Dear Japan. A Letter to My Home

“I Shine Brighter Now” Photography by Reylia Slaby

Dear Japan,

First, I want to say that I love you. You were the country where I took my first breath. My lungs filled with your air, and from there I was home. My first tears happened in your hospitals. My cries echoed throughout the hallway and took me throughout my childhood, becoming laughter, then to tears and back again.

You were the only home I knew.

I grabbed at floating cherry blossom petals from three years old until now. I danced in the summer with hanabi, the sparks singed my fingertips and wrists, but we gleefully let them burn. We did rajiotaiso at swimming pools. In the fall my sisters and I played in the fallen momiji, in a sea of red leaves. When winter came along we huddled together in front of the gas stove, our feet burned and our faces cold.

I love you, my country, my nippon. You made me who I am.

I love you in both sunshine and disasters. I scrambled under the table with my family in the Kobe earthquake of 1995. I stayed inside for your raging typhoons and your overpowering heat. But I swam in rivers and lakes of perfect water, hiked through mountains where the Gods live. Read Siddhartha in the middle…