Chikushino

The second part of my winter vacation brought me to the southern part of Japan, back to the island Kyushu. To be more precisely it brought me back to Chikushino-shi, basically a suburb of Fukuoka. I was invited to spend new year with my host family of 4 years ago.
It’s strange to notice that a world that one the one hand was the reality I lived in for one year, but seemed so far when I was in the Netherlands, still existed almost unchanged.
I am always nervous when I see people or places again that I haven’t seen for a long time, but both the persons as well as the environment had hardly changed. And after the first excitement of seeing each other again had faded away, it felt like those 4 years in between had never existed, they kind of faded away, that’s how natural it felt to be back in their family life even it was for only one week. After Tokyo, the speed of life was way more relaxed, I was not there as a tourist but as a guest in a family. Toasting in front of the TV we entered 2006. On January the first we went to Dazaifu Shrine, where we prayed for a good new year and I also bought omamori, a kind of amulets that protect you or enable you to achieve you certain goals. I bought the omamori for good results at school. Also in Dazaifu there had recently opened the 4th national museum of Japan, this being the only one of it’s kind in Kyushu. And because it was located in Kyushu, one of the focus points is international relations, because the ports through which those relations took place were mainly located on Kyushu. So they concentrated on the relations with Korea and China but also with the Netherlands. With my hostfamily I went to a special exhibit of Chinese treasures, and later returned to see the permanent exhibition. At the station there was also a banner for the Olympic Games of 2016, for which Dazaifu was competing. So although by now means as sparkling, one can see that Dazaifu is trying to make her way up in gaining fame as a city. By the kind of lucky coincidence what you sometimes encounter, 3 friends of mine who study in Nagasaki were at the same time in Fukuoka. And we were all able to watch one intriguing fact of consumerism in Japan. The winter sale start on the 3th of January and already early in the morning people are cueing in order to be able to get a fukubukuro, a bag full of brand clothes. The trick is that you pay far less than what is the actual amount of money for the clothes, but on the other hand you don’t know what is inside the bag. The shopping area was extremely crowded on this holiday, loads of women carrying bags and bored-looking husbands and boyfriends dragging behind. Later it appeared on the news that people almost fought about the bags, and used all parts of their bodies in order to be able to buy such a bag. Without having bought any clothes I returned back to Kyoto. But my heart felt as if I had done the best buy in the world, because my host family had told me that as long as I was in Japan I could regard their home as my home, and I was always welcome. And that’s something more worth to me than all the money spend on clothes on the 3rd of January.