Portrait

It is interesting how roads cross. I remember the first time that I met Tatsuya Ogawa, it was during the orientation week and as every other student I had to register my computer at the school.  Without exaggerating I was somewhat surprised when the Japanese person who assisted me also started to use some simple phrases in Swedish. It was an unimaginable thought and a unreal feeling to travel around the world and there meet a Japanese person who at the time actually spoke better Swedish then I spoke Japanese.

We started talking(in English I might say) and he introduced himself as Tatsuya and turned out to be my first personal connection with the country where I had arrived. Nowadays i consider him to be a good friend of mine. Tatsuya is a 21 year old Japanese student on the way of educating himself to work within tourism and is planning on going to Iceland as an exchange student. The most striking thing about him is he's good humour and how obvious it is that he enjoys learning different languages and to meet new people.

During my stay here I have not yet met any other Japanese student who actually can speak fluent English and make basic sentences in Finnish, Swedish, and German.   

I choose a picture of him that I took at one of the times we were hanging out at the Hirakata bar Seven gods.
I think that the location for the picture suited Tatsuya as a person very well. Even though he prefers kareoke to bars the seven god felt more like a location that represented Tatsuya better.
Just as the bar calls itself the fifth Seminar House and is eager to connect with international students so is Tatsuya. He is my friend and many times he has turned out to be my goto guy if and when I need assistance in any form in understanding the Japanese society. 

My neighborhood

Taking a walk in the neighborhood of Katahoko Higashimachi made me think about what Benedict Anderson referred to as “Imagined Communities” (Anderson: 1991). Even though Anderson used his famous term by describing how one consider him-/herself as a part of a nation despite that a member of a state or nation is very unlikely to meet or know all the people in the state where they are living.  

The same statement can be made about the neighbourhood where I have my stay. As an exchange student in Japan at the lowest  language level and not being able to comprehend daily conversations and participate in discussions with the locals of this part of Hirakata has put me in a position of only observing that which is around me. Theodore C. Bestors probably made a correct observation of how well labeled the Japanese societies are (Bestor: 2003, p 321) but without knowledge of how to decode all the labels and signs the possibility of making false assumptions are tremendous.

As a Seminar House 1 resident one of my daily routines is a walk or bike route from the Seminar House towards the Kansai Gaidai University. The neighborhood can by this route be described as a interesting dialogue of commercialization, tradition, the modern and the old Japan. About half way through the route placed among houses and worn down two story apartments there is a memorial ground called Katahoko Konshidan. I remember the first time I saw the memorial ground and how I wasn’t even sure if was allowed to enter it.

When I returned to this part of my neighborhood I realized that the memorial ground from the beginning of the 18^th century with it’s statues that I almost didn’t dare to touch also can appear as perfect soccer goals for some of the early teenagers of Katahoko Higashimachi. They didn’t mind when I showed them the camera and in my broken Japanese asked if it was OK to take pictures of them. Rather they started to pose a bit before returning to their intensive soccer game.