SO THERE I was, preparing for a trip to Japan to get hands-on information (and photos) on the Yasukuni Shrine. My plane is scheduled to take off two days later, and I’m just making sure I have everything ready. Everything is ready. Wait—2008? I must be hallucinating. But no, the expiration date on my passport really did say December 31, 2008. What do I do? I call the Bureau of Immigration at Incheon Airport. I explain my situation, and also add that I simply cannot miss this plane, for a cover story for The Yonsei Annals is at stake. They tell me to come to the airport on the day of my departure. So I get there by 9 o’clock in the morning, the time the Bureau opens. I explain the urgency of my trip, but the woman says dryly, “Sir, we need the official documents. Unless you provide us with any, I’m sorry but you can’t take off,” and I’m like thinking to myself, “Geez, woman, cut the bureaucratic crap and just let me go, please?” There was no way I could get official documents so quickly, so I ask her to have a chat with our editor-in-chief. During the entire conversation I silently pray to God that if He lets this moment pass, I’ll promise go to church and believe and everything. A few minutes later, the woman hangs up and says she’ll issue an emergency passport. Oops. Forgot my promise with God. Sorry, big guy.

  I finally landed in Japan. Now, I had learned Japanese for a year, but I found myself completely lost. People didn’t talk like they did in the audio lessons, and all the words I had memorized seemed incapable of finding their way out of my mouth. It seemed so funny that while the Japanese looked no different from Koreans, the only language that I could use with them was English. A lot of times even English was no use, and I had to resort to body language. And in a place like Japan, a person frantically swinging his arms and hands in the middle of the street isn’t looked kindly upon.

  Anyway, after all the trouble, I got to Yasukuni Shrine. It wasn’t as grand or magnificent as I had expected to, although the fact that all the cars parked in front of the temple were Beemers and Mercedeses was enough to surprise me. Did this imply that a great number of upper-class people worshiped at the shrine? I wouldn’t know, but it was still interesting. I was also surprised at how the Japanese thought of the Yasukuni Shrine. All of the people I interviewed admitted that there was definitely something wrong, and none of them would tell me their names, perhaps out of fear of being implicated as a traitor.

  It was a fun trip. Enlightening, envisioning, memorable. And I’m never doing it again.

저작권자 © The Yonsei Annals 무단전재 및 재배포 금지