Ring Of Fire

I lived in Sendai for two years, from 1985 to 1987. I taught at a language school in downtown Sendai, but I was also sent to many other places to teach, cycling or walking to get to various schools, factories, and companies.

On Wednesdays, I traveled by shinkansen or bullet train, down to Yonezawa to teach at a girls' junior college, changing trains in Fukushima. I will never forget those train trips. The journey from Sendai to Fukushima was nothing special, but the train ride from Fukushima to Yonezawa, which took precisely 48 minutes,was incredible, especially in the winter. The train wound through a heavily forested valley, a veritable fairyland, where snow lay many feet deep and icycles sparkled in the trees. On Thursdays, I took the shinkansen up to Morioka to teach bored engineers at a large car manufacturing company. Early autumn was my favorite season there: I loved seeing the rice fields full of golden grain, the wind making the paddies wave and ripple.

The students I taught in Sendai were a varied bunch: children, business people, doctors, and housewives. The housewives were my firm favorites. They were quirky and funny and infinitely kind and helpful. One woman, Yoko, the fifty-something wife of a lawyer, used to come to school parties dressed in a Korean kimono, or hanbok. There is a long, complicated history of enmity between Korea and Japan, and this isn't something Japanese people usually do unless they happen to be of Korean ancestry. Yoko wasn't even part Korean. "Aren't you afraid people will mistake you for a Korean?" a classmate once asked her. Yoko raised an eyebrow. "I would be so proud if they did," she said firmly. She kept her hanbok flawlessly clean and got a lot of wear out of it.

Chizuyo, another one of my housewife students had been training to be a math teacher when she got married. She loved her husband and children, but advised all the younger women against getting married. "You have no idea how lucky you are! I am trapped -- trapped!" she used to say gleefully. Chizuyo and her husband went to live in the States for several years. Their first day there, they got picked up by a scam artist at the airport who left them stranded in a remote desert town after relieving them of all their cash. But despite this experience, they had a wonderful time in the States. "I'm finally tutoring math!" Chizuyo wrote in the last letter I got from her. "No more just being a housewife!"

I had many wonderful colleagues in Sendai too, including the head teacher at our school, Brenda, who'd interviewed me at a teachers' conference in the World Trade Center. Brenda intrigued me: a fellow Californian and Japanese-American and she looked exactly like a man I'd studied Japanese with five years earlier, in Tokyo. When I mentioned the uncanny resemblance, it turned out that my fellow student was actually her brother.

My landlord in Sendai was a widower who lived right downstairs from me. I can't get over how lucky I've been with Japanese landlords: three times now I've lived in places where the landlady or landlord lived only feet away from me, but they never caused any trouble. Mr Arisawa was a gentle, kind man -- and a packrat. Every room in his apartment was chock-a-block with the most hideous junk you've ever seen, and he obviously had a penchant for plastic. He had massively chunky plastic clocks, outlandish plastic light fixtures, and a whole selection of worst plastic kitchen items you've ever seen. He somehow lived among all these things, packed in boxes right up to the ceiling. His hoarding must have caused him no end of inconvenience, but he always seemed so happy -- even when I (gently) turned down his offers of plastic light fixtures and chopping boards.

I've lost touch with all of these people. I have no idea how they're doing, or whether they've survived yesterday's terrible earthquake. I was able to contact one friend and find out she and her family were safe, but the rest -- I have no idea. It is so hard to see the images of buildings burning, cars washed off bridges, boats tossed about like Lego toys, and remember that I used to cycle down those streets, buy the fish from those boats, walk past those buildings.

Sendai was one of the calmest, pleasantest towns I've ever lived in. But like all of Japan, it's sitting on a ring of fire.

To donate to Japanese earthquake victims through the Red Cross: http://american.redcross.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ntld_main&s_src=RSG000000000&s_subsrc=RCO_FrontPagePanel