Walking in History with New Friends

The big story today were the new tomodachi who guided our students around an historical area.

Tomodachi is Japanese for friend, and this became the word that seemed to work best to define the seven college students from Nagoya who met us today at the central train station. The new friends — Sayaka, Kozue, Akina, Aimi, Chikako, Hitomi and Nana — accompanied our group to a lakeside location an hour away by bus where we could examine buildings that help to preserve a key era of Japanese history.

Professor Araki, who is from Nagoya, arranged to invite the seven college seniors to join us for the day. They made the day. We may all like architecture and history, but let’s be honest here.  Which is more engaging for a traveling college student: (A) the first Japan Red Cross Society hospital that once stood in Tokyo’s Hiroo district and helped to engender new levels of medical service, or (B) a group of really pleasant and helpful students who are just as eager to meet Elon students as the Americans are to meet them?

If you answered A, you didn’t get your degree at Elon.  This is not to say that Elon students don’t care to discover how Japan went though a remarkable political, social, and educational change after the overthrow of the rigid Tokugawa leadership in 1868.  This change was driven by the need to modernize to defend against the encroachment of Western powers — the same ones who, at that time, occupied China and piloted their steam-driven warships around East Asia seeking coal, water and the occasional shipwrecked sailors.

We know our students do care, because what happened then still influences the conditions of our lives today. Without some of the changes during the Meiji era, for instance, maybe we would never have met our new tomodachi.  But let’s not load up this point too much; let’s just agree that our charming new friends were a lot more fun than wooden buildings.

The buildings, though, provided the setting for meeting our friends. And thus we spent quite a special day amid more snow flurries and an icy breeze that prompted us to scurry from one old wooden structure to the next in the genuine study of Japan’s history and culture.

The place is called Meiji Mura. (Meiji is the name of the young emperor who was thrust into power during the overthrow, and mura means village.) The village is a spacious landscape where historians, designers and engineers have managed to relocate — by disassembling and then carefully re-assemblying — a big assortment of wooden homes and buildings that are memorable examples of life in the Meiji Period, from 1868 to 1912.

You’d rather see pictures, so here they come. Students divided up into groups of five, each with four Elon students with one tomodachi.  They hung together for most of the day, even after the bus left the village and dropped us in the affluent and architecturally breath-taking Sakae district downtown. We finally bid sayonara at 7 p.m., back at the main train station.  It was a little sad, but perhaps not the end of some new friendships.

Here are today’s teams, earnestly displaying the ubiquitous peace sign pose that is an auto-gesture for young people here.  The more proficient posers, you’ll notice, can do double signs. A day after our visit to Hiroshima, a couple of peace signs didn’t sound so routine. This was a good day to make friends.

From left, Sarah Zimmerman, Summer Thaxton, Randall Andersen, Aimi Takehara and Alex Delong join with Dr. Yumika Araki, who organized the friendly day.

Charlie Lynch, Lauren Jubelt, Kozue Wakahara, Stefan Dimuzio and Holly Taylor.

Taylor Brownstein, Inkoo Kang, Akina Kozawa, Richard 'Ninja' Schulz and Emmy Kean stand in front of St. John's Anglican Church, built by U.S. missionaries in 1907.

Sadie Stafford, Matt Eydt, Hitomi Tanikawa, Sam Tippit and Alexa Terry in front of a railroad factory building.

Alex Harrington, Damion Guy, Nana Ishiguro, May Milkins and Drew Malay.

Ryan Kilbane, Cody Greene, Chikako Yamamoto, Ashley Barnas and Chris Lorch.

Julia Jacobs, Nick Friederich, Sayaka Yamamoto, Pam Richter and Gray Fain.

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