It seems like just yesterday that we all had our first dinner in Japan together, yet we are already saying bye to so many friends we have made in the past month. Usually, I cannot avoid a few tears while writing farewell notes. However, today I am not sad because I know I will come back and feast with my new friends again. This is only a temporary leave – or in Sumio’s words, the Commencement to our lifelong relationship with Japan.

The past four weeks as a Kawamura Fellow has given me an exceptional opportunity to get to know many aspects of Japan on a deeper level – from cutting-edge technology and robot-automated factories, to beautiful cloisonné and creative clay ceramics, to grandiose National Diet Building and dinner with politicians, to delicious gourmets and baseball game in Yukatas, to impressionable Hiroshima and deep discussions about Japanese society, to relaxing onsens and breathtaking view of Mount Fuji, and to, most importantly, new friendships and the feel of family. Each of these experiences can take up at least one thousand words to describe.

However, Fellows usually write around one thousand words for their farewell message, so I will not write however much I want! (Trust me, you don’t want me to. In 9th grade, I was the person who wrote the most number of lines for my “Tic Tac” code in my first computer science class. It was over 10 pages and my teacher decided to jokingly hang it up as an example of “Example of Bad Programming: Brute Force”.)
It’s safe to say that Japanese food, technology, and culture are very well-known and respected in the world, so I will not use my remaining words to write about how truly amazing they are. Instead, I will focus on two personal memories that have made the most impact on me.