Dream Trip 2009

Great Travel Moment

In the Tokyo Dome, baseball fans cheer by chanting and singing in unison and rhythmically hitting these plastic batons together to make even more noise. The fans' intensity was exhilarating to behold and this was quite unlike any baseball game I had ever been to before. As an Asian American growing up in Illinois, I often felt like an outsider. It was embarrassing when the rolls my mother would pack for my school lunches became a source of fascination for my classmates. I always thought that if I visited Japan, I would feel as if I had come "home." I never expected that this fascinating and beautiful country would actually reinforce my otherness, but in the oposite direction. While the world has gotten so much smaller in the past 30 years and I rarely feel like an outsider anymore, it was very poignant to finally feel so American in Japan.