Kyoto Fu: the Legend Continues

So. Friday, with about three hours of sleep, I set out to explore Kyoto not as a tourist destination, but as the site of a year of fond memories. Where I had spent Thursday visiting holy sites featured on post cards and famous around the world, I spent Friday visiting unremarkable places special simply because of their place in my heart.

My first stop was at the Kyoto University of Foreign Languages, where I spent the days of my exchange year studying Japanese. My first impression was of how beautiful the campus is; my image of the university was always shaded by my first impression that it was tiny, cramped and ugly compared to my home university of CWU. But then, CWU's immense, park-like campus was built on cheap land on the edge of a small town, and KUFL was built in the middle of a fairly large city. I've seen a bit more of the world now (I'm looking at you, Germany. Fund your damn schools!) and realize that American universities are something special, and actually it's pretty impressive what KUFL was able to do, considering that space considerations essentially forced them to build a university consisting entirely of high-rises.

I didn't spend as long at the university as I thought I would. It was packed with people, but it felt like a ghost town to me. After all, it was the people who made Kyoto a place full of special memories for me. I could go back to the University, but I couldn't bring back the afternoons spent skipping class and drinking hot sweet green-tea lattes from the vending machine - the vending machine isn't even there any more. I could go back to the all-night convenience store around the corner, but I couldn't bring back Thomas, Raymond and Brad to play hacky sack at two in the morning in the parking lot. There are moments in your life when you are starkly confronted with the irretrievable goneness of the past.

As it turned out, though, not everyone from my time in Kyoto was gone. As I stood in front of my old dormitory, a freshly-purchased potted plant in hand, I wondered who would come to the door. Tsuda-san, who had been in charge of the dorm when I lived there and had shown me around Kyoto and told me stories from the fifties and sixties throughout the year, is sixty eight now, and I was sure she must be retired. She had never responded to my letters, and I didn't have her phone number, so the only way to find out was to drop by unannounced.

And she was there! She invited me in, made happy noises over the strange, bulb-shaped flowers of the plant I had brought her, and sat with me for a couple of hours over iced coffee. For a long time, we discussed nothing of import, the kind of conversation common to old friends who joyfully reunite but actually have nothing in common. Then she asked me what I was studying, and I made a leap of faith and I told her the truth.

You should understand that my studies are not politically correct. The words "eta" and "hinin" were for more than two hundred years the legal term for the class of people I am researching. The history of a people whose government termed them "the plentiful filth" and "the inhumans" is obviously an ugly one, and their historical and - to a certain extent - contemporary oppression is something many are ignorant of, and many others would simply rather not talk about. As a foreigner, I am especially careful about who I talk about my research with - I tell most people that I am working in "minority studies."

The reward for my faith in Tsuda-san was an amazing hour of conversation about her view of the Burakumin (the "village people", the term in contemporary use and the one they use themselves), especially the role of the government in subsidizing growth in historically Buraku districts now called "dowa" districts. In Japan, this issue is somewhat similar to the issue of affirmative action in America, with similar arguments on both sides of the debate. In fact, the parallels between Buraku and African American history are plentiful; the Burakumin were legally declared to be human beings just eight years after America prohibited the ownership of brown people by pink people, and both were forced to then fight for the enforcement of their de jure equality.

It was indescribably fascinating for me, as someone who has been interested in the history of these people for years, to hear the perspective of a perfectly ordinary Japanese citizen on a subject that I had only been exposed to from an academic viewpoint.

So finally I had the chance to reconnect with my past, to renew a friendship that I have missed these four years, and to discover a window into a viewpoint I had long since given up on ever getting access to.

And it was only lunch time. This was going to be a good day!