Leafing thro the photo album, I found that I was at another place. Instead of at Hiroshima, my first summer holiday in Japan was in Lake Biwa.Date : 06Aug1981
Place : Takashima Station, Biwa Lake
Fr left : Huang Zhijun, Yang Kairong, Zhu Ze, k3, Eryu Shiji, Zhu Yixing,Dr Huang Guangwu
This picture was taken 26 years ago to the day at the railway station near Lake Biwa, Japan. It was a summer vacation to the biggest lake in Japan and with a group of students from China, and their Japanese female friend.
I had arrived in Osaka four months earlier, and was staying in the same foreign student dormitory as them, in the in the new campus ground of the Osaka University of Foreign Studies (OUFS), located at Aobadai, Minoo, on the outskirt of Osaka city.
Of the five Chinese students, four were graduate students majoring in the Japanese Language and Japanese studies. Of the four three were from the Shanghai University of Foreign Studies, and the 4th student from the North-East Region. Variously they had been in OUFS for 2 to 3 years, and were one of the first batch of students sent by the government of the PRC to Japan, with Deng’s policy of opening up to the outside world – 改革开放 - gaige kaifang - in 1978.
The fifth student was a medical doctor, a bare-foot doctor I believe for that. He came for his immersion in a medical hospital in Japan, and had similarly gone to the OUFS for the 6 month intensive Japanese course. This Dr Huang, was my neighbor in the dormitory. He spoke Mandarin with a Guangxi slang.
What was distinct about him I thought was that his mannerism and image was more akin to that of a farmer from the rural area than one would have associated with a doctor that had gone thro tertiary education and training. China then, was just beginning to shake off her communist ideology and the doctor was probably selected probably due to his ideological credentials.
The Chinese students were all able cook, and in the evening would meet in the kitchen to prepare dinner. We would talk in Mandarin, and interspersed with Japanese in between. The fact that I was able to speak Mandarin had helped in the mingling with them, and from them to learn Mandarin.
Their female Japanese friend was studying Chinese in China, and was back in Japan for vacation. She was introduced to the Chinese students by her lecturer in China. Her parents had lived in China before the Pacific War and possibility cos of this link with China, she had gone on to study Chinese. There was among the Japanese, a minority whose parents was born in China and had lived there before the War. China was just opening up then, and many of these Japanese had goodwill towards their poor and big neighbor.
The documentary - the Silk Road - by NHK that was shown on Japanese TV a year or so earlier was such a big hit in the country, that it generated a tourism boom to China. The theme music was by Kitaro. Due to his long hair, Kitaro was banned from performing in Singapore.
During my secondary school years, I had read of the suffering of the children of Hiroshima who had survived the bomb. However during my stay in Japan, I did not make it to Hiroshima or Nagasaki. After Osaka, I went on to Tokyo, and it took me further away from western Japan, to the eastern Kanto region.
Postscript:
a) the photograph - in Chinese:
日期：1981年8月6日地点：高岛 站， 琵琶湖
从左：黄志军，杨凯荣， 朱泽，笔者，儿玉十纪，朱一星，黄光武
/--
