On Saturday, I traveled by train from Kanazawa first to Shin-Osaka Station, and from there to Kansai International Airport where I caught my fifty-minute flight to the southern city of Kagoshima. At Kagoshima Regional Airport, I was greeted enthusiastically by Mao and her mother, Shinko, who were clutching a homemade sign decorated with tinsel and fake flowers that read “Welcome Karin!” It was so great to see Mao again after four years! She looked great, if a little tired. We hauled my luggage to the Matsushita family’s Prius and headed directly from the airport to the Yamakataya Department Store, the location of the Santa Rosa Kagoshima Student Exchange Program’s (SRKSEP’s) party for the group of Japanese students who will travel to my hometown of Santa Rosa, California, this summer. Much to my astonishment, I was welcomed as something akin to a celebrity at this party. As soon as I walked in the door, I was mobbed by a group of people clamoring to take my picture, some of whom I met five years ago during my visit to Kagoshima with SRKSEP. I was asked to give a speech to the guests in Japanese, which I had to make up on the fly and as a result was not very profound at all, but I did my best to express my feelings of gratitude towards the people of SRKSEP for my great experience five years ago and assuage any worries the Japanese students may have about traveling abroad or going to Santa Rosa. As a kind of “reward” for giving a speech, one of the members of SRKSEP brought me a cup of shaved ice with fruits and a flavored syrup that is a specialty of the Kagoshima area. It’s called a shirokuma or “polar bear,” and it was so delicious that I would have gladly given another speech if it had meant receiving another one of the delicious treats.

The rest of my week with the Matsushita family was jam-packed with activities. As it transpires, the air-conditioning in the Matsushita home recently stopped working due to a tremendous expulsion of ash from Sakurajima, Kagoshima’s local active volcano. The house has become unbearably hot both during the day and at night, with indoor temperatures exceeding 90° F, so Mao and I spent the week in hotel rooms graciously reserved for us by Shinko and Kenichi, Mao’s parents. I felt a little bad that the Matsushitas had to go through so much trouble to host me, especially in light of Shinko’s recent health problems. Thankfully, since Mao has been working so hard lately studying for her university entrance exams, this week became a sort of vacation for her, too. I hope that providing Mao with an excuse to take some time to relax and have fun made up at least in part for any inconveniences I might have caused her family by coming to stay.

On Sunday, Shinko and I took a ferry to Sakurajima, an inhabited island and active volcano in the Kagoshima bay (Mao had to study; although my visit provided her with some free time, she was still very busy with her studies. Life for a Japanese student in cram school is truly “exam hell,” as the Japanese call it). Sakurajima is an incredibly beautiful, and incredibly active volcano. It dominates the Kagoshima skyline and coats the city in ash when it experiences a particularly big eruption, which isn’t uncommon. On a sign board outside the visitors’ center, I read that the volcano has already erupted 783 times this year, with 8 eruptions on Saturday, July 28 alone. Nowadays, the volcano expels only ash, but in the past its massive eruptions caused devastating damage. I expressed my concerns to a tour guide at the visitors’ center: “Isn’t it dangerous to live so close to an active volcano?” I asked, “People live on the island of Sakurajima. What precautions do they take? What plans do they have in case of disaster?” The tour guide promptly drew my attention to some pictures of shelters constructed in Sakurajima residents’ yards and along roadsides. These structures, built to provide protection from falling cinders, looked like open boxes made of concrete. They didn’t look like they would hold up in the case of a truly serious explosion. Sensing my lingering doubt about the safety of Sakurajima residents, the guide assured me that Sakurajima schoolchildren wear helmets when walking to and from school. Again, I wasn’t really convinced that plastic helmets would do much to protect the children if the nearby volcano suddenly started spewing magma.

On Sunday evening, I went out to dinner with Mao, her mother, and her father (who I had not yet met! Kenichi was very busy this week both with his normal job as head of a security company and his volunteer work with Lions Club International, of which he is a senior member). We ate tofu ryouri (tofu cuisine). Although as a vegetarian I have had ample opportunity to sample tofu as a meat substitute, in salads, and in Asian dishes, I had never experienced tofu like this before. At American supermarkets you can buy tofu in a variety of consistencies ranging from soft to firm, but these options have nothing on the amazing diversity of Japanese tofu. We ate firm tofu in a gravy-like sauce, creamy tofu, soft tofu in a salad with peanuts, and yuba (a film of tofu collected from the surface of a pot of boiling soymilk). The meal was extraordinarily delicious, and I received a lot of inspiration for cooking with tofu in the future.

The rest of the week was busy, but fun. We spent Monday and Tuesday in Ibusuki, a resort town about an hour’s drive from Kagoshima City. We stayed at a ryokan with a truly glorious onsen that I spent as much time in as possible. As it turns out, the chef at this ryokan is a childhood friend of Shinko’s, and he prepared a special meal for us on Monday evening. Although I made sure beforehand that Shinko and Mao knew of my dietary restrictions (no meat, no fish), I became a little concerned when in the car on the way to the ryokan Shinko asked me if I ate shark fin. I explained to her that I don’t eat seafood or meat. “Shark fin isn’t meat. It’s the fin of a shark.” Shinko told me in Japanese, thoroughly confusing me. I soon found out that her friend wanted to prepare shark fin soup for the evening’s meal. I am a vegetarian not only because I feel that the modern era’s meat preparation process is unhealthy for both humans and animals, but also because I don’t like the taste of most meats. I will occasionally eat dishes with meat-based broths or eat around the meat in soups and stews, but in the case of the shark fin soup, I could not eat it in good conscience. The shark fishing industry is notorious for not fishing sustainably, with fisherman often finning sharks alive and dropping them back into the ocean where they have little chance of survival. Desperate not to appear rude or ungrateful to the host, I ate the vegetables and sprouts that topped the soup, but left the shark fin untouched.

