Haruki Nonaka, Part 2

With hopes of maturing, a move to Brazil

Hiroki Nonaka plays checkers with children staying in a parsonage due to poverty. (February 1981 in Amoreira, Parana State, Brazil)

Haruki Nonaka

Born in Osaka in 1953. He lived in Kure from the time he was a young child to the time he graduated from high school. After completing his studies in the Faculty of Humanities at Sophia University, he moved to Brazil in 1978. He studied theology and worked as a priest in Catholic churches in Rio de Janeiro and Para. He returned to Japan in 1991. He now works as a teacher of social studies at Hiroshima Nagisa Junior High and High School. In such classes as "Human Beings," "International Life," "Global Learning," and "Global Citizens," his workshops and lectures employ interactive learning methods.

I was born in Osaka. Because of my father's job, we moved to the city of Kure when I was 6 months old. The first time I really experienced a different culture was when I lived in Brazil, but as I reflect on my life, I see that I had encountered the idea of different cultures since my childhood.

Before she married, my mother lived in Kyoto. My father went to a university in Kyoto, so my parents spoke Kyoto dialect at home. I spoke two dialects: Kyoto dialect at home and Hiroshima dialect outside the house. During summer vacations, I stayed at my parents' house in Kyoto. I was living in the two different cultures of Kyoto and Hiroshima.

When I was a year old, I was baptized at a Roman Catholic Church in Kure. Every Sunday my family went to church. At the time, Christianity wasn't very familiar to the Japanese people. At elementary school, my teacher asked us about religion. "Is anyone here a Christian?" she said, but I felt too ashamed to raise my hand. When I entered junior high, I became defiant toward my parents and I asked them: "Why did you baptize me? Don't I have the freedom to choose my own religion?"

For me, Christianity was a "different culture." Christianity has had a big influence on my life and my way of thinking.

From the time I was a child, I wanted to become a doctor in order to save people suffering from disease.

However, when I entered the upper grades of elementary school, it became hard for me to concentrate on studying. I easily experienced stress in my relationships with friends and I was anxious about speaking my mind to others. In high school, I had a few close friends, but I still felt distress because I wasn't able to express myself honestly. I failed my university entrance exams and I went to a cram school, but I couldn't focus on my studies. As a result, I failed my entrance exams again and I grew despondent over my future.

In such circumstances, it was thanks to my encounters with a Spanish priest and an English teacher at the cram school that hope for my life was revived inside me. Then one day, I decided to be a Catholic priest. I thought I would be "a doctor for the soul." While I was undergoing training at the Tokyo Catholic Seminary to become a priest, I began to study philosophy at Sophia University. At the time, I felt like I had just struggled out of a long, distressing time in my life, but in reality, I still wasn't motivated to study.

But when I was a senior in college, a change came over me. On the weekends, I started helping at a church school for elementary and junior high school students. Once a month, the junior high students pulled around a cart in a residential area to collect old newspapers and magazines, then sell them to get money to buy medicine. This medicine, to get rid of intestinal worms, was sent to a Japanese priest who was working in a slum in the city of Maringa, Brazil.

Taking part in that effort made me think that I wanted to go to Brazil myself and see the grim reality there firsthand. I was impressed by the energetic lives of the French and Belgian missionaries who were working there, far from their homelands, and that strengthened my wish to go to Brazil. I had hopes that I could mature as a person if I went off to live in a foreign country, far from Japan.

My dream came true eight months after I graduated from college. From the time I was 25, I went to Brazil and lived the next 12 years there and in Mexico. I learned a lot of things during my time in that part of the world.