Hiroshima
I knew Hiroshima before I knew Joa. In summer 2001 I visited Diane, newly arrived there as a JET, and stayed for several weeks. I remember spending 9/11 with her there, a historically notable city in which to experience a historically notable date. Hiroshima was also enormous to me, multiples larger than anywhere I had yet lived.
When I applied to JET, asking for Hiroshima schools seemed obvious. Fate put me in Yanai instead, just over an hour away on local trains and significantly more rural. Hiroshima became the urban life I could visit: fun, sophisticated, diverse and full of international folk with faintly hippy pretensions. Diane and friends sometimes ran the vegetarian International Love Cafe pop-up. There were English speakers, artists, interesting bars and a gay life larger than anything MountainMouth could manage. More than anonymity, it was the crowd itself. Here I could be art Joa, not the foreign English teacher.
Diane was my Hiroshima anchor during our first overlapping year in Japan. Genmasa came with me to do art things and fool around at Diane’s apartment, then she and Shige inherited the central roles after Diane left. Shige supplied extravagant hats, dancing, galleries and a family home full of food, beer and domestic astonishment. I helped collect his work from Hiroshima Contemporary Art Museum and eventually cried on the airport bus after saying goodbye to him. Takashi, my first boyfriend of Japan life, was based there too, although he never became the city’s main story.
The main story was KISS :: Hiroshima 2003. After 2 months of planning, 12 people kissed me in front of a packed KOBA while Diane managed the order, Genmasa joined the team and cameras recorded everything. The performance dissolved into more kissing and a debate about sexual and racial boundaries. Then I caught the train to Yanai, got up at 6.30 and resumed teaching. I never seriously imagined moving to Hiroshima. Its purpose was not to become home. It was the nearby city that let Joa escape, find his people and become public.