This past week, 60 American college students living and studying in Tokyo were transformed into country bumpkins. In some sort of masochistic (but greatly appreciated) effort to expand our horizons regarding Japan and its culture, my program directors decided to haul us around Nagano, Japan for about a week. I don't think the city or prefecture of Nagano has experienced such an invasion of foreigners since the 1998 Winter Olympics.
Nagano is the polar opposite of Tokyo in countless ways, shapes, and forms. Tokyo has its trademark skyline of skyscrapers and flashy neon lights. Nagano has its own "skyline" made up almost entirely of mountains and hills. The streets of Tokyo are lined with Western brand name stores. In Nagano, every other store is a family-owned-and-operated joint that usually makes its own goods in a back room.
Throughout our stay in Nagano, my friends and I kept remarking how odd it felt to be there. Although it's only about a two or three hour bullet train ride away from Tokyo, we felt like we were in an entirely different universe, as if we had just left downtown Los Angeles for a rural mountain town in Colorado.
After making our own rice cakes, noodles, and clay tea cups, engaging in a traditional Japanese drum workshop, and taking nightly group baths in giant communal hot springs, the concept of "Tokyo" began to erase itself from our memories. Humongous subway systems? Twenty-story buildings? Giant karaoke and pachinko
parlors on every street? That stuff
wasn't really "Japanese," it was just Tokyo.
It wasn't long before I began to overhear conversations among my peers, who were fantasizing about how incredible it would be to study abroad in such a peaceful, rural, and traditional area. The amount of English-speakers and English writing on signs and in retail is drastically less in Nagano than in Tokyo - no doubt would it be more of a necessity to speak Japanese in the former.
As we wandered from traditional archery tournaments to woodblock print museums to Buddhist temples, I also began to realize that there were essentially no other foreigners in Nagano for as far as the eye could see. I wondered, is a place like Nagano just too indigenous for outsiders to enjoy living in?
Enter Sarah Marie Cummings, somewhat of a Nagano heroine who will probably end up taking over the world within a couple of decades. Born and raised in State College, Pennsylvania, Cummings came to Japan as an exchange student in college and then returned once more when she was in her mid-twenties. She has been in Japan for ten years since.
Currently, Cummings is presiding over the remote village of Obuse, located within the Nagano Prefecture, doing about a gazillion amazing things at once. Our group had the pleasure of also invading this poor little town and discussing what it's like to be an American living in Japan with her.
Cummings' main passion in Obuse is in the sake (rice wine) business, where she helped transform an old building into a sake factory - the only sake factory in the country that still practices the traditional brewing methods - and Japanese confectionary shop. Prices remain high because the restaurant is fairly new and serves only homemade goods, but from the looks of the full tables and healthy stream of customers, there doesn't seem much to be worried about.
In addition, Cummings has helped make another old and run-down building into a high-class traditional Japanese inn for visitors to Obuse and its nearby cities, established an annual half-marathon race in Obuse that has managed to attract thousands of people to this small town every year; create monthly community gatherings ("Obusessions") that bring guest speakers, performers, and retailers to Obuse, and received permission from the government to form a non-profit internship organization that has had recently brought a handful of students from Stanford, Cornell, and Columbia Universities to work in Cummings' sake business or other local jobs.
Because she has been living in and conducting business in Small Town, Japan for the last decade, Cummings is fluent in Japanese and rarely has the need to speak in English. This was perhaps one of the more interesting aspects of her life here to me, for it was very clear that her English, her native tongue, was suffering. When Cummings speaks, she talks slowly and enunciates everything carefully, as a foreigner world, making her words sound a little unnatural. She often fumbles for correct terms and stumbles over basic English grammar. Her vocabulary is limited.
Perhaps the most astounding thing of all is that Cummings was doing all of this incredible volunteer work for a village of foreigners in a country that is not her home and surrounded by a culture she was not brought up in. Cummings has this uncanny capability of maintaining a very original and American presence in Obuse - she doesn't dress in the traditional Japanese clothing that many of the native women wear, and she has nearly platinum blonde hair - but her days continually begin and end with complete dedication to preserving the history of Obuse.
We left Cummings' talk feeling like complete failures in life, but it seemed that we had all gained even more insight and appreciation into the effort it takes to keep cultural gems like Obuse and Nagano thriving, for not every town can have its very own Cummings to keep perspective.
Yet, on the way home, when I saw that familiar Tokyo skyline in the distance and as I sat on the subway for the long ride back, my friends and I laughed at how strange we felt. It was strange because for the first time, we began to feel things that none of us could ever imagine ourselves feeling in a foreign metropolis like Tokyo: comfort and stability. Because no matter how many amazing things you can do and amazing people you can meet in other places, there really is no place like home.
