Turn Back the Clock

Erina, Debby, Jeffrey, and Makiko all grown up
Remember those mysterious Japanese girls at your junior high school? You didn’t get to know them. They ate those rice ball lunches and weird Japanese sweets in the corner of the cafeteria, and played volleyball after school. Maybe they only attended your school for a few years, moving away before high school, never to be heard from again. Well, at least until last Sunday.

After 11 years, I reunited with Makiko and Erina – on their Tokyo turf. Debby, my half-Japanese hometown friend, facilitated the bittersweet reunion during her visit here. Actually, I couldn't even recall their names, and swore that we had never met on account of taking classes in separate “houses” of our junior high. Makiko, however, produced a band class photo from 1992 in which she played second flute, just chairs away from this writer, then the fourth oboist. Erina tooted on the clarinet in the row behind us.

More than a decade and 7,000 miles later, four junior high graduates from 1994 shared vanilla ice cream on a sweltering afternoon. The sweet simplicity of the plain flavor complemented our innocent visages in the yearbook that Makiko dusted off. We laughed at outdated hairstyles, incompetent social studies teachers, and now deceased librarians. Coincidentally, we were the same age back then as the kids I teach now.

Let’s rewind life to 1994 to see how we appeared in our 8th grade portraits:




I think you’ll agree what a difference 11 years makes.