not Catholic, and certainly not of the upper crust, but may be he wanted to join the rank, with his recent promotion to the General Manager of the branch office.

The school took few dozen students for the first years of primary school, secondary school, and high school, but in principle they did not take any new comers for other years. Therefore, it was truly exceptional for the school to accept me as a fourth year student, and my sister as the first year student, from the second term of the year. My father must have had a truly influential connection.

My feeling for this school has always been divided; I was miserable for the first two and half years, and was happy for the latter years. My misery probably had not much to do with school, but rather my wanting to go back to where I lived before we moved to Fukuoka. Looking back, this was a great school, encouraging us to learn things from experience. They had Kendo (art of Japanese sword) class once a week, tennis club for children over 10, and we were all encouraged to learn how to play at least one music instrument by age 9. I don't recall studying hard at this school...I spent hours and hours in library, reading.

Since I moved to Yokohama at 14, I only went back to Fukuoka once, an year later, for a visit.

In early September this year, our office in Tokyo organized an event in Fukuoka, and I had a chance to visit Fukuoka. As the event ended on Friday, I extended my visit for one day for exploration. My goal was to trace my commute from school to where I used to live 20+ years ago. I walked almost everyday during these 4 years, walking 40 minutes one way. I was a stubborn child, dismissing to commute with bus for being too lame, just as I claimed wearing coat in the middle of winter was lame and lived without one...I wonder what I was thinking, really.

Central Fukuoka has changed massively over the past 20+ years, and there weren't too many places that I could recognize.

But school...it stood there, solid, as if 20+ years has not existed at all. I felt like I was a girl again, with pigtails and dark blue uniform, carrying heavy black leather bag full of books and feeling quite lost in a city that I didn't belong. I wondered around, fearing that the place still tried to grab me. I wanted to escape, but wanted to stay at the same time.

Then, I started to walk home...I mean toward my old home. My body pulled me toward the direction, and my head just looked to see the changes. Strangely, only few things have changed, but everything looked smaller than I remembered. There was a memorial park along the way, with the bust of Buddhist nun and an old wooden house; a European-styled house built on red bricks with statues of two angels holding a fountain in the front; a remains of former fortress with sharp rising stone walls; a pond with floating lotus leaves...
Finally I reached my house, a tired looking apartment building that used to look spanking new and modern while we lived.

35 minutes walk from school to home, with additional 10 minutes to the nearest station with my adult legs...that was the world I lived in for 4 years, a 5 kilometer radius of that apartment building.

That world still exists, only without me. I am glad that I escaped from it, like I dreamed of escaping as a child...yet it is a comfort to know that it still exists, like a parallel world that never crosses, only showing itself like an illusion once in a blue moon.

Goodbye Noe Valley

San Francisco in the evening and the nightfall...


I was in San Francisco this week, and spent half a day to completely move out of the apartment I lived in since 1997. The apartment was in Noe Valley, still my favorite part of town in San Francisco. I kept my place there for various reasons, subletting it for the past few months, but the opportunity came my way to move into a new place in San Francisco with less hassles, so I decided to say goodbye to good old Noe Valley.

The apartment itself wasn't perfect, as it was on the ground floor with little light, and fixtures were very old, some probably dating back to half a century ago (they have their own charms, but not in the sense of convenience.) The ceiling was too low, and I could hear too much of the neighbors upstairs.

Still, it was my home, and home it was for close to a decade. So, it was with a pang of sadness that I left the place for the very last time.

It was a home for me and my two cats; one now deceased and another adopted. I have great memory of this place, especially of the first 3 years while my friends from New York lived in San Francisco (they all went back.)

Goodbye Noe Valley as my neighborhood...I will still go back there for a visit, but not to be at home again.

The Edge of the World

View from my hotel room in Istanbul
It snowed and snowed and snowed...


On my last trip to to Tokyo, I flew over Istanbul to meet with our business partner for a day. I flew on Lufthansa via Munich, and on that long-haul flight, watched a German film called "The Edge of the World". The film description on the program didn't say much, except that it was a film about a Turkish family in Germany and their journey, and I thought it was more than appropriate to watch it on my way to Istanbul.

The film was about the crimes and how such crimes are dealt with by people who are not directly involved in the crimes...in this case, a son whose father became an accidental murderer, and a mother whose daughter was killed by being too involved with her lover's affairs. I was especially touched with the process of healing leading to the ultimate forgiveness by the mother.

The film was inter-cultural, but ultimately what resonated was the universal humanity. And I thought Istanbul suited so well as the backdrop for this film. It's unique mixture of the west and the east is just what I think of Istanbul: a city with beautiful European architectures juxtaposed with impressive mosques; a very liberal party town with some women in scarfs and veils; wealthy urbanites walking alongside old men pulling garbage carts.

Istanbul may really be the "Edge of the world", in the sense that it is the "edge" of Asia and the "edge" of Europe. If that was the intension of this film's title, it could not be more true.

With few films that I've watched so far in the past few months, I thought this topped...but then, the situation could not have been more perfect, as I was on my way to Istanbul on Lufthansa.