Ludmilla urged me not to post anything on Facebook until our return home today for security reasons. In a way, that was unnecessary because of four security backups, but why create unnecesary burdens on any of them?
But now we are back after an incredible series of deep complex learning experiences, with thousands of photos and a huge mass of reports from Google Translate from plaques all over Japan which no one has ever known about who did not know Japanese. Back when I went to Harvard from 1964 to 1974 (BA,MA,PhD), I certainly read and discussed the classic texts on China and Japan by Fairbank and Reuschauer, and studies of history from Toynbee to Hegel and Marx, but actually visiting the primary sources has shown me how different and larger the real story has been. I feel as if I just spent three months in a more adult, friendly and advanced version of The Magic Schoolhouse. We spent a month before in Japan ( and Korea) in 2019, building on brief trips before that, but there -- as in Hawaii, Alaska and Pacific islands-- we now saw into a level we had never reached before.
We also learned more advanced science and spiritual connection to other mammals and even birds. The details of all these topics are hugely important, not just to us but to the entire earth, but will a lifetime be enough to pass on even half of it? I will try.
Ludmilla too more and better pictures than I did, but as a start, I have posted my unedited, unexplained photos from port visits to Kodiak, Sitka and Ketchikan:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/E9gi4bf7LXmbztrv5
Thanks to her, to airbnb, to Google maps, to numerous onsens and to Japan railroads and busses we experienced a diversity of lifestyles from the lowest practical level to the highest levels and kami ever discussed in Buddhism and shinto.
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