A Living Story

One Field Trip that I went on in Japan represents an extremely profound memory during my time on Semester at Sea. On the second day in Kobe, I went to Hiroshima with my International Relations class. When we arrived in the city, our guide told us that the people of Hiroshima don’t have any resonating feelings or attitudes towards anti-Americanism, but just hope and prayers for world peace and understanding. As a developing world citizen, this inspired my commitment towards learning how to appreciate different perspectives and cultures; it also helped me shed any ethnocentric views that I had about World War II and allowed me to go into the day with a totally open mind.
After a full day of touring the memorial museum, the monuments, and the t-shaped bridge that was the atomic bomb’s target location, the students, faculty and I were completely emotionally and spiritually drained. The memorial museum displayed informative photographs that helped explain World War II and shed light to foreigners on how the atomic bomb devastatingly destroyed Hiroshima’s people, culture and infrastructure. It was difficult to read through the sections describing the Untied States’ justification for dropping the atomic bomb and why Hiroshima was the target location. Even though I didn’t feel any bitterness towards me from the local people because I am American, I felt a need to show the Japanese, who were around me, how moved and touched I was by their suffering. I hoped that they would consider me a global citizen part of a united teamwork, rather than an American student who is just studying for school.
When I got on the bullet train that evening to travel back to Kobe, I sat down in my seat and within five minutes an elderly Japanese woman came and sat down right next to me; I learned later that her name was Kekune. We exchanged smiles and had our own two seats together, isolated from the bustling of the other passengers around us. Right away I could tell that she didn’t speak a lick of English, and I thought that maybe we could communicate through writing words and drawing pictures in my journal. As I was flipping through the book, she saw the stamps from the Hiroshima Museum that I had pressed onto one of the pages earlier that day. She started pointing to the stamps and tried so hard to tell me something.
After an hour train ride, body language, drawings, and a translator to help us communicate, I found out that she was thirteen living in Hiroshima when the bomb dropped. Both of her parents were killed the day of. She spent two days after the bomb dropped looking for her parents’ corpses; officials finally found them and delivered them to her. She suffered a lot of radiation sickness and so did her siblings, whom she raised herself after that day. She showed me her survivor booklet, which we had seen at the museum earlier that day and that all survivors carry with them at all times. Now, she is a widow with two children, one of them named Hiroshima.
This experience was incredibly meaningful. The energy between us was so powerful, despite the language barrier. After a full day of learning the importance of becoming a global citizen and caring for the cultures and economies outside of America, and then sitting next to a survivor of that source, instilled the values of worldwide compassion, understanding and learning into me. I was provided with a living example of the need to push us out of our comfort zones at home and learn how to make our own contribution towards making the world a better place.