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.
