I wanted to walk where my grandparents, Hikosaburo Okamura and Tsuru Uyeta, walked.
In the early 1900s, they left Japan and came to America. I did not speak Japanese. My grandparents did not speak English. I remembered no stories about their lives in Japan.
There is a Japanese song, Furusato by Angela Aki, which says:
“Home is always calling out my name.”
If I visited their Hometowns, would they call out my name?
The unprepared visitor
One month before my Japan trip, I did not know my ancestral villages. My grandparents came from Fukuoka, Japan. This is an area the size…