My family moved a lot for my father's job. The experiences of mine as a transfer student were very different from the flattering ones of my father’s and the one of my grandfather’s work ride in a horse-drawn carriage.
At the schools I transferred to, I found myself being observed by the locals at arm’s length. It was more so in some areas where the people were less accustomed to accepting strangers. I was looked at with curiosity and confusion.
But fortunately since I was only a child myself then, within a month or so from moving to new schools, I had become so familiar with their local dialects that anyone could not tell the difference between me and the local pupils. However, it still had been difficult for me to get invited to the 'inner circle' of the local community, such as at traditional festivals and small gatherings.
In a year or two, the job relocation of my father would happen again. Even though I had made friends in the new place, farewells would soon follow.
At the beginning, it was beyond its imagination that a young sapling could be uprooted suddenly while it was trying to grow its roots so diligently.
Friends of mine and I tried to keep in touch through handwritten letters with Japanese characters which we had just learned, but as their local friendships grew there, I seemed to have been left out at the corner, and in about two years or so their replies ceased to come.
The merciless goodbyes had become so hard on my heart eventually. Since my junior high school, I stopped trying to speak the same local language because I knew I would have to leave them soon anyway.
During my high school years, the locals, who would have shunned me as a stranger before, began to approach me, projecting their admiration for Tokyo onto me. Although there were such superficial 'approaches', they had taken me in only based on the 'attributes' attached to me. I feel even now that I 'the outsider' was not so important that they didn't even care whether I was there or not.
That is why I still remember some exceptional people I occasionally met - Haru-chan's mother in the neighboorhood, the grandmother of Kumi's family who was a good friend of mine at kindergarten, Shin's mother who was a classmate of mine, the husband of the house next door, and other adults who looked after me with kindness. I will never forget them.
Well. After I became a university student, the class reunion was held in Tokyo for the local high school that I had moved out of halfway through. A close friend of mine, who had been my best friend since we met in high school, invited me; so I was very happy and rushed off to go. To my disappointment, however, upon my arrival at the venue, I found that everyone seemed to have forgotten all about me while in my mind I could finally have a reunion with my classmates for the first time in two years and remembered all of them…..
It is said that the friends you meet in junior high and high school become irreplaceable companions throughout your life. However, I believe this is possible only when intense 'memories' are created while sharing the same time and space together. Their memories with me during our first and second grades might have been overwritten by the third, the highest grade of high school life after I moved out. I was there in a place of conviviality with every familiar face, but I had little to share with them. And I was never invited again.
In seven schools from primary to high school, I had made efforts to adjust myself and could make a reasonable number of friends, but after all, I continued to be treated as an outsider.
By the end of my childhood, I was a rootless stranger, like a cloud or a floating weed in the air.
My father used to drive willingly for long distances during Obon holidays* to take us to both of our parents’ hometown to see our relatives. He didn’t mind driving through the hot winds on the open plains in summer and also driving very late at nights and very early mornings to the chilly basin hometown for New Year's holidays in freezing winter. Those experiences seem to have been painful for the child being driven to the mediocre countryside with no scenic beauty where the people were all too different in culture and ways of thinking.
However, it was probably my father's wish to give his child who was like a floating weed a connection with his own family.
I’ve recently realized that all of my immediate family members on my father's side have gone already. As they were mostly elders, they had completely emigrated over the sky.
In the house left by my father, my grandparents on my mother's side had lived a peaceful life though once it had been burned out in several air raids during WWII when they were teenagers. A major earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident occurred on 11th of March, 2011 and it became a place where plutonium fell.
Watching the overwhelmingly devastating scenes of the tsunami on TV, my sense of reality faded away. I imagined each tragedy of the people who had been swallowed up by the tsunami and also came to realize myself that I had lost my own hometown due to radioactive contamination.
I couldn't take my eyes off the images of the seaside towns being swept away by the forcible muddy waters and fell into a state of shock in no time.
I wished and dreamed then, “This tsunami would sweep away all the sorrows and sufferings I have experienced.”
* The Obon holiday is a time when the Japanese traditionally welcome their ancestors in the middle of August. The Japanese mostly can take a few holidays then often to go back to their hometowns.