All I Really Want is World Peace

I've landed in Japan during school field trip season. Busload after busload of school kids are on the same tourist trail as me in the Kansai Prefecture, which means the temples are literally crawling with what I would guess are 10 or 11 year olds. Herding them about are teachers and a small army of tour guides - the female ones, unfortunately clad in what closely resembles an airline hostess costume from the early 90's. All school uniforms seem to be navy blue and white or black and white, so at least there's some uniformity to this endless sea of bodies. The only way to have a temple to yourself is to go to a boring one, I've discovered. Plus I visited the city of Kyoto, one of the world's most culturally rich cities (17 UNESCO world heritage sites) on a weekend, so on top of the school kids, their parents, aunts and uncles and grandmas were out in mass as well. How I long for open spaces!


While taking in a bit of culture is part of the curriculum, they also seem to have English language homework as well. I regularly get swarmed by 5 or 6 kids at once - I think being on my own is either working in my favour/going against me, depending on your perspective. At a temple on Sunday afternoon I was quickly surrounded by a group of students who I learned were from the Tokyo area. They were so incredibly polite, it was insane. I'm sorry, but if this was a pack of Canadian kids, forced to wander around five or six hundred year-old churches with homework assignments, I think there would be a lot of grumbling over the stupidity of the whole thing. The group, I kid you not, visibly quivered with excitement when I agreed to answer a few questions. I think they must have had a quota of English-speaking foreigners they had to land by the end of the trip, and given they outnumbered us at least 300 to one, it seemed I was worth celebrating. Typically the questions are fairly routine, the only variation being the ease with which they are delivered. What is your name? Where are you from? Is this your first time to Japan? May we take your picture? At least the questions are less probing than elsewhere in Asia. How old are you? Are you married? Do you have kids? Why you have no boyfriend?


But things do get a bit challenging when I'm asked to write a small essay for them, on the spot. The other day I was asked to share my thoughts on world peace or the friendliness of Japan, for future translation by the class. Suddenly I felt like an ill-prepared Miss Louisiana at a beauty pageant, faced with publicly sharing her thoughts on world peace when she though all she needed to do was look good in a two piece. I dodged the world peace question and instead chose to write many positive comments about Japan's friendly people. It really should have occurred to me to spend a few minutes of my spare time crafting a more eloquent answer to the world peace question, which I could summon if questioned in the future. But of course, I didn't. So I find myself in Hiroshima this afternoon, touring the atomic bomb memorial. Having just finished viewing a memorial to children killed or poisoned by radiation, I suddenly found myself surrounded by four school kids. After the preliminaries were out of the way, I was once again asked to share my thoughts on world peace. While I contemplated responding 'well, isn't that what George W. Bush is over in the Middle East fixing right now before his term ends?', I stopped myself. I rambled on for a few sentences in the vein of highly optimistic 'we must all work together' drivel. Not that I don't mean it or believe it, but upon quick reflection it sounded so ridiculously simplistic to border on plain stupidity. So here I am, standing at the epicentre of a nuclear bomb that killed 140,000 people and I'm busy wondering whether next week, when the kids get back to class and work on translating my thoughts, they'll all have a good giggle over the idiotic ramblings of 'Heather, from Canada'.