The main event on Wednesday was a gathering of Kagoshima’s Rotary Club. As the Santa Rosa and Kagoshima Rotary Clubs sponsor SRKSEP and make the exchange between our cities possible, I was invited as a guest to give a speech before the Rotary Club members. In my speech I had hoped to talk about Kanae Nagasawa, a boy born into the samurai class in Kagoshima in the 1800s who settled in Santa Rosa, California in the mid-19th century.

Nagasawa was 13 years old when he and a group of similarly young and wealthy Kagoshima residents were secretly sent abroad by the Satsuma government to study Western technology and culture at a time when the incredibly strict isolationist policy of the Edo Period Shogunate forbade foreign travel or exchange. Satsuma–the southern region of the island of Kyuushu that is now Kagoshima and the surrounding area–was always a little bit different from the rest of Japan in that it liked to “do its own thing.” As the southernmost point in mainland Japan, Satsuma was one of the first sites in Japan to welcome Western traders and missionaries, and was the site of the introduction of Catholicism to Japan by St. Francis Xavier in 1549. As a result of this extensive exchange with the West, the residents of Satsuma had seen Western technology and were very reluctant to adopt the Edo Shogunate’s isolationism when they felt that there was so much to be learned from Western civilization. The Satsuma government paid an absurd amount of money to assure the sea passage of Nagasawa and his comrades to England. The young men traveled to England by way of the British colonies of Hong Kong, Singapore, India, and Egypt, learning English and encountering steam technology and inventions such as the locomotive for the first time.

After attending secondary school in England, Nagasawa immigrated to California, where he began the cultivation of wine grapes in the area of Santa Rosa now known as Fountaingrove. What most history books leave out, however, is that Nagasawa settled in the Fountaingrove area due to his involvement with a new religious movement (read “cult”) led by a man named Thomas Harris, who became Nagasawa’s adoptive father and held extensive land in Fountaingrove in hopes of creating an “Eden of the West” for followers of his movement. Accusations of adultery led Harris to abandon the property and move to upstate New York, leaving the land to Nagasawa. Gaye LeBaron, an esteemed historian in Santa Rosa, brought this story to light several years ago in Santa Rosa’s local newspaper and it caused a bug hullabaloo. I was really surprised to learn about this more…ah…dubious history of the man who not only cultivated wine in my hometown for many years, but who also cultivated the relationship between Santa Rosa and Kagoshima by providing a historical link between the two cities. Needless to say, I chose to focus on other aspects of the relationship between Santa Rosa and Kagoshima when giving my speech.

I spent all of Thursday with Shinko in a whirlwind tour of some of Kagoshima’s most famous museums, including the Museum of the Meiji Restoration, Satsuma Kiriko Glass Workshop and Museum, and Sengan-en Park and Shimadzu Family Museum. I soon discovered Shinko’s passion for photography; throughout the duration of my day trips with her she was constantly taking my picture, using both her own camera and mine. She took pictures of me standing in front of statues, trees, and buildings. She took pictures of me looking at museum exhibits. She took pictures of me as I myself was taking pictures. I assured her that I didn’t need so many pictures of myself; the sites and monuments we observed were beautiful in pictures that didn’t also feature me, but Shinko wouldn’t take no for an answer. Eventually, Shinko exhausted the limits of my camera’s memory, forcing me to go back and erase duplicates and blurry pictures from my camera in order to free up space. I took advantage of Shinko’s trip to the bathroom at Sengan-en to sit on a bench and go through the pictures on my camera, deleting ones I felt I didn’t need and worrying that I wouldn’t have sufficient space to photograph Sakurajima in Thursday’s wonderful weather. A sudden noise caused me to look up, and sure enough, there was Shinko…taking a picture of me deleting pictures from my camera.

On Friday, my last day in Kagoshima, Mao, Shinko and I went to the Kagoshima City Aquarium, which features some great exhibits on marine life in the oceans surrounding Japan. I saw so many strange and beautiful creatures, including the world’s largest eel and a tube worm unique to the volcanic vents surrounding Sakurajima. As we made our way through the aquarium, I couldn’t help but notice that the Japanese visitors seemed to be evaluating the animals in the tanks by how they would taste. Upon arriving at a tank featuring giant crabs, a young boy exclaimed, “Wow, Mom! Looks delicious, doesn’t it?” In front of the tank housing the largest eel in existence, a middle-aged man commented to his wife, “I wonder if they could make sushi out of it. That would feed a lot of people. I wonder if it would taste good.” I found myself remembering a scientist I read about once who made it his goal in life to eat his way through the animal kingdom. I wondered if he ever went to a zoo and appraised the animals in a similar fashion.

Later that day I said my goodbyes to the Matsushita family and boarded my plane for Tokyo, where I am spending one day resting and recuperating from my ridiculously busy two months before departing for America on Sunday morning.  On my flight north, I was able to catch a glimpse of Mt. Fuji peeking up through the clouds! I will be finishing up the blog with one final post, so stay tuned until the very end! Take care and thanks for reading.