After I was graduated from a Catholic high school in Kyoto, Japan, I
went overseas for the first time in my life as a family trip around
Europe during spring break right before starting college. The culture
shock I experienced there seemed to alter my brain. It took control of
me and began to inflict cracks everywhere on common practice of the
small hamlet of Kyoto that I was born and grew up in.
One of the
things I realized in Europe was that so many different people lived by
so many different ways of their own. It had been always that way and not
worth mentioning, but that kind of notion blurred in my home town where
everybody knew everybody who lived in the same way. As a firstborn, I
was destined to succeed my family that had lasted over 1000 years, which
meant I should live with my family in the same house, on the same
location, for my entire life until I die. Although that had been fixed
according to the hamlet’s long-standing common practice, what I saw and
felt in Europe told me that shouldn’t be the only way to live.
Another
thing Europe showed me was better understanding of my parents. Through
numerous happenings during the trip, I learned their true self. They
weren’t wise, weren’t respectable and didn’t even love each other. It
became questionable whether I should follow the fixed life that was
demanded by my parents now that I found they didn’t deserve trust.
The first day of college came in only a couple of days after I returned from Europe. It was an orientation day on which we had a physical checkup. I didn’t understand why it was necessary in the first place. For a few-minute-long checkup, all the freshmen had to stand in line waiting for their turns. We waited for three to four hours doing nothing, just standing. I couldn’t leave the line for lunch. A friend from the same high school as I had been in spotted me and went to get a cookie. While I was munching it standing in an everlasting long line, I felt dreadful for my college life that had just started. I had been fed up with my school days that were inefficient, wasteful, full of totalitarian practice. I thought I finally got out of it but it turned out to be started all over again. Everybody did the same ineffective thing at the same time here in college too.
The college had a
compulsory two year’s curriculum claimed ‘general education’ and one of
the subjects was physical education. About 30 students of the same class
gathered at the ground wearing the college gym uniform. We played catch
in pairs in one class, and danced odd moves to music all together in
another. To me, it wasn’t college at all. I was sent back to
kindergarten.
I asked myself what I was doing day after day. The
world was infinitely vast yet life was too short. There was no time for
doing what I was told to like others did. Time had to be spent on what I
wanted to do even though others didn’t do. Three months later, I
stopped attending all the classes other than an English conversation
class. I knew I would neither graduate college nor get a degree as a
result, but I didn’t care. There, I chose what to do by myself, and my
own life has begun.
