While fighting jet lag and pushing down strong feelings for excitement, I had finally arrived back in Japan. Being Half Japanese, I used to come down once every 4 years to visit my family, but due to COVID, I hadn’t been back in 7 years. This trip not only gave me a chance to travel again, but it also gave me immense amounts of knowledge and allowed me to look at life from a different perspective. Since it is half way across the world, there is obviously very many differences between America and Japan. However, the most striking is how they handle trash. In America, trash cans be found quite frequently around public spaces, but in Japan, there isn’t. Not to mention, they separate the trash into 4 sections: burnable, non-burnable, recyclable, and oversized. What’s more, they burn “burnable trash” at an incineration plant and transport the remaining ash to a different location. This method works very well in Japan as it is smaller than America and the population produces less amounts. It would be helpful if America could figure out a way to combine some aspects of how Japan handles their trash into their own aspects to find a more environmentally friendly way to reduce and get rid of trash.
Although there are many cool things about Japan, it is also essential to know about its history and issues they had to overcome to get to the place it is today. One of the most important and enraging piece of information I learned on this trip would be the 2011 Okawa Elementary School Earthquake/Tsunami Incident. This was an unfortunate event where there was a solution to a problem, but many lives were lost due to a wrong decision. To be more specific, after the 2011 earthquake, students and teachers were waiting outside the school for 50 minutes because they were waiting for teachers to make a decision on whether to run towards the river or towards the mountain behind their school. Many students wanted to go to the mountain because they knew that there must be a large tsunami after the earthquake, but a number of teachers told them not to go on their own because they wanted their class to act as a group. Towards the 51st minute, teachers finally made the decision to run towards the river and almost everyone died or went missing. Only 1 teacher and 3 students survived because they had run towards the mountian and they had to watch their classmates be killed by the 8 meter high waters that crashed into the mountain side. Later on, when parents questioned the school about why their children had died, the City Council lied to them stating that it was safer because trees would have fallen and students would be in more danger. However, after closer examination, it was concluded that not a single tree had fallen in the forest and all students would have survived if they had run towards the mountain (it would have taken them less than one minute). After learning this, I was really upset. Although there’s nothing we can do about it now, I believe that it is essential for students to be able to take charge and make decisions especially if it comes to a point where it can save their lives. If only people were more educated on tsunamis and if only there had been a better evacuation process and quicker decision making, lives would have been saved. Therefore, learning about this event will hopefully prevent another tragic incident such as this.
Another incident that was angering was the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Museum where we learned about the thousands of innocent lives lost due to the “necessary” actions the U.S took against Japan to “end the war”. War in itself is already something that should be avoided because of the trauma and deaths it can induce on many groups of society. This bomb is a unforgettable mark in history. Due to the U.S dropping this bomb there were many deaths, but the worst part was the people who survived. They suffered from many injuries that eventually killed them in later years. Furthermore, in this museum were the remains of children’s clothing, letters that were sent from parents to their kids, and many more artifacts that were severely affected by the bomb.
Although there were some pretty dark topics that were covered in this trip, it was overall very educational and I highly recommend it to those who are interested in learning about the harder aspects of life and ways to prevent them from happening again.
Thank you.
