“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life
This is the second installment in the series, Our Hometown Totsuka. In the previous article, I posted photos of the temple where Junko-san’s memory resides. In part 2, photographs taken from Shimokurata-cho to JR Totsuka Station are posted.
As I mentioned in the previous post, let’s keep discussing what it means to go abroad. For the Japanese, living in the US is like a dream. Essentially, it is all thanks to those fancy and cool images created by Hollywood. As is often the case with any Japanese kids from the 90s, we pretty much grew up watching American TV shows broadcasted by NHK, including Full House, Growing Pains, and Little House on the Prairie.
But just because you’re living your dream doesn’t mean your problems will go away. You still have to pay bills, fix annoying home problems, and recover from a nasty cold. Even though your friends envy you for your life abroad, they might not realize what you have costed for traveling beyond the pacific ocean. The grass isn’t always greener on the other side.
But still, you chose to go abroad for a reason. When you look back in those years, it would be nice if you could smile and say to yourself you never thought that you could do it.
Here, I posted photographs of Totsuka. Junko-san and Jason, can you recognize any of those decade-old buildings?
