“There is no place like home.”
― L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
This series of posts is especially dedicated to my Facebook friends, Junko Ito Neibauer and Jason Taylor. We’ve been connected on the social media for a decade. To appreciate and commemorate our ten years of friendship, I’d like to dedicate those photographs to them.
Through this series of Our Hometown, Totsuka, I would like to think about what living abroad really means with you. Junko-san and Jason spent more years in the US than in Japan. Since I also spent several years abroad, I thought it might be a perfect time to discuss the topic.
Think about it. When you start your new life abroad, you’re invited to a special club, where you can have two homes, two languages, and two currencies. Different cultures, different people, different experiences. Everything is different from where you’ve been, and now you’re walking into the place you’ve never been before. Probably, you will struggle between the two worlds, but someday you may notice that the experiences you’ve got in the dual worlds make you unique and interesting.
Here, let me briefly introduce our history. I met Junko-san through a Facebook community page of Yokohama. It was 2009 when I was in Wisconsin, and she was in California. Since she has been married to an American man and living in the US for a long time, she missed her home city, Yokohama.
Soon, we became online friends and started exchanging our experiences both in Japan and the US. To my surprise, we were from the same district of Yokohama, which is Totsuka. So, we had many in common. After finishing college as well as coming back to Japan, I started sharing photos of my neighborhood on Facebook, and she enjoyed watching them. Through the online interaction with Junko-san, I was connected with her son, Jason, as well. Since Jason also spent his childhood in the district, he was able to recognize buildings on my photos.
Here are photographs of Eishoji temple that holds her childhood memories. According to her, she learned math with soroban and calligraphy in the temple. There was a huge ginkgo tree, and she went there to collect some ginkgo nuts with her mother and sisters. Even though she spent decades in the US, her memories of Japan still shine in her heart.